Going Back to the Source: A Personal Reflection on Capital, Volume 1

Yves here. KLG tells us how as a child in a union home, he came upon the oppressive and arguably immoral operations of capital, and how that stoked an anger similar to that which informs the writing of The Bearded One. The publication of a new translation of Marx’s Capital prompted this essay.

KLG’s opening thoughts:

Karl Marx himself was impressed by the achievements of capitalism, which increased aggregate “wealth” by several orders of magnitude compared to what came before. He was also the first philosopher, historian, and political economist to describe what capitalism is and how it does its hidden work. While he did not anticipate where capitalism would lead us due to what Andreas Malm has described as Fossil Capital, it is clear that neither the earth nor most of its inhabitants, human and otherwise, are doing well. Given this trajectory, Marx would not be surprised.

A new translation of Capital, Volume 1 has been published by the Princeton University Press. It will revive serious consideration of Marx’s analytical approach to the problems we face in the Anthropocene. What follows is a personal reflection on the importance of this book for our time. It was good to be reminded that Chapter 1 is entitled “The Commodity,” now that capital has converted virtually all that is important to human life into commodities of one kind or another. And that what is not subject to direct commodification has been transformed beyond recognition by financialization in this, the final stage of capitalism that is Neoliberalism.

By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health.

It is a surprise to no one who knows me that my views on political economy are heterodox and skewed toward what in my view is a genuine Left, but where they came from may be unusual.  This origin goes back to a single moment in the mid-1960s.  I was perhaps ten years old and the evening meal in my working class household was usually at 6:00 pm, and being “home in time for supper” was the one rule strictly enforced.  All six of us were to be at the table together unless there was a compelling reason for absence.  No excuses.

After supper, it was then time for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, which I watched with my father at 6:30.  I was aware that NBC and ABC existed [1] but the only reliable broadcast signal we received on the 19-inch black-and-white Philco was from the CBS affiliate sixty miles away as the crow flies across very flat country.  The Kennedy Assassination two years earlier had been the first event that glued me to the television.  The Civil Rights Movement and the War in Vietnam were the most frequent topics of those days, and I was fascinated that they were local as well as national and international.

But the big story to me that particular day was from the world of big business, a version of which has reappeared thousands of times since.  A major transnational corporation announced a mass layoff of hourly workers and their stock price went up because several thousand citizens who worked for them were put out of work.  I distinctly remember asking my father, who was a union machinist/mechanic with the title “Instrument Repairman” (i.e., jack of all trades) in a heavy chemical plant, if that was normal.  He replied that it was.  My ten-year-old mind immediately concluded this apparent cause-and-effect was evil, as well as threatening to my own family.  The (objective) anger I felt at that moment was tinged with confusion.  This anger has remained to this day, but as I have grown older the confusion has dissipated, somewhat.

This is primarily because when I went off to university it was still possible to study various disciplines intentionally and at some depth.  In-state tuition was affordable with a summer job and a part-time job during the academic year, and as long as one paid, he was welcome as a student.  Faculty in the Departments of History and Anthropology also welcomed the occasional oddball from the Department of Biochemistry on the “other” side of campus.  All it took to learn then was curiosity and desire plus an affinity for the various research libraries with open stacks, which I have previously called wonders of the modern world.  Now?  I believe what I did is impossible.

Michael Harrington’s The Twilight of Capitalism (1977) and his previous Socialism (1972) [2] were my ur-texts along with the little magazines sold at the newsstand (RIP) one block from the main entrance to campus.  These included Dissent, In These Times, Monthly Review, and ephemeral publications such as Working Papers for a New Society(edited by Robert Kuttner) and a bit later the influential journal democracy, edited by Sheldon Wolin from 1980 to 1983.  Membership in the predecessor of the Democratic Socialists of America, which was small and of little political significance but educational for a complete naif from the hinterlands, was transformative due to the presence of legitimate luminaries of a Left that had kept its head and heart.

From the other side, The Economist, Commentary, and The Public Interest, along with the Pink Paper on the newspaper rack in the Science Library were useful.  And from the University Bookstore (pre-Barnes & Noble) that previously fulfilled its obligation to the university as a source of knowledge in the form of books from backlists, the works of Julian Simon and Herman Kahn and founding neoconservatives such as the elder Kristol. [3]  The entire range of philosophy, history, sociology, and the natural sciences was on those shelves, too, now replaced by rack after rack of branded apparel and miscellaneous merchandise celebrating the prowess of the football team.  But I digress, with not a little anger.

These formative experiences bring us back to my primary source for understanding what capitalism is and what it does, Capital, Volume 1.  The recently released translation by Paul Reitter is what I have been waiting for since I read the paperback edition of the Ben Fowkes translation (Penguin, 1976) as that naif in the mid-1970s.  I am certainly not competent to review Capital itself, but since I received my new copy last week I have found the current translation to be astonishingly good, beginning with the Foreword by Wendy Brown [4] and the Editor’s Introduction by Paul North, both of which explain why Capital has enduring relevance, especially as the “economic sciences” have hypertrophied into a pseudoscience that rules the world, albeit with a few notable heterodox exceptions such as Elinor Ostrom, Amartya Sen, and Herman Daly.  What follows is a gloss on this front matter as an introduction to the text itself and how Capital is essential for any thorough understanding of this modern world.  This reminder has been especially useful to me in these times.

Per Wendy Brown’s Foreword, Karl Marx explains how “capitalism arrays eight billion Homo sapiens across a wildly uneven spectrum of opulence, comfort, poverty, and desperation” while noting that the mainstream of economics and politics simply “…identifies capitalism as an economic system based in markets organized by free competition and spurred by the profit motive…to draw everything into its orbit, to permeate and transform every physical and psychic cell of earthly life.”  But, contrary to the economists among us and those who accept their pseudoscience, “…understanding capitalism means grasping all of its conditions, requirements, drives, mechanisms, dynamics, contradictions, crises, iterations [5], and above all its world-making and world-destroying capacities, its life and death drives.”  Contrast this, the project of Capital, with the modern “economic sciences” for which essentially the only legitimate subject is how the market has made this world into “the best of all possible worlds” now and forevermore.

Brown notes that:

…in addition to political economy, Capital has been read as a work of social and intellectual history, political theory, literary criticism, satire, even drama.  It is also a philosophy of political economy and more precisely an account of why philosophy is required (italics in original) for an understanding of capital…Marx’s critique of political economy is a philosophical critique of unphilosophical approaches to political economy, those not alert to its many elements beyond markets (including law, politics, militias, and police, but also language, mystification, and theology), those that do not interrogate political economy’s fundamentals (labor, capital, value, money, the state) to discover their genesis, nature, and constitutive relations with one another, and those inapt to examining the relations between capital’s surfaces and depths.

Separation and alienation are the essence capitalism, but one would not learn this from the general run of economists, who also will fail to notice that the feudal political economy out of which capitalism arose was “relatively transparent in its hierarchies, extraction of rents, and labor cooperation compared to the opacities of capital…(which include)…capital’s twinning with a political ideology…of universal yet abstract freedom and equality, an ideology that obscures relations of domination, stratification, and exploitation in the realm of civil society.”  The reciprocal obligations that existed under feudalism are absent under capitalism, in which obligations that are enforced extend from labor to capital, only.

Paul North begins his Editor’s Introduction with Marx’s anger: “Before I talk about Marx’s ‘method,’ it is important to understand what motivated him to undertake his immense study, which…coincided with the limits of his lifetime…This venture…to construct the hidden whole of the capital system was motivated in the first place by anger.”  But his anger was not personal contrary to Isaiah Berlin, who wrote that Marx lived in “a cloud of anger and resentment.”  Rather, according to North his anger developed into something…you could call objective…A state of the soul continuous with the state of the world.”  That is a difficult concept, but full of possibilities.

Karl Marx was born into a world in which his father Heinrich (born Herschel Levi) was required to convert his family to Protestantism so he could continue his work as a lawyer under Prussian rule.  After completing his dissertation in philosophy and the granting of his PhD by the University of Jena instead of the University of Berlin, Karl Marx famously got into trouble at the age of 24 in 1842 as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung for exposing laws against gleaning fallen timber in local forests.  Newly established property rights of the local aristocracy thus superseded the rights of:

…rural paupers who needed wood not only for their fireplaces, but also for brooms, tools, fishing rods, fence posts and other essential means of living…Need, Marx discovered in a visceral way…is higher than law.  And so, a different mode of anger was necessary to free the state of laws that do not recognize, above all, citizens’ needs.  Anger had to turn into the coldest, most ruthlessly thorough analysis of the system of needs.

Marx extended his analysis of political economy, rather than economics, for the remainder of his life, until he died at the age of 64.  His works resonates today, for those who will pay attention.

Karl Marx was much closer to his predecessors David Ricardo [6] and Adam Smith, political economists who understood the economy was embedded in society and culture, than to neoclassical [7] economists including Alfred Marshall and those who followed him in the twentieth century.  The latter were disciples of W.S. Jevons, who “stated explicitly that economics should be modeled on physics…as…a system naturally maintaining mechanical equilibrium, whose features are completely determined and so perfectly explainable.”  This complete nonsense has been the reigning paradigm of economics as it is taught and practiced for the past century.  But “what neoclassical economics does not explain well are the imperfections…the constitutional flaws – which we can name, with Marx, extraction, extortion, exploitation, and expropriation – that lie behind its idealizations.”  The object of Marx’s objective anger throughout his project follows:

The basic outrageous fact that is that workers are complicit in a system that does not benefit them, and everyone is complicit in a system that benefits no one in the long run.  Most obviously, the system doesn’t benefit workers since it extorts and exploits their powers and keeps them always at the lower end of societal wealth.  Today it is excruciatingly obvious, although it was to Marx, too, that it doesn’t benefit the earth, since the system recklessly extracts raw materials and gives back putrid waste and toxic pollution. [8] It is also true that it doesn’t benefit capitalists in the long run because it destroys the earth’s surface; because it makes them into extorters and exploiters; and moreover, because it simultaneously leaved them liable to failure, crises, and at the outside, popular revolution.

Finally, all of this derives from the neoclassical necessity for capital to grow incessantly.  This is the fatal flaw of capitalism in a finite ecosphere on a finite planet.  Although Herman Daly was never Marxian in his analysis, this is old news.  As well expressed by North:

Our beast has a giant gullet, sucking into its maw previous societal forms, serfs, landowners, capitalists too of course, and raw materials, fruits of the earth that often have to be wrested from it by force, as well as the intellectual capacities of whole societies and epochs.  When it needs to grow…Capital is relentlessly creative…It finds (what it wants) in the productivity of workers, through inventing machines that speed up and intensify their work.  It imperializes and colonizes land, good, and peoples.  It draws into the workforce previously unemployed populations – in Marx’s (time) this included women and children…Now it draws into the workforce people who previously existed in different societal systems, as subsistence farmers…where they still exist.

Objective anger is the only reasonable response to this infernal process as it continues through the twenty-first century, an omnipotent but not omniscient power that remakes and unmakes the world according to its insensate needs.  The two-fold question is simple: Are people for the economy or is the political economy for the people?  Capital shows us how to consider this conundrum and to respond appropriately.  The imaginary species Homo economicus exists only in the fever dreams of the neoliberal descendants of neoclassical economists.  Therefore, political economy must be for people and for the one and only one world upon which we depend for our existence.

As I finish this on the evening before US Election Day 2024, it is clearer than ever to me that Capital, Volume 1 in the current edition is an essential source as we continue our work towards a better world.  And no later than tomorrow, whichever solipsistic wing of the Uniparty turns up “victorious” in the next 24 hours.

In the words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”  Understanding the thing is the first step.

Notes

[1] Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and Bonanza (NBC) along with ABC’s Wide World of Sports were available on a neighbor’s large console TV with the unnaturally bright colors, courtesy of their tall antenna.

[2] Harrington’s Socialism may have been forgotten, but it is a very good introduction to the work of Karl Marx that does not have the proverbial axe to grind from one sectarian perspective or another.  Contrary to the blurb at Alibris, it is not his final work.  But it may be his most substantial along with The Twilight of Capitalism, even if that twilight has lingered longer than expected.

[3] The term “neoconservative” was first used by Michael Harrington, who described these shock troops of Neoliberalism well, probably because he knew them.  In New York naturally, where at the time “public intellectuals” were still both public and intellectual, on a Left and a Right that at the time were distinct.

[4] Regular readers of this series will recognize Wendy Brown as the author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution as well as her recent work on reparative democracy provided in a previous discussion here.

[5] Especially the current and most likely final iteration of capitalism in the form of the Neoliberal Dispensation in which “the market is the measure of all things, while they last, even those that cannot be measured.”

[6] Ricardo’s description of “comparative advantage” in the modern world economy required that capital be largely immobile, something ignored as an inconvenient irrelevance today when capital in its most common form transits the world instantaneously with the click of a mouse.

[7] Neoclassical economics was first described in 1900 by the indispensable Thorstein Veblen, “An Economist who Unmade Economics,” according to this sensitive biography by Charles Camic.

[8] Explicated well and at pellucid length in Kohei Saito (2023), Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism and John Bellamy Foster (2020), The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology.