Students are urged to think for themselves and engage with Marx's powerful methods of argument and explanation. Shapiro shows that Capital is key to understanding critical theory and cultural production.
This highly focused book will prove invaluable to students of politics, cultural studies and literary theory.
Students are urged to think for themselves and engage with Marx's powerful methods of argument and explanation. Shapiro shows that Capital is key to understanding critical theory and cultural production.
This highly focused book will prove invaluable to students of politics, cultural studies and literary theory.
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Overview
Students are urged to think for themselves and engage with Marx's powerful methods of argument and explanation. Shapiro shows that Capital is key to understanding critical theory and cultural production.
This highly focused book will prove invaluable to students of politics, cultural studies and literary theory.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783710850 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 03/20/2008 |
| Series: | How to Read Theory |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 316 KB |
About the Author
Stephen Shapiro is Professor of American Literature at the University of Warwick. He is the author of How to Read Marx's Capital (Pluto, 2008) and How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punishment (Pluto, 2011).
Stephen Shapiro is Professor of American Literature at the University of Warwick. He is the author of How to Read Marx's Capital (Pluto, 2008) and How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punishment (Pluto, 2011).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Commodity
Section 1. The Two Factors of the Commodity: Use-Value and Value (Substance of Value, Magnitude of Value)
Marx begins Capital by saying that '[t]he wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an "immense collection of commodities"; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our analysis therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity' (125).
These opening lines contain three interlocking themes – analytical, socio-historical, and experiential – that recur in Marx's study of capitalism. Firstly, he rejects the claims of free-market, 'liberal' economists, typically represented by Adam Smith's 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Even if you have not formally studied any economics, you are probably familiar with the common sense of liberal political economy, because its claims are the ones often taken to be true by mainstream politicians and journalists. Smith argues that market exchanges involve consensual agreements between buyers and sellers, who trade with one another to satisfy their own needs. In this light, he believes that if commerce is liberated from the state's interference through taxes and tariffs, then the market place will spontaneously expand to benefit everyone. For Smith, while humans trade for selfish reasons, they must, however, learn to co-operate with each other to achieve their desires. This produces fellow feeling, which, along with the checks of supply and demand, is the 'invisible hand' that prevents traders from creating market crises and conflict.
By replacing Smith's phrase – 'the wealth of nations' – with 'the wealth of societies', Marx indicates that he intends Capital to be, as his subtitle says, 'a critique of political economy'. By using the word 'societies' rather than 'nations', Marx suggests that the basic assumptions of free-marketers are wrong. Our immediate problem involves the structure of capitalist society and the way its economic practices create profit, not the relationship between the nation-state and the market place. While Marx later explains the role of governments in assisting the rise of capitalism, he sees it as a structure greater than individual nation-states, even while governments frequently shape its contours through legislation. Marx calls his book a critique, rather than a criticism, of political economy, because he will not just disagree with writers like Smith, he will explain how their arguments are wrong in that they are based on partial claims, ones made often without regard to the historical development of market relations, especially in the turn from a feudal to a modern commercial society.
The introductory line's second theme, consequently, is a historical one. With the phrase, 'in which the capitalist mode of production prevails', Marx insists that he is not writing about societies in general. He wants instead to focus specifically on societies in which capitalist economic practices dominate – capitalist societies. Throughout Capital, Marx constantly highlights the particular features that make capitalism new and distinctive from pre-capitalist practices, even while it also incorporates elements from the past. Marx often begins his chapters by discounting popular definitions of words and replacing them with his own, because he thinks that the commonly used ones obscure (and implicitly justify) the newness of capitalism. This fussiness about definitions may seem pedantic, but Marx does so because he wants his readers to understand why capitalism differs from older kinds of commodity exchanges and labour practices so that we can perceive what needs to be changed to get outside the damaging world that capitalism makes. If we learn what makes capitalism unique and how it began, then we can think about how it may end. To replace capitalism with a post-capitalist world – no matter what word we use for this: socialism, communism, or any other name – we need to know what specifically turns market trades into capitalist market trades.
The third theme follows on from the first two as it involves how we come to understand capitalism's historical transformation of non-capitalist societies. At first glance, capitalist societies seem to be different, because they create an 'immense collection of commodities'. We do not have to be economic experts to realize that more and more things are for sale than in the past. In the end, Marx will not actually define capitalist societies by their creation of consumer choices. One of Marx's major claims in Capital is that different economic practices should always be defined in terms of how and why they produce goods, rather than how and why people consume them. A basic difference between Marx and liberal economists like Smith rests in this difference of perspective. Smith considers the market place of consumer choices as the only important sphere of economic practices. Marx insists that the sphere of production is the actual location that matters.
At this point in Capital, he has not yet made this claim. Why then start by talking about an effect of capitalism, the 'appearance' of consumable commodities, rather than its defining feature of how it produces these commodities? Marx begins in what seems to be the reverse order to illustrate his belief that we have to start with what we experience, what is before our eyes, and then work 'backwards' to learn what causes these effects. Throughout Capital, Marx first describes an aspect of capitalism and then explains its cause. Sometimes he delays this explanation for a very long time. For example, Marx waits until the volume's last part, 'So-Called Primitive Accumulation', to explain how capitalism emerged from pre-capitalist societies and what lies at the root of all capitalist accumulation. Why not start with the beginning? After all, one of the most frustrating challenges for first-time readers of Capital is that because Marx argues from appearance (the effect) to cause, rather than the reverse, we have to struggle through the first sections of Capital, which are notoriously difficult to follow because their dense philosophical language makes it hard to perceive where the argument is leading or why a dry and abstract discussion of value is necessary before turning to the gripping, and almost immediately understandable, description of exploited workers.
Yet the strange thing is that once you have read the entire book and understood its argument, Capital's early pages will in retrospect seem almost obvious. Marx says that this initial difficulty of comprehension is true for every new way of understanding the world. The principle of gravity was once hard to conceptualize, even while we have always experienced its effects, because humans first have to understand that the earth rotates around the sun, and pre-Galilean science thought that the earth was stationary. Nowadays the notion of gravity seems self-evident because we have the analytical tools that make the concept clear. You might find the same happening with your own reading of Capital. What seems hard at first becomes easier when you look back and recall Marx's later, concrete examples.
Marx writes in this way, though, to make an additional point. He wants to insist that we can use our everyday experiences as the medium for understanding the world's unseen complexities, and, furthermore, that world revolutions happen when we transform these experiences, rather than simply inventing new abstract, philosophical concepts in isolation from what we perceive. Capital is a revolutionary text, not because Marx has realized something before anyone else (although he does claim this); its power results from how Marx gives us a critical language to describe what we already know, even if in a vague and incoherent fashion, and then redirect this new-found understanding through social and political action. Even though Marx was himself well aware that Capital's terms and organization make it challenging to read, he still kept them, even after many drafts and revisions, because he wants to teach us how to think through a problem and not just passively learn his answers. Marx wants to empower his readers by showing us that we can learn how to learn and become engaged in changing society.
Before continuing, one other important feature of this version of Capital's first paragraph is worth mentioning. All the English versions of Capital translate the original German of 'eine "ungeheure Warensammlung'" as 'an "immense collection of commodities"'. While it is not incorrect to use 'immense' for 'ungeheure', the word can also be translated as 'monstrous'. On one hand, 'immense' makes sense because Marx argues that the logic of capitalism results in a massive increase in the number of produced commodities. On the other, 'monstrous' conveys Marx's recurring argument that quantitative, empirically verifiable changes in society become qualitative ones. The manner of capitalist production not only increases the number of commodities, it also fundamentally makes this growth of commodities frightening, not least because the way that commodities are used in capitalist societies has disturbing effects on human life, even beyond the immediate realm of labourers. Within capitalism, commodities appear like monsters, as Marx explains, because they seem to be supernaturally more powerful than humans, partially as a result of the dehumanizing work conditions that capitalism always creates. Throughout Capital, Marx uses the language of Gothic horror – vampires, werewolves, dripping blood – to describe capitalism's human costs. Even within Capital's first words, Marx inscribes his ethical outrage at the moral hell that capitalism has unleashed on our life world.
After this opening, Marx says that we must begin our study of capitalism with 'an analysis of the commodity' as its 'elementary' or most basic unit. What is a commodity? A commodity is an outside object, 'a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference' (125). These needs might be physical and necessary for basic survival (like food) or 'fanciful' (like the desire for pornography). Marx is not interested here in evaluating different kinds of wants. Both vegetables and pornography are 'useful' in the sense that we consume them to satisfy a personal need, be it digestive or erotic. Instead of differentiating between 'good' and 'bad' commodities, Marx says that every useful object can instead be looked at from the viewpoints of 'quality and quantity'. These two factors of material qualities and abstract quantities indicate two different kinds of 'value' that Marx will shortly define as use-value and exchange-value.
An object can be useful in multiple ways. A shoe might be used to protect feet or it might excite a foot fetishist. The qualitative ways in which these uses alter throughout time is a topic for (cultural) historians, who might want to know why one age prefers wearing boots rather than shoes, for instance. Marx's focus here instead treats how measuring the quantities of these objects changes, for this will unravel the nature of capitalism. In short, he will study the history of the production of exchange-values, not use-values, since capitalist societies are ones defined by their search for and production of quantified exchange-values.
Because an object's use-value depends on its material qualities, its 'physical body' (126), an object can be more or less useful depending on how well its natural properties satisfy our needs. If we want to keep warm on a winter's night, a wool coat is more useful than a nylon one, but if we want to keep dry on a wet summer one, then a nylon windbreaker is more useful than a heavy winter jacket that weighs us down because its wool absorbs water. Because 'the usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value', an object's utility can only be 'realized in the use or in consumption' (126), rather than as an abstract number. We might decide to rate a coat's relative comfort on a scale of 1 to 10, but we would recognize the relative arbitrariness, if not silliness, of these numbers. Furthermore, a coat is useful only when we actually wear it; we cannot make the quality of warmth real to us ('realizable') if it sits on the shelf. So use-value comes from using an object. Yet while an object's 'material wealth' – its material softness, warmth, etc. – determines its usefulness (what Marx calls its utility), 'in the form of society to be considered here' (i.e. a capitalist one), commodities 'are also the material bearers of ... exchange-value' (126).
Exchange-value is harder to perceive and experience than use-value because it depends on intangible, numerical (quantitative) aspects, involving how much it can be traded for in exchange for other commodities. We can realize a commodity's use-value by personally consuming it, but its 'exchange-value' appears only when we try to sell it and see if anyone else will pay to use or consume it. Until someone else agrees to buy an object, it does not really have an exchange-value. We might collect old comic books, which might have a use-value to us, even if only a sentimental or nostalgic one. The comics might also have an exchange-value, but we do not know how much or little that may be until we try putting them up for sale or watch what happens when someone else does so.
Because a commodity's exchange-value is not determined by human satisfaction, it only emerges in the market place. An ornately carved chair and a rough stool might have, more or less, the same use-value, the usefulness of lifting us off the ground, but when selling the two, we discover that the delicately crafted chair has a greater exchange-value. We cannot know that one chair has a larger exchange-value by sitting on it; this information emerges only when the two chairs are brought to the market to be sold. Exchange-value, thus, is registered in the absence of sensuous satisfaction; it is an 'abstract' feature and as such requires an imaginary standard of measurement. This lack of personal immediacy makes exchange-value a feature that seems to be both outside of the object, as it refers to this standard, and within it, given that it does not relate to human utility.
There is a contradiction here. How can an object's exchange-value be simultaneously extrinsic and relative, since it depends on the 'accident' of how much others might pay us for it in the market, and yet seemingly intrinsic, or belonging to the chair, given that it has a quality that does not depend on human needs for use?
Before we try to solve this riddle, notice how Marx constructs his arguments. He frequently pursues a question until it seems to reach a contradiction. At this point, he uses this paradox to carry his exploration further. It often seems as if Marx assumes that finding a contradiction means that he is coming closer to the point where a solution can be found, rather than a sign that his argument has gone wrong and come to a dead end. He looks for contradictions because he thinks that these will discover the weak point in our understanding, the terms that need revising because their current use has become untenable. When Marx's commentators talk about his 'dialectical' style of argument, they mean how he looks for paradoxes to redefine his terms and argument. The search for contradictions between two elements that reshape an initial problem consistently features in Capital as the logic that structures the flow of Marx's argument. Marx often seems to zigzag back to alter earlier points to show how our initial perceptions can be refined in light of later realizations.
To return to our discussion, the outside/inside problem can be answered by recognizing that exchange-value depends on our ability to find something that both characterizes the commodity apart from our use of it and acts as a means for it to be equated with other commodities. If I have corn and want to trade it for iron, to satisfy my need for raw material to forge a plough, how much corn do I need to offer in return for a certain amount of iron? Because corn and iron are materially different substances and have very different use-values, there needs to be something against which they can be compared, or made equivalent, so that I know to trade my corn's exchange-value for a proper amount of the iron's exchange-value. This standard of measure 'cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of the commodities' (127), because these material features belong to an object's use-value, and we need something intangible, something different from a commodity's useful, physical substance, to determine its exchange-value. An 'exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the "form of appearance", of a content distinguishable from it' (127). This 'appearance-form' is 'characterized precisely by its abstraction', it is a conceptual (or 'idealized') aspect that belongs neither to the commodity's natural properties, nor to its use-value to humans. Unlike use-value, which has a tangible effect, exchange-value is simply a form of expression, a marker or sign for something else, which does not belong to the commodity's physical nature. For instance, a numeral like the number '5' does not have any use-value, it does not have any concrete 'fiveness'. 'Fiveness' belongs to the collection of five actual objects, let's say apples. The number '5' is only a conceptual device, an abstract marker that erases the concrete differences between the individual apples, such as their particular shape, colour, or taste.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How to Read Marx's Capital"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Stephen Shapiro.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgements
Part One: Commodities and Money
1. The Commodity
2. The Process of Exchange
3. Money, or the Circulation of Commodities
Part Two: The Transformation of Money into Capital
4. The General Formula for Capital
5. Contradictions in the General Formula
6. The Sale and Purchase of Labour-power
Part Three: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value
7. The Labour Process and the Valorisation Process
8. Constant Capital and Variable Capital
9. The Rate of Surplus-Value
10. The Working Day
11. The Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value
Part Four: The Production of Relative Surplus-Value
12. The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value
13. Co-operation
14. The Division of Labour and Manufacture
15. Machinery and Large-Scale Industry
Part Five: The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value
16. Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value
17. Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-power and in Surplus-value
18: Different Formulae for the Rate of Surplus-Value
Part Six: Wages
19. The Transformation of the Value (and Respectively the Price) of Labour-power into Wages
20. Time-Wages
21. Piece Wages
22. National Differences in Wages
Part Seven: The Process of Accumulation of Capital
23. Simple Reproduction
24. The Transformation of Surplus-Value into Capital
25. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
Part Eight: So-Called Primitive ["Originating"] Accumulation
26. The Secret of Primitive Accumulation
27. The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land
28. Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated Since the End of the Fifteenth Century. The Forcing Down of Wages by Act of Parliament
29. The Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer
30. Impact of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. The Creation of a Home Market for Industrial Capital
31. The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
32. The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation
33. The Modern Theory of Colonisation
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index