READING THE GRUNDRISSE WITH DAVID HARVEY: ONLINE CLASS (PART 1)

hello hello welcome welcome to the people's Farm if this is your first time here okay all right we're just gonna stand here and look great I like your sweater it's a great sweater all right we're all good all right hey y'all welcome um welcome to the people's Farm if this is your first time here super happy to have you here can't wait for you to come back we're a space for political education and cultural work um and if you're joining us online welcome welcome so I'm super excited for our first class reading the grand jise with David Harvey this is going to be an amazing time for us to really go through and study one of the most foundational texts of Mark says political economy and there's nothing better than engaging in study together so I'm really excited to have you all here in person and to our folks online for joining in we have folks that signed up from all across the world so this is really really really special to us um so as you see here we have Marx's companion to the Grande say published by David Harvey so today's a special day because today is the publication date so huge congratulations to you David this is amazing and we're really honored to have you here so for folks in person please please please at any time if you have a question raise your hand I'll bring the mic over to you this is your class so please feel free if you have any clarifying questions anytime just raise your hand and for folks online the chat is open so if you have any questions or comments just type them on in um so we're really excited and we're so excited to have you here and David thank you and I'm going to pass it over to you thank you well it's uh my pleasure to be back here I haven't been back here for a couple of years now so it's great and uh as usual there's this slight confusion as to whether we're doing it in person or whether we're doing it on the web or or what um but as it turns out it's a rather mixed thing so I'll probably have to talk more than uh uh I hadn't anticipated because the international audience will probably want to hear what I have to say as much as I want to listen to what you have to say in the debate that uh May then ensue now the grand racer is a very difficult book in lots of ways it's a remarkable book but it's full of junk and some of it is kind of impossible to kind of parse and it's Mark's talking to himself and obviously he had some kind of very interesting ideas about the world and those come out in the Grand Reserve but also other things get caught up in his uh pet peeves and his pet anxieties so I think that uh one of the things I wanted to do was to try to produce a companion which kind of isolated certain features of the of the grunder for much more detailed consideration and uh there are many comments made about this text uh many of them by philosophers and there's a big debate about Hegel and Marx and the good reason features very large in in that um I'm I'm not uh incredibly uh enamored of Hegel uh I don't uh I'm not a Hegel scholar and I'm not a philosopher and so many of the themes that get caught up in that uh don't interest me so much but the person who does interest me a lot is uh Marx's dialogue with Ricardo and uh so it's if anything my bias in this class is well it's the ricardian side of uh of countries that I'm most interested in but Marx has also caught up as uh happens with marxists in general in political movements of various kinds and found himself uh pitted against uh the tradition of French socialism and the tradition of French socialism particularly took the poor the the form of prudon and so marks periodically in the Grand Reserve takes off into some criticism of crude oil and uh you know well that was the text of the time and if you're interested in it please go off and read it and enjoy it if you can uh I I don't enjoy it very much and when prudhon comes up I tend to kind of skip over and say okay get me back to the real things I'm going to look at which is uh the the base with the with Ricardo and the base with Ricardo is largely established I think by the uh very specific analysis that uh Marx has uh and and and and and what he's really trying one of the things he's really trying to do in the good reason I don't want to say this is the only thing he wants to do but it is certainly one of the things he clearly wants to do and he wants to do it in great detail and he he says this and this is on the original edition of the good research page 331 in my Edition it's uh X1 the exact development of the concept of capital is necessary since it is the fundamental concept of modern economics just as capital is the foundation of Bourgeois Society the sharp formulation of the basic presuppositions of the capital relation must bring out all the contradictions of Bourgeois production as well as the boundary where it drives Beyond itself and as I say in my introduction I anchor my reading of the grundry so around this problematic how do we understand capital what is capital how does it work how does it function and Marx goes at this very step-by-step throughout the grandresa and of course further in capital and further in theories of surplus value but here there is a problem of Marx's method which I want to alert you with at the very beginning what Marx does is he tends to approach a problem incrementally he starts with something where he feels secure and starts to build the argument step by step he does not like to import into that process Concepts which are way way down the line so for example you will find him in the grand research saying at some point oh uh this is where interest bearing Capital comes in but we are not in a position to handle that here so he then excludes it so what what happens is that Marx creates a picture and a dynamic as it were of something but on very restricted basis and many of the things that he needs to do in the long run are delayed until the long run comes around and of course in in the grundry so the long run is a long way way away and so he never gets there so what this means is that his statements about what is capital are contingent they're contingent with where he is at in his argument if he is wide way down the line he'll give you a very sophisticated answer to the question what is capital at the outset he'll give you a very simple answer and the problem I often have is people who sight marks often cite it from some page you know 50 of the Grand Reserve or or 100 in in capital or something like that as if it is Marx's definitive statement it's not it's always a contingent statement it's like saying at this point in the argument we can say and he'll make a statement but it's not a universal statement it's a statement for that what can be said at that point in the argument so when reading the grand reset you always have to be very well aware of where you are at in the argument and that then becomes if you like the contingency that says from that perspective at that moment Marx can say a b and c and so you will get a certain argument now that is all very well as a general proposition and it's an important General proposition the trouble in the grand Reser is Marx obviously sort of working late at night with lots of caffeine and all kinds of things suddenly has a flash of insight where he goes way way ahead of where it could possibly be and these are often brilliant sorry incantations about what the world of capitalism is about and how the world of capitalism is working and so on so so he he abandons his his General technique so when you're reading it you have to recognize that when he goes off on one of these kinds of fantastic kind of kind of insightful characterizations of how the world of capital is really working when he does that uh it is in it is in a sense out of uh line with his General approach so this is what makes the the the the the boundaries so uh interesting to read because you have to be aware where you are in the argument is this now a statement where he is actually giving you a measured kind of con I measured commentary as to where capital is about and what it's about or is it one of those moments where Marx is kind of throwing all caution to the winds and saying well for my asset it looks like this to me and and these are the some of the most brilliant parts of the of the good reason as as I mentioned in the text a student once said to me after reading some of this unit he said it's it's like it's like these brilliant jewels of of wisdom and and insight that occur various points in the grundry so but they're all buried in a in a mud of dense and often turgid argument so again you've got to get used to that and one of the things I've tried to do in my companion was to put as much of the mud to one side and try to uh keep with the jewels and also with the the the the argument of what is capital and how does uh Capital uh work so that is one of the things that I think you should you should bear in mind the second thing you should bear in mind and this is something that only really came to me very late and and came when I was writing right writing the the companion because I had read The Greenery so many times and I'd always taken those jewels and used them in all kinds of ways but I I never actually appreciated the fact that the greenery sir does have a structure and it has a structure which is again important to reveal to set out at the outset so I'm going to go against what Marx does which is to move step by step towards something to say where marks actually kind of ends up because then you can more clearly see where we are where some of the steps that gets into where he ends up so the end point is terribly important the end point is actually contained in this idea of totality now in most of the commentaries on the ground research I haven't seen much which really talks about the notion of totality but for Marx this came critically and as you will see in the text again and again you will come up with the idea of a totality and Marx has in mind a totality and he's going to look at the capitalist mode of production capital's mode of production as a totality and that totality has within it circulatory processes of different moments and the analogy I use is to kind of say uh think of a human body we'll say the human body is the totality of what we're going to look at and within that human body however you see all kinds of different circulatory processes of work you see the heart pumping blood around oxygen being taken in by the lungs and getting into the blood and going around you see uh gastroenterologists will be looking at the the food supply and all the rest of it and the the brain neurologist and so the body is the totality but within the totality there are these different circulatory processes and then within Medicine of course each one has its specialty there is cardiologist for the heart as Pulmonary Specialists for the for the lungs gastroenterologists for the for the digestive system neurologists for the brain and you can go on like that so you would say the totality of what Marx is looking at and thinking about when he's in investigating Capital the totality of of a capitalist mode of production capitals mode of production that totality is something which has within a different circulatory processes at work and Marx calls these circulatory processes moments so you have a totality an internal circulation and moments within the totality and in the same way that medicine has all those Specialists so we find you know marxists there are people who are expert on social reproduction there are those who are expert on finance there are those who are expert on labor processes for those who are getting working on fictitious capital or those who are working on the state and and Capital so there are specialist kind of errors but Marx's idea all the way through is that always keep the totality in mind and always keep the circulatory processes in mind and so what I what I did was to start to say look uh actually but Marx does even in the greenery so is to start to break up these circulatory processes and he talks about and I do this on pagex V1 the circulation of Commodities through Exchange the circulation of money and money and interestingly in that chapter Marx talks about the circulation of money without talking about money capital this is that tactic I'm telling you about he's looking at money the circulation of money as if Capital has no impact in the next chapter Capital will come in and so we start to introduce Capital to the side but the circulation of money is the circulation of money and he wants to know what it's about and and of course there's a great deal of Bourgeois literature about what is money and how does it work it's a means of circulation it's a measure of value it's a store of value it's a medium of circulation and all the rest of it so we have all of those things we can say about money just as money without actually introducing Capital into the story but Marx has to introduce money this way because money has to exist before Capital can come into being if Capital suddenly started to try to work and there was no money it wouldn't work so Capital needs to have before it originates there has to be a monetary system there has to be a commodity exchange system there has to be even wage labor all of those things had to pre-exist the rise of capital well Capital does is to come along and take those elements and put them together in a new way and so that then generates the circulation of capital so the circulation of Commodities through exchange the circulation of money as money the circulation of the capacity to labor can we have that diagram upon the I guess oh there we are at a certain point around page 400 marks actually it starts to talk about these circulation processes explicitly and one of them is the circulation of Labor and now this is very interesting because when you look at it you say you know this is internal to capitalism mode of production capitalism motor production feeds off this circulation process in exactly the same way that oxygen comes into the human body in particular way and so everything else feeds off it so Capital feeds off the circulation of Labor capacity and you look at it and you say let's start with the with the idea that the labor works wakes up in the morning in a place of residence they get out of bed and then the first thing they have to do is to go out and find a job so they go into the labor market so the first moment is the moment of the residence the second moment is what happens in the labor market now not it's not the case of course that everybody goes into the or the labor market every day but everybody who's been in the labor market knows that this is a certain kind of experience which attaches to that there's competition going on between individual laborers in the labor market there are all kinds of things being said you know laborers try to convince capitalists that they are the right kind of labor for the job that's that's required and you don't trust those hungarians or those Irish or something like that because they're unreliable so all kinds of things go on in the labor market where Rivals gets up individual capacities get get get caught up and and so so you move from you know comfort of the bed and waking up in the morning and you go to the labor market and if you're successful what happens is you actually give your labor capacity you don't give yourself you give your labor capacity over to a capitalist who then takes it into the realm of production so we then find the labor moving from the labor market into the point of production in which they do what it is that the capitalist says they can do because they've sold their labor power as a commodity and the contract of the sale is the capitalist has the right to that labor power and the capitalist uses it in a certain way to make a new commodity so but that is that if you like the the the the the the key one the key factors and then at that point you you you're talking about a class relation a class relation between capital and labor which dominates at the point of production that class relation does not dominate in the same way in the labor market it's a different experience now at the end of the week what happens is the laborer gets a certain amount of money and then what do they do with their money they become a money manager at a certain point and all kinds of things can happen to them uh at some certain point the only way they can get their money was through a bank and they had to pay Bankers fees and they had to do all that kind of thing and besides the one with his credit cards and all kinds of things so lots of things going in the monetary sphere and the laborers find that maybe some of them are wages hard-earned wages they've got is stolen away by the financial institutions and financial scams and all kinds of things like that so so what goes on in in in in the world of of the laborer having the money and what goes on in terms of money power there's another moment in the circulation of Labor capacity then the the labor will go to the supermarket buy all the goods needed and buy things by you know booze and or whatever at that point they they go into the labor market and they go into the commodity market and start to buy things that they need and want and this is I think again an incredibly important experience because they're the experienced Capital as a seller capital is selling the stuff and and when you say well you know what's going on well there's a lot of exploitation going on there's a lot of uh you know stuff going on amongst the landlords uh demanding a great deal the name of brand to pharmaceutical companies use Monopoly pricing and all the rest of it and and Marx that's an interesting thing about this she said when the laborer goes into the labor Mart goes into the in into the commodity Market they have exhausted their identity as worker then no longer are actually having an experience of a worker they have an experience of a buyer against sellers and then after that of course the labor will take some of the Commodities back to the place of residents and we'll cook dinner and you know use them and all the rest of it so what you what you see in the the labor capacity is is a circulatory process with different moments in it and the different moments actually imply different experiences now the habit I mean many marks this is to say the only experience that really matters is the point of production and therefore that is the place that dominates all else but actually you know if you kind of say what does the working person worry about most do they worry most about the kinds of conditions that exist in commodity markets where they're actually being exploited through Monopoly pricing Arrangements is that more important to them than experience in in in the labor process what's their experience back in the point in Social reproduction how does that work so so what Marx does then is to suggest that the circulation of Labor capacity is vital to the reproduction of the labor capacity of that labor capacity and the politics that come out of that aren't rather rather different the sort of fights that go on around what goes on inside of production the fights that go on in the in the labor market the fights that go on uh from uh being cheated and scammed and in terms of money capacity the fights that go on when when you've got to you know deal deal with price gouging and and and all the rest of it now this has a significance politically because when somebody comes along and says hey we should have a 15 minimum wage and you say great great and the 15 minimum wage comes along and what happens through all of those Predators hanging around you know credit card companies in in [Music] price gouging markets and all the rest of it in other words actually capitalists will quite like it or some capitalists would quite like it if uh everybody had fifteen dollars an hour in other words when you start to look at the totality within the totality you start to have rather different political perspective and actually what you see is the likelihood that workers themselves were put up with lousy conditions of production provided they have enough money to be able to actually go through the rest of it and get a decent living uh condition at the at the point of reproduction right you say okay I'll put up oh that's a crap job of jobs that David will call them you put up with all of that because that gives you enough money to be able to be do what you want to do somewhere else so that you kind of then start to see that the politics of this becomes a vital a vital question so this is Mark's talking then about the circulation of Labor capacity and at the same time capitalists are latching onto it like leeches both in terms of consumption and also in terms of the marketing and all the rest of it capital will will will do that at the same time as capital will be of course be forcing the laborers into conditions of exploitation and radical exploitation in in the in the workplace so you see what I'm what I'm what I'm saying here that in order to understand Capital as a totality you have to understand this circulatory process inside of that totality and how Capital uses its encounter with this which is going to the next few chapters in Grand Reserve or about how Capital users encounter within this to actually reproduce itself and reproduce itself so the circulatory processes then are going to be significant and if we come to the next next slide and what Marx does a bit further down the line and I'm you know disobeying his habit of just saying I've only talk about the things that really I can talk about now this is where he ends up this is the circulation of capital now it looks a bit complicated but actually it isn't too complicated start at the bottom where the idea of money capital somebody comes along and they have some money because the money is in circulation and they decide to use it as capital and what do they have to do to do that the first thing they do is they go into the marketplace and they they find some commodities in two kinds of Commodities are significant one is labor capacity labor power the second is means of production they have its raw materials machines all that kind of thing so you go in and the capitalist buys those means of production and and and the labor power and then puts them to work in a in a labor process which makes a new commodity so this is the point of production so we start with money capital we then go through commodity commodities and we then go to the production process and the production process is builds another commodity a different a new commodity and that new commodity would be a various kinds it'd be luxury goods it could be so wage Goods it could be means of production and so on uh so that commodity is then sold for money the the value if you like is realized in monetary form so you've gone from money to commodity to production to commodity to money and one of the things that you can do when you do this is you make sure you end up with more money at the end of the day than you did at the beginning of the day in other words you're going to do this so that you end up with more I.E profit so the capitalist comes along and says well okay I start with this amount of money I want to end up in a day with that amount of money plus profit so that is if you like the first step then there comes a moment of distribution which we're not really in a position to talk about very much because in Marx's analysis because we haven't gone to it but the Surplus or the value which is which is taking their monetary form gets distributed some of it goes to the state in the form of taxes now Marx doesn't talk about the circulation of Revenue and state revenues he should have done there are times when he when he mentions it it's there and it's actually terribly important in terms of State debt and all that kind of thing but yeah some of it some of the some of the the the the the money that's circulating gets taken off in terms of taxes some of it goes in terms of wages which we've already talked about some of it goes to the bankers who lent money maybe to to to the producers who maybe even let the money that the capitalists are using at the very start so they need to get interest on their loan so they have to be satisfied so and and then it may be that uh capitalists have a hard time marketing their product so they they they they employ Merchants so Merchants get to market the product so and then at the end of the day there's also the fact that you want to use the land and landlords are going to say if you want to use my land you have to pay rent so you have rent interest Merchant capital and and wages and and so this is the distribution the moment of distribution and some whatever's left over the industrial capitalist who started all of this gets gets enough profit to keep on doing it now one of the things that Marx does is to say it's only when this system goes through the whole circulation process and then does it again and again and again but you've really got capital before that you've got exchange market exchange you just got Market exchanges going on and you could have a society where there's lots of Market exchanges but no Capital circulation but Marx kind of says capital is defined by the fact that it goes from that amount of money to more money coming back again and circuits round and round in other words it's not a cycle this is a very important thing it is not a cycle it is actually spiral because you've always got to have profit and if if there's profit it means there's more money at the end of the day and if money is an accurate representation of value which marks for so presupposes it is then there's more value at the end of the day than there was at the beginning of the day and that value that service what Surplus value means about so when you go through this see what you see is you see this kind of this kind of process this is what Marx calls the inner structure of capital and it is what I would call the mode of production this is the circulation process of the mode of production and Mark spends most of his time analyzing this in great detail but go back a minute to the human body as a totality yes you can look at the human body as the totality you can see how it functioning and how things are supporting it and you can see that it occasionally breaks down diesel something so the human body is is a totality but the human body exists in the environment and if you want to talk about you know why people die then one of the things you have to do is you have to say well this has something to do with opioid addiction it has something to do with a lost people lost their jobs I got depressed and they drank too much and got cirrhosis of the liver and all kinds of things like that so the bodies don't it can be viewed as a totality but they're not a totality of everything and the body exists and a world where lots of things are going on which have implications for for the body we've just seen the terrible term thing in Turkey well you know the body die of its own volition almost and no he gets hit by something so there is an environmental configuration so that you would never say the only cause of of death is because some of his heart stops speeding or because the neurological process has got compromised you would always want to ask what were the social conditions that led to the deterioration of the blood flow or the pulmonary system and so on what were the environmental conditions what what are the environmental uh what are the carcinogens that exist in the the in the environment so the body does not you just wouldn't say I'm interested in the only thing I'm interested in is is the cause of death as it occurs within a body you want to also know a great deal about the context and holistic medicine and holistic thinking about this would actually appreciate the fact that while the body is a can be understood as totality in a certain way so it exists in a certain environment now the same thing is true of capital exists in a certain environment this circulation of Labor for instance the social reproduction of the laborer that's very much about the social reproduction of all kinds of other aspects of of the cultural world so in this diagram what we have at the bottom is kind of saying look all of this rests on the metabolic relation to Nature and therefore the metabolic relations in nature is not part of the inner structure but it's part of the outer structure that and and the outer structure is itself very often built by capital cities get built space relations get built all kinds of things of that kind so that there's a huge kind of relationship between the inner structure and the outer structure and Marx tends to use the term for this social formation so one of the things that I do is is to try to distinguish between the mode of production which is the inner structure and the conditions in the social formation which are about the metabolic relation to Nature about building cities about building places about building things of that stone in other words it's it's a physical environment and there's also a cultural environment how much does Capital actually rely upon knowledge structures which have been passed down over Generations in the labor force where does that come from how about social reproduction so there's a there's a language here which I think it's very useful to to deploy and say I Marx is looking primarily at the mode of production that is what he's concentrating on and that is what we're going to end up with is understanding that and its contradictions more and more so that is what marks will be really concentrating on but he is very aware of something called the metabolic relation to Nature he's very aware of all of the implications of place building a place construction of uh he's very well aware of all of those things and and and periodically when he thinks about it he suddenly goes in and says well you know all of this depends upon human history the activities of people learning things and doing things so so that again the totality is there but the totality in a in a way is a bit Chinese dull like capitalist mode of production exists interior to the social formation and in a sense the capitalist mode of production is the engine of what happens to Capital it's the engine which is pushing expansion technological change dynamism and all the rest of it so the capitalist mode of production is the center of this but there are all sorts of things that going on in the social formation which are much bigger or much larger and much more complex but Marx doesn't always say oh no I can't deal with that here no he'll he'll swoosh in there every now and again and say hey we've got to think about the social formation in this case but I think it's useful at the very outset to say when you mean the grand recent you realize that you are dealing with with step-by-step revelation of how a totality works and and and and how there are moments within this totality like in the moments of capital are the money moment commodity moment production moment the produced commodity moment the realization moment the distributional moment and then some of that money comes back in as money capital and it goes round and round and round and creates the spiral that is the totality that we're looking at and that is the totality as it is actually laid out in the grinderies so it's very important when you're reading the grand research and recognize Where You Are in this totality which part of it you're looking at are you looking at you know fixed Capital are you looking at investment in the built environment are you what are you looking at and and to me this creates a structure for for reading so that you always saying to yourself okay I'm now on the money point where I'm just looking at money and we're not looking at anything else all right now I'm at the point where money is colliding with the circulation of Labor capacity and then you go on and you step by step and you start to see emerging something like this as as miles continues it gets more complicated and this is a simple version of the the totality but it it it gets you thinking about where where you are in terms of uh the analysis so this is if you like where I would uh want to uh and what I would want to emphasize and and try and try to use this framework uh to interpret what is going on in the different sections as they as they come up as you go on uh there are certain sections which are dedicated for example to fix Capital formation and fix Capital circulation uh that is has a context of circulation of interest-bearing capital and there are various connections of that kind but once you have it in mind that okay what you're looking at is the totality of a capitalist mode of production as an inner structure then the totality of the capitalist social formation has the totality of everything and then that leads into if you like uh specific understandings of particular kinds of circulation processes that are embedded within this overall circulation process so that is where where I'm as I say my ambition here is to is to start where Marx ends up so that you can then say to yourself well you know this is where we're going and this is where we look at one piece of this story like labor capacity or money circulation or commodity circulation this is where we will we'll look at it one final kind of comment and this will be probably taken as a bit of a cheap shot in a way um there's been a long history within Marxism of saying what is the cause of crisis and some people say it's a following rate of profit some say it's overproduction some say it's over concerned under consumption it's only yeah am I shake did a nice story uh article many many years ago talking about the different ways in which uh different theories of of crises uh when you adopt this framework you actually end up with a very different kind of understanding uh you wouldn't say if if I asked you what's more important to you your heart or your liver and he said well this is a ridiculous question it's a ridiculous question both of them can go wrong and you can die from heart failure and you can die from liver effect and there are times when actually the same thing can be said about this there are times when and Marx talks about this specifically each one of these transitions from money into commodity that transitional moment isn't one of a potential blockage and barrier I mean if somebody starts out with money and says yeah I'm gonna I got this idea I want to be a capitalist and they take their money and they go out and there's no labor market no laborers end of story right and my and and the same is true if everybody you go through this whole thing at the end of the day you take the commodity into the market and you can't find anyone to buy it end of story so what Marx does is to set this up in such a way that you see The Continuous Flow which can encounter barriers at various points and each one of those barriers has the potentiality to gum up the whole system so that we don't end up with kind of saying oh the only World form of Crisis is this or the only formal crisis is that we ask the question where is the primary barrier right now that is gumming up the whole system and how do you does that barrier get unblocked right this is because because like I say it's not as if one one part of your body causes the other part of your body to die you know it's not like that at all what what we encounter here is Marx thinking about a process and it is a process capital is a process not a thing capital is a process of flow and it's flowing around this system and you have to understand that the flow can gum up at any one particular point and one of the things which capital is very concerned to do is to make sure that all of these transition points all of these moments are adequately held open so Marx kind of says capital has to leap over barriers it has to circumvent barriers within the circulation process and if he can't find the neighbor that it needs in his own backyard it will go somewhere else and look for it if it can't find the land in its own backyard it will go somewhere else so you you are looking here at a flow model capital is a flow it is a flow that takes you through these different moments and Marx is very emphatic the continuity of the flow is a is foundational for what capital is about when the flow stops the whole thing comes up I always recall this moment around 9 11. 911 everything stopped all the flight stopped everything stopped there was no flow and all of a sudden all of the authorities said good God this is the end of capitalism unless we get things started again so Giuliani came on TV and said get out your credit cards and Shop George Bush came out and says get on planes and fly because for those three days the motion stopped and I think everybody recognized it if it remains stopped then that was the end of capitalism then and there and of course the purpose of a strike and a general strike is precisely could say hey stop we have the power to stop so there is a there is if you'd like a way of thinking about this or saying the continuity and the flow is what capital is about it's not a thing in economics capital is a thing conventional economics in Marx's world it's no thing it's a process it's a flow and and and again Marx is going to argue in here Contra the economists that if you cannot understand Capital as a flow you're gonna you're gonna get things very badly wrong and it's it's the case every time there is a major crisis under capitalism nobody knows where it came from and what what its problem was 2007-2008 took everybody by surprise I said what the hell how is this and Marx has a wonderful comment when he kind of says you know when faced with a crisis the economists typically say this would not occur if the economy only performed according to the principles in my textbook and they do that they do that you know if they they're great my model is not wrong reality is wrong you see a lot of that there was a lot of that around in 2007 2008. but Marx's analysis is to go okay we have to look at this flow and this is very much what the framework that I want to adopt in in this reading of uh the good reason so let me stop just here and then we all spend a little time uh going to Marx's introduction because I wanted to spend some time talking about the general framework so that you have that General framework in mind when you're you know dealing you're down in the mud which you're bound to be at a certain point I'm sorry to say but remember the jewels are always around the corner and they shine very brightly when you get to them so let me just just pause here and see if there are any kind of questions or comments people want to make I'm told by the way people get intimidated by me I don't I don't bite yeah right um the red and the green labels are very vast and how they're defined here the construction of space and nature um I find it a bit difficult to understand what it is and is not inside of that vast description so is there uh examples or this is of those uh I think that uh um for instance you take the general General principle which marks lays out which is to say all of this uh is caught up in the metabolic relation to Nature so that would be his General film General formulation now the metabolic relation to Nature is very very complex so when you get into it you have all the Marxist books about nature and how Marx understood nature and so on so there is a specialism about that what what uh I would I would do is to say well okay there are certain problems which exist in the social formation which are or actively can be understood as products of what is going on in terms of the engine of the mode of production for example the mode of production uh is about growth uh and it's about growth uh endless growth in fact Marx cancer says in capital this whole system being a spiral is about more and more commodity production that pushed to all kinds of stresses on the on the environment when Marx was writing the stresses on the environment were very local but the pro the problem was you know yeah putrid dwelling houses of working classes in Manchester or somewhere so that was a problem there we've now got a problem of habitat destruction and we've now got a problem of of uh global warming and climate change and all the rest of it so my argument would be when you understand this and you understand the spiral form that means you produce more and more and more you have to extract more and more in the way of uh raw materials from from out of the bowels of the earth so that you're going to get environmental issues cropping up in our society which for Marx was not there uh I mean capital in In 1855 was industrial Capital was confined to you know a few industrial districts in Britain and and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and a bit of a bit of Western Europe and that was it so the impacts on the on global climate change were were negative but if you look at the high kind of growth spiral and the exponential growth what you see is that you know after 1950 or 60 you're in that curve of an exponential growth which would go like that so that in 1950 the total output and I'm trying to remember this exactly was it was about nine trillion dollars that was the total total of the global economy about nine trillion dollars and it's now close to 100 trillion dollars it's increased tenfold and during that time carbon emissions went up and during that time you know carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere shut up to levels not seen ever before over the last eight hundred thousand years from all the data so you get something like that happening and in which case you kind of say well you know it's a spiral form it's a problem uh and yes it's a big it's a it's a big problem and the same thing would be true of habitat destruction as you destroy habitats because you need to for agriculture and all the rest of it so you actually destroy a lot of the species diversity on planet Earth so you know those things are there all I'm all I'm doing here is to say well you know yes if you just say I kind of say everything that's out there but one of the things you do is you choose a particular kind of topic and say well are we having problems with um uh with climate change the answer is obviously yes to what degree are those problems of climate change due to the spiral form or if you like a product of the way this system Works in its inner structure can you solve the climate change problem without altering the inner structure that's one of the big questions [Music] uh capitalist corporations will tell you yeah of course we can my view will be no you can't and so the argument then goes up goes on the the what the what the theory does connects to the concrete kind of kind of kind of problem now when you get into the details of the particularities as Marx would talk about it you'll find a great deal of variety you know great you know and and it can look overwhelming and I think I'm you're picking up that's that's the problem here it looks so overwhelming but you can pick a problem say uh I don't know use of plastics where did the Plastics industry come from nobody knew anything about Plastics in 1945 invented around 1950s became important after 1970s because they figured out how to put carbonated enough pressure within the plastic that would take carbonated drinks and now of course it's it's a major source of I mean the [Music] it's a major source of of global pollution so what are we going to do about Plastics again you find yourself then saying you know where the Plastics industry come from well part of it came from the whole kind of question of how to keep the system in expansion from the 1970s onwards so those are the sorts of things that and and I agree with you you know the way Marx sends it up just as metabolic relation to Nature but what he's signaling is you've got to go and look at it and see what the hell's going on oh or he will talk about uh uh free gifts of nature and the free gifts of human nature who will talk about that and what does he mean by that he means the way in which Capital does not pay for for example a lot of the minerals and extraction the bowel of the Earth if it does pay for it it pays for it because the landlords get there and charge a rent but a lot of this is free gifts of Nature and the same thing is true of human capacities and powers to what degree does Capital actually mine cultures and what does it do to cultures in mining them and what is it doing ecotourism and what does it do with cultural tourism and all the rest of it so there's all of those issues and and the point I think that Marx is making is if you have the framework you'll know what kinds of questions to pursue and how to pursue them and you will always at some point or other ask the question what's the relationship between what's going on in the social formation and what the laws of motion are in the capitalist mode of production because what Marx will do is to come up with certain Laws of Motion the capitalist mode of production and those laws of motion I mean that that is what capital has to do to survive and because Capital does those things it has these implications for instance global warming and so on in the social formation which are on can be intolerable at the same time as of course it can also do things which make it more tolerable I mean it's not it's not at all it's not all a one-way negative Street yeah thank you thank you Professor um I was just wondering if you could comment momentarily on the the text of the green dress just in the context of the Canon of Mark's Work um I unders I'm a little bit confused as to whether or not this was actually ever intended for publication by him or if this was strictly personal notes and then um why this text why I choose to make a companion to this text over another why teach a class on this why is this appropriate to someone who may be a beginner to learning or reading marks and what's the significance of this specific text in the totality of his work and understanding it well you know I'm tempted to give the answer to somebody who's asked why are they climbed Mount Everest and the answer was because it's there so I'm rather tempted to give that answer it's a text that's there but I think most people who encounter it realize that something special is going on in this text for instance all this stuff I'm telling you about circulatory processes and moments and all the rest of it is very explicitly uh dealt with here and when you go back and you read Capital you realize how much of capital is actually informed on that basis where but Marx doesn't tell you [Music] the Marx was Marx was there are two moments if you like in Marx's work one has a moment of discovery and the other is the moment of presentation Marx was very interested in presentation when in writing Capital he was very aware about all this stuff about Hegel wouldn't go down with a working classes and all the stuff that he's doing here wouldn't go down with the working classes so he sought a language which he felt could be understood well by self-educated workers which is his primary audience and the auto did Acts were to understand what they would understand so you read capital and a lot of the framework that he describes in the grindery sir is buried when you read the broneries and realize what he's doing so you suddenly explain why is it the volume two of capital is all about circulation [Music] and and and how come people never quite integrated volunteer of capital into volume minor Capital very well and how would you do that well you understand it better by the framework of the good research poses the other thing which I personally find these are certain issues that are important to me for instance I'm a geographer I'm interested in space time Marx and the grand Reser is very explicit about how Capital changes spatial temporality he talks about the annihilation of space Through Time issues of that ass thought which he doesn't deal with elsewhere so it's been so speaking personally I I I find I I've always found some of the ideas in the Grand Reserve are extremely relevant to the kinds of studies I was doing on urbanization uneven geographical development and the like in other words if I was looking for a framework a theoretical framework for those issues I would turn to the good reason so it just happens to be an important text to me and uh I think my work on urbanization has been very much informed by the Grand Reserve more so than capital thanks David do you want to take any more questions it's rather but if not I want to go on to House of Time by the way am I yeah it's 5 24. okay okay I want to go on then to uh uh Marx's introduction where some of these uh themes and I'm gonna go to my original test as you can see I fell well read this text it's falling to bits this is about the fifth version of the country so mine I've just ordered another one but what I what I thought I would do then is to go over the Marx's introduction which as I mentioned was not actually written as an introduction it was a separate piece which got stuck in front of the the main the main text and uh as the uh the translator points out Marx himself wasn't very happy with this text but I think it's possible to see why a simple answer I think is that Marx's trying to escape if you like from the clutches of Ricardo and in some ways in the countries and people get mad at me when I say this I see the grand resource marks actually struggling to release himself from the prison House of hegelian language and from the prison House of ricardium formulations so and this is rather ricardia production but if you understand that at the outset then you can read it critically now Mark starts off this with uh a brief comment on individualism and the individual and how important the idea of the individual and individualism is to conservative philosophy liberal philosophy John Locke and all the rest of it and the tenancy and those those people to regard the the individual or somehow or other uh having god-given Liberties or natural Liberties and all the rest of it and Marx is basically saying no individualism came about because of a certain kind of society grew up with commodity exchange which allowed for the formation of individual and individualism so what people treat as god-given right is in Marx's viewer a historical social product of the rise of a market Society and this is the theme that he he takes up here and he kind of says well actually the right Wingers have this twaddle as he calls it where they do this nonsense of kind of started pretending that the individuals existed before anything and then they have individuals came together and started to form collectivities and Mark says history was the other way around there were collectivities and the collectivity started to kind of fragment and disperse and started to engage in trade and when they engaged in trade they started to create an environment in which it was possible for individuals to survive as individuals but it was a social condition that allowed individualism to survive and this has a very important political point point because right now the rhyming goes on and on and on about how you know how socialists and Marxist and you know don't believe in individual liberty and freedom that's absolutely not the case Marx is very interested in individual liberty and freedom he's just saying the problem is that we haven't created a a form of production and a form of of economy which will allow individual freedom to truly flourish uh and and that you know and and this is completely the wrong way it's completed the wrong way around and I and I and this will come up again and again in immigrant research and uh I'm my best summary of it is uh comes from Henry Lefevre because in Orange is the Feb French Marxist urbanist sociologist was was once to ask why he was a Marxist and not an anarchist and his answer was I'm a Marxist so that one day we can all live like anarchists and it's exactly what Marx is about it captures exactly [Music] because Marxist is is kind of saying you know the issue is to create a world in which individuals have uh access to the realm of freedom and we don't assume and if ever if if this individual liberty and freedom and so on was God given and from there from the very beginning how come we've screwed it up so badly well the answer is of course it's the state and it's the the Socialists and all the rest of it but Marx is kind of saying no individual liberty and freedom is only possible in a world where Necessities are taken care of he says it in volume through the realm necessity is Left Behind so that you have free total free time and Marx frequently comes back in the grand research the idea of free time is the mark of what a socialist society was made about and so this is if you like the opening Salvo in here is kind of saying you know the origins of liberal theory is in a fantasy and it's a fantasy that uh individualism is natural rather than socially created and he uses the kind of example of Robinson Crusoe which was also used in capital uh Robinson cruso was DeForest fable [Music] about you know what happened to somebody who got uh Shipwrecked on an island and then was trying to figure out how to survive on the island and invented the economy that looked surprisingly like 18th century capitalism and and uh Marx kind of says well you know he recovered from the wreckage uh as a pen and paper and pencil and could uh act like a 18th century businessman so Robinson cruso was was good uh a fable which many economists referred to as kind of an actualization of individualism of course Robinson Crusoe ended up finding there was somebody else on the island which was man Friday who was a kind of a colonial subject and so all those kinds of things come in uh Defoe by the way is a very fascinating person to read on all of this because the uh he he actually set up a whole series of novels and I I really kind of found the as I say in the in my version of the text if you if you know if you want to look at some of the social relations that were really going on then then you would look at some of his other novels now what Marx does in this so the Marx is doing this and you can read about that as you as you want to um what Marx does is then to talk about uh production and distribution in general uh and his the issue here is this there are certain categories which is again a theme that is going to Echo throughout the whole ground research there are certain categories which uh actually apply to all modes of production no matter what uh for example the category of Labor there's no motor production that doesn't have Labor of some kind going on uh an appropriation of nature uh uh so what Marx's concerned with here is to say I want to know this question is I want to know what the specific qualities are of a capitalist mode of production yeah okay there's going to be labor the the going to be appropriation of Nature and all the rest of it um and there's going to be some kind of notion of possession uh and he makes the point that you know the tendency of course is to say property is important but yeah property is important if you teach it property is possession but that doesn't mean private property necessary and he talks about the way in which uh actually historically most of the property rights were specified as common property rights and Collective property rights although that kind of right to appropriate uh the natural world and uh and and engage in the metabolic relation uh and so so the the in this in these first pages uh he he's kind of kind of wants to to make very clear that the the categories that he's learning with have a specific meaning within capitalism that they don't have within feudalism this is particularly going to come out with a question of land rent land rent under feudalism was very different from Land rent under capitalism when you take something about land rent and bring it into the capitalist mode of production it turns out to be very a very different Beast but the category of land rent is still there in both modes of production labor is there in all modes of production appropriation is there in all modes of production so there is the question of what is it that all modes of production have in common how much could be talked about as in common and that would include Capital because Capital will have these modes but how are what are the specific categories that distinguish the capitalist mode of production from Socialism or anarchism or liberalism or conservativism or whatever so this is a this is the question he's he's asking and in the course of that he immediately comes up against uh uh some of the theorizing that has gone on and and in particular he's very he's very annoyed at John Stuart Mill because John Stuart Mill uh took the way that production is something which is quote naturally ordained naturally set up and that therefore there is nothing that Society can do about production which is somehow rather different from what he's already going on so production was Universal and production was also natural entirely natural but says Mill distribution is not distribution is social distribution is he says this is on page 87 of my version of the gun racer uh he says that the aim is rather to present production see for example John Stewart Mill as distinct from distribution as encased in Eternal natural laws independent of History and which opportunity Bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded in other words what he sees John Stewart Mill doing is disguising Bourgeois relations as if they are natural but their relations of production which are natural so that Mill kind of says no it's we're just dealing with nature and Marx is saying no but hidden within your account of nature is a conception of Bourgeois Society you're smuggling in the Bourgeois stuff in production and of course Marx wants to revolutionize production he's not content simply with redistributive socialism John Stuart Mill was an advocate of redistributive socialism and very strong advocate of that and it's interesting reading Mill and and about redistributive socialism and what it's about it's a bit like reading sort of Bernie Sanders or picketti or or even Elizabeth Warren today I mean they're they're very much about redistribution and and Adam Smith was about redistribution Hannibal Smith was in favor of a free market economy which generated a great deal of wealth for the state but he then said it's up to the state to redistribute it equitably that part gets always left out in Smithfield a cow because he basically was saying let the individual entrepreneurs alone let them get on and they'll create all the wealth and then you that'll give you the tax base on which to redistribute so this was Adam said so redistributive socialism is very much on the agenda and it was on the agenda for one very very simple reason which does go back also to Ricardo which is because of the labor theory of value Ricardo worked with a labor Theory value Marx takes up Ricardo's theory of the laboratory value and I've modified it in certain ways which we may get to as we go on modifies it in certain ways but the thing about the labor theory of value was it had attached to it a moral conundrum if labor is the source of all value not the labor theory of value declares then how come the libraries get someone to love it right they make they make the goddamn value and the capitalist dealer which is you know crude oil properties theft and all that kind of stuff so so the labor theory of value because it is it says in effect all value is due to the application of living labor to production had that moral kind of conundrum attached and the result was the whole school of ricardian thinkers in the 1820s 1930s 1840s who are the same basically look this is wrong this is morally wrong they're the ones who you know so we need to redistribute it and and and and that of course connected very much with Jon Stewart no John Stuart Mill was at the apogee if you like about ricardian socialism which working with the labor theory about he said labor is the source of value [Music] we allow the entrepreneurs and everything have to organize production in the way they do because that is natural and so on but then we take the wealth of this generation I mean redistributed on an equitable basis as far as we can so that is what we should do that's what we're beginning to argue well the capitalist entrepreneurs the capitalist owners didn't like that like they and one of them they they detested the labor theory of value so then came along in the middle of a century uh uh an alternative Theory value and this was the value of value Theory based on the marginal productivity of the different factors of production the homogenalist economics which came in the 1850s 1860s and the point was to say that the the value was created by the margin of the contribution of the different factors of production and the value of those different forms of production depended upon the relative scarcity and and if Capital was scarce and labor was abandoned then that fully Justified paying labor very little and paying capital a lot right so the the the theory of value is as the marginal contribution of the three basic factors of production of land labor and capital was very convenient to the capitalist class because finally now they said well we're getting a lot because capital is scarce labor is abundant the laborers reproduce too much there are too many laborers around too many workers around you you're probably good you have too many kids and all kinds of things like that so they ended up you know abolishing the moral question after 1850 and by the time you get to 1890 everybody's forgotten about the and of course if you say today the libertarian value is a good idea imagine what people would say in an economics Department out of your damn mind let me see a value right now we know that was all junk well it was all junk because it actually led to recording socialism and with a with a strong moral justification and a strong material justification but then it got abolished by the marginalist revolution in economic theory and the the the explanation of value in terms of the marginal productivity of land labor and capital as distinctive factors of production so John Stuart Mill then is uh the apogee of this but Marx of course was kind of saying well it's not about we've got to get away from this fact but labor is uh where where it's at we've got to get away from uh this I this idea that somehow our production is natural it's not production is social from the very beginning and therefore we have to understand that sociality and where sociality came from and the labor theory of value of course emphasize some of that what then Marx does is to say okay let's look at this now and he opens the second section on the general relation of production to distribution exchange consumption with the argument it is necessary to focus on the various categories which the economists line up next to it there's a bit of confusion in what follows is Marx talking about how he interprets the world or is he giving an account of how classical political economists interpreted the world my argument would be and this statement when he counselves we have to focus on the various categories which the economists line up next to it Marx is not talking about his own views he's talking about what the economists do now this leads to misunderstandings because what follows there are all sorts of strange things have followed and if you say these are Marx's views you get him completely wrong he's saying these are the views of the economists and this is my critique of the views of The Economist s My Views are radically different but he doesn't tell you what they are so you don't know what the alternative views are and that's going to come at the end of the of the good research uh and he puts he says this he says okay let's look at these different moments in the circulatory process the production moment distribution moment Exchange and consumption so he's got four moments there and he then says these form irregular syllogism production is the generality distribution and exchange the particularity and consumption of singularity in which the whole is joined together this is admittedly a coherence but a shallow one now syllogism hierarchical organization in which production is considered the generality after John Stuart Mill position is distribution and exchange the particularity so you have the generality particularity and then consumption singularity in which the hole is joined together singularities are strange strange word to introduce you uh but what it I think really means is that this is the moment where everything collides and disappears implodes the singularity [Music] physics is about an implosion moment and and consumption the commodity disappears you eat it who disappears it disappears something so it's a singularity because it is the moment at the end where yeah okay you eat it and it's gone so it's the moment of implosion if you like of the commodity and then he says production is determined by General natural laws this is not Mars this is this is John Stuart Mill distribution by social accident and the latter may therefore promote production to a greater or lesser extent that is if you just when you distribute some of the value as in this diagram and if all of it flows to say the merchants and none of it goes to the bankers then that has an impact back upon the whole system so how the distribution works and the who gets what in the distribution matters in terms of this dynamic and then he starts to say well you know let's do the next section Let's do an analysis of this how do you separate production from consumption to begin with production is a form of consumption right the producer consumes raw materials energy all the rest of it so production is consumption so what are we saying there's something over here called production something over here called consumption that's that's that's that's a nonsense there are two moments perhaps but they're bound together so if he says consumption is also immediately production there's something called productive uh consumptive production and and productive consumption consumptive production is the producers are actually consuming the output so if I'm producing car parts then my car parts are consumed by the car manufacturer so they are consuming what I have produced so so Mark starts to play games with all of this and and and I'm not going to go through them all because you know after a while your head starts to whirl because production is consumption is consumption it's part of everything but again Marx uses the language of moments the act of production he said he says is therefore in all of its moments also an act of consumption so this then goes on for several pages and and it's just it's interesting to read because basically what he's doing is saying all of these categories which economists cheat as being separate from each other actually are internal to each other you can't have production without consumption and you can't have consumption without production makes a nonsense and therefore you've got productive consumption and consumptive production and all the rest of it these things uh and he then goes on I just want to read you a bit of this passage not only is production immediately consumption and consumption immediately production not only is production a means of consumption and consumption the aim of production consumption is also conceived as an object of production I mean each of them apart from being immediately other and apart from mediating the other in addition to this creates the other in completing itself and creates itself as the other well go on you've got to have a lot of fun with this one but it's about but it's about they are each other's other and you can't and and and so we'll see what Marx is doing is taking the categories of classical political economy running them together I have to say look they're nonsense and then it kind of says or goes on further uh and I'll go to the uh the conclusion just so that you can go back and read everything that goes on in between because it goes on in that vein the library concluded the conclusion we reach he says is not that production distribution exchange and consumption are identical but that they all form the members of a totality okay this is on page 99 [Music] huh they all form the members of a totality distinctions within a Unity the flow is the unity there are distinctions within the flow so Mrs Marx beginning to extract his I think some of his own meanings production predominates not only over itself in the antithetical definition of production but over the other moments as well production predominates over itself well it's interesting because what is being produced at that moment of production one thing is you are producing a commodity thing which is going to be sold in the market but you're also producing profit Surplus value which is more important to the Catalyst reducing the commodity or producing the Surplus value you produce the commodity in order to get the Surplus value so it's the profit you're after all right and if you're after the profit you've got to produce a surplus value which means you've got to produce a commodity that in congeals Surplus value within itself and that has to be done through the act of production so again this is these are distinctions within a Unity distinctions Within a process then he goes on the process always returns to production to begin anew that is you go through again again and again with this powerful that exchange and consumption cannot be predominant is self-evident likewise distribution is distribution of products well as distribution of the Agents of production it is itself a moment of production a definite production thus determines a definite consumption distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments it's the relations between the moments which marks is after admittedly however in its one-sided form production is itself determined by the other moments for example if the market I.E the sphere of exchange expands then production grows in quantity and divisions between its different branches become deeper a change in distribution changes production you know this is where we start to see the tautologies but Marx talks about the tautology's building finally the needs of consumption to determine production Mutual interaction takes place between the different moments this the case with every organic whole as the word whole here is totality of course but it's organic it's not mechanical it's organic and it's growing it's like an ecosystem now this is very different from some other mechanical Notions of a totality but look like a machine engine or something of that kind this is a biological an organic whole an organic totality which is expanding growing pushing and it's the continuity of this process and you look at this and you say oh yeah there is a moment of production which we can talk about but at that moment of production we can't understand its meaning by taking it out of the whole total of totality of movements and moments so this is if you like what Marx is is doing here he's beginning to say okay I'm going to use these terms like production consumption Exchange yeah and and the like I'm going to use these but I can't use them in the way that classical political economy used them because that's called political economy assumed they were separate entities together or put the four together or whatever no what we have is is a process with different moments in it and those moments are critical for creating Surplus value which can be appropriated by the money capitalist who starts the whole thing and that is where the spiral form comes in so this is his argument he's making here and and it's a it's a critique of classical political economy and I think a very a very profound one but again you're not going to get the critique unless you recognize that when Marx talks about the syllogism and all the rest of it he's not talking about his own way of thinking things he's talking about classical political economy the way they set things up and he starts to dismantle that and then say all of these Concepts like production and consumption have to be understood in relationship to the totality of the circulation processes they are moments within that circulation process and each moment relates to the other moments which comes back to what I was saying earlier any one of these moments can be the point of of you know stoppage [Music] any one of them this leads to the Third thing where Marx talks about the method of political economy and this is a Marx doesn't talk about his method very often this is one of the rare cases when he does and my sense of it is that he's always uncomfortable talking about method because he's very nervous about people taking a method and standardizing it if you like and saying oh well this is what you do he's living in a much more complex world so he wants to be very cagey about his method my own view is that you learn Marx's method by watching him do it you learn from watching him work and in some ways I've been trying to give some sense of how he works through his critique and that that I think is just a very interesting way in which to think about his method but what he tries to do here is to actually uh describe certain aspects of his method in some in some detail and I think that uh one part of his method is to kind of say how do we discover things and how do we present things and as the opening he does this it seems he says correct to begin with the real and the concrete with real precondition mouth to begin in economics with for example the population which is the foundation and subject of the entire social Act of production however on closer examination this proves false the population is an abstraction if I leave out um the classes of which it is composed these classes in turn are empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest EG wage labor Capital Etc these latter in turn presuppose exchange division of labor prices Etc for example capital is nothing without wage labor without value money price Etc but also if I were to begin with the population this would be a chaotic conception remember the phrase chaotic conception he's very nervous about it hitting chaotic conceptions so what he does is he says you know population is just doesn't mean anything it's a chaotic conception until you start to break it down look at the classes and look at all those things and when as you break it down so concept of population starts to become less and less relevant and then he kind of says from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions Lead Me to the simplest determinations you start with population what happens is people go down further and further and deeper and deeper into the elements the comprised populations right the way down to I don't know ethnicity religion all kinds of things of that kind come into the picture and then he says this from there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations if you start with the population it's a meaningless kind of concept and you start to go down further and further and further once you've got down which is what it might be called the method of discovery you start to come back up [Music] taking all of the concepts you've got from underneath and you reconstruct the idea of population in the light of those underlying things which you've established through your inquiries it's a method of decent and the method of ascent as he calls it and the method of Assad is he says the true scientific method but you can only get to that true scientific method by doing the decent first so his method therefore is okay start with something concrete around you and and go down deeper deeper and deeper well into all of the differentiations that exist all of the determinations then bring come back to the surface irrigate if you like the surface it's like going down a deep well bring the water back to the surface and irrigate the surface with your findings which is by the way one of the lessons I give to people writing phds that's what you have to do you have to go down a well things together and then bring it back up and there are those people who go down a well and you never see them again but then the point is as Mark says to bring all of those things back to the surface well you now understand population as not a chaotic conception and he goes on to say that uh this is not a chaotic conception but he says You Now understand the population as a rich totality of many determinants determinations and uh and relations again this goes back a little bit to what you were asking you know when you've got all of this stuff together in terms of this conceptual apparatus and the purpose of theorizing if you like is is precisely to be able to to come back to understand what's going on in the population at a different level and that is the method of ascent and as he says this is very specific um this also leads however to something terribly important which is the notion of abstraction what Marx is doing is saying we're dealing with totalities but in order to deal with totalities we have to be prepared to abstract them I've abstracted the human body as one way I'm thinking about totality I abstract the mode of production I abstract the social formation and and and this allows me conceptually to grasp what is going on and that is what the grand racer is trying to do is to conceptually grasp what is going on in terms of what capital is about and how it works so the introduction then is very much about doing this there are other issues that arise in the introduction I don't know I think we're probably out of time right lots of time we've got about a few more minutes um uh but I'm gonna stop here and then ask if you have any immediate questions about about this one of the things we can do is um you can go back and look at the stuff we've done and next week we can have a sort of brief five or ten minutes on any questions that arise as you do that right so are there any questions [Music] you mentioned a part of the critique is the ricardian Socialist and then you talked about the marginalist revolution so is both of these camps uh Marx's Target in his work like Marx is also engaging with the marginalists and also trying to refute their positions as well as the ricardians uh he doesn't directly take on the marginalists he does take on the idea that value is constructed out of the three major [Music] land labor and capital because actually Adam Smith theory of value has Adam Smith has a labor theory of value but he also has the idea that you add up the value of land labor and capital as a theory of value So Adam Smith has that it doesn't use the marginalist argument so Marx does critique Adam Smith on that but but not the marginalist uh thing Revolution directly but he was he was aware it was happening at the same time it was kind of right yeah I I don't I don't see him as terribly aware it wasn't as if he was reading yeah government journals and things like that any others okay well next week I want to go to uh the chapter on money which um as uh heavily influenced by critique of prudent which I systematically avoid um and you don't have to follow me on that if you want to get into it be my guest um but uh like I said this is largely going to be a thing about how does money circulate and what are the consequences of monetary circulation independent and before we get to the way in which money is used as capital so remember that that is the context in which this chapter will unfold okay any other questions yeah so you mentioned at a certain point in this text he says okay now before we go any further in the analysis of production we need to see what the presuppositions of the economists are um prior to him making that statement is he more uh straightforwardly talking about his views or because it seems like he's still discussing the economist even before that point but I wonder if if you think that like prior to that maybe there's some point we should pay attention to that he's revealing his own cards uh prior to that point well there is there is a a discussion of where his own thinking runs in the economic and philosophic manuscripts and some of the texts previous but they were not really informed by a very detailed investigation into the ricardian system and what it was all about this was informed very much by the investigations into the guardian economists uh so yeah he had some general ideas but like I said they're back in the economic and philosophic manuscripts um but there he doesn't sort of say hey I've got to go off and read the ricardians in any detail he decided to do that somewhere in the 1840s towards the end and then started then and started to develop his own idea ideas through a critique and I think again it was an interesting sort of question of how much his critique really takes him away from Ricardo or whether Ricardo is still lurking as it were in his Consciousness and I think this comes about most strongly in the kind of theory of value he adopts lucado's theory of value but he never entirely overthrows it certainly not in the country so the grundry city tends to budget quite a bit and capital and various other places he starts to articulate it in a different kind of way but then he leaves the stuff alone so the question of whether he wanted to stick with the labor theory of value or whether the labor theory of value was too problematic there comes a point in grundrice where he sees it as too problematic or starts to see it as too problematic but therefore it has to be but the question is does that mean the abolition of the labor theory of value in his thinking or does it mean uh that it needs to be reformulated my own viewers I like to reformulate it and in particular uh I would like to get back onto that moral Terrain which comes out of the day of Labor produces all the value why the hell are they getting so little of it and why is it all going to you know Elon Musk and a few people like that you know this is some something you know it's kind of an interesting moral ground there and of course economists don't like putting arguments on moral ground they want scientific ground and what the marginalist theory did was to give them a scientific ground and wish to base their theory of value and Marx's course very concerned about remaining in an unscientific ground but he wants he wanted cake and eat it on that perfect thank you so much David for a wonderful first class and thank you all for coming out I'll see you again next week on Tuesday at 4 15. all right thank you um yeah okay can those people who have uh in this sort of credit um we need to keep a record of you being here maybe you could you get checked in you say rejecting people um and okay the people doing a bit for credit how many of you are doing

Channel: The People's Forum NYC

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Length: 114min 10sec (6850 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2023