» NEIL SMITH: What I remember
from those days is how textual the discussion was. And my sense from talking with students here is that while that's still a core
of what you're trying to do with the book, that the way you're teaching it has really evolved and changed in its own way. And, in one sense it's a much larger, it's
no longer just around a small seminar table where you're having a reading group, it's a much
larger group. You've certainly got a lot of the same mix of academics, students, faculty,
activists, and so on who are involved in it. But at the same time my sense
is that your approach to the book has changed somewhat too.
So I wonder if you might want to try and spin that out a bit. » DAVID HARVEY: One of the
great things about doing this all this time- and when you think about it, teaching the same book for nearly forty
years sounds like an incredibly boring thing to do. And most people, if they taught
the same course for forty years, would go nuts just doing it. But every time I go through it
I find a fresh angle on it. And the fresh angle is sometimes something
I didn't see in the text before which now jumps out at me as being very significant. And the other thing that happens
is that circumstances change, people's interests change, the intellectual background
with which they come to Capital changes, so actually taking this text and sort of, putting it with the changing historical and geographical
circumstances is actually… actually in itself, a very interesting exercise. I've always
found a great deal of excitement about that. But the other thing that happens is that, there are many things I see in the
book now which I didn't see before - in part because I've gone through it with so many
different people seeing it from different angles, that I start to see it from their angle, and
then and I see things that I didn't see before. But partly also because I think my
own intellectual interests have grown and shifted and therefore, in a sense I'm changing the way in which I think about
Capital and teach Capital, depending very much on the kind of circumstances
that I'm writing about today. [Music] I'm curious to know how many of you actually read these two chapters? Wow. How many didn't? Don't do it again. One of things I suggested last time was, a good idea when you're looking at a particular section, to go over what the main idea is,
because that way you can chart your way through what's going on. And last time we dealt with section one of Chapter One and I suggested that you
could decompose this into a very simple sort of structure which looks like this. Marx starts with the commodity as the foundation for his investigation of a
capitalist mode of production, immediately suggests it has a dual character: it has a use-value and it has an exchange-value. The mystery about the exchange-value was that
the tremendous heterogeneity which existed of use-values is somehow or other rendered compatible, commensurable. And so Marx argues there must be
something that lies behind exchange-value which explains that commensurability. And what it is that lies
behind is the notion of value. And he defines that as socially necessary labour time. In order to be socially necessary the labour expended on something
has to be a use-value for someone. So Marx reconnects to use-value and so you start to see value as a coming together of both use-value and
exchange-value in the concept of social necessary labour time. Now if you ask yourself this
question of what is the structure of the next two sections, they go something like this: He concentrates on labour time. He's already distinguished between the tremendous variety of labour
times that might be actually spent and something which he calls abstract labour. So here he takes a concept which was just simply referred to in the first section and splits it out and says, well,
socially necessary labour time has two aspects: concrete labour and abstract labour, and he talks about the
difference between the two. But in the end there's only one labour process, it's
not as if one labour process is doing the concrete and one's doing the abstract. No, there's one labour process
and it has this dual character. It is both concrete, and it is abstract. The question is how do you find out what the abstract value is in
the commodities which you've produced? And the answer to that can
only be found at the moment when abstract and concrete labour come
together at the moment of exchange. So we're now going to look at exchange and
the way in which exchange generates a way of expressing value, representing value, because
we know that value is a social relation, therefore it's immaterial. So what we got out of exchange,
coming out of exchange, is a duality again. Relative and equivalent forms of value. And these relative and equivalent forms of
value eventually coalesce at the end of this long, and in my opinion and somewhat turgid,
third section into the idea
that there is a way in which
value gets expressed. And it gets expressed in the form of a money commodity. You want to take this further into the next
section, the money commodity conceals something, it conceals the social relations. So the next section is about the way in which there are social relations
between things, and material relations between people. Now you can see a certain pattern emerging here in the nature of the argument. There is an unfolding going on. There is an expansion of the argument going on. And actually if you look at the logical structure of the argument in Capital you see
it is in continuous expansion of this kind. Now the classic way of thinking of
the Hegelian logic is of course thesis-antithesis-synthesis. But these are not synthetic points. These are points which internalize a tension, a contradiction that needs to be further expanded and looked at. In this section, the first section, we have the argument that there is a distinction
between abstract and concrete labour, but now we expand it. And out of that comes an
understanding of how exchange processes produce
a representation of value in the money commodity, the money form, the universal equivalent,
as he puts it. So you see
how this process of representation unfolds in Capital. But of course at each point in this he's going to make
many other observations. This, if you like, is the sort of skeletal structure of the argument.
But as he built his argument he builds in extra elements. And as those extra elements are built in, so what we see
is a gradual expansion not only in the terms of
this kind of linear way that it sort of expands in this way as well. It goes from a very narrow conception of the commodity
to a broader and broader and broader conception as he works through
these different elements. So let's look
very concretely then at this section two. He starts off
on page hundred and thirty-two where he makes the very modest claim
that "I was the first to point out and examine critically this twofold
nature of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is crucial to an understanding
of political economy, it requires further elucidation." This is a polite way of saying: to the degree that classical political
economy never made this distinction, they got their political economy all wrong, and I'm going to get it right
because this distinction is fundamental. Now the first part looks at concrete labour and in much the same way that he's
looking at the heterogeneity of use-values, he's looking at the immense heterogeneities of concrete labour processes, producing different items-
shirts and shoes and apples and pears and all the rest of it, different skills involved different techniques involved,
different raw materials involved, and, therefore, the labour process
is itself heterogeneous. It is not simply that you're
producing heterogeneous products you're also
witnessing a heterogeneity of labour processes, spinning and weaving, shoe making and bread baking and
all the rest of it, call for different skills that the heterogeneity of it is simply stunning. So he goes over that heterogeneity. In the process however he makes one move
to broaden the argument. And that move is, I think, of singular importance and this move occurs at the bottom
of page hundred and thirty-three, well about halfway down, he says: "Labour, then, as the creator of
use-values as useful labour is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society." Now, usually you don't find Marx saying that in Capital, because he's
interested only in how things work under capitalism. But here he is saying use-values have to be produced no matter
what kind of society you're in. He says "it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man
and nature and, therefore, human life itself." What we're doing here is at this point,
we're introducing the whole idea of a metabolic relation to nature as being something
which has to be integrated into the argument, integrated into the analysis. He doesn't pay that much
attention to this in Capital, but the point of him making
this statement here is to say: there's no way which you can examine this whole process without
actually looking at this metabolic relation to nature. And he goes on to explain a little bit,
"the physical bodies of commodities are combinations of two elements:
the material provided by nature and labour. If we subtract the total amount of useful
labour of different kinds which is contained in the coat,
linen etc, a material substratum is always left. This substratum is furnished by
nature without human intervention. When man engages in production
he can only proceed as nature does herself." That is you have to proceed
in accordance with natural law. You "(…)can only change the form
of materials. Furthermore, even in this work of modification he
is constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of
material wealth, i.e. of use-values(…). As William Petty says, labour is the
father of material wealth, the earth is its mother." That gendered metaphor is very
common of course from seventeenth-century onwards,
and so Marx is simply repeating something that had been there from
the Enlightenment onwards. But, notice something here: material wealth
is not the same as value. Material wealth, it's going to be the total quantity of
use-values available to you. The value of those use-values can vary in all sorts of ways. You can have a lot of use-values and very little value because
there's very little labour input, or you can have very few use-values and a lot of labour input,
so the relationship between wealth and value is not one-on-one at all. So, Marx's conception of wealth is about the material assemblage of use-values which are available to us. He then goes on
to make some comments. This heterogeneous labour contains
a bit of a conundrum. Different skills,
different capacities for productivity of different labourers, and we have to look at that
which he does over the next two pages. And he says in order to
really advance his analysis, what he has to do is to
create a simple standard of value. And this standard is going to be called,
as he says on hundred and thirty-five, "simple average labour". Now simple average labour, is not constant, he points out: "(…)it is true
it varies in character in different countries and at different cultural epochs, but in a particular society it is given." This is a move that Marx will often make. For purposes of analysis I'm going to assume
it's given, even though I know it varies all over the place. But for purposes of analysis
I'm going to assume there's something there called simple average labour, which is what the abstraction of value is about. Furthermore, what I do is I
take the issue of skills and complex labour,
and simply say: "More complex labour counts only as
intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour
is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour." He then adds: "Experience shows
that this reduction is constantly being made." He doesn't tell us what experience it is
that shows us this. This is actually a rather problematic argument
and it goes under the title of 'the reduction of skill to simple labour problem'
in a lot of marxian theorizing. And it poses certain difficulties for the way in
which certain people have used Marx's value theory. I want to signal the fact that this passage conceals something which is a bit problematic and which is being a matter of some controversy in the field of Marxian studies. What i'm going to do, therefore, is to ask the question which we have, I think, have to ask
of this. What experience is it that shows this reduction is being made?, and how is that reduction
being made? And we will come across
some examples where we will find that argument laid out. So on the bottom of that paragraph he says:
"In the Interests of simplification, we shall henceforth view every form of labour power
directly as simple labour power; by this wish shall simply be saving ourselves the trouble of making the reduction." As I've indicated, this is a strategy that Marx sometimes uses.
He hits a complication, says: okay I recognize the complication,
I going to simplify it away, and for purposes of argument go on as if this datum of simple average labour is adequate to my argument. On page hundred and thirty-six/
hundred and thirty-seven he starts to
talk more about the abstract qualities of labour. He shifts from
the examination of the concrete, both looking at the relation to
nature and the problem of skills, and goes to look more concretely, if I can put it that way, at the abstract side
of this argument. And of course in the abstract side
we´re dealing with a quantitative relation. And he has to say certain things about
the temporal duration of labour, how the temporal duration of labour works. And the first thing he notices
on the top of hundred and thirty-seven is that, right at the bottom hundred thirty six,
is that "(…)an increase in the amount of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous
fall in the magnitude of its value." Value is dependent upon human productivity. Highly productive people can
produce a large amount of material wealth very quickly. And they can work less hours,
so actually the amount of value that they make can be very low but
the amount of material wealth they generate can be enormous. So again, he's going to emphasize
that distinction between material wealth and value. And he goes on to point out
that while changes in productivity affect material wealth, they
don't necessarily have any effect at all on value creation. We will see instances
where this is the case but, nevertheless, the change in productivity is itself not directly connected
to transformations in value. That leads into the bottom of
hundred thirty-seven, to a definition: "…all labour is an expenditure of
human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or
abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand all labour is an
expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being
concrete useful labour that it reproduces use-values." Just simply means that
if it takes so many hours of simple labour to produce a coat, and you produce ten coats, the amount of value is ten. If you produce fifteen coats it's fifteen. »STUDENT: But the value per coat remains the same.
»HARVEY: The value per coat remains the same. He then goes on to talk about what
happens when the value per coat goes down which is why the changing
productivity then comes in. Section three: the value form, or exchange-value. Again, what we see is an opening argument which specifies the nature of a problem. And he begins with this discussion
about the objectivity of commodities and the fact that, even though
they have objective qualities, nevertheless, he says about the
middle of page hundred and thirty-eight, "Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity
of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite
to the costly sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects." He then goes on to say: "(…)let us remember that
commodities possess an objective character as values only insofar as they are
expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character
as values is therefore purely social. From this it follows," he says, "that it can only appear in the
social relation between commodity and commodity." Now, this is a little bit strange, in the sense that Marx is saying that the value of a commodity is immaterial. Not an atom of matter enters
into the value of a commodity. Marx's foundational concept- value is immaterial, but objective. This doesn't fit very well with the image
of Marx, right, as someone who kind of is a grubby materialist for who everything has to
be sort of fixed and material and if it's not material then it's nothing. Here is his fundamental concept of value which is immaterial but objective. And it's immaterial because it's a social relation. Can you see social relations? Can you actually have iotas or atoms
or molecules of social relationships? You can't trace them that way, yet we know that social relationships are objective. There's a social relationship between you and I and you could look at what's going on in the
room and say: okay there's a social relationship between teacher and taught. And you can talk about it and it has objective
consequences in the grade you get and all that sort of stuff, but you can't actually measure it in terms of atoms,
and movement and you can't actually find the molecules floating through the air, you know, from my brain into your
brain or from wherever you know. It's not like that. It's immaterial but objective. So Marx is saying: value is immaterial and objective
like that, it's a social relation which becomes objectified in the commodity. And that process of objectification is of course also an
objectification of a process in a thing because the process is
socially necessary labour time. So the process is objectified in the thing. How it is objectified in the thing is a matter of
some considerable interest. And furthermore: how the commodity expresses that value relation
objectively, as a thing. And Marx's answer to that is: you cannot go to a commodity this table and dissect it and get the chemical composition
and everything else, you can't go to this table and find out what its value is
internal to the table. You only find out what the value of this table
is, when it is put in an exchange relation with something else. Later on he will actually
use the notion of gravity as a similar example. it's very difficult,
impossible in fact, to take a stone and dissect it and find gravity inside of it. You can only find gravity when you put the
stone in relationship to another stone, it's only a relationship between bodies. So it's immaterial but objective. So this is Marx's fundamental
concept and it's very important that you you recognize this at the outset. So when somebody comes along and says: well,
Marx is just one of those boring materialists who doesn't have any…well, how come? His foundational concept
is immaterial but objective and what is this about. And the immateriality is of course socially necessary labour time. But in order to figure out what socially
necessary labour time is you've got to have a form of appearance. So, on hundred and thirty-nine,
again he makes the modest claim: "Now, however, we have to perform a
task never even attempted by bourgeois economics. That is, we have to show the origin of this
money-form, we have to trace the development of the expression of value
contained in the value relation of commodities from its simplest almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money-form. When this has been done, the
mystery of money will immediately disappear." What then follows is, I think, a very boring exegesis of how this works. And we can simply go over
the general line of argument in order to actually look at
some very important, again, seeming sidebars like the relation to nature
which actually now going to become integrated into the argument. The argument goes like this: I have a commodity, I don't know what its abstract value is. I'm desperate to know and
have a measure of the abstract value in my commodity. You have a commodity. So I say: Okay, I'm going to measure the value, abstract value of my commodity in terms of
your commodity. You have the equivalent form, I have the relative form. If we were in a barter situation you would have the relative
form, relative to my equivalent. There are as many equivalents as there
are commodities, and as many relatives as there are commodities as well. So this is the simple version that kind of says: I only find out what this table is worth when
it's exchanged with something else, and therefore it is your labour
input which is going to be the measure of abstract labour in mine. He then expands it and he says:
Well, what happens when, for example, I have shoes and you don't
want shoes, but on the other hand I want the shirt you have. So I trade my shoes
for your shirt, and then you take the shoes that you've traded and trade them on, in
other words, you can imagine something going on and on
and on and on…like that. or you could also imagine
somebody sitting there with cans of tuna and they're
the only person who've got cans of tuna. And everybody wants to trade with cans of
tuna, so suddenly cans of tuna turn out to be very significant and therefore multiple commodities are
exchanging with the same thing. So Marx goes through these various forms of this and at the end of the day
we start to see crystallizing out the idea that there is one commodity, or a particular bundle of
commodities which start, actually, to be a stand-in for the equivalent. And out of that we see
crystallizing the universal equivalent. One commodity becomes the central equivalent for all exchanges, and that one commodity we call the money commodity
and the most obvious one to look at would be gold. So one commodity crystallizes out. There are a number of points which have to
be made about this and Marx is going to make this point several times. In order for this to happen, exchange has to become generalized, it has to become, what he
calls, a 'normal social act'. It can't be just an occasional exchange, it has to be generalized
and it has to be systematic. If it's not generalized or systematic then it's unlikely that gold is going to emerge as the universal equivalent. But what you can see him doing here is very different from the argument of classical political economy.
He's saying that the money form arises out off the exchange relation. It's not superimposed from outside. It's not that somebody had
a good idea and said: oh let us have money. Nothing of that kind, no, it arises, in Marx's view, out of simple acts of exchange which gradually expand to the point where they become generalized for the whole of society. Now, there's an interesting question here: Is this a historical argument or a logical argument? Actually we're often going to find that
arising in Capital, and it's something you should think about. In the nineteenth century there was a tendency sometimes
to interpret Marx as making a historical argument as well as a logical argument. I think most people who
are familiar with works in archaeology and anthropology and
history and all the rest of it would now kind of say you can't really treat this as a historical argument. There are too many symbolic systems like coins and so on, floating
around, of various kinds, historically and archeologically, and all the rest of it, in the absence of kind of clear
exchange relations of this sort. So, it's probably best not to
treat this as a historical argument. But what it does do,
and I think this is the way to look at it is: It actually constructs a logical argument about the relationship between
the money form and commodity exchange and what that would
say historically would be this: that while there may have been all kinds of different systems, that you might call monetary systems floating around,
exchange of cowry shells or
stories or whatever, while there may have been
all kinds of systems of that kind floating around
to the degree that capitalist commodity exchange becomes
generalized so it disciplines all of those forms to this singular relationship between the money form and the commodity form. So in that sense you could kind
of say: the logic of capitalism, and a capitalist system, would say that, as exchange proliferates
and becomes a normal social act, what this means is that money and commodities will move into
this kind of relation, no matter what the original foundation of the monetary form
may have been. But then there are some very
specifics about this argument. And I want to
just pay attention to occasional bits of language
which I think are significant. On hundred and forty-two for example, in the middle there, he's talking about human labour in general,
however he goes on to say: "(…)it is not enough to express the specific character of the labour
which goes to make up the value of the linen. Human labour-power in its fluid state(…)" Now, I've often and will often draw your attention to the way in which Marx
concentrates on the fluidity of things. "(…)human labour-power in its fluid state,
or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value in its coagulated state,
in objective form", through objectification. So again, there's this process-thing relationship. And that is always kind of lurking and you'll always find passages where Marx will be re-emphasizing that. But then there's something odd about the way in which
these relative and equivalent
forms of value work together. And he identifies three peculiarities: the first
is identified on page hundred and forty-eight: "The first peculiarity which strikes us when we reflect
on the equivalent form is this: that use-value becomes the
form of appearance of its opposite, value." That relation is entailed in the very
beginning of this argument. It's the use-value you
have which is the equivalent of my relative. And it's that use-value, it's
not the generality, it's just that use-value, and we can never going to escape from that contradiction. That a specific use-value, in the end of the day it's going to be gold, becomes a form of
appearance of its opposite, value. The result of that,
on hundred and forty-nine. is he starts to talk about the way in which - and this is where you start to get
a precursor of the fetishism argument -, he says: "The relative [value-]form of a commodity,
the linen for example, expresses its value existence as something wholly different
from its substance and properties, as the quality of being
comparable with a coat for example; this expression itself therefore indicates that it conceals
a social relation." Now in the fetishism section we're going to be dealing a lot with the
way in which things get concealed. But here he is kind of saying: that concealing goes on in this logical
relationship which is being built up between commodities and their monetary expression, and he then
goes on a bit further down that paragraph, to say:
"Hence the mysteriousness of the equivalent form, which only impinges on the crude bourgeois
vision of the political economist when it confronts him in its fully developed shape,
that of money." He then goes on to sort of
have a little cut at the classical
political economists for their failures. So he says on hundred and fifty at the top: "The body of the commodity, which serves as
the equivalent, always figures as the embodiment of abstract human labour and is always a
product of some specific useful and concrete labour." Specific concrete labour
is what makes gold. But gold
is supposed to be an expression of abstract human labour. Second peculiarity at the bottom of that page: "The equivalent form therefore
possesses a second peculiarity: in it, concrete labour, becomes a form of manifestation
of its opposite: abstract human labour." Third peculiarity, top of hundred and fifty-one:
"(…)the equivalent form has a third peculiarity: private labour takes the form of
its opposite, namely labour in its directly social form." You can see all sorts of
contradictions emerging out of this. The expression of value
is a particular commodity, a particular use-value
produced under particular concrete conditions of labour, which is in principle appropriable by any
one individual, and at the same time, it's meant
to be the general expression of the whole world of
commodity production. Tension. Just to give you
an example: you don't have to take the private appropriation. If gold is the money commodity, if gold is the one commodity, which is the center of all of this, then who are the producers of gold? Now there was a very interesting
moment towards the end of the nineteen sixties when the two most important
producers of gold in the world market were the Soviet Union and South Africa. Capitalism was not terribly happy. I mean, the Soviet Union and South Africa could
actually mess up the whole gold supply system by flooding the market or
doing something or other, you know. So, in a sense, one of the reasons, one of the
many reasons actually, that we went to a de-metallic, a non-metallic monetary base from the nineteen seventies
onwards had everything to do with the fact that the powers that be in Washington and London
and Tokyo and all the rest of it, decided that, hey, we can't keep gold as a base or
other reasons why they couldn't keep gold as a base, we can't keep gold as a base because of the political liability that lies in.
So these contradictions that he's talking about here are likely to erupt, in very specific ways, who controls the money supply, who
controls those use-values, what are the conditions of labour? What happens as happened in eighteen
forty eight when suddenly gold was discovered in California, and there's a flood of gold into the
world market? What happened when the Spaniards went into South America and stole all the
gold from the Incas and all the rest of it and flooded Europe with gold in the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries creating
the grand inflation? You know, in other words, the fact that a specific commodity has this capacity to be the universal equivalent, with all of those particularities about it, creates a problem. It is as it were a simple relationship
between a particularity at an universal, and the particularity is standing in as a measure of the universal. Tension, contradictions, monetary contradictions fly all
over the place later on in the analysis. But what he's doing here is laying in a little bit of a basis for that. Also on hundred and fifty-one he points out something else
which is very important about exchange. He is very fond of quoting Aristotle. And he notices that Aristotle says: well, if things exchange there must be something equivalent in the exchange. So, that what Aristotle began to lay out was
the notion that exchange implies equivalence. But Aristotle couldn't have
a labour theory of value. Why not? Because of slavery. No free market in
labour, this kind of stuff. So Aristotle saw something very
significant about the nature of exchange and about the nature of economies, which is the equivalence principle. It didn't necessarily mean there's equivalence
between people but there's equivalence somewhere in the system that says that is equivalent to that. And that equivalence principle is something which is going to be very
significant in the way in which markets work. So Aristotle, on hundred and fifty-one, says: "There can
be no exchange without equality (…) and no equality without commensurability." This is something which is very important for how
markets work. Now, what happens as this universal equivalent starts to become more and more present in the argument is this: and he points this out again on
hundred and fifty-three towards the bottom, he says: "The internal opposition between
use-value and value, hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by
an external opposition, i.e. by a relation between two commodities
such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed,
counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed,
counts directly only as an exchange-value." That is: what we begin to see, is the beginnings of an emergence
of something which is going to be crucial to the argument. An internal opposition within the commodity between use-value and value is eventually going to be expressed
as an external opposition between the world of commodities and the world of money. Those two worlds suddenly become separate from each other. And as they become separate from each
other they can be antagonistic to each other. in other words: you go from
an internal opposition to an external opposition, with the potentiality
for an antagonism. So, the end of the story then is about how the expanded form of value morphs into an universal equivalent. And that therefore, what
this means is that money becomes the expression, the money commodity becomes the expression
of value. He says on hundred and sixty,
he says this, in the middle of the page: "Finally, a particular kind of commodity
acquires the form of universal equivalent, because all other commodities make it the
material embodiment of their uniform and universal form of value." Then notice the next sentence: "But the antagonism
between the relative form of value and the equivalent form, the two poles of the
value-form, also develops concomitantly with the development of the value form itself." And that takes us into
the final section just on the money-form. What we've done here is looked at the way in which concrete and abstract
come together in an exchange how the relative and
equivalent forms of value build in certain ways, generate this money commodity. Then that leads us into
fetishism, but let's have any questions you have about
this section and the preceding section. »STUDENT: What's interesting, you asked
about whether Marx is attempting, or we can use this as either a logical
or a historical argument, what's interesting is that, people have come to
apply this approach to a historical analysis and they have this concept of, contingency
and codification, so that capitalism develops as a series of accidents (»DAVID HARVEY: yes), which become
codified, and then there's also the question of consciousness. And then also brings to mind, I think, this
notion of the true in the form of the true and how, what can we say about the social relations in
the capitalist society when…in capitalism you have expressions embodied in things that
are in contradiction to something else, like, for…, the expression of value is
in a contradictory form in the particular use-value of something, and this idea that truth is when
representation and the thing itself coincide, and are these the only ways
to have absurdities in a society? »DAVID HARVEY: Well they're not absurdities
so much as I think Marx is all the time talking about the internalizations of contradictions. And those internalizations
of contradictions also become generative. And it is the tensions there… And here we will get
a kind of complicated argument, which I don't want to go into an any great
depth but a complicated argument, which says: you know, are we talking about Marx's mode of representation here? And his talking about contradictions? Or are
we talking about real contradictions that exist? Now, I've already indicated, what I find fascinating
about Marx is that he sets up, just in this chapter, this notion
of a contradiction within the money form. And then when I'm looking at and kind of say:
Well, why did they go off the gold standard in the late nineteen sixties, you know,
and then I kind of thought to myself: Well, actually this helps
me understand something about that. And I think it was very real, and if you
go to the literature you find: indeed it was real. There was this nervousness
about the empowerment of the Soviet Union and South Africa. So, you know, the relationship between Marx's argument
and the realities around us, and the tensions we feel in our daily lives, is
always a complicated one, and you have to work that through for yourself, and work it out for yourself.
But what you have see in doing this: he is making a logical argument here, where he's talking about the way in which
these contradictions get internalized. In something like money, right, what _is_ money? It's a very interesting kind of question, you
know, I mean how many of you have thought about what is money?, where did it come from? And, if you go to Dickens' Dombey and Son,
you know, there is this Mr. Dombey and little Paul is dying and he kinda says: Papa, what's money? And Mr. Dombey, the great
entrepreneur, can't give him an answer. And little Paul's mother has died,
so he says: Well, can money bring her back? And Mr. Dombey doesn't know what to say. What is money? What is it? And we're with it all the time, we use
it all the time, but it's deeply contradictory. Also in terms of our
relationship with it, in terms of the fetish. I mean, even I wake up sometimes
and sort of go and check what's happening to my stocks in my pension fund, you know, sort of… So we get a fetish about it, you know, well,
what is it?, you know. Oh it went up by two percent, yeah!, you know. Or: it went down by ten, you go: oh my god!,
you know, so I have a contradictory relation to collapses of the stock market.
On the one hand I like it politically, on the other hand I hate it personally, because there goes my pension fund, you know. So, so these kind of contradictions and
tensions are there all the time in our daily lives. And so I think we need to think about them. One of the interesting things about this
section is, that is written in a completely different style. I mean, the last section is Marx
with his dull accounting hat on, you know, this equals that and that equals that. This is Marx kind of going off with mysteries and… werwolves and all the rest of it. It's a very different writing style. And one of the things that's
happened as a result of that, is that quite a lot of people actually regard this
as some kind of extraneous piece of argument in Capital, some sort of thing, that's set off on the side. And that therefore they don't take serious note of it too much, when
they're talking about the general theory that Marx is laying out in Capital. The other side kind of doesn't pay much mind to the general
theory of Capital and treats the section on the fetishism as the golden piece, the golden nugget in Marx, and kind of expands it into great social literary theory and all the rest of it. I think it's very important
to recognize that Marx imported this into the second edition
from an appendix, as he did the third section. He rewrote them and brought them into the
second edition, and therefore it was a very conscious move on his part to do this. But it also says
something about Marx's technique, that he feels perfectly happy
switching writing styles as he moves from one kind of topic to another. And he matches his writing style to
what it is that he's really trying to convey. So, I think one of the questions we have to ask is: what is the positionality of this in Marx's general line of argument?
And I think that the positionality is already partially being revealed with his talk of how things get concealed, how things become
mysterious, how things get buried, how we can't see quite what's going on, how there is a complication of this contradiction between the money form with its particularities
and the universal equivalent, which it's supposed to be functioning as. So these kinds of relations have already been set up in such a way that
they start to become the focus, as happens with all these other pieces
of the argument. They become the focus. Ideas which are being latent
there, suddenly become the focus of general kind of argument. And what he's interested in here is really two sets of things. First is the unraveling of the, the notion of fetishism of the commodity, in which an ordinary sensuous thing gets transformed into something, which he says
on the bottom of one hundred sixty-three, that "transcends sensuousness". Something which, on hundred and sixty-five, he says: "(…)sensuous
things, which are the same time suprasensible or social." Now, the enigmatic character of a commodity, as he puts it, arises out of it's social character. He says at the bottom of hundred and sixty-four:
"The mysterious character of the commodity form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the
social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products
themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things." A bit further down: "What we find", he says is, but this "is nothing but the definite
social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them,
the fantastic form of a relation between things." And he then makes
a brief sidebar about religion, but then goes on to say:
"I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they're produced as commodities, And is therefore inseparable
from the production of commodities." This inseparability from the
production of commodities is extremely important. It says that fetishism is not something that you can sort of just
brush away. It's not a a matter of consciousness, it's a matter of something that's deeply
embedded in the way in which commodities get produced and exchanged. As he goes on to say, right at the bottom, which is the, of hundred and sixty five,
which is the key passage really: "In other words, the labour
of the private individual manifests itself as an element
of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of
exchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation,
between the producers. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between
their private labours appear as what they are", note that,
appear as what they are, "i.e. they do not appear as direct
social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things". Now, the argument in a way is simple enough. People under capitalism
do not relate to each other directly as human beings. They relate to each other
through the myriad of products which they encounter
in the market. But when we go into the market and we ask
the question: Why does this cost twice as much as that? What we're encountering is an
expression of a social relation which has something to do, in Marx's view, with value,
socially necessary labour time. Now, what are the ramifications of this? There are a number of ramifications. First off, we can't possibly know about the conditions of labour of all of the people who worked
to put breakfast on our table. We can't possibly know it. It's so intricate, it's
so far fetched, it's so far flung, And when you take the inputs that are going into
the inputs that are going to the inputs, the coal that makes the steel
that goes into the tractor that goes into… Millions and millions and millions of people
are involved in putting breakfast upon our table. And the big question then arises: Well, where does our breakfast come from? I used to like to start my introductory geography classes with that
question: Where does your breakfast come from? Now, go and think about it. And the first answer was: Well, it came from the
supermarket. Well no, come on, go back a bit further than that. And what do you know about the people who
produced it? And by the time we got into about the third week, people would say things like:
I didn't have breakfast this morning. I think it was a kind of sense of guilt that was
kind of bubbling up, you know, and the typical response is kind of something like that. So, the point here is that the social relations between things mediate between us and
everything that is going on out there. Now, Marx doesn't make this argument, but, you know, I've had this argument for instance with religious folk who insist upon, you know,
good moral behavior or something of that kind and, and it's always about face-to-face relations,
I'm good with my neighbor and good with the person next door, I help the person on the street
I see, this kind of stuff. And you kind of say, well what do you do about all
those people who are putting breakfast on your table? What's your moral responsibility to all those
people? And the answer is: "Well, no, I am not interested in that."
Well, that is where our real social connectivity to the world of labour lies. And it becomes a very complicated to
find out, so occasionally we do find out that, you know, this product has been produced under appalling conditions
of labour somewhere, so we should boycott this product or boycott that product. But you can see how incredibly complicated
this world is. And how the market system, and in
particular the money commodity, conceals from us so much of what's going on
in the world around us. And so Marx is starting out
by kind of saying: we've got to confront
the way in which that world works. and recognize that it is concealed
from us by virtue of the way the market is. And in so doing, he comes back to… going back over the idea that commodities are objective, they exist, you can't go into the supermarket and look at a lettuce and find out
whether it has been produced under conditions of exploitative
labour or anything else, you can't do that. So you have no means of knowing
and if you do have a boycott of grapes from this place you find the grapes turn
up as if they have been produced in another place. But then he goes on a bit further and says this: We have to understand, he says on the bottom
of hundred and sixty-six, that "Men do not therefore bring the products their labour into
relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely
as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different
products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different
kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it. Value,
therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms
every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic." Later on, he says, we try to decipher what this hieroglyphic was. But: "The belated scientific discovery that the
products of labour, insofar as they are values, are merely the material expressions of
the human labour expended to produce them, marks an epoch in the history of mankind's development, but by no means banishes the semblance of
objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labour." Now, again what he's talking about here
is the generalization of the exchange process, …the global…, the world of commodities, the global structure. And again he's coming back to
this idea that value does not walk around saying what it is. Value arises, the notion of value
arises out of all of these processes. It doesn't precede them, it arises out of them. And the value relation
is something which is produced specifically within a capitalist society. And it was a capitalist society that actually unraveled the labour theory of value. One of the first to actually come up with some version
of the labour theory of value was Hobbes. And then we get a whole kind of line, of Locke
and Hume and all these kinds of people talking about this, and eventually when you get to Adam Smith, you get a labour
theory of value in Adam Smith and a labour theory of value in Ricardo. So the labour theory of value is not something
that's been around forever, it is something which essentially arose with the rise of capitalism. But, as
we've seen, the labour theory of value, as classical political economy saw it, was labour-time, not socially necessary labour time, no
distinction between concrete and abstract labour, all of these things Marx has been talking about. So the labour theory of value then, or the rise
of the labour theory of value, was concomitant with the rise of the bourgeois epoch. And it follows from that, that the destruction of a bourgeois economy, the destruction of capitalism, would require the construction of an
alternative value structure, an alternative value system. Or conversely, if you don't like the value
system of capitalism and you want something else, then you better
become a revolutionary very fast because, this is the
dominant form of value which operates in our society. And it operates, as he says,
behind our backs. We don't see it, we don't
understand its consequences. We end up with
schizophrenic forms of value, like good face-to face relationships, but I
don't give a hoot about what goes on through the market. Those kinds of divisions. And then we get the
introduction of something which is also going to become very significant in the next chapter. At the bottom of hundred and sixty-seven he talks about the way in which proportions of products get exchanged. And clearly, these
exchange relations vary a lot. "These magnitudes", he says, "vary continually,
independently of the will, foreknowledge and actions of the exchangers. Their own movement within society
has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from
being under their control, in fact control them." That is: the producers. Who's in control of this system? The producers? Or does the system control them? Now, of course, the argument
that the system controlled them, is not unique to Marx. The person who pushed it most strongly was Adam Smith, in the terms of the
'hidden hand of the market'. It is the hidden hand
of the market that guided things. Individuals, in a properly functioning, perfectly functioning market society would
not have any kind of control over the system. The market would be
the controlling mechanism. And it would be the
hidden hand of the market that guided us to the grand capitalist utopia. But, says Marx, within this market system, a bit down on hundred and sixty-eight, is that, "The reason for this reduction (…) is in the midst of the accidental and
ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products," you can treat that as fluctuations of supply and demand, "the labour-time socially necessary to produce
them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way the law of gravity asserts
itself when a person's house collapses on top of him. The determination of the magnitude of
value by labour time is therefore a secret hidden under the apparent movements
in the relative values of commodities." By the ups and downs of the market. "Its discovery destroys the semblance of the
merely accidental determination of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour, but by no means
abolishes that determination's material form." So within all of these market fluctuations,
and the hidden hand of the market, there is a regulative principle which emerges, and the regulative principle is going to be that of
socially necessary labour time, embodied in commodities, which establishes the average exchange ratio
with other commodities. And this is going to be
the regulative principle. So this is, if you like, the first part of the fetishism argument. The second part begins immediately after, when Marx takes it into
the realm of thought. How do we think about the world, when the physical indicators say: it looks like this, when we understand it to be like that. The notion of fetishism suggests that there is a deep way of looking at something, which is other than it
appears upon the surface. And Marx somewhere else
kind of made the comment: that if everything were as it appears to be on
the surface, there would be no need for science. And he's trying to construct
the science of political economy. He's very serious about that science. So he's trying to construct an apparatus which is going to get behind the fetishism, get behind
the surface appearance. How do you do that? And how have other people
approached that question? And what he finds, of course, is that many
people have not approached that question, they've been deluded by the surface appearances. But, go back to that very crucial thing:
they appear as they really are, the surface appearances are not simply illusions. Indeed we do go into a market/supermarket,
indeed we do shop, we do put down money, indeed we do all of those things. That is what we do. And we watch ourselves doing it,
they're actions, it is real. And you have to take account
of that reality. In other words: you have to deal with the reality at the same
time as you're dealing with the underlying structure. Now this is a familiar way of proceeding in a
lot of scientific endeavors. What does psychoanalysis do
if it's not about saying: Well look, the surface appearance of
behavior conceals something else. Then a psychoanalyst wouldn't say: Well, that person who is aggressive and
wields a knife like that, he's just feeling insecure, so don't worry about them wielding the knife. You get out of the way. You don't say this is an illusion, no it's real. But you do know that there's something
going on behind it which is other than what it appears to be on the surface. So Marx
is making a similar kind of argument, in fact he is a pioneer of that mode of argumentation in social science. And many people, I think, have taken that ability from him. But he then is interested in how the surface appearances have been interpreted in classical political economy. And, as he says on hundred and sixty-eight:
"Reflection on the forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those
forms, takes a course directly opposite to their real development. Reflection begins post festum and therefore
with the results of the process of development ready to hand." That is: we've got to understand the world we're now in
and we have to work backwards to where it all came from. "Consequently," he says, "it was solely
the analysis of the prices of commodities which led to the determination
of the magnitude of value…" We started in the supermarket, said, well, what's a common value? "It is…precisely this finished form of the world of
commodities - the money form - which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations
between the individual workers, by making those relations
appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly." He then goes on to talk about
the categories of bourgeois economics. He says they "…consist precisely of forms
of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore
objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined
mode of social production. …The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic
and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production." And he then has a great deal
of fun with the Robinson Crusoe myth. Robinson Crusoe myth was used by the political economists of the
time to fantasize about how somebody operating in a state of nature would decide on how to regulate their lives,
how to regulate their relation to nature, what to do, how to do it,
all this kind of thing. And Defoe had produced this kind of myth, and actually the Crusoe-economy has
been a very important aspect of the whole of politically economic theorizing. But what Marx does is have
some fun with it and point out that "Our friend Robinson Crusoe
learns (…) by experience, and having saved a watch, ledger, ink and
pen from the shipwreck, he soon begins, like a good Englishmen, to keep a set of books." In other words, the fantasy was
based on English political economic life, and then what the economists
did was to fantasize that this is how a rational being in a state
of nature would actually regulate their lives. So, Marx is
having kind of fun with this. And he says, well let's go
away from Robinson's island. By the way, I think that the economists
got the wrong Defoe novel, they should have taken Moll Flanders, it's much better, I mean, Moll is a
classic kind of commodity character. She actually moves around and
speculates on the passions of everybody else, and has everybody else
speculate on her passions. And there's this wonderful
moment in Moll Flanders where she spends all her last money and everything
she's got to sort of hire a carriage and dress very elegantly to go this ball,
and she goes to this ball and she meets this guy, and they both dance together and they decide to
elope and get married, and they elope and get married, and in a local inn they
wake up the next morning and he says: I hope you got some money because I'm dead broke. And she says: I'm dead broke, too, and
they both laugh and kind of leave, you know, it's kind of a wonderful, kind of moment of how, you know, commodity collisions
can take place. And she goes to the colonies, she goes to Virginia, she's in debtor's jail… It would be a much better metaphor for what capitalism is
really about than Robinson Crusoe. But anyway, we go from Robinson's island and we go and we look at a situation which is pre-capitalist. The world of personal
dependance in medieval europe. He talks about the corvée, and in which "…social relations", he says,
"between individuals in the performance of their labour appear at all events as
their own personal relations, and are not disguised as
social relations between things, between the products of labour." If you're working for the lord, you know,
you're working so many hours for the lord on the estate. That's it, I mean, there's
a personal relationship of dependency. So, there's nothing obscure about that, nothing opaque about
that, and he says the same thing about a patriarchal rule, industry, a peasant family. And he even then goes on and at the bottom of the page hundred and
seventy-one to talk about: "Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men
working with the means of production held in common, and expanding their many different
forms of labour power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force." This is one of the rare passages where Marx
actually talks about some sort of fantasy of socialism and what
socialism would be about. And again, he says: "All the characteristics of Robinson's
labour are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual." And he goes on to talk about the way in which the social
relations in a society of that kind would, on hundred and seventy-two, be "…transparent in
their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution." So, he's talking about the very specific quality, the opaque quality of social relations as they emerge under capitalism,
and contrasting them with alternative modes of production, in order to
highlight the specificity of the world in which we have our being. He then goes on to make some comments which are kind of interesting and controversial: "For a society of commodity producers, whose
general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their
products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material form bring their individual
private labours into relation with each other as homogeneous human labour, Christianity with its religious
cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e.
Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion." Now as you know, Max Weber reversed that thesis much later, to say that capitalism was actually
an expression of that religious belief, while Marx is kind of saying: actually that religious transformation was a refraction, a reflection, if you like, of these rising commodity relations,
and the rise of the value theory and the value of human labour in the abstract,
and all those kind of things. And that the specific form of religious beliefs, at some point or other, moves in parallel with the transformations of the
economic and political structure. And he goes on to kind of comment: "In the
ancient Asiatic, Classical-Antique, and other such modes of production, the transformation
of the product into a commodity, and therefore men's existence as producers
of commodities plays a subordinate role…" And he talks about the impacts of market exchange upon patterns of belief. And those patterns of belief of course also affect, what he calls on hundred and seventy
three, "the umbilical cord of his natural species-connection with other men, or
on direct relations of dominance in servitude. They are conditioned by a low stage
of development of the productive powers of labour and corresponding limited relations between men within the
process of creating in reproducing their material life, hence also limited relations
between man and nature. These real limitations are reflected
in the ancient worship of nature…". And he then goes on to talk, a bit further down,
"The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process,… until it becomes production by
freely associated men, and stands under their
conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series
of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous
product of a long and tormented historical development." This is Marx in his speculative mode, talking about how ideas and beliefs are not immune, and that, of course, is something that
carries over into the next two or three pages. And, of course there's a lot of debate on the degree to which we can put credence upon this. But it's very clear, as he says at the bottom of
hundred and seventy-five, that he is reiterating a reductionist argument, in effect, when he says, in the footnote: "My view is that each
particular mode of production, and the relations of production corresponding
to it at each given moment, in short 'the economic structure of society', is 'the real foundation, on which
arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond
definite forms of social consciousness', and that 'the mode of production of material life
conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life." Now this is the argument he laid out in the introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, and he's sticking to it in Capital. It's a reductionist argument that says that beginning with an understanding
of the labour process and the nature of the labour
process, and what the labour process is about, how human beings are organizing their production, on that basis you can say a great deal about politics, about legal structures patterns of belief and the like. You may not like the reductionist argument and you can disagree
with it, but I think you should be very clear that Marx is saying that, that is what he believes, that's what he thinks is significant. My own view of it is that it's an inspired idea, but, like most reductionist
arguments, ultimately it fails. But by taking that reductionist position
you start to see all kinds of things that you wouldn't otherwise see. And without that reductionist
impulse, Marx would never have understood all manner of things. You'll find analogous kind of reductionism,
by the way, going on in biological sciences, where evolution gets reduced to, you know, micro-physics and all the rest of it. And again, you could argue, well ultimately the attempt
fails, but the fact is that, you know, evolution and genetic histories and so on, are now
sort of embedded in each other, and the very search for the reductionism
has actually produced incredibly important insights in the biological field, in
exactly the same way, that I would argue that Marx's holding to principles of
reductionism here, plays a very significant role in his method of inquiry and his impulsion to inquire, and one of the things that I get annoyed at, I have to
say, is that people who kind of say: oh it's reductionist therefore don't believe it. If people were not prepared to be reductionist
about things we wouldn't know, we would hardly know anything about anything. And in fact, a lot of the time
we're constantly trying to reduce complexities to simplicities. And that has been a lot of what understanding
and knowledge constructions have been about. And ok, we understand the world's
a very complicated place, on the other hand, once you've got some of the simplicities, there you can understand the complexities
in a different kind of way, and that's what Marx, I think, does for us. But he is very up front here about, this
is what he's doing, and in these passages he's being very explicit about how these belief
patterns cannot be isolated from the nature of
the political economic process which is being engaged. But again, I want to emphasize, the footnote on hundred and seventy-four, towards the bottom, footnote thirty four, is a very important footnote because there
he goes over what he calls the chief failings of classical political economy. And, what he's pointing about here is that we should not make
the same mistake of treating the value theory, the labour theory of value as the eternal natural form of social production. It is a historical construct, and as such it can be historically deconstructed. But the classical political economists treated the labour theory of value as natural. As something that was, and that's
why you go back to sort of Robinson Crusoe. What would a natural person do in a natural
environment? Well, it would do what Robinson Crusoe did. Which is what bourgeois thought should be done,
in the seventeenth century. And as he says on hundred and seventy four: Bourgeois political economy, he says,
"…has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular
form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its
duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. These formulas, which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production
has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the political economists' bourgeois
consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature imposed necessity
as productive labour itself." This is a pretty devastating
critic of classical political economy. And in a sense it was so devastating that, with all the fussing that went on after Marx, economics had to find…, had to abandon the labour theory of value. So what the marginalist economists did
in the middle of the nineteenth century was, faced with this kind of criticism, they kind of said:
the only way we can deal with this is junk the whole labour theory of value. And so we end up with a marginalist theory of
value, which is, you know, a completely different value structure. And economics is reconstructed as a
neoclassical economics, rather than classical political economy. But with this kind of thing going on, it's
very hard to hang on to a labour theory of value. And it had to be junked, or else,
you know, you would end up being a Marxist, and nobody wanted to be that, so,
you know, classical political economists kind of were thrown, were pushed aside,
largely because Marx produced the kind of critique that made
it impossible to hold that positionality anymore, without actually acknowledging
the power of what Marx is saying. And he goes on hundred and seventy-six to say this:
"The degree to which some economists are misled by the fetishism
attached to the world of commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social
characteristics of labour, is shown, among other things, by the dull and tedious dispute over the part
played by nature in the formation of exchange-value." This still goes on, of course. "Since exchange-value is a definite social
manner of expressing the labour bestowed on a thing, it can have no more natural
content than has, for example, the rate of exchange." And he goes on to talk about the physiocratic illusion that ground rent
grows out of the soil, not out of society. And then some amusing ends where he talks about the way in which, if commodities could
speak, what would they say. In fact, that language of commodities has been here and I haven't commented on it,
but it's something which is a bit intriguing. Ok, so that's the fetishism
of commodities, has anybody got any observations?, I mean, I don't want to debate
too much Marx's major thesis, that we can do some other time. I wanna get through chapter two, so let's zip into chapter two. Chapter two is, I hope, not too difficult. What Marx is doing here is simply setting out the conditions of exchange. And he starts by showing that, well, of course commodities don't go to
market on their own, they have owners. So we have to say something, not about commodities,
but about the relationship between commodities and their owners. And what he does is to imagine a society in which, on the first page there, on hundred and seventy-eight,
he says, "The guardians must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property. This juridical relation, whose form is the contract, whether as part of a developed legal system
or not, is a relation between two wills which mirrors the economic relation. The content of this juridical relation (…)
is itself determined by the economic relation. (…) persons exist for one another
merely as representatives" and as he says, we're now going to look at
"(…) characters who appear on the economic stage (…)" as "personifications of economic relations." Let's take the last bit first. He's going to look right throughout
Capital in terms of personifications of social relations. He's not going to be talking about individuals. He's going to be talking about buyers and sellers, capitalists and labourers. He's going to be talking about people in roles. So the analysis is going to be about what people do in those roles. Individuals may adopt many different roles, but it's a very familiar trope to actually say, well, we're going to look at roles rather than people. And you wouldn't make the argument that a discussion of the relationship between drivers and pedestrians in the streets of manhattan is illegitimate because people are both drivers and pedestrians. And you're not talking about individuals. You say, well, no it's still worth
talking about relationships which are between pedestrians and drivers because there's something important going
on there, and what you find of course is that, on a given day, when you're the driver
you cuss the pedestrians and when you're a pedestrian, you cuss the driver,
you know, so, this kind of, so Marx is going to be talking about
roles, he's going to be talking about that all the time. And he's not going to be
talking so much about individuals, I mean, occasionally he will, but, by and large,
he's just going to be talking about roles. And the roles, in this case,
are strictly defined. That he's recognizing individuals who have private property relation over the commodity they command, and they trade it under
non coercive conditions. That is, there's a reciprocity of respect for juridical rights of individuals. And this is, actually, a
description of the kind of legal and political framework for
properly functioning markets. And in that context he points out: The commodities are, as he says
on hundred and seventy-nine, "…born leveller(s) and cynic(s), it is always ready to exchange not only soul
but body with each and every other commodity…" The owner is willing to dispose of it, the buyer is willing to take it. "All", as he says, "All commodities are non-use-values
for their owners, and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently they must all change hands." Now again, his argument here
is historically specific. So he has a good ol' crack at
Proudhon, in the footnote, and the anarchist kind of vision, because, basically he says, well
what Proudhon did was to take the notion of justice, the
bourgeois notion of justice, and the bourgeois notion of labour, and labour input, as the basis of the construction of an alternative society,
which is, as far as Marx was concerned, was ridiculous, because all you're doing was: taking the pure form of bourgeois consciousness and saying, this is the way in which to escape from bourgeois society, and Marx
kind of says: that's nonsense. So, what we then go through,
to some degree in here, is a recapitulation of the way
in which money crystallizes out. As he says on hundred and eighty-one: "Money necessarily
crystallizes out of the process of exchange(…)", and "The historical broadening and deepening
of the phenomenon of exchange develops the opposition between use-value and value which is latent
in the nature of the commodity." We've come across this idea, this opposition, before. He's now coming back to it, expanding it a bit. "The need to give an external expression of
this opposition for the purposes of commercial intercourse produces the drive towards an independent form of value,
which finds neither rest nor peace until an independent form has been
achieved by the differentiation of commodities into commodities and money." In other words, this, again is about the process of exchange proliferating, generating, making that separation. This separation, however, presumes, he says on top of hundred and eighty-two,
that we're dealing with individuals and private owners, and that "Things are in themselves
external to man, and therefore alienable." Alienable in this case means: they're not part of my
being, I can freely dispose of them. And you can freely dispose of
what you have. If you have some deep attachment to something, you're not going to
be able to dispose of it but, the assumption is that all commodities are alienable in this way. And he says in the middle of that page: we're
talking here about "the constant repetition of exchange [which] makes it a normal social process." And this universal and social equivalent starts to work its way
through different social orders. And on a hundred and eighty-three
he talks about the way in which "In the same proportion as
exchange bursts its local bonds, and the value of commodities accordingly expands
more and more into the material embodiment of human labour as such, in that proportion does the
money-form become transformed to commodities which are by nature fitted to perform the
social function of a universal equivalent. Those commodities are the precious metals. Gold and silver." This then leads him, however, into
some important reflection on hundred and eighty-one, hundred and eighty-three. Bottom of hundred and eighty four, sorry, and hundred and eighty-five: "We have seen that the money-form is merely
the reflection thrown upon a single commodity by the relations between all
other commodities. That money is a commodity is therefore only a discovery for those who proceed from its finished shape in order to
analyze it afterwards." This then leads him to talk a little bit
about the way in which money can take on symbolic forms. But he then goes on to say: in a sense "…every commodity is a symbol…" A symbol of what?, well, a symbol of value. "…it is only the material shell
of the human labour expended on it." Now, frequently you find people talking
about, you know, well, what do we do about symbolic aspects of economies, how
do symbolic economies work? But what Marx's opening up here is a possibility
to absorb that kind of analysis, and it would take adjustments and all the rest of it, but you can
absorb that kind of question into his analysis, because he's very, very well aware that from the very get-go all commodities are symbolic, symbolic of labour content. Therefore, in a sense, we're dealing
with symbolic economies all along. The nature of those symbolic economies, however, can be transformed and shifted. And we could look at that in
terms of our contemporary society. But what we have to do, however, is to be careful of detaching the symbolic qualities from its rootedness in the value theory. And we always have to bring
those symbolic qualities back to this rootedness. And as he says, at the bottom of hundred and eighty-six, "The difficulty lies not in
comprehending that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why and by what means a commodity becomes money." That's the conundrum he's been playing
with right away throughout of these last few sections. So this leads into talk, hundred and
eighty-seven, about the magic of money, towards the bottom. Then comes a very, very important sentence: "Men are henceforth related to each other in
their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore
assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their
conscious individual action. This situation is manifested first by the fact that the products of men's labour
universally take on the form of commodities. The riddle of the money fetish is therefore the riddle of the commodity fetish, now becomes visible and dazzling to our eyes." What Marx is doing here is accepting Adam Smith's vision of a perfectly functioning market economy in which the hidden hand guides decisions. No one person is in charge, no one person can command, everybody has to function according to, what Marx will later call, the
coercive laws of competition in the market. Now, Adam Smith's thesis was that actually individual
motivations of entrepreneurs and autonomous individuals acting in the market didn't matter, they could be greedy,
they could be selfless, they could be whatever. They could be nice, they could be horrible, but at the end of the day, Adam Smith argued, autonomous individuals,
acting freely in the market, following their own wants,
needs and desires in whatever way they wanted, would be led to produce a social result, when mediated through the hidden hand of the
market, that would redound to the benefit of all. Marx is accepting that vision. And I think it's very
important to understand why. Marx's Capital is a critique
of classical political economy. Classical political economy held that if only you would let
the market do its work, everything would be great. If only you would get the state out of the
picture, if only you would eradicate monopoly control, if only you would do all of those things,
you would end up with a social order that would be incredibly dynamic and socially just. That was Adam Smith's utopian dream. That was Ricardo's utopian dream. That was the utopian dream of liberal theory. Continues to be the utopian
dream of neoliberal theory. Only let the market do its
work and everything will be okay. Now, Marx, at this point, has a choice. He could say either markets don't work. We all know there is monopoly, there is
power… and all the rest of it, messing around and destroying everything, so, I'm not even going to accept
that utopian project as being ever possible. Or he can, as he does here, accept the conditions of that utopian dream, and then ask the question: is it really going to benefit everybody? And the big thesis that is going to
come out in Capital is: No! It's just going to benefit the bourgeoisie, It's just going to benefit the haute bourgeoisie, and it's going to screw the workers, left, right and center. The closer you come to implementing this utopian
project of liberal theory, neoliberal theory, the greater the levels of social inequality, the greater the degrees of injustice in society, and the greater the destruction of both environmental qualities
and labour qualities will ensue. So Marx is accepting the terms of
classical political economic debate in order to show that, in their own
terms, they are wrong about the outcome. And he's going to prove it step by step by step. But in so doing, he's going to confine himself to the argument that the classical conditions, which are laid out
in Adam Smith's hidden hand, are actually there, and
have actually been achieved. When we know, they've not been
achieved and they never were achieved. But we have gone through certain historical
periods where people have tried to achieve them, as over the last thirty years for example. So what Marx is doing is really trying to deconstruct the classical political economic
vision of the liberal bourgeoisie in order to show that it's self-serving. But, it puts him in a problem
and it puts us in a problem. When we're reading his analysis, we have to
be very careful in saying: is he talking about a real capitalist society, or this theoretical society which Adam Smith dreamed of, and the classical political economists dreamed of. And sometimes those two things
run interference with each other, sometimes they mess each other up. And we have to watch out for that. Sometimes he
ends up saying things which are not unrealistic precisely because of that presumption. So that's where we are. We're out of time. Next week I want you to
read the chapter on money, the whole of the chapter on money. Think about the structure. It's a very difficult chapter, it's the chapter that nearly
everybody gives up on. If you get through it, you'll be… you'll be okay. So, we'll go through it next time, thanks.
