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Kevin's Reviews > A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1
A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1
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Kevin's review
bookshelves: econ-marxism, 1-how-the-world-works, 2-brilliant-intros-101, econ-market, econ-value-labour
Jun 11, 2022
bookshelves: econ-marxism, 1-how-the-world-works, 2-brilliant-intros-101, econ-market, econ-value-labour
Applying Marx’s Capital to our existential ecological crisis?
“Après moi le déluge! [after me, the flood!] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.� –Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Ch.10 section 5.
Preamble:
--When I first started learning about Marx/Marxism, my priority was always (1) learning insights on how to diagnose capitalism and build alternatives, rather than (2) becoming a Marxologist to learn the “truth� about exactly what Marx the individual was thinking at every moment of his life.
--Before this review, I unpacked Marx’s infamous Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (see link).
…Harvey’s Companion was a key guide in providing accessible context, in particular unpacking Marx’s methodology and thus the assumptions he made specifically for (most of) this book (1,000+ pages is merely Volume 1 of Book 1; Marx planned 5-6 books). These Volume 1 methodological assumptions will come as a shock to newcomers who assume Marx = The Communist Manifesto (a political pamphlet he co-wrote at age 29 during the Revolutions of 1848):
(i) Perfect market (every commodity sold at their “value�, abstracting away arbitrage/violence etc.).
(ii) Profits as a whole (abstract away distribution of profits between industrial capitalists, financiers, landlords, merchants, etc.; since the focus is on Industrial capital, this abstracts away merchant/usurers capital, i.e. trade/finance)
(iii) Closed system (abstract away trade, thus much of geopolitics/imperialism).
--I actually prefer Harvey’s online Vol. 1 Companion lectures (2007 + 2019) over Harvey's book (Harvey has a dry writing style), which I listened to numerous times on 1.4x speed; find them here:
--Now let’s apply Capital’s insights on capitalism's:
(i) Abstractions (hiding social relations so the status quo appears inevitable, crucial for social consent) and
(ii) Contradictions (potential sources for crises)
...to the 21st century. The major life events that have influenced my studies are immigration (global inequities/imperialism), the War on Terror (geopolitics/imperialism), and the 2008 Financial crisis (capitalist volatility).
…However, it is existential ecological crisis that has shot up my list, with the new normal of wild-fires/heat waves in the Pacific Northwest as well as the abstract appreciation that exponential (rather than linear) change is utterly unintuitive to us humans (thus, we underestimate at our peril). Indeed, global capitalism expects ~3% growth in GDP each year in perpetuity on our finite planet, which is not linear but exponential growth (growth compounds on prior growth; doubling time of entire economy = only 23.45 years!). The COVID-19 virus is trivial compared to the virus of capitalism that is infecting our planet and social imaginations (Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century)�
Capitalism vs. Ecology:
1) Capitalist Value system, Capitalist Markets:
--Like Capital Vol. 1, let’s start with Marx’s analysis of the �commodity� and build up to capitalism’s value system. Under capitalism, commodities are produced to be sold on the market for profit. This logic spreads in peculiar manners when we move outside everyday goods and into the land market, labour market, financial markets, essential services/utilities, infrastructure, etc.
--Even within everyday goods, non-capitalist societies have alternative social relations such as producing for self/local community, mutual aid, social obligations, etc. Capitalist market exchange is instantaneous exchange between strangers (thus no further social obligations, so each side seeks to maximize their gain as they briefly “confront� each other in the market); when you stop to reflect, this is curiously both cosmopolitan and anti-social.
--Markets predate “capitalism�, especially on the edges of communities where trade between neighboring strangers takes place. The “Great Transformation� changed “societies with markets� (markets on the edges) to a “market society� (capitalism), where land became privatized/commodified (land market) as land area now had a price (production for the growing global market, which became dominated by colonialism with its own colonial market commodification), and the serfs kicked off (the “Enclosures�) are now forced to sell their labour to survive (labour market).
--The capitalist State has always provided the violence for these peculiar capitalist markets, and this intensified with its entanglement with private banks (financial markets) and rising scale of production. Violence is essential in establishing + maintaining capitalist market relations, from European “House of Terror� workhouses to modern Prison Industrial Complex, from markets for colonial drain (including slave trade, opium trade) to modern cash crops exports/intellectual property trade regime (The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions).
--Returning to the commodity, it holds the contradicting nature of both (i) use-value (satisfies human wants/needs; a quality) vs. (ii) exchange-value (economic gain from selling on the market, represented by price; a quantity). As producers (or rather capitalist owners of production, as the workers do the work) produce to sell on the market for profit, we can see how (market) exchange-value is prioritized. The capitalist at its core has zero desire (use-value) for a factory, a mountain of shoes, or hiring labour (it’s not a charity); these are all just means-to-an-end, the end being profit (exchange-value); competition weeds out the morals of individual capitalists. Anwar Shaikh () stresses how market competition is war-like survivalism rather than some dance leading to harmonious equilibrium of supply/demand.
--Producing for strangers means private labour (ex. producing for oneself) becomes social labour (producing for society), but this socialization is stunted by abstraction given the lack of direct social relations. The brief interaction between seller/buyer is the stranger-vs-stranger market confrontation (we will discuss alienated production later). This exchange is mediated via the commodity, thus �commodity fetishism� where social labour is concealed/objectified in the commodity itself. This has pervasive social consequences, as all our attention is on the commodity/its price while oblivious to the labour + environmental relations/conditions behind it.
--Market exchange and its continuation is a process, thus Harvey’s constant emphasis that capital = �value in motion�, which counters (1) mainstream status quo framing as static and (2) stereotypes of Marx as rigid structures. As exchange-value is expressed in price, money becomes an ultimate fetish; social power becomes private power with the accumulation of money. This accumulation of money/exchange-value (quantity) is endless (Michael Hudson: “wealth addiction�, “hubris�), compared with the limitations of accumulating use-value (a quality; how many shoes can you really need?).
--To visualize this, consider:
(i) C-M-C: Commodity exchanged for Commodity, facilitated by Money. This generalizes non-capitalist exchange: “selling in order to buy� where the end goal is consumption of the Commodity (consuming its use-value). This ends the process and has inherent limits. This also applies to the worker purchasing goods for subsistence.
(ii) --�: Money invested into Commodity production, sold for more Money (profit). This is Marx’s �General Formula of Capital�: �buying in order to sell� (speculation!) where the end goal is more Money (exchange-value). For capitalism to survive/reproduce itself, the M� (more Money) is re-invested (money becomes capital), starting another expansionary process. Thus, capitalism’s inherent logic = perpetual growth.
…Any disruption of this perpetual growth process leads to capitalist crisis and thus social crisis in a capitalist society, since production is predicated on profit-seeking growth (exchange-value) rather than social needs (use-value). Thus, the long and utterly irrational (for social needs) history of capitalism’s boom-bust cycles (accepted by the mainstream as “business cycles�):
(i) Booms: speculative euphoria spreads; every speculator wants in and optimism builds optimism� until the bubble bursts.
(ii) Busts: the downward spiral of pessimism, where the boom frenzy’s irrationality is mirrored in bust despair; factories are kept idle/crops hoarded and even destroyed while the masses are unemployed/starve because capitalist owners (speculators) are too pessimistic to anticipate profits. In a sense, a “capitalist strike�, preventing the restarting of the economy�.
--Speculation and self-destructive capitalists (“Après moi le déluge!�): Marx focuses on Industrial capital in Vol. 1, thus mostly abstracts away finance/trade. However, Marx does introduce -� (Money for more Money, ex. credit/debt with interest, with its automatic compound growth):
--Short-term: individualist profit-seeking and competition survivalism leads to increasing speed-up and short-termism, so capitalist development of technology (databases/satellites/container shipping) to move vast financial sums digitally in milliseconds for financial speculation + shipping goods regardless of environmental costs should not be a surprise. Harvey, as a geographer (space + time), notes that this speed-up is covered in Vol. 2, with some foreshadowing in Vol.1 (but we can immediately see how capitalist speedup contradicts with nature’s self-renewal time-frames): “[…] the velocity of circulation of money is merely a reflection of the rapidity with which commodities change their forms, the continuous interlocking of the series of metamorphoses, the hurried nature of society’s metabolic process, the quick disappearance of commodities from the sphere of circulation, and their equally quick replacement by fresh commodities.� [Vol. 1, Ch.3 section 2]
...see Comments below for the rest of review (Capitalist Production + Fragments + Reversing Capitalism!)...
“Après moi le déluge! [after me, the flood!] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.� –Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Ch.10 section 5.
Preamble:
--When I first started learning about Marx/Marxism, my priority was always (1) learning insights on how to diagnose capitalism and build alternatives, rather than (2) becoming a Marxologist to learn the “truth� about exactly what Marx the individual was thinking at every moment of his life.
--Before this review, I unpacked Marx’s infamous Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (see link).
…Harvey’s Companion was a key guide in providing accessible context, in particular unpacking Marx’s methodology and thus the assumptions he made specifically for (most of) this book (1,000+ pages is merely Volume 1 of Book 1; Marx planned 5-6 books). These Volume 1 methodological assumptions will come as a shock to newcomers who assume Marx = The Communist Manifesto (a political pamphlet he co-wrote at age 29 during the Revolutions of 1848):
(i) Perfect market (every commodity sold at their “value�, abstracting away arbitrage/violence etc.).
(ii) Profits as a whole (abstract away distribution of profits between industrial capitalists, financiers, landlords, merchants, etc.; since the focus is on Industrial capital, this abstracts away merchant/usurers capital, i.e. trade/finance)
(iii) Closed system (abstract away trade, thus much of geopolitics/imperialism).
--I actually prefer Harvey’s online Vol. 1 Companion lectures (2007 + 2019) over Harvey's book (Harvey has a dry writing style), which I listened to numerous times on 1.4x speed; find them here:
--Now let’s apply Capital’s insights on capitalism's:
(i) Abstractions (hiding social relations so the status quo appears inevitable, crucial for social consent) and
(ii) Contradictions (potential sources for crises)
...to the 21st century. The major life events that have influenced my studies are immigration (global inequities/imperialism), the War on Terror (geopolitics/imperialism), and the 2008 Financial crisis (capitalist volatility).
…However, it is existential ecological crisis that has shot up my list, with the new normal of wild-fires/heat waves in the Pacific Northwest as well as the abstract appreciation that exponential (rather than linear) change is utterly unintuitive to us humans (thus, we underestimate at our peril). Indeed, global capitalism expects ~3% growth in GDP each year in perpetuity on our finite planet, which is not linear but exponential growth (growth compounds on prior growth; doubling time of entire economy = only 23.45 years!). The COVID-19 virus is trivial compared to the virus of capitalism that is infecting our planet and social imaginations (Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century)�
Capitalism vs. Ecology:
1) Capitalist Value system, Capitalist Markets:
--Like Capital Vol. 1, let’s start with Marx’s analysis of the �commodity� and build up to capitalism’s value system. Under capitalism, commodities are produced to be sold on the market for profit. This logic spreads in peculiar manners when we move outside everyday goods and into the land market, labour market, financial markets, essential services/utilities, infrastructure, etc.
--Even within everyday goods, non-capitalist societies have alternative social relations such as producing for self/local community, mutual aid, social obligations, etc. Capitalist market exchange is instantaneous exchange between strangers (thus no further social obligations, so each side seeks to maximize their gain as they briefly “confront� each other in the market); when you stop to reflect, this is curiously both cosmopolitan and anti-social.
--Markets predate “capitalism�, especially on the edges of communities where trade between neighboring strangers takes place. The “Great Transformation� changed “societies with markets� (markets on the edges) to a “market society� (capitalism), where land became privatized/commodified (land market) as land area now had a price (production for the growing global market, which became dominated by colonialism with its own colonial market commodification), and the serfs kicked off (the “Enclosures�) are now forced to sell their labour to survive (labour market).
--The capitalist State has always provided the violence for these peculiar capitalist markets, and this intensified with its entanglement with private banks (financial markets) and rising scale of production. Violence is essential in establishing + maintaining capitalist market relations, from European “House of Terror� workhouses to modern Prison Industrial Complex, from markets for colonial drain (including slave trade, opium trade) to modern cash crops exports/intellectual property trade regime (The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions).
--Returning to the commodity, it holds the contradicting nature of both (i) use-value (satisfies human wants/needs; a quality) vs. (ii) exchange-value (economic gain from selling on the market, represented by price; a quantity). As producers (or rather capitalist owners of production, as the workers do the work) produce to sell on the market for profit, we can see how (market) exchange-value is prioritized. The capitalist at its core has zero desire (use-value) for a factory, a mountain of shoes, or hiring labour (it’s not a charity); these are all just means-to-an-end, the end being profit (exchange-value); competition weeds out the morals of individual capitalists. Anwar Shaikh () stresses how market competition is war-like survivalism rather than some dance leading to harmonious equilibrium of supply/demand.
--Producing for strangers means private labour (ex. producing for oneself) becomes social labour (producing for society), but this socialization is stunted by abstraction given the lack of direct social relations. The brief interaction between seller/buyer is the stranger-vs-stranger market confrontation (we will discuss alienated production later). This exchange is mediated via the commodity, thus �commodity fetishism� where social labour is concealed/objectified in the commodity itself. This has pervasive social consequences, as all our attention is on the commodity/its price while oblivious to the labour + environmental relations/conditions behind it.
--Market exchange and its continuation is a process, thus Harvey’s constant emphasis that capital = �value in motion�, which counters (1) mainstream status quo framing as static and (2) stereotypes of Marx as rigid structures. As exchange-value is expressed in price, money becomes an ultimate fetish; social power becomes private power with the accumulation of money. This accumulation of money/exchange-value (quantity) is endless (Michael Hudson: “wealth addiction�, “hubris�), compared with the limitations of accumulating use-value (a quality; how many shoes can you really need?).
--To visualize this, consider:
(i) C-M-C: Commodity exchanged for Commodity, facilitated by Money. This generalizes non-capitalist exchange: “selling in order to buy� where the end goal is consumption of the Commodity (consuming its use-value). This ends the process and has inherent limits. This also applies to the worker purchasing goods for subsistence.
(ii) --�: Money invested into Commodity production, sold for more Money (profit). This is Marx’s �General Formula of Capital�: �buying in order to sell� (speculation!) where the end goal is more Money (exchange-value). For capitalism to survive/reproduce itself, the M� (more Money) is re-invested (money becomes capital), starting another expansionary process. Thus, capitalism’s inherent logic = perpetual growth.
…Any disruption of this perpetual growth process leads to capitalist crisis and thus social crisis in a capitalist society, since production is predicated on profit-seeking growth (exchange-value) rather than social needs (use-value). Thus, the long and utterly irrational (for social needs) history of capitalism’s boom-bust cycles (accepted by the mainstream as “business cycles�):
(i) Booms: speculative euphoria spreads; every speculator wants in and optimism builds optimism� until the bubble bursts.
(ii) Busts: the downward spiral of pessimism, where the boom frenzy’s irrationality is mirrored in bust despair; factories are kept idle/crops hoarded and even destroyed while the masses are unemployed/starve because capitalist owners (speculators) are too pessimistic to anticipate profits. In a sense, a “capitalist strike�, preventing the restarting of the economy�.
--Speculation and self-destructive capitalists (“Après moi le déluge!�): Marx focuses on Industrial capital in Vol. 1, thus mostly abstracts away finance/trade. However, Marx does introduce -� (Money for more Money, ex. credit/debt with interest, with its automatic compound growth):
Our capitalist, who is at home in vulgar economics, may perhaps say that he advanced his money with the intention of making more money out of it. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and he might just as well have intended to make money without producing at all. He makes threats. He will not be caught napping again. In future he will buy the commodities in the market, instead of manufacturing them himself. But if all his brother capitalists were to do the same, where would he find his commodities on the market? [Vol. 1, Ch.7, section 2]---� and the Environment: Michael Hudson (The Bubble and Beyond) focuses on -� Finance Capitalism (“economic rent�). He makes the point that much of today’s market economic activity is financial speculation, thus fictitious, rather than industrial production. This may strangely seem beneficial environmentally. However, Jason Hickel shows how tightly GDP continues to be tied to material use in the must-read Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. When profits trump morality, industrial production and its cascading supporting services still bloat our economy, from the useless (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory) to the annihilationist (US Military Industrial Complex, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner)� not to mention the additional services required to keep the lights on (food/cleaning/maintenance). Lastly, Fossil Capitalism is hoarding its wealth and bribing politicians to prevent a green transition.
--Short-term: individualist profit-seeking and competition survivalism leads to increasing speed-up and short-termism, so capitalist development of technology (databases/satellites/container shipping) to move vast financial sums digitally in milliseconds for financial speculation + shipping goods regardless of environmental costs should not be a surprise. Harvey, as a geographer (space + time), notes that this speed-up is covered in Vol. 2, with some foreshadowing in Vol.1 (but we can immediately see how capitalist speedup contradicts with nature’s self-renewal time-frames): “[…] the velocity of circulation of money is merely a reflection of the rapidity with which commodities change their forms, the continuous interlocking of the series of metamorphoses, the hurried nature of society’s metabolic process, the quick disappearance of commodities from the sphere of circulation, and their equally quick replacement by fresh commodities.� [Vol. 1, Ch.3 section 2]
...see Comments below for the rest of review (Capitalist Production + Fragments + Reversing Capitalism!)...
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--Adding to how increasing productivity under capitalist production (“Relative Surplus-Value�) does not result in less material use from increased efficiency, Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World points to the Jevons Paradox where increased efficiency means more savings thus more reinvestments to expand production/consumption. This vortex propelling ever-more production on our finite planet must be somehow absorbed by consumer demand, thus the advertising industry behemoth (all the money spent on advertising/administration instead of research/development!) pushing our social addiction to get our fix to ease our over-stimulated dissatisfactions (modern stress): Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions. --The promise of leisure for society, betrayed by increasing working intensity/hours, seems moot when we consider the other effect of capitalist mechanization: structural unemployment (more stress, hooray!). Marx starts with the double “freedoms� of commodified labour: (i) Freedom from prior social obligations (ex. feudalism; although as the slavery example and of course colonialism shows this is not a totality), (ii) Freedom to sell your labour-power or else starve, in the absence of prior social obligations.
--Thus, capitalism’s boom-bust technological conquest has crashed through communities all over the world. Vol.1’s “absolute general law of capitalist accumulation� = more accumulation on one side, more pauperism/precarity on the other side. Those workers displaced make up the �industrial reserve army of labour�, which is crucial for capitalist class power to discipline its workers (divide-and-rule). After the combined capitalist crises of the Great Depression/WWII/victory of USSR communism over fascism/Third World decolonization forced the welfare state compromise (and the “Golden Age of Capitalism�), we see how capitalist class power could not tolerate the full employment policy; thus, Neoliberalism “globalization� expanded the “reserve army of labour� via outsourcing/free capital flows, smashing domestic labour power. The Patnaiks provide additional theory on the Global South reserve army: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present.
--Workers alienated from the means of production and lost in capitalism’s abstraction (financial speculation/capital flows, global commodity chain, etc.) fall prey to reactionary scapegoating of visible deviations (visible minorities, etc.), with Global Trumpism/“ecofascism� being the emerging variant in response to climate refugees, etc. We should note here the dangers of just how mainstream the �overpopulation� framing is (ex. “Limits to Growth� liberal technocrats), which was caught by Marx when he disputes Malthus� naturalization of population growth/poverty by revealing how capitalist social relations generates the reserve army! For an updated critique (esp. the obvious point that the rich’s astronomical consumption are driving ecological collapse, not the poor masses), see Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis.
After political economy has thus declared that the constant production of a relative surplus population of workers is a necessity of capitalist accumulation, she very aptly adopts the shape of an old maid and puts into the mouth of her ideal capitalist the following words addressed to the ‘redundant� workers who have been thrown onto the streets by their own creation of additional capital: ‘We manufacturers do what we can for you, whilst we are increasing that capital on which you must subsist, and you must do the rest by accommodating your numbers to the means of subsistence.� [Vol.1, Ch.25 section 3]
3) Fragments: --After capitalist markets and capitalist production, the remainder are only hinted at in Vol.1:
(i) Capitalist State regulation:
--The contradiction here is the capitalist state’s role in (a) creating (“so-called primitive accumulation�, actually violent appropriation)/reproducing capitalism (regulations to manage social protests/crises) vs. (b) arena for class struggle.
--Regulation spurred on by social protests can actually stabilize self-destructive market forces (i.e. the capitalist state bails out the capitalists, at the expense of the masses; where have we seen this before?); this also reminds me of the Patnaiks on the stabilization of settler immigration policy, which relieved the social crisis of too much surplus labour in the heart of European capitalism.
These laws [English Factory Acts] curb capital’s drive towards a limitless draining away of labour-power by forcibly limiting the working day on the authority of the state, but a state ruled by capitalist and landlord. Apart from the daily more threatening advance of the working-class movement, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity as forced the manuring of English fields with guano [seabird excrement as fertilizer]. [Capital V1, Ch.10 section 2]--Marx mentions historical examples of shifting alliances and betrayal. He also praises �men as competent, as free from partisanship and respect of persons as are England’s factory inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into conditions of housing and nourishment, and so on.��; indeed, Marx’s chapters on the working day/factory conditions rely on these state officials� reports.
(ii) Human-Nature Metabolism:
--A centerpiece of Ecological Marxism (human-nature metabolic interaction), Vol.1 only has a few sentences directly referring to this regarding metabolism disruption from capitalist urbanization damaging soil fertility (similar to earlier mention of capitalism’s linear wasteful “efficiency� vs. nature’s circular recycling from Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist; light read: The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet).
Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. […] Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. […] Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth � the soil and the worker. [Vol.1, Ch.15 section 10; emphases added]--We also see hints of Marx's explorations in agricultural chemistry in mentions of Justus von Liebig in footnotes (further explored in Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy): "To have developed from the point of view of natural science the negative, i.e. destructive side of modern agriculture, is one of Liebig’s immortal merits. Moreover, his brief comments on the history of agriculture, although not free from gross errors, contain flashes of insight."
4) Reversing Capitalism: --Capital Vol. 1 gets to the essence of capitalism’s logic, which I have attempted to apply to our ecological crises. This provides a blueprint to reversing the logic; must-read: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World and Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present (more on economic transformations):
(i) Reverse capitalist markets: reverse the Enclosures privatization/commodification (artificial scarcity) by decommodification + reviving/expanding the social Commons (radical abundance). This has been at the core of social protest/class struggle, from the welfare compromise to decolonization. People' Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons provides a crucial application of expanding the social Commons to renewable energy infrastructure.
(ii) Reverse capitalist production: instead of surplus value extraction by absentee shareholders (speculators who have nothing to do with the workplace/community), property rights must be changed to local stakeholder ownership operating for social needs.
(iii) Reverse capitalist financing: -� speculation by absentee private bankers must be replaced with various levels of public banking, transforming credit/money into a public utility for social needs.
(iv) Accounting for social needs: discard GDP (which was created to measure national war-time production) and replace it with accounting for various social indicators, including internalizing ecological health (planetary boundaries, resilience of circular design/diverse redundancies, etc.):
-Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
-The New Economics: A Manifesto
(v) Decolonization: all the above reverses capitalism, thus reverses colonization (in general). To be more specific to geopolitics/history, the Global North should redirect its imperialist military spending to domestic social Commons + degrowth, allowing the Global South to de-link from imperialist drain so it can pursue its own Just Transition. A People’s Green New Deal focuses on this, where agroecology plays a large role given Global South’s vast agrarian population.
Kevin this is a review to end all reviews
Reid tries to read wrote: "Kevin this is a review to end all reviews"haha cheers Reid, these reviews keep building on each other, esp. since I recently reached several milestones (Capital Vol.1, Capital and Imperialism, etc.)!
Rick wrote: "Nice review, although no alternative"Hmmm, do you mean I provided no alternatives (see Comment #4), or you don't believe there are real alternatives?
A major theme of Capital is uncovering contradictions (where alternatives are already half-born, in a sense).
Ex. capitalist state's institutions for social needs (to various degrees), in order to sustain capitalism (as private firms refuse to pay full costs) + compromise with social movement struggles: public health/welfare/education/sciences R&D/utilities/infrastructure etc.
Ex. cooperation within the capitalist firm (Graeber's "baseline communism"; these firms can be colossal multinationals), while profits are privatized to capital shareholders (instead of the workers/local communities being the primary stakeholders). This counters those who only view all social relations as mediated by individualist competition.
I am a bit confused-- what is the point of Marx's critique on Ecology?
Tanveer wrote: "Hi Kevin. Do you know if this is a good book to read before starting with Capital?Hi Tanveer. I read 90% of "Marx's Capital: An Introductory Reader" (thanks for the reminder to finish it); it is a collection of essays by some of my favorite anti-imperialists/Marxists (Vijay Prashad, Prabhat Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh, etc.), so it is impossible for me to not recommend it!
I will add that it is an introduction to Marx's Capital *project* as a whole, so it draws from not just Volume 1 but also 2 and esp. 3 (I don't recall much on 4, "Theories of Surplus Value"). The first 2 essays are perfect reads for inspiration, and then it dives into finance/agriculture/technology/imperialism.
So, Harvey's Companion to Volume 1 is more direct if you want to learn Volume 1 step-by-step, chapter-by-chapter.
Read this with Capital the first time through and enjoyed it. The lecture series actually has a lot of unique material as well.Recently re-read with Heinrich's How to Read Marx's Capital. I really can't recommend it enough, Felt like it gave me so much more insight into value and the exchange process. I also just think that Capital rewards repeated reads, there is just so much to dig into with it.
Yale also did an entire series on Capital that was really wonderful, if you haven't yet seen it. I couldn't find the entire list but it may be on Youtube if you search for Franke lectures at Yale.
Mike wrote: "Read this with Capital the first time through and enjoyed it. The lecture series actually has a lot of unique material as well.Recently re-read with Heinrich's How to Read Marx's Capital. I reall..."
Harvey did say we'll start understanding Capital on the second read haha!
Thanks for the plug for Heinrich's and Yale's companions, there are several companions on my radar so I'll definitely bump those up. I was looking for companions for Volumes 2 and 3 and saw Heinrich's "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital", although I think a comrade told me it was brief on Volume 2.
Have you gone through the other volumes yet? I'm just restarting Volume 2 after going through Harvey's lectures on it several times (which Harvey's geography background shines, although some of the formal details may have been rushed). The members from our Capital study group who went through Volume 2 together recommended John Fox's "Understanding Capital, Volume 2". And of course Ernest Mandel's introduction seems like a good overview.
Since I'm most interested in modern applications, I'm particularly interested in getting to Volume 3 since Michael Hudson/Harvey are always harping on it regarding Finance. I'd like to synthesize this with what seems like disagreements with Anwar Shaikh (I've gone over his graduate lectures for his book "Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises" several times now, all available on youtube).
This review is an excellent reminder that I need to read more on Marx. Thank you for sharing your invigorating thoughts on this.
Kevin wrote: "Mike wrote: "Read this with Capital the first time through and enjoyed it. The lecture series actually has a lot of unique material as well.Recently re-read with Heinrich's How to Read Marx's Cap..."
I have read about half of Volume 2, however I read it before I'd read Volume 1 and much of it didn't make sense. I'm in a study group that plans to get through all 3 volumes, eventually. We've been working very slowly through the first volume so it may be some time.
I was lucky enough to get to talk to Paul North and Paul Reitter at Yale who are doing the new translation of Capital, Volume I. You can see an interview that they did by searching "A New English Translation of 𝘊𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭 Red May 2021". I know that there have been a lot of debates around the original English translation of Capital that are now being addressed by these authors as well as Heinrich. I'm really excited to see what changes will be made in the new version.
Abubakar wrote: "This review is an excellent reminder that I need to read more on Marx. Thank you for sharing your invigorating thoughts on this."Cheers Abubakar! Since you've read Polanyi's "Great Transformation", you're more than ready for the political economy in Capital, something that was absent in the New Atheists carousel and even somewhat limited in Chomsky.
Mike wrote: "Kevin wrote: "Mike wrote: "Read this with Capital the first time through and enjoyed it. The lecture series actually has a lot of unique material as well.Recently re-read with Heinrich's How to R..."
Geez, I cannot think of a worse plan than starting with Capital Volume 2 haha.
Translation: interesting. This is why I'm not committing to becoming a Marxologist. There's so much else I need to learn outside of Marx (and political economy), and then you realize Marx has mountains of unpublished materials, translation nuances, etc. etc.
Rick wrote: "I am a bit confused-- what is the point of Marx's critique on Ecology?"Marx doesn't critique ecology. He critiques capitalist markets failing to value ecology. The point? Ecology is actually valuable, indeed essential for survival (duh). Capitalist markets' bottom line is profits (growth of money on a finite planet) through sales (exchange-value, which becomes more contradictory for "fictitious commodities" like land/nature, which are obviously not simply human-made commodities for sale on the market). There are many other values (the incalculable survival of the biosphere, of life, for one) that contradict sales for growing money.
As for alternatives, human societies have long developed numerous social relations other than capitalist markets to manage finite, common resources, see "Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action ". If you rely on status quo approval to access credibility (a disastrous path in the field of economics dominated by power politics), the author of "Governing the Commons" surprisingly received the "Nobel Prize in Economics" (which is actually awarded by the Swedish central bank).
How does David Harvey's "Marx's Refusal of the Labor Theory of Value" fit in with Steve Keen's critique of LTOV and Anwar Shaikh's defense?
John wrote: "Rick wrote: "I am a bit confused-- what is the point of Marx's critique on Ecology?"Marx doesn't critique ecology. He critiques capitalist markets failing to value ecology. The point? Ecology is ..."
Once again reminded to catch up on the pro-capitalist political economists who had enough integrity to examine real-world capitalism (unlike today's Neoclassical mainstream economics) and thus could not just ignore its volatility and crises:
In breaking down the pre-capitalist framework of society, capitalism thus broke not only barriers that impeded its progress but also flying buttresses that prevented its collapse. That process, impressive in its relentless necessity, was not merely a matter of removing institutional deadwood, but of removing partners of the capitalist stratum, symbiosis with whom was an essential element of the capitalist schema....You can tell pro-entrepreneur Schumpeter took Classical political economy seriously, esp. Marx:
[...] that the capitalist process in much the same way in which it destroyed the institutional framework of feudal society also undermines its own.
[Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, emphasis added]
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.
[The Communist Manifesto where 29 year old Marx and 27 year old Engels were optimistic during the Revolutions of 1848]
Well -- What is the alternative, which you or Marx proposes? ?
Rick wrote: "Well -- What is the alternative, which you or Marx proposes? ?"--Didn't a previous post directly answer your question on alternatives? I.e. replace for-profit markets of "fictitious commodities" with non-market community-based cooperative management, so finite resources are:
a) negotiated with boundaries set by actual stakeholders, rather than...
b) ...dictated by profit-seeking absentee speculators (often global finance) constrained by grow-or-die competition
--Didn't this post also anticipate a follow-up question of "well, what are examples of this actually working?" by referencing the well-known empirical research in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action?
--I would add the alternative economic details in Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present as the author empathizes with the liberal ideology of competitive markets, just not for "fictitious commodities" that contradict social needs (see below).
--Are you instead expecting a one-liner answer for your one-liner question? Perhaps a single word/phrase as "the alternative" to completely replace "capitalism" (however you define "capitalism", a mystery as you haven't specified your definitions/assumptions/concerns)? The world is not so simple, and one-liners do not invite meaningful communication. If we simply reply with "the alternative is cooperative management", how would you even interpret this? Or are you simply looking to confirm your rejection of alternatives?
If I were to add to the previous posts:
1) Definitions and Assumptions:
--Let's take a gentle start and assume you support Adam Smith's "capitalism" of "free [market] competition" for "the butcher, the brewer, [and] the baker" to pursue their "own interest", while on the whole creating a competitive "division of labour" to produce optimal commodities for society (thus "wealth"). This is predicated on the following basic assumptions:
i) "Commodities" are produced for market exchange.
ii) Thus, market competition between individual producers forces producers to improve their production process by eliminating excess production costs (not just technical/organizational innovations but also eliminating overhead, ex. feudal economic rent of usurious interest/land rent/monopolies) to find and lower the true cost of production, i.e. the "natural price" (hence the Classical political economists' interest in the "labour theory of value"): "The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken, not upon every occasion, indeed, but for any considerable time together." [Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Ch.7]
2) Concerns and Contradictions:
--Even more gentle: let's assume we both agree with Smith's general model (put aside violence to create/maintain markets, imperialism for cheap resources/labour, "reserve army" of unemployed to suppress labour's power, cancerous profit-seeking vs. social needs, profit-seeking's boom/bust expectations, endless accumulation of money-power, etc.).
--Real-world capitalism still contradicts Smith's model with certain key markets featuring "fictitious commodities" (i.e. commodities not simply produced for market exchange). Historically, these have been land/labour/money.
--These peculiar markets lack (i) meaningful competition (ii) to improve the production process (iii) for average consumers; thus, the reversion to rent-seeking neofeudalism.
--ex. Smith's critique of rent-seeking in Book 1, Ch.6 [emphases added]:
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property [ex. land market], the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them; and he must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities makes a third component part.--Land not just in real estate, but also in monopolizing access to raw materials (fuels, minerals, etc.) and now further expanding into nature (ecological services, carbon offset markets, etc.). Money may be the most important one, as financial markets has exploded in scope and magnitudes while being inaccessible to much of the public (unlike "the butcher, the brewer, [and] the baker"). Similarly, the very-profitable arms trade is not for average consumers.
3) Alternatives:
--I'm setting up definitions and quoting Smith to show that certain markets are the furthest from the production of "real commodities" ("the butcher, the brewer, [and] the baker") and conflict with even the father of "free [market] competition", who prioritized society's wealth (social needs) rather than profit-seeking as an end in itself.
--These fictitious and non-public markets are also key to ecological crisis, from the arms trade to financial market's debt (which requires excess growth in production to pay off or else crisis especially for the masses who face austerity cuts rather than bailouts/lenient bankruptcy laws) to the fossil fuel industry (natural monopoly in access to nature).
--Alternative: stop trying to politically force all these into "markets" dictated by endless private profit-seeking. There was a time when social purpose was actually considered (thinking about corporate law: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power). These areas need to be controlled by representative institutions (from inter-govermental to national government to workers federations to local public assemblies) to negotiate social needs and boundaries. Once again, see the economic details: Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
--After addressing these peculiar markets, I would challenge Smith on his complete reliance on "natural prices" in markets for "real commodities" as well, as he treats nature as a free gift ("The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them.").
John wrote: "How does David Harvey's "Marx's Refusal of the Labor Theory of Value" fit in with Steve Keen's critique of LTOV and Anwar Shaikh's defense?"I've yet to synthesize their views, but my recent takeways of Harvey’s “Marx’s Refusal of the Labour Theory of Value�:
i) “Value in circulation�: Classical LTOV focuses on the market, i.e. sphere of exchange, in considering LTOV in relations to price formation.
ii) “Value in production�: Harvey writes “But Marx was not primarily interested in price formation� (although Anwar Shaikh does warn it should not be neglected). Marx in Capital V1 Ch. 7 critiques Classical by leaving the market (“a very Eden of the rights of man�, “alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham�) to consider the effects on the labourer, starting with the production process (“the hidden abode of production�) where capitalists squeeze out surplus-value by extending the working day (absolute surplus-value) and technological innovations (relative surplus-value). Thus, Diane Elson’s “value theory of labour� and Bertell Ollman’s “theory of the alienation of labour in production�.
iii) “Value in social reproduction�: Marx also considers the effects on social reproduction outside but dependent on the production process (for wages), ending with “industrial reserve army of labour�, etc.. Harvey ties this back to commodity exchange by considering social reproduction’s wants/needs/desires (use-value) and thus the demand required to realize commodity exchange.
iv) Harvey sums up the above 3:
Marx’s value form, I conclude, is not a still and stable fulcrum in capital’s churning world but a constantly changing and unstable metric being pushed hither and thither by the anarchy of market exchange, by revolutionary transformations in technologies and organizational forms, by unfolding practices of social reproduction, and massive transformations in the wants, needs and desires of whole populations expressed through the cultures of everyday life. This is far beyond what Ricardo had in mind and equally far away from that conception of value usually attributed to Marx....I also wonder where Marx’s critique ends and proposals for alternatives begin? In V1, I only remember a hint early on (Ch.4 Fetishism of the Commodity; emphases added):
Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force. All the characteristics of Robinson [Crusoe]’s labour are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual. All Robinson’s products were exclusively the result of his own personal labour and they were therefore directly objects of utility for him personally. The total product of our imagined association is a social product. One part of this product serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another part is consumed by the members of the association as means of subsistence. This part must therefore be divided amongst them. The way this division is made will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production and the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers. We shall assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations. On the other hand, labour-time also serves as a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution.
--Vol.1’s focus is on production, as Marx critiques the mainstream focus on the visible sphere of the market, where capitalists-workers seem to meet in “voluntary� exchange (wage labour contract): “[…] leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business�� [Vol.1, Ch.6.]
--Since Vol.1 abstracts away violence/cheating, everything on the market is assumed to be sold at their value (in essence the “socially necessary labour-time�, the average labour-time required to produce), so how are profits made, i.e. where does surplus-value come from? To summarize, the labourer sells their labour-power (ability to labour), while the capitalist tries to work the labourer beyond the “necessary labour-time� (needed to reproduce the labourer) so the remaining “surplus labour-time� the worker in essence works for free to generate the surplus-value that makes up the profits. Thus, capitalist production = capitalist appropriation of surplus-value from surplus labour-time.
--It is advantageous to the capitalist that this process is (as always) abstract, but we can observe it boiling over in the long historical struggle over the length of the working day. One way for capitalists to increase surplus-value is lengthening the working day (“Absolute Surplus-Value�). The other ways are increasing the intensity of work, and increasing productivity through technology/organizational change (“Relative Surplus-Value�; foreshadowing the “scientific management� of Taylorism/Fordism).
--The latter will initially give the individual pioneering capitalist extra surplus-value, until competitors adopt the innovation, at which point the “socially necessary labour-time� (social average) is lowered. This lowering cheapens both labour-power and commodities. Technological advances tends to mean more machinery; capitalism’s history is plagued by the question of why working time has not decreased compared to the huge productivity increases, but once again Marx makes it clear that capitalist production = capitalist appropriation of surplus-value from surplus labour-time.
--This is not just greed but also survivalism; ex. capitalists are pressured to recoup the cost of their machines ASAP before technological competition devalues them (“moral depreciation�, strange term), thus the increase of working hours to keep the machine running (Marx covers the “relay system� night shifts) and increasing work intensity (machines dictate work pace so workers become �living appendage of the machine�; see Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times factory scenes). We should note that since nature is treated as a free gift/dump, the “efficiency� of production favours linear processes (rather than the circular recycling of nature) with tremendous environmental waste (not accounted for: Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist).