The Grundrisse with David Harvey

Reply to Moliere

Harvey is fantastic. This will be interesting indeed.

Also committed to join. Thanks for the heads up.

Reply to Mikie Reply to fdrake

Well, the person who told me about it bought me a hard copy of the book, officially guilt tripping me into committing. :D (honestly was probably going to do it anyways)

Glad to have some fellow travelers along. Maybe we can use the thread to post thoughts as we go along.

Would love to attend in NYC but I have a conflicting schedule unfortunately. I did read the Grundrisse along with his video series several years back.

Reply to Maw That's cool. Feel free to comment along.

I've read a lot of Marx, including Capital v 1, but never the Grundrisse -- it wasn't exactly on my list, but I'm easily nudged ;). Plus the whole free course to keep me on schedule is nice.

Got my account up and running at Action Network, and spotted the reading schedule as I was getting prepped for tomorrow. I haven't read yet, I was going to wait until after class to see what sort of format to expect from the class before taking notes and such. (also, I didn't get the companion, I'm just going to follow along with the Grundrisse)

Looking forward to it!

Some notes while listening, very rough but willing to share:

I stand corrected in the first lecture, as Harvey tells us he is not a philosopher in the first few sentences :D. Oh well. I am inclined to call anyone a philosopher who can interpret Marx.

Super happy with Harvey's mention of "moments", and the circulatory analogy.

Interesting his inner/outer distinction -- because it highlights how the "outer" is itself something which comes under control, or is coming under control, as capital develops. And I like how Harvey highlights the totality in order to focus what Marx is talking about, the mode of production of capital, as well as because he uses "metabolism" as a distinction between the environment and the mode of production.

But as "moments"! Very cool. I like his highlight that it depends on where you're at in the text.

Neat that Harvey mentioned the M-C-M of capital, but he's breaking it down with his notion of "every conversion from commodity to money", but then highlighting "totality" where each part is interdependent upon the other parts to make a process work, not a thing. He even mentions "flow" which made me happy, thinking about the Deleuze-Marx crossover.

Hah! I love his story about 9/11, and how people got worried about the flow of capital. I basically attribute the whole "back to normal" thing with Covid-19 to be the same thing.

Then 2008 mentioned, which makes me happy too. First time I read Capital V1 was in the wake of 2008 and it made me start to take Marx seriously rather than just as an interest.

Also glad he mentioned climate change in relation to Marx, especially with his notion of the "spiral structure" of capital. There's an entity you can relate to problems!

I'm glad he's relating modern political problems to the theories of Marx, and in a way that's actually quite easy to digest. With a live Q&A from the audience no less! That's brave to put on a live stream. (also, they said they'll have the video recorded to share on youtube later)

Hrrmm! Good question about why the Grundrisse! And what a great answer! I've asked that question myself, and hot-damn, a great answer that motivates me to get on to Capital V 2

Interesting quote from Harvey is that Capital is written specifically for autodidacts, educated workers. Guess that's why I glommed onto it! As a young one I thought Engels was funny to say Capital v 1 was the bible of the working class, but apparently...

Ahhh.... I didn't realize that Harvey was a geographer first. Eggs and faces.

Happy that on lecture 1 he mentions how Marx is committed to freedom. (and even mentions a take about marxism/anarchy). "free time is what the mark of a what a socialist society should be about"

Oh, no. So many mentions of Robinson Crusoe. I'm so seen! Just cribbing on Marx... ;)

"there are certain categories that apply to economy no matter the mode of production"
"i want to know the categories that specifically apply to a capitalist mode of production"
-- love this mention of categories between the general theory and the theory of capital, because I remember capital v 1 starts with the most general categories which is very confusing when you are reading capital v 1 to learn about, say, capital. But he's always talking about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. So he has to make a third, general relation that relates the change

hah! I snuck in some reading and was happy to hear the same highlight I made on p87 of Penguin as they said. The one where he's annoyed with Mill, and relating that to modern politcal struggles! ala Bernie/Sanders etc. that are popular and somewhat on the side of Mill. Glad to see this distinction being made. With the labor theory of value being mentioned no less! vs. the "problem of scarcity".

Mmmm. I'm so happy to hear him hitting "moments" so often, because one of the reasons I have not written Hegel off is because I thought Hegel's logic is really central to Marxist thinking. And "moments", as I recall, were the monadic bits that formed the familiar the triadic structure from Hegel (then, having a name for that traidic structure, it can then form another moment from its negation...). Basically I'm glad that he's not doing the kind of reading which wants to minimize Hegel, because my honest reading of Marx is ... that they are too close to do that.

I love the page 100 close Harvey quoted, supporting my interpretation of Marx that the social is an organism: "This is the case with every organic whole" (for David harvey, "whole" is "totality")

"you learn Marx's method by watching him work" -- that's interesting because the only time I feel like I can kind of follow Hegel is in his Phenomonology of Spirit

"he is very nervous about chaotic conception" -- until you start to break it down into all the classes and all these things and as you start to break it down you stop needing population.

"...but this time not as a chaotic conception, but this time as a totality" -- starting to come back up from all the concepts you have established. it's a method of descent then a method of ascent...and the method of ascent is the real scientific method.

ahhhhh! "that is what the grundrisse is trying to do is to conceptually grasp..." very excited to hear "grasp", tho not related to this but more Levinas in relation to Marx

****

Hah! I love his honest comments about how he's not interested at all about Proudhon and Marx. Also I'm OK with having only read a few pages of the introduction, but now I'm seeing he's going to assume having read beforehand. Happy that he's up front about the kind of interpretation he's interested in, and I'm glad to hear that it's from the perspective of one of the main influences of Marx's theories! Never thought I'd get the opportunity to hear an interpretation of a text from a living Ricardian! One who is also critical of Marx. So, so good. I was nudged, and it's distracting me from reading Levinas, but... I think I'm hooked. (will post later when I figure out where they are putting the recordings)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is_uAYFpsZU&ab_channel=ThePeople%27sForumNYC

Hopefully that one works.

Finished up the introduction reading today, and I like this quote from Marx on methodology because it relates to a number of debates we have on the forum with respect to realism:

It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. 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. The former is the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes into being. For example, the simplest economic category, say e.g. exchange value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific relations; as well as a certain kind of family, or commune, or state, etc. It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole. As a category, by contrast, exchange value leads an antediluvian existence. Therefore, to the kind of consciousness – and this is characteristic of the philosophical consciousness – for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality, the movement of the categories appears as the real act of production – which only, unfortunately, receives a jolt from the outside – whose product is the world; and – but this is again a tautology – this is correct in so far as the concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending; but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception; a product, rather, of the working-up of observation and conception into concepts. The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head, which appropriates the world in the only way it can, a way different from the artistic, religious, practical and mental appropriation of this world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside the head just as before; namely as long as the head’s conduct is merely speculative, merely theoretical. Hence, in the theoretical method, too, the subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposition.

Definitely a "Hegel on its head" move, where the categories are real both concretely and within one's own head. (EDIT: or as I've said before, Marx gets to cheat on the problem of consciousness, but the solution might be judged worse than the problem)


My aim is to have a writeup for the next reading to post before the class this time, so as to exercise the mind more.

In the introduction there's a number of times Marx really "shows his ass" -- and this is where my heterodoxy comes into play -- where he truly believes there are higher and lower forms of civilizational development, in the same vein as the positivists like Comte, but instead with a proposed socialism which could develop out of capitalism as an even higher form of economic development.

Given the influence historiography, and even tangentially anthropology, has had on my thinking I cannot agree with Marx on stages of history, or even a material teleology. However, with historiography I've learned there's always a theory of history which makes the writing of history possible -- there is no "way things were" in a scientific sense. (which is another point of contention I have with the orthodox view, though not so strongly as the above).

But to give an end quote to show what I'm saying:

In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organization. For example, the Greeks compared to the moderns or also Shakespeare. It is even recognized that certain forms of art, e.g. the epic, can no longer be produced in their world epoch-making, classical stature as soon as the production of art, as such, begins; that is, that certain significant forms within the realm of the arts are possible only at an undeveloped stage of artistic development. If this is the case with the relation between different kinds of art within the realm of the arts, it is already less puzzling that it is the case in the relation of the entire realm to the general development of society. The difficulty consists only in the general formulation of these contradictions. As soon as they have been specified, they are already clarified.

Let us take e.g. the relation of Greek art and then of Shakespeare to the present time. It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Crédit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination. This is its material. Not any mythology whatever, i.e. not an arbitrarily chosen unconsciously artistic reworking of nature (here meaning everything objective, hence including society). Egyptian mythology could never have been the foundation or the womb of Greek art. But, in any case, a mythology. Hence, in no way a social development which excludes all mythological, all mythologizing relations to nature; which therefore demands of the artist an imagination not dependent on mythology.

From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?

But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.

There is an interpretation in there that minimizes the cultural chauvinism, but I'd say this is one of the things I find most unattractive in Marx -- he, too, was a product of his time, and chauvinism is a part of his writing.

The chapter on money -- begins with criticizing the belief that owned metal and monetary value are in any way related. And while fights with Proudhoun are more just for historical interest, the following reflects upon Marx's method:

Economic facts do not furnish them with the test of their theories; rather, they furnish the proof of their lack of mastery of the facts, in order to be able to play with them. Their manner of playing with the facts shows, rather, the genesis of their theoretical abstractions.

Marx against clouds [s]on[/s]in the sky revolutionary thinking:

But no, says the Proudhonist. Our new organization of the banks would not be satisfied with the negative accomplishment of abolishing the metal basis and leaving everything else the way it was. It would also create entirely new conditions of production and circulation, and hence its intervention would take place under entirely new preconditions. Did not the introduction of our present banks, in its day, revolutionize the conditions of production? Would large-scale modern industry have become possible without this new financial institution, without the concentration of credit which it created, without the state revenues which it created in antithesis to ground rent, without finance in antithesis to landed property, without the moneyed interest in antithesis to the landed interest; without these things could there have been stock companies etc., and the thousand forms of circulating paper which are as much the preconditions as the product of modern commerce and modern industry?

Personally I'm enjoying the discussion on money's value, but I can see it as being pretty dry too. A gem in the discussion, though, to disabuse certain misinterpretations of the labor theory of value:

What determines value is not the amount of labour time incorporated in products, but rather the amount of labour time necessary at a given moment.

There's a lot more where Marx talks about the value of money in relation to other theories of value, in particular he criticizes the use of time-chits as a replacement for money, noting that the time-chits would basically function exactly as money does now, where it'd have a relationship to price such that 3 hours time-chit= 1 hour labor time, due to market fluctuations -- a common distinction Marx makes is between price and value, or exchange value and real value. If you think of the little charts they put up to represent a Market, the average between the fluctuations is here being posited as the value and the number on the graph is the price. I'm not sure if this was my understanding of Capital's distinction... I would have said that the two are entirely separate, or in contradiction, which is what Marx says here but he's also intimating that the market price more or less "tracks" value (if we wanted to dispute, say, the use of the average function, but wanted to posit another one, some kind of aggregate function EDIT: Like median or mode, for instance, but I'm sure we could come up with more)

...

Also, I am not following this line:

Value is at the same time the exponent of the relation in which the commodity is exchanged with other commodities, as well as the exponent of the relation in which it has already been exchanged with other commodities (materialized labour time) in production;

I'm not sure what the exponent of a relation is, for Marx. (or, really, in general...)

But, I like this paragraph which gets closer to what I understand of Marx's theory of value:

Two commodities, e.g. a yard of cotton and a measure of oil, considered as cotton and as oil, are different by nature, have different properties, are measured by different measures, are incommensurable. Considered as values, all commodities are qualitatively equal and differ only quantitatively, hence can be measured against each other and substituted for one another (are mutually exchangeable, mutually convertible) in certain quantitative relations. Value is their social relation, their economic quality. A book which possesses a certain value and a loaf of bread possessing the same value are exchanged for one another, are the same value but in a different material. As a value, a commodity is an equivalent for all other commodities in a given relation. As a value, the commodity is an equivalent; as an equivalent, all its natural properties are extinguished; it no longer takes up a special, qualitative relationship towards the other commodities; but is rather the general measure as well as the general representative, the general medium of exchange of all other commodities. As value, it is money.

More or less pointing out that any commodity can serve as a repository of value, and hence be currency. (but there are material reasons you'd pick one commodity over another).

All this talk about how money works to arrive at the conclusion:

Now, just as it is impossible to suspend the complications and contradictions which arise from the existence of money alongside the particular commodities merely by altering the form of money (although difficulties characteristic of a lower form of money may be avoided by moving to a higher form), so also is it impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products. It is necessary to see this clearly in order to avoid setting impossible tasks, and in order to know the limits within which monetary reforms and transformations of circulation are able to give a new shape to the relations of production and to the social relations which rest on the latter.

Super interesting paragraph distinguishing social existence of value from natural existence:

The product becomes a commodity; the commodity becomes exchange value; the exchange value of the commodity is its immanent money-property; this, its money-property, separates itself from it in the form of money, and achieves a general social existence separated from all particular commodities and their natural mode of existence; the relation of the product to itself as exchange value becomes its relation to money, existing alongside it; or, becomes the relation of all products to money, external to them all. Just as the real exchange of products creates their exchange value, so does their exchange value create money.

Got up to the break on page 153, or at the top of https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm today ~80 pages to go before Tuesday, laundry day should cover it.

One thing I'm wondering about -- I'm interested to see how Harvey begins to bring out the structure of the Grundrisse, because he mentioned that in the first lecture of his. And so far it just seems like a grab bag of topics that are loosely connected.

fyi, if you are following along with the marxists dot org website version, Tuesday's reading gets us up to everything before this point: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch05.htm

Picking up where I left off (weekends are for rest) --


Even More on the Differences Between Time-chits and Money (and how that doesn't add up):

In this case the bank is simultaneously the general buyer and the general seller in one person. Or the opposite takes place. In this case, the bank chit is mere paper which claims to be the generally recognized symbol of exchange value, but has in fact no value. For this symbol has to have the property of not merely representing, but being, exchange value in actual exchange. In the latter case the bank chit would not be money, or it would be money only by convention between the bank and its clients, but not on the open market. It would be the same as a meal ticket good for a dozen meals which I obtain from a restaurant, or a theatre pass good for a dozen evenings, both of which represent money, but only in this particular restaurant or this particular theatre. The bank chit would have ceased to meet the qualifications of money, since it would not circulate among the general public, but only between the bank and its clients...

..The bank would thus be the general buyer and seller. Instead of notes it could also issue cheques, and instead of that it could also keep simple bank accounts. Depending on the sum of commodity values which X had deposited with the bank, X would have that sum in the form of other commodities to his credit. A second attribute of the bank would be necessary: it would need the power to establish the exchange value of all commodities, i.e. the labour time materialized in them, in an authentic manner. But its functions could not end there. It would have to determine the labour time in which commodities could be produced, with the average means of production available in a given industry, i.e. the time in which they would have to be produced. But that also would not be sufficient. It would not only have to determine the time in which a certain quantity of products had to be produced, and place the producers in conditions which made their labour equally productive (i.e. it would have to balance and to arrange the distribution of the means of labour), but it would also have to determine the amounts of labour time to be employed in the different branches of production. The latter would be necessary because, in order to realize exchange value and make the bank’s currency really convertible, social production in general would have to be stabilized and arranged so that the needs of the partners in exchange were always satisfied. Nor is this all. The biggest exchange process is not that between commodities, but that between commodities and labour. (More on this presently.) The workers would not be selling their labour to the bank, but they would receive the exchange value for the entire product of their labour, etc. Precisely seen, then, the bank would be not only the general buyer and seller, but also the general producer. In fact either it would be a despotic ruler of production and trustee of distribution, or it would indeed be nothing more than a board which keeps the books and accounts for a society producing in common. The common ownership of the means of production is presupposed, etc., etc. The Saint-Simonians made their bank into the papacy of production.

What Adam Smith, in the true eighteenth-century manner, puts in the prehistoric period, the period preceding history, is rather a product of history.

This reciprocal dependence is expressed in the constant necessity for exchange, and in exchange value as the all-sided mediation. The economists express this as follows: Each pursues his private interest and only his private interest; and thereby serves the private interests of all, the general interest, without willing or knowing it. The real point is not that each individual’s pursuit of his private interest promotes the totality of private interests, the general interest. One could just as well deduce from this abstract phrase that each individual reciprocally blocks the assertion of the others’ interests, so that, instead of a general affirmation, this war of all against all produces a general negation. The point is rather that private interest is itself already a socially determined interest, which can be achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society; hence it is bound to the reproduction of these conditions and means. It is the interest of private persons; but its content, as well as the form and means of its realization, is given by social conditions independent of all.

Heh, those are right next to one another, but they are both really good sections. The first, as criticism of naive socialisms (one which mimics the same criticism I've heard levied against socialism, that the Party now is both the State and the Employer), and the second for talking about scope. "Private interest" is a social relation, which Marx here points out, while real, is the product of the time (the private interests come on the scene as soon as bourgeois politics begins to undermine feudal social relations) -- one could do worse in reading Marx in always remembering that Feudalism is the historical analogue of Capitalism: it's on a scope larger than the individual, in that case, fiefs and duchies and kingdoms and the entire mess that was medieval ownership, but it's those over time, and they are independent of any individual kingdom, duchy, fief, and so forth.

But more on our relationship, in capitalism to the social bond:

The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual’s own activity or his product becomes an activity and a product for him; he must produce a general product – exchange value, or, the latter isolated for itself and individualized, money. On the other side, the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket.

Something interesting to note here is in relation to We-Intentions. Note how money, here, is not given power due to We-Intentions, but because it is an independent, social entity with objectively determinable properties.

But, back to the badness of time-chits:

Individuals are subsumed under social production; social production exists outside them as their fate; but social production is not subsumed under individuals, manageable by them as their common wealth. There can therefore be nothing more erroneous and absurd than to postulate the control by the united individuals of their total production, on the basis of exchange value, of money, as was done above in the case of the time-chit bank.

Or, really, I'm just stressing the point about the social being both real and independent of individuals.

Something often misunderstood with Marx is how he feels about capitalism. He's actually quite fascinated with its operations. And he judges it positively:

It has been said and may be said that this is precisely the beauty and the greatness of it: this spontaneous interconnection, this material and mental metabolism which is independent of the knowing and willing of individuals, and which presupposes their reciprocal independence and indifference. And, certainly, this objective connection is preferable to the lack of any connection, or to a merely local connection resting on blood ties, or on primeval, natural or master-servant relations.

Equally certain is it that individuals cannot gain mastery over their own social interconnections before they have created them. But it is an insipid notion to conceive of this merely objective bond as a spontaneous, natural attribute inherent in individuals and inseparable from their nature (in antithesis to their conscious knowing and willing). This bond is their product. It is a historic product. It belongs to a specific phase of their development. The alien and independent character in which it presently exists vis-à-vis individuals proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life, and that they have not yet begun, on the basis of these conditions, to live it. It is the bond natural to individuals within specific and limited relations of production. Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations, are hence also subordinated to their own communal control, are no product of nature, but of history. The degree and the universality of the development of wealth where this individuality becomes possible supposes production on the basis of exchange values as a prior condition, whose universality produces not only the alienation of the individual from himself and from others, but also the universality and the comprehensiveness of his relations and capacities. In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness [22] as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.)

I'm sort of just quote-dumping here, but these are some great sections for clarifying misunderstandings I've come across in reading Marx : the social is independent of the individual, and alienation is a stage in seeking control over the social -- the original fullness that we might dream of cannot come back, either, because we now depend upon the world market. We were raised in an environment which taught us to become industrial citizens: if we "returned to how things were" we'd be peasants or hunter gatherers, and a great deal of the population would die off because those means of production are not able to support a population the size of what we have now.

For Marx he's always pointing out that these relationships are not natural, because they are different from how they were (feudal), and so the bourgeoisie, like every class which has ruled the world, sees itself as the end of history when it's just a moment in history.

Ye olde appearance/reality distinction -- the social appears natural because the individual has no control over the natural, but is born into a world with such and such social realtionships already at play. But in reality, the social relationship is much larger than our immediate surroundings, and our immediate surroundings, as well as ourselves as individuated people with personal bank accounts (the individual right to own property), are the product of social forces.

A particular expenditure of labour time becomes objectified in a definite particular commodity with particular properties and a particular relationship to needs; but, in the form of exchange value, labour time is required to become objectified in a commodity which expresses no more than its quota or quantity, which is indifferent to its own natural properties, and which can therefore be metamorphosed into – i.e. exchanged for – every other commodity which objectifies the same labour time. The object should have this character of generality, which contradicts its natural particularity. This contradiction can be overcome only by objectifying it: i.e. by positing the commodity in a double form, first in its natural, immediate form, then in its mediated form, as money. The latter is possible only because a particular commodity becomes, as it were, the general substance of exchange values, or because the exchange values of commodities become identified with a particular commodity different from all others. That is, because the commodity first has to be exchanged for this general commodity, this symbolic general product or general objectification of labour time, before it can function as exchange value and be exchanged for, metamorphosed into, any other commodities at will and regardless of their material properties. Money is labour time in the form of a general object, or the objectification of general labour time, labour time as a general commodity. Thus, it may seem a very simple matter that labour time should be able to serve directly as money (i.e. be able to furnish the element in which exchange values are realized as such), because it regulates exchange values and indeed is not only the inherent measure of exchange values but their substance as well (for, as exchange values, commodities have no other substance, no natural attributes). However, this appearance of simplicity is deceptive. The truth is that the exchange-value relation – of commodities as mutually equal and equivalent objectifications of labour time – comprises contradictions which find their objective expression in a money which is distinct from labour time.

This is an interesting paragraph to me because it highlights what "contradictions" means by Marx. Money is a concrete which resolves contradictions -- that's really interesting. "contradiction" is still a notion I'm suspicious of within the general wheel-house, because the rules for thinking dialectically are very far from clear to me, and are likewise easily subject to abuse because of that. Don't like a conclusion you've drawn? Just think dialectically about it, comrade! ;)

Here I'm noticing how the concrete object resolves conceptual contradictions from a time period before -- so money comes about because we have division of labor which segments the population into roles which could not survive on their own, yet they don't produce commensurable goods. If you have 2000 pairs of shoes at the end of the day, while you are one hell of a shoe crafter, you don't have the things you want. You're reliant upon all the other laborers to do their part, and exchange their goods: basically the need for money. Hence why we have all the talk about time-chits -- I take it that it was thought to be a viable replacement to capital, where Marx is clearly coming down against that, saying that capital takes us to a better place than we were, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the possibility of a new society).

***

Through all the parenthetical notes it's easy to get lost in just what Marx is talking about and why, so I'm going to post the conclusion:

This much proceeds from what has been developed so far: A particular product (commodity) (material) must become the subject of money, which exists as the attribute of every exchange value. The subject in which this symbol is represented is not a matter of indifference, since the demands placed on the representing subject are contained in the conditions – conceptual determinations, characteristic relations – of that which is to be represented. The study of the precious metals as subjects of the money relations, as incarnations of the latter, is therefore by no means a matter lying outside the realm of political economy, as Proudhon believes, any more than the physical composition of paint, and of marble, lie outside the realm of painting and sculpture. The attributes possessed by the commodity as exchange value, attributes for which its natural qualities are not adequate, express the demands made upon those commodities which ???? ?????? [36] are the material of money. These demands, at the level to which we have up to now confined ourselves, are most completely satisfied by the precious metals. Metals as such [enjoy] preference over other commodities as instruments of production, and among the metals the one which is first found in its physical fullness and purity – gold; then copper, then silver and iron.

So eat it, Proudhon!

I'm going to be real -- I totally skipped part a where he's going into why different metals couldn't be used as money, thereby scientifically demonstrating his conclusion. And I only skimmed part b.

d, though, has some interesting parts I'm slowing down and reading now. I like this clear statement about money:

But first let us note that what is circulated by money is exchange value, hence prices. Hence, as regards the circulation of commodities, it is not only their mass but, equally, their prices which must be considered. A large quantity of commodities at a low exchange value (price) obviously requires less money for its circulation than a smaller quantity at double the price. Thus, actually, the concept of price has to be developed before that of circulation. Circulation is the positing of prices, it is the process in which commodities are transformed into prices: their realization as prices. Money has a dual character: it is (1) measure, or element in which the commodity is realized as exchange value, and (2) means of exchange, instrument of circulation, and in each of these aspects it acts in quite opposite directions. Money only circulates commodities which have already been ideally transformed into money, not only in the head of the individual but in the conception held by society (directly, the conception held by the participants in the process of buying and selling). This ideal transformation into money is by no means determined by the same laws as the real transformation. Their interrelation is to be examined.

Also pushes against some of the We-Intentions notes I put before; maybe because here he's talking about money in its ideal character in addition to its real character?

But mostly I like Marx's clear statement on the dual character of money, that it is both the means of exchange and measure of value.

One of the things I think that was "lost" in dropping Marx is looking for a material analogue that connects economics to the sciences. If economics is a science, as Marx holds, then it must have some measurable natural quantity -- hence Marx positing labor-time as the measurable quantity which all commodities share in common. Not that the price is in these units, it's not -- but with the discussion about money from before, it should be seen that since money is itself also just another commodity, nothing is explained by saying it's a medium of exchange. Of course it is, but what Marx is trying to understand is why it is a medium of exchange -- how is it that value, objectively (scientifically) increases? And for it to increase, you'd have to first say what it is, which for Marx is labor-time (though price tracks accreted concrete labor time, too -- so price is a measure, though its value fluctuates with its market)


A quote about ideal/real:

If exchange values are ideally transformed into money by means of prices, then, in the act of exchange, in purchase and sale, they are really transformed into money, exchanged for money, in order then to be again exchanged as money for a commodity. A particular exchange value must first be exchanged for exchange value in general before it can then be in turn exchanged for particulars. The commodity is realized as an exchange value only through this mediating movement, in which money plays the part of middleman. Money thus circulates in the opposite direction from commodities. It appears as the middleman in commodity exchange, as the medium of exchange. It is the wheel of circulation, the instrument of circulation for the turnover of commodities; but, as such, it also has a circulation of its own – monetary turnover, monetary circulation. The price of the commodity is realized only when it is exchanged for real money, or in its real exchange for money.

Also, a good quote to hammer, again, how Marx's theory of capitalism depends upon an account of exchange

The circumstances which determine the mass of commodity prices to be realized, on the one hand, and the velocity of circulation of money, on the other hand, are to be examined later. This much is clear, that prices are not high or low because much or little money circulates, but that much or little money circulates because prices are high or low;

All the previous to just say how monetary policy isn't all you need to look at.


Hrm, I'm thinking I'm going to call it there today. Tomorrow, finish before the lecture. I'm probably going to restart at the beginning of part D... I can feel the reading fatigue setting in and I'm starting to speed up. :D

(Top of Page 186 in Penguin Grundrisse)

Thanks for all this @Moliere. May I ask you a favour? I'm trying to read along with the Marxists.org version, but I suspect the page numbers are way off compared to the Penguin Classic that Harvey's working from. Could I ask you to post the first line of Page 83 and page 115 in your version? In the marxists one they don't seem too related to Harvey's discussion topics. The translations are different too.

Oh I see you already did the thing. Sorry.

Reply to fdrake Hey no worries. I'm glad to do it. For the 21'st of February you'll stop at this paragraph on this page. I'll keep updating every week so you can follow along.

This is the occasion to draw attention to a moment which here, for the first time, not only arises from the standpoint of the observer, but is posited in the economic relation itself. In the first act, in the exchange between capital and labour, labour as such, existing for itself, necessarily appeared as the worker. Similarly here in the second process: capital as such is posited as a value existing for itself, as egotistic value, so to speak (something to which money could only aspire). But capital in its being-for-itself is the capitalist. Of course, socialists sometimes say, we need capital, but not the capitalist. [7] Then capital appears as a pure thing, not as a relation of production which, reflected in itself, is precisely the capitalist. I may well separate capital from a given individual capitalist, and it can be transferred to another. But, in losing capital, he loses the quality of being a capitalist. Thus capital is indeed separable from an individual capitalist, but not from the capitalist, who, as such, confronts the worker. Thus also the individual worker can cease to be the being-for-itself [Fürsichsein] of labour; he may inherit or steal money etc. But then he ceases to be a worker. As a worker he is nothing more than labour in its being-for-itself. (This to be further developed later.) [8]

I'm intermittently unable to concentrate and ill, I've only gotten round to Grundrisse readings today, but have read the companion statements. Some notes I've made from the first week's readings are as follows:

Subsection summaries (from Marxists.org translation)

Section 1) “1. Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)


“Independent Individuals. Eighteenth-century Ideas"

This section is about the economists Marx is reacting to. More specifically, the intellectual climate of economics at the time. The chief accusations levied in this chapter are twofold. Firstly, that hitherto economists have tended to conceptualise the economy before inspecting it to see how it works. Secondly, behaviour and properties of people are dictated by how the economy was seen to work in these conceptualisations. Both are instances of "fitting reality to the model" rather than "fitting the model to reality". Though perhaps it is better to say that the the intellectual climate of economists idealised how the economy functioned, didn't inspect it, and assumed people behaved as if they were were governed by the idealised, ahistorical, model.

"“Eternalization of historic relations of production. – Production and distribution in general. – Property"

This section is about the mechanism of idealisation in the first section. The imagined models of the economy are reified as if they are natural laws. Rather than historical specificities. Marx seeks to depart from that reification to instead model capital as a process of continual development. That occurs over history, through the transition of modes of production, as well as within capital itself. Capital itself is being construed as a process of contingent development which follows general tendencies, historically, rather than natural laws, eternally. But you can look at commonalities in production to see what's shared, and start analysing there.

Section 2) “(2) THE GENERAL RELATION OF PRODUCTION TO DISTRIBUTION, EXCHANGE, CONSUMPTION”

There are some categories of capitalist economy which are often treated independently. They're also treated as being mutually exclusive. Together they form the general functioning of a capitalist economy. They are production, distribution, exchange and consumption. Treating them independently is silly, since they are mutually and conceptually dependent. Nevertheless you can split them apart for reasons of analysing them and their inter relations.

Consumption and Production

Consumption and production are interdependent. When something's produced, components of its fabrication process are used up. Things wear, break down, change in form. That is consumption. When something's consumed, When something's consumed, it also sustains a labourer. It produces and refreshes a necessary part of the production process. But clearly that's not the same as gears needing to be oiled and wear on machines.

They also relate procedurally. As moments of capital's circuits. They're corollaries of each other. Mutually necessitating. Production is production for consumption. Consumption is of produced goods.

There's a metaphysical way they relate too. A product is only a product insofar as it can be consumed. Consumption is only consumption insofar as it creates the need for continued production.

Lastly, the concepts of production and consumption have a primary relation. Production produces consumption, and also the need to consume produced products, as production controls which products are accessible. In that regard, consumption can be seen as part of the process of production.

These three things reinforce each other. They are analogous phenomena in different registers. But consumption and production are not identical. Conceptually interdependent? Yes. Saying something about one says something about the other? Yes. But they're not done by the same people. Other stuff goes on. Like distribution. And exchange.

Distribution and production

Distribution apportions produced goods to people. But not only that. Who distributes the products and who decides that? Ultimately who counts as producing each product - who owns the production process - decides how the products enter the networks of capital. In that regard those people are determinative of distribution. But society must be set up so that distributing products is principally determined by how products enter the market and how people relate to products.

Thus, the distribution of products is also a social process. It's not just goods being assigned to people, it's how the assignment works socially, and furthermore the way society is structured to ensure that means of assignment. Production and distribution are interdependent. Who gets what is decided by who produces what and how. Who produces what and how is decided by who gets what. The principal way production and distribution meet is through the distribution of ownership of means of production. This is simultaneously a fact about production and distribution. And a nod to the fact that means of distribution long predate capital.

“(c1) Exchange, Finally, and Circulation

Circulation is all the exchanges put together and interacting; "circulation is the totality of exchange". It's also embedded in production. Any interstice comes with exchanges - need wood to produce a chair? Gotta buy wood. Need to sit with support? Gotta buy a chair. Who gets access to what is thus mediated by exchange; and thus circulation. This then relates to distribution; who accesses what is determined by the means of distribution. And thus production; who decides who exchanges what is determined by who produces what and how. Make the thing? You better buy things. Own the means of making? You exchange to get what you need to buy things.

Summary point:

Despite production, distribution, exchange, circulation and consumption all reciprocally codetermining (mediating), the way in which things are produced determines all the others. Who owns production determines distribution; production generates distribution. Who can buy what is determined by who produces what; production generates exchange. Production makes demands for its processes and satisfies other process's demands, including self maintenance; production generates circulation. Production sustains the need to rely upon it for need satisfaction; production generates consumption.

Reply to Moliere

Thank you!

I'm not going to lie, all this about what determines the amount of money that should be in circulation is a bit dry, but here's one of the gems Harvey talked about:

Circulation is the movement in which the general alienation appears as general appropriation and general appropriation as general alienation. As much, then, as the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and as much as the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them. Circulation, because a totality of the social process, is also the first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value, but extending to the whole of the social movement itself. The social relation of individuals to one another as a power over the individuals which has become autonomous, whether conceived as a natural force, as chance or in whatever other form, is a necessary result of the fact that the point of departure is not the free social individual. Circulation as the first totality among the economic categories is well suited to bring this to light.

One of the innovations of Marx, in social theory, is exactly this -- the notion that the social is independent of individuals, and that it can be described. He's talking about " the social movement itself" and not what a bunch of people are doing together.

It's an idea that I've had a hard time getting across, sometimes, because we are so habituated to thinking ourselves as individuals, and thinking of the social as that which arises out of what a collection of individuals do.

***

Oi, these notebooks are pretty rough. :D How many times do I need an example of two different commodities being equated to one another, and the explanation that money is the commodity which mediates the use-value (or physical) differences between products, and its value is expressed in price which is related, through the process of circulation, to labor time, and therefore it acts as both a medium of exchange and a measure of value. (apparently, hundreds of pages worth)

(I feel like these notebooks are responding to some very particular criticisms that I'm probably missing, given this conversation happened some 150 years ago)

But another gem, or at least a conclusion in what appears to be some difficult to follow reasoning:

Only within circulation, then, is it such a material symbol; taken out of circulation, it again becomes a realized price; but within the process, as we have seen, the quantity, the amount of these material symbols of the monetary unit is the essential attribute. Hence, while the material substance of money, its material substratum of a given quantity of gold or silver, is irrelevant within circulation, where money appears as something existing in opposition to commodities, and where, by contrast, its amount is the essential aspect, since it is there only a symbol for a given amount of this unit; in its role as measure, however, where it was introduced only ideally, its material substratum was essential, but its quantity and even its existence as such were irrelevant. From this it follows that money as gold and silver, in so far as only its role as means of exchange and circulation is concerned, can be replaced by any other symbol which expresses a given quantity of its unit, and that in this way symbolic money can replace the real, because material money as mere medium of exchange is itself symbolic.

Ahhh, at last, any commodity can serve the function of money.

That's not the only thing he's trying to establish, but due to the historical nature of the debates I'm just admitting to struggling with some of the assertions (in trying to figure out why they are relevant).

The story I'm gathering is -- money has moments. In its first moments it behaves in accord with C-M-M-C (interesting to note that in Capital, this equation is C-M-C -- here I'm guessing he's treating the equation as a particular exchange) (measure of value between two commodities?), in its second moment it begins as money to return as money (medium of exchange and realizer of prices), and then in the third moment money becomes an end unto itself and exits the field of circulation.

In the case of money as capital, money itself is posited (1) as precondition of circulation as well as its result; (2) as having independence only in the form of a negative relation, but always a relation to circulation; (3) as itself an instrument of production, since circulation no longer appears in its primitive simplicity, as quantitative exchange, but as a process of production, as a real metabolism. And thus money is itself stamped as a particular moment of this process of production. Production is not only concerned with simple determination of prices, i.e. with translation of the exchange values of commodities into a common unit, but with the creation of exchange values, hence also with the creation of the particularity of prices. Not merely with positing the form, but also the content. Therefore, while in simple circulation, money appears generally as productive, since circulation in general is itself a moment of the system of production, nevertheless this quality still only exists for us, and is not yet posited in money. (4) As capital, money thus also appears posited as a relation to itself mediated by circulation – in the relation of interest and capital. But here we are not as yet concerned with these aspects; rather, we have to look simply at money in the third role, in the form in which it emerged as something independent from circulation, more properly, from both its earlier aspects.

Heh, didn't quite finish the assignment. I'll have to block more time this coming week. But that's where I'm at as of right before class.

@Moliere - were you sent an invite link this week? I've yet to receive one.

Reply to fdrake I was not, I just went back to the youtube page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkeaMEUxWrc&ab_channel=ThePeople%27sForumNYC Listening now.

Reply to Moliere

Cheers.

Happy to hear that Harvey thought this section was definitely one with gems buried in a lot of muck that needs historical explanation to be of interest, because that was definitely how I was feeling.

Glad to hear Harvey confirm my implementation of "use-value" in the above. :D

"electronic monies are even more superior" -- yes! I'm glad to hear Harvey say this, because one of the things I've always thought about Marx's theory of what makes a commodity a good commodity for money actually are consistent with electronic balance sheets, and makes sense of a transition from gold-based to fiat money (even though I know Marx doesn't believe in fiat money, but that gold must back paper money)

"We always have to ask the question: who is the master behind these ideas?"

"ideas are the vehicles which change the world" -- Theses on Feuerbach

Ahhh "free time is a measure of socialism" -- nice. Reminds me of the best theory of communism: "Communism is free time and nothing else"

"Capital does not like a world in which there is free time. It colonizes it. And capital does not like a world in which people have time to think. They want people to be able to act on information, not think"

"we get mixed up on money as a form of price, and money as a form of value"

"we are actually producing experiences"

****

Ooo this is interesting. The conflict between Marx's nihilism and Marx's clear and obvious moral commitments. Nice question.

"they are not thinking about morality as a political question -- as far as they are concerned, how much morality is there on wall street?" -- yup. You get this even from the manifesto.

"will you actually change capital by changing people's ideas and changing their morality? i think that the evidence of that is very very negative" -- I like that he's taking the hard line against belief as an agent of change. Not that it's unimportant! And he's emphasizing that, with Marx. But "activity" is a category distinct from belief.

***

Interesting that he took a question from the youtube chat while they were streaming. I'll keep that in mind while reading. I might come up with one.

***

I like that Harvey is pointing out the centrality of the military to our situation. And, in general, I like how Harvey is tying this old text to our current world throughout his lecture and Q&A. I agree that the military is our economic center.

***

"both merchants and industrialists are subservient in the United States to the financiers"

"one of the most important thing about money is how mobile it can be and so many of the innovations in block-chain technology are about reducing the cost of exchanges"

Interesting that he's bringing in the idea of the velocity of transaction which Marx keeps mentioning. And then qualifying why monetary policy is still not the vector of revolutionary change.

***

I'm impressed that Harvey committed to central planning. It's something I'm still "eh" on. But he puts to words some of the things I think -- like, can you say that central planning failed in the Soviet Union?

***

Why was marx convinced money would not go off the gold standard? because it seems...

ahh! this question is great. It's the exact sort of thought I was having that his theory actually supports fiat currency.

"first, I don't know. i just think at that time there was no reason for it. and as marx is a person of his time it was irrelevant"

definitely a different answer than I thought. More or less Harvey points to the passage which is a hypothetical to make a reductio of Proudhon as a good description of what we actually did; whereas what I think is that if labor-time is the basis of value then fiat currency makes sense as a development of money. Eventually, exchange-value rules. Money as measure and medium and goal becomes a concrete social which is alien to any individual (individual, worthwhile to remind ourselves, coming about as a reality only because of the economic relations which allow individual rights to property).

***

Yup, just posting my notes while listening. I'm glad to have you along @fdrake -- I hope you get to feeling better soon.

Reply to Moliere

the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them,

I am not sure I understand your account of Harvey’s lecture correctly.
It may be concluded that instead of this appearance - ‘the totality of the process appears as an objective interrelation,’- it is indeed generated by ‘the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another and by their own collisions with one another.’ And yet, there is also ‘an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them.’ So, aren’t there two mutually controversial generative processes? On the one side, you mention ‘collusions and interactions of ‘conscious individuals’; on the other, you write that precisely these interactions are produced by ‘an alien social power standing above them.’ Marx himself evaluated the process of social production as the important notion of his work: “The guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” (Marx, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’).
Will Harvey talk again about the production of social relations of production? In ‘Fragment on the machines’, Marx briefly outlined the production process as a whole.

(3) THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

This section begins with an elaboration of the pattern of analysis covered in section ( 1 ). Specifically how previous economists have idealised capitalist economies and forced those idealisations onto the functioning of capitalist economies. This is adjusting the world to fit a model, rather than adjusting a model to fit the world. Then how does this happen?

The previously made error in method is twofold. Firstly, it has the wrong starting points. Secondly, it infers connections in the wrong way. Both errors are categorical errors, they are errors in style rather than blunders. The two errors germinate from the same style of thinking - it contaminates them both.

The wrong starting points - Marx has criticised starting with the whole of a thing and breaking it apart into constituent elements. EG, what is life? Well it moves, it needs food... Rather, he prefers starting by isolating a concept he knows which is a part of a whole. EG, what is food consumption for a living organism? Well it needs to do that to keep itself going... The first way will be called The Bad Way, the second way will be called The Good Way.

He prefers The Good Way because it begins with an explorable mechanism which can be compared directly with how things work. The Bad Way instead requires fixing fundamental concepts of the whole of a thing from the point of departure of its analysis. In the the Good Way, you get to find out what you need to assume about what you're analysing to make it match the world on a fundamental level. In the Bad Way, you assume how something works at a fundamental level and work out how to distort that fundament to fit the world. In essence, the Good Way abstracts from concretion and recontextualises the abstraction in the concrete. The Bad Way concretises from an abstraction already conceived under a concept, and splits up the concretion to cover states of things implied by it. In other words, The Good Way lets you check all of your working once or twice, the Bad Way makes hard to check all your working at all - your starting points and inferences.

He uses that insight to shit on Hegel. But of course Hegel would idealise reality, he found the generating concepts of his own ideas in the process of their analysis! What is concrete is a concept! What founds that is mind! Marx finds the above error characteristically Hegelian, the most blatant example of the error in method.

He also uses that insight to shit on other economists. Despite respecting Adam Smith, Smith was construed as often treating production as the central feature of all economies - but because Smith started with capitalist production and treated it as production universally, he ended up distorting what would apply to all systems of production due to setting up production as capitalist production. An error which may be generative of the myth of barter, and treating the capitalist economy's use of money as the way in which currency has always been used.

Smith's error then propagated to the conception of labour. Smith got it half right, half wrong. Smith was right in thinking that all products (use values) were the result of labour - past labour, objectified labour - and that held for all economies. But Smith got it very wrong when he considered that all economies were indifferent to who did what insofar as they determined the value of products. The latter statement is true of capitalist economies with their characteristic function of money, but not of labour as considered universally. The equation of labour universally and labour in capitalism is an instance of reasoning The Bad Way - applying a fundamental conception and being unable to test it.

Marx uses highlighting Smith's error in labour as a pivot point. He criticises wealth, agriculture, land, rent, joint stock companies, national wealth in the same manner; taking a conception of them which was seen as universal, highlighting how their conceptions each employ The Bad Way, and drawing out what makes their conceptions historically contingent and ultimately universalising something from capitalism into the past inappropriately.

Since that error's so commonplace, and has been for years and years, the standard conceptual relations between economic concepts has also been screwed over by it. That means there's all kinds of bad starting points, which then engender the Bad Way of relating them. In that regard Marx feels he needs to fix the categories he's going to analyse and the order in which he'll analyse them.

The order obviously has to be (1) the general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society, but in the above-explained sense (Good Way - me). (2) The categories which make up the inner structure of bourgeois society and on which the fundamental classes rest. Capital, wage labour, landed property. Their interrelation. Town and country. The three great social classes. Exchange between them. Circulation. Credit system (private). (3) Concentration of bourgeois society in the form of the state. Viewed in relation to itself. The ‘unproductive’ classes. Taxes. State debt. Public credit. The population. The colonies. Emigration. (4) The international relation of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Export and import. Rate of exchange. (5) The world market and crises.

Quoting Moliere

ahh! this question is great. It's the exact sort of thought I was having that his theory actually supports fiat currency.

I think it does too. At least for the Marx of Capital Vol 1. Equal valuations of commodity amounts don't care whether their representative's amount of "objectified labour" is derived from the socially necessary labour time of gold amounts, or a representative of commodity ratios alone - like a representative of gold, silver, bronze, eggs all at the same time. I think all that matters for a money to fall under Marx's analysis is the money is used to represent value relations socially and for exchange, socially, to be embedded in the circuit of capital. "How can it work with fiat rather than gold?" seems to me the same question as "How can it work with gold rather than silver?".

Reply to Number2018 Oh I wouldn't go so far as to call it an account. This is all very rough, scratch-pad level wonderings on my part. Usually I do this in a notebook, but others were wanting to read along so I thought it might be a good way to eventually get a conversation started, or at least be able to read others thoughts and notes as they go through the text.

The format of the class means that how much you get out of it depends very much on the student (at least for those like me who aren't taking this for a grade) -- no grades and no certificate and no feedback from writing papers to see if you have misread something and all that. So this was a way of maybe, somehow, focusing myself enough to stay on target ;)

I'm not sure what Harvey will or will not cover. I myself haven't read the Grundrisse, so I couldn't even give you heads up beyond the table of contents.

But I'm not so sure about this:

Quoting Number2018

It may be concluded that instead of this appearance - ‘the totality of the process appears as an objective interrelation,’- it is indeed generated by ‘the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another and by their own collisions with one another.’

except perhaps in a dialectical sense where there is another moment, which is generally what I think socialism is meant to be: When what was an alien relationship becomes something which is controlled by those who live under that relationship, and so it is no longer an alienation but rather political autonomy.

Quoting Number2018

It may be concluded that instead of this appearance - ‘the totality of the process appears as an objective interrelation,’- it is indeed generated by ‘the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another and by their own collisions with one another.’ And yet, there is also ‘an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them.’ So, aren’t there two mutually controversial generative processes? On the one side, you mention ‘collusions and interactions of ‘conscious individuals’; on the other, you write that precisely these interactions are produced by ‘an alien social power standing above them.’ Marx himself evaluated the process of social production as the important notion of his work: “The guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” (Marx, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’).

@Moliere - I think Number's point isn't inconsistent with how you've put it. Also I wouldn't read your contrast, Numbers, as a contradiction. It can very well be that people create systems together which are impersonal and have a bizarre logic that constrains them. A bureaucracy, any workplace culture, a conflict dynamic in a relationship. The bizarre powers that guide people's relationships.

From the quote you've given, I read it that the specifically productive relationships that have conscious people "collide within them" are characterised by a bizarre alien, self sustaining logic that the process of production generates and sustains.

Reply to fdrake Cool, glad someone else is on the same page as me there.

Reply to fdrake Ahhh OK that helps me.

Reply to fdrake Quoting fdrake

I wouldn't read your contrast, Numbers, as a contradiction. It can very well be that people create systems together which are impersonal and have a bizarre logic that constrains them. A bureaucracy, any workplace culture, a conflict dynamic in a relationship. The bizarre powers that guide people's relationships.

@Moliere I do not think, fdrake, that when you write ‘people create systems together,’ you imply one of the theories of the Social Contracts. They are precisely the ones that Marx criticized. Let’s return to the quote from ‘A preface.’ ‘Men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will,’ which means he talks about conscious individuals with their intentions and goals. On the other hand, ‘the totality of these relations of production constitutes the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.’ What is the relation between individual consciousness and ‘forms of social consciousness’? Marx pointed it out: “The epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society” (Marx, Grundrisse, p 18). So, in ‘A preface,’ Marx starts with people who ‘create systems’, but means that social symbolic systems ultimately determine individual consciousness. Yet, there is neither a circular causality nor the Hegelian sublation of dialectical moments. Because ‘the definite relations of production’ has the ultimate priority as an intrinsic cause.

Quoting fdrake

the specifically productive relationships that have conscious people "collide within them" are characterised by a bizarre alien, self sustaining logic that the process of production generates and sustains.

In the Marxist tradition, articulating the relations of individual and larger social forces has always been one of the most challenging problems. Because masses or ordinary members of totalitarian or bureaucratic organizations too often have not recognized their inferiority. They do not feel like they are ruled by an alien, violent imposition. Ideology as the explanatory theoretical framework has ultimately failed. In ‘Fragments on the Machines,’ Marx briefly outlined how to evade a trap of ideological and essentialist conceptualizations.“The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it but in the real production process itself.” (Marx, Grundrisse, p 694) The infrastructure is not conceived here as an essence, having an ultimate literal sense; it is in the process of capital’s metamorphoses. On the other hand, the mechanical, cognitive, and social ‘organs’ of the social brain, the living labour, and the workers themselves constitute moments of the same process. All are subsumed under the overall automatic activity. Therefore, the social and individual domains no longer confront each other. Social subjection and individual agency have become indiscernible poles of the machinic
engagement.

Quoting Number2018

Social subjection and individual agency have become indiscernible poles of the machinic engagement.

Is the contrast you are bringing out between what @Moliere and I's shared position and what you're stating is that we're emphasising the poles of the "machinic engagement" rather than their reciprocity. As in, are you interpreting what we've both written as too focussed on individuals and societal processes as really independent entities, rather than ones which are conceptually distinct but mutually determining?

How does the social contract play into that? As a means by which individuals coordinated volitions become normatively binding?

Continuing from here:

“(4) PRODUCTION. MEANS OF PRODUCTION AND RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION. RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION AND RELATIONS OF CIRCULATION. FORMS OF THE STATE AND FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN RELATION TO RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION AND CIRCULATION. LEGAL RELATIONS. FAMILY RELATIONS.”

This subsection seems to be simultaneously a digression and an acknowledgement of loose ends from the rest of the discussion in this section. We've previously gone through production, consumption, exchange, circulation and distribution briefly - and shown these interdependent social processes are generated and sustained by the dynamics of production processes. Reference to "the state", the "population", international relations, nations and so on were also in the section, and these haven't been written about yet. There's some bullet points on some topics related to these.

Do you think this subsection is one of those digressions of profound insight Harvey spoke about, @Moliere? Or does it have a more central; or culminatory; role in the section?

The bullet points go as follows:
1 ) War precedes peace. War creates and demarcates societies, which can exist in peace afterwards. Put another way, the steadiness of bourgeoise society depends on past violence.
2 ) Historiography and anthropology are kinda bullshit unless they're also looking at economic functioning. Political economy needs to be included in any analysis of culture and states.
3 ) Lots of issues are derivative of the character of production in society. Cultural inheritance and politics can behave like organisational constraints to the productive process without changing the fundamental aspects of the circuit of capital.
4 ) Marx seems to feel the need to distinguish his concept of materialism from naturalistic materialism. It's difficult for me to tell if this is referencing physicalism in political economy, Marx's inheritance from Greek metaphysics. Or both of them. Or none of them.
5 ) How the means of production and relations of production (making stuff considered through what's made and how vs making stuff considered as a social organisation) relate to each other and their internal tensions (@Jamal - think this is the theme you highlighted in your recent post on Dialectic of Enlightenment.
6 ) Institutional development can decouple from productive development. See Roman private law and modern production.
7 ) How has the possibility of a global conception of history and production become possible in bourgeoise society? This relates to the theme of capitalist economy concentrating and maintaining its predecessors and the role they still play in the current developmental trajectory of capital.
8 ) I've no idea what this means. Something related to "population" as a fundamental category for analysis, but considered in an anthropological sense? Maybe Marx thinks he can do it better with his new way of analysing history.

There's then a digression on the development of art and the human imagination. A thoroughly wonderful pair of quotes within it:

All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.

I think this is a simultaneous statement of a few things:
A) The old art is dead, we are no longer in the social form to create it.
B) We still imitate the old art, it's an aspirational goal.
C) This references the "uneven development" of social, aesthetic and economic processes.
D) We have a nostalgia for the old art.
E) But we've got the potential to create new art.

I can hear Adorno grumpily burning their approving gaze into the back of this passage's head.

Quoting fdrake

think this is the theme you highlighted in your recent post on Dialectic of Enlightenment

Possibly. I do recognize that my post in the Shoutbox describing the disappointment I experienced yesterday when eating a plum pie was a good example of the divergence of use value and exchange value.

By the way, when it comes to Marx’s political economy, I read Capital volume 1 many years ago but haven’t revisited it much since then and haven’t read the Grundrisse. I’m interested—I only wish I could get over my antipathy to anything in the vicinity of economics. Sublimated anxiety over money, probably.

Keep up the great work :up:

Reply to fdrake Quoting fdrake

Is the contrast you are bringing out between what Moliere and I's shared position and what you're stating is that we're emphasising the poles of the "machinic engagement" rather than their reciprocity. As in, are you interpreting what we've both written as too focussed on individuals and societal processes as really independent entities, rather than ones which are conceptually distinct but mutually determining?

How does the social contract play into that? As a means by which individuals coordinated volitions become normatively binding?

As far as I see, @Moliere admitted that his/her position is just a preliminary note of Harvey’s lecture.
I have yet to understand your position, likely because you quickly embraced Moliere's non-elaborated one. But, yes, it looks like both of you are talking about individuals and systems rather in terms of really independent entities than in terms of processes. For me, both individuals and systems are moments, and may be results of interdependent societal processes. They do not designate stable unities; instead, they are appearances of structured, complex, self-completing processes. Stating that 'people create systems' resembles a post factum fabulation that may be affiliated with the Social Contract theories. Under certain conditions, events in the making can appear as retaining their identity and even as 'individuals coordinated volitions.' Systems theorist Nicklas Luhmann noted: "' Homo economicus' is a social construct. What constitutes the unity of action and how the identity of an actor can be determined through the attribution of actions cannot be discovered by plumbing his internal mental life. For the continuation of its own operations, society, and its organizations, assume the unity of individual and person as an operational fiction." (Luhmann, 'Organization and decision' p 67) System's 'normatively binding' cannot merely be a result of 'individuals coordinated volitions', it is an autopoietic operational domain. What one experiences as rational choices and volitions most often emerges on the level hiding the imperatives of the encompassing machinic engagement. A spectrum of rational judgements is pre-given and pre-determined. The unconscious presuppositions implanted in the field make the unfolding event unrecognizable. Most often, systems secure possible chains of effects and outcomes independent of the will of individual.

The Chapter on Money

Like Harvey, I'm going to skip most of this chapter. The first bit is looking at a spreadsheet which a Proudhon-ist had (for Marx) misinterpreted. And the spreadsheet itself allegedly shows Proudhon's idea was wrong, or at least insufficiently justified. I don't know any Proudhoun, so I can't comment how successful the criticism was. I believe the criticism. broadly stated, is that Marx sees Darimon and Proudhon as construing credit as a form of money circulation. Which is bad. Maybe because they go in opposite directions around the circuit of capital. You pay for a thing (money circulation, passing money on), you ask someone else to give you a lend (taking on a debt, making a promise to pass money on later).

Marx construes the error highlighted in the spreadsheets as an instance of a more fundamental error - can you reform an individual institution in the circuit of capital to improve things? Yeah! But can you reform an institution in the circuit of capital to remove anything which is necessary to the functioning of capital? Hell no. So anything it partakes in which is necessary to the functioning of capital is not reformable without attacking more fundamental parts of the circuit of capital. Those non-reformable parts include every injustice and pathology so implied by the fundamental developmental mechanisms of capital. Like power dynamics between bosses and workers, landlords and workers, landlords and companies and so on.

The chapter then goes into how reforming the monetary system, in principle, would not work. Why? Anything which would work to make money flow around capital's circuit needs to imitate all of its functioning. So it wouldn't matter if money is gold or silver or a chit of paper. It would still need to do what it needs to do for capital. There's a bit on how money needs the commensuration of all types of labour and thus needs to work as a universal quantifier on value. Those ideas seem to be developed more thoroughly in Capital Vol 1.

There's a passage on depreciation of product values. Marx's brief account is that if 1/10 of the expected grain was produced over a season. Someone who buys the grain at 10 times the price would change all purchasing patterns in the economy. If the buyer values grain as 10 times the price it did before a crisis, then all other products require 10 times as much quantity as they did previously to be equal in value to a given amount of grain. So if X multiply in value by a factor of A, then all other things have their value divided by a factor of A. This represents "the decreased productivity of capital in all other forms".

“With or without metallic money, or money of any other kind, the nation would find itself in a crisis not confined to grain, but extending to all other branches of production, not only because their productivity would have positively diminished and the price of their production depreciated as compared to their value, which is determined by the normal cost of production, but also because all contracts, obligations etc. rest on the average prices of products. For example, x bushels of grain have to be supplied to service the state’s indebtedness, but the cost of producing these x bushels has increased by a given factor. Quite apart from the role of money the nation would thus find itself in a general crisis.”

Which is stressed that a crisis in the production of a commodity is not principally a monetary crisis - "where is all the gold going now lol? shit we don't have enough gold, it's a crisis" -, it's "our country is bleeding gold because we're spending it all on grain imports".

Marx expresses a germinal form of his labour theory of value - that the value of something is equated to its socially necessary labour time. Again that theory is detailed more in Capital Vol 1. But there is a cool quote showing that Marx saw there being a strong distinction between value and price!

“ Price therefore is distinguished from value not only as the nominal from the real; not only by way of the denomination in gold and silver, but because the latter appears as the law of the motions which the former runs through. But the two are constantly different and never balance out, or balance only coincidentally and exceptionally. The price of a commodity constantly stands above or below the value of the commodity, and the value of the commodity itself exists only in this up-and-down movement of commodity prices. Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand. ”

There is a very striking passage on the relationship of alienation and the production of exchange value:

“The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual’s own activity or his product becomes an activity and a product for him; he must produce a general product – exchange value, or, the latter isolated for itself and individualized, money. On the other side, the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket. Activity, regardless of its individual manifestation, and the product of activity, regardless of its particular make-up, are always exchange value, and exchange value is a generality, in which all individuality and peculiarity are negated and extinguished. This indeed is a condition very different from that in which the individual or the individual member of a family or clan (later, community) directly and naturally reproduces himself, or in which his productive activity and his share in production are bound to a specific form of labour and of product, which determine “his relation to others in just that specific way."

“The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production here appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals, not as their relation to one another, but as their subordination to relations which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals. The general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual – their mutual interconnection – here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing.”

The concepts which later become alienation and commodity fetishism are rooted in the monetary system, in this analysis. I'm quoting it because it's an under-appreciated point made very precisely. Alienation and commodity fetishism aren't mental attitudes, they're social phenomena characteristic of exchange in capital's monetary system. Which, themselves, influence how people think and feel.

The very necessity of first transforming individual products or activities into exchange value, into money, so that they obtain and demonstrate their social power in this objective [sachlichen] form, proves two things: (1) That individuals now produce only for society and in society; (2) that production is not directly social, is not ‘the offspring of association’, which distributes labour internally. Individuals are subsumed under social production; social production exists outside them as their fate; but social production is not subsumed under individuals, manageable by them as their common wealth. There can therefore be nothing more erroneous and absurd than to postulate the control by the united individuals of their total production, on the basis of exchange value, of money, as was done above in the case of the time-chit bank.

I think this is related to what @Number2018 was writing about earlier. That construing the circuit of capital as a collective exercise of agency, of agents coming together and binding their wills to reproduce a system, misses the phenomenon. This is because the social medium in which agents come together is distinct from the social mediums by which agents assemble to produce institutions. In essence, the institutions of capital are an entire separate social sphere, an entire separate social process, which acts parasitically upon the collective agency of its agents. Parasitically and constrainingly. This goes hand in hand with labourers producing, principally, exchange value detailed in the previous passage.

I think there's a lot of value (lol) in Chapter 2, it's providing very condensed and quite pithy statements of arguments which are more laboriously made elsewhere.

Another thing which interests me is that this chapter provides a good example of Marx's method. We started off with money, Now we've seen a lot of concepts unfold from its analysis - social and productive preconditions and interdependencies. With exchange. With production. With value. Marx also located criticisms of other economists within this unravelling of fundamental assumptions. This allows him to contextualise the work of others within his own "working out" of the behaviour of capital. And thus reveal whatever misapprehensions (bad inferences, bad starting points) he believes they have.

“It is because the commodity is exchange value that it is exchangeable for money, is posited = to money. The proportion of its equivalence with money, i.e. the specificity of its exchange value, is presupposed before its transposition into money. The proportion in which a particular commodity is exchanged for money, i.e. the quantity of money into which a given quantity of a commodity is transposable, is determined by the amount of labour time objectified in the commodity. The commodity is an exchange value because it is the realization of a specific amount of labour time; money not only measures the amount of labour time which the commodity represents, but also contains its general, conceptually adequate, exchangeable form. ”

This one is also really interesting to me, a point I've really not understood before. The distinction and dependence between value and price, use and exchange etc - these codependent dyads - isn't just a conceptual distinction. It's also seen as internal to the account as an active process. A "real contradiction" Why? I think it's clearest to see with value and price. Price deviates from value through supply, demand and asymmetries in production. The deviation isn't a statement or defect, the deviation is productive and indeed generative of a dynamic in capital - the untethering of money from labour, entailed by and suggestive of the untethering of use from exchange. It isn't just a conceptual bifurcation of dependent opposites, it's two contrary social processes being in tension within one greater movement. The distinction itself is part of the model, an active part, as well as the two differentiated terms.

Quoting Moliere

Value is at the same time the exponent of the relation in which the commodity is exchanged with other commodities, as well as the exponent of the relation in which it has already been exchanged with other commodities (materialized labour time) in production;

I read this as exponent in the sense of "person who expresses a view or represents it" - so value represents the relation in which a commodity is exchanged with other commodities (X is worth Y) and also represents the relation in which it has already been exchanged with other commodities (X had SNLT equal to the SNLT of Y).

(SNLT = socially necessary labour time)

In terms of phrasing, I think "exponent" imbues something agential to value - it's kinda personalising and developmental. Rather than static, like a price, or a quantification of labour time. More like the means of quantification of labour, and the articulation of the means of quantification of labour.

Still trying to figure out my schedule. I'm catching up with reading today, like last week. I like your expositions @fdrake. They are helping me see some of the structure that I wasn't seeing, and are very lucid.

For next week, just fyi, the final reading for online is on this page on the following paragraph:

An interest of 24 on a capital of 40 is too much; but 24 = 3/5 of 40 (3 × 8 = 24); i.e. in addition to the capital, only 2/5 of the capital grew by 100%; the whole capital therefore by only 2/5, i.e. 16%. [67] The interest computation on 40 is 24% too high (by 100% on 3/5 of the capital); 24 on 24 is 100% on 3 × 8 (3/5 of 40). But on the whole amount of 140, it is 60% instead of 40; i.e. 24 too much out of 40, 24 out of 40 = 60%. Thus we figured 60% too much on a capital of 40 (60 = 3/5 of 100). But we figured 24 too high on 140 (and this is the difference between 220 and 196); this is first 1/5 of 100 then 1/12 of 100 too much; 1/5 of 100 = 20%; 1/12 of 100 = 8 4/12% or 8 1/3%; thus altogether 28 1/3% too high. Thus on the whole not 60%, as on 40, but only 28 1/3% too much; which makes a difference of 31 2/3, depending on whether we figure 24 too many on the 40 [or on] the capital of 140. Similarly in the other example.

In the first 80 which produce 120, 50 + 10 was simply replaced, but 20 reproduced itself threefold: 60 (20 reproduction, 40 surplus).

Hours of labour
If 20 posit 60, making up triple the value, then
60 180.

Quoting Moliere

For next week, just fyi, the final reading for online is on this page on the following paragraph:

An interest of 24 on a capital of 40 is too much; but 24 = 3/5 of 40 (3 × 8 = 24); i.e. in addition to the capital, only 2/5 of the capital grew by 100%; the whole capital therefore by only 2/5, i.e. 16%. [67] The interest computation on 40 is 24% too high (by 100% on 3/5 of the capital); 24 on 24 is 100% on 3 × 8 (3/5 of 40). But on the whole amount of 140, it is 60% instead of 40; i.e. 24 too much out of 40, 24 out of 40 = 60%. Thus we figured 60% too much on a capital of 40 (60 = 3/5 of 100). But we figured 24 too high on 140 (and this is the difference between 220 and 196); this is first 1/5 of 100 then 1/12 of 100 too much; 1/5 of 100 = 20%; 1/12 of 100 = 8 4/12% or 8 1/3%; thus altogether 28 1/3% too high. Thus on the whole not 60%, as on 40, but only 28 1/3% too much; which makes a difference of 31 2/3, depending on whether we figure 24 too many on the 40 [or on] the capital of 140. Similarly in the other example.

In the first 80 which produce 120, 50 + 10 was simply replaced, but 20 reproduced itself threefold: 60 (20 reproduction, 40 surplus).

Hours of labour
If 20 posit 60, making up triple the value, then
60 180.

Ambassador you are spoiling me.

More chapter 2

The remainder of chapter two splits into two themes.

The first theme is the behaviour of money. We've already looked at how money works as a value, and how that value is represented; at least notionally; by amounts of precious metals. A given amount of gold is used as the value of a given amount of any other commodity. That represents its value.

In Dungeons and Dragons terms, the blacksmith has taken three hours of their time to make a dagger for you. That's the modal amount of labour for forging a dagger. Three hours of that amount of labour has the going rate of one gold. Thus the value of the dagger is one gold. Though perhaps there is a young dragon nearby, and you really need a dagger, so you may pay a lot more than one gold for it. Would you pay 100 gold? 100 times the value? Maybe, but very unlikely. That it can be considered a "very unlikely" price to pay, societally, is an instance of value constraining price without being numerically identical with it.

That facilitates looking at money *as a value* - which is something that can be abstract, imagined, conceptual, legally constrained and so on. And also as a product; precious metals serve as the material repositories of value and thus the glue of exchange relations. These dual functions are in tension with each other, and this tension is required for money to play the role it does in circulation.

The second theme is analysing circulation itself.

The behaviour of money is ultimately the behaviour of exchange value.

Money is in the first instance that which expresses the relation of equality between all exchange values: in money, they all have the same name.)

It's a material expression of exchange value. How exchange values behave dictates how money behaves; but money may disobey.

“Exchange value, posited in the character of money, is price. Exchange value is expressed in price as a specific quantity of money. Money as price shows first of all the identity of all exchange values; secondly, it shows the unit of which they all contain a given number, so that the equation with money expresses the quantitative specificity of exchange values, their quantitative relation to one another. Money is here posited, thus, as the measure of exchange values; and prices as exchange values measured in money. ”

I read "money as price shows first of all the identity of all exchange values" as that exchange values are totally commensurated by amounts of money representing definite values. How much one thing is worth is qualitatively identical to how much something else is worth scaled up. If 2 goats is worth 1 egg, 4 goats is worth 2 eggs. We've got different total values in trade, but the same set of value ratios which the money represents as a price. Similarly, if 2 goats or 1 egg are worth 1 gold. Then 4 goats or 2 eggs are worth 2 gold.

In that regard, exchange value is a (scarequotes) a "flat medium", a single undifferentiated dimension that holds all equal to a given amount of gold. I'm imagining it as a number line. Every fraction of gold is worth a given fraction of every commodity.

__1 gold piece___1.5 gold pieces_____2 gold pieces
{here lay 2 goats} {here lay 2 eggs}

The "flat medium" facilitates the ascription of exchange value to a product to quantify its value. That makes it function as a price. It can be used to quantify how much anything trades for.

“The fact that money is the measure of prices, and hence that exchange values are compared with one another on this standard, is an aspect of the situation which is self-evident. But what is more important for the analysis is that in price, exchange value is compared with money. After money has been posited as independent exchange value, separated from commodities, then the individual commodity, the particular exchange value, is again equated to money, i.e. it is posited as equal to a given quantity of money, expressed as money, translated into money. By being equated to money, they again become related to one another as they were, conceptually, as exchange values: they balance and equate themselves with one another in given proportions.”

I found this passage confusing and profound in equal measure. What I'm getting from it is that there are two separate acts which establish the equation of money and exchange value. The first act is money being used as something like a shop label, and the process which sets the number on it. That takes an exchange value (how much value is in this thing?) and assigns it a number (constrained by supply, demand and other things, how much do we charge for it). But simultaneously the act of assigning a number to an exchange value through a money takes the money and assigns it to a given value. The commensuration relationship money has is posited, necessitated, and thus reproduced in every such act. This occurs in shops, but also in the mind. It's simultaneously a social and an ideal commensuration. The commodity is now exchangeable for an abstraction, by means of exchanging that abstraction's material representative (real money).

“Alongside real money, there now exists the commodity as ideally posited money.”

This ideality of money, alongside it being a "flat medium" for the expression of value quantities, facilitates is second function as a unit of account.

“Real money intervenes only in order to realize payments and to balance (liquidate) the accounts. If I must pay 24 livres 12 sous, then accounting money presents 24 units of one sort and 12 of another, while in reality I shall pay in the form of two material pieces: a gold coin worth 24 livres and a silver coin worth 12 sous.”

“Accounting money is an ideal measure, which has no limits other than those of the imagination. ”

Money on the books isn't the same thing as money out in the wild. I can calculate that I owe @Moliere 5 goats. I don't thereby conjure up 5 goats which I may give them. We'd be square if I gave them 5 goats. Not 5 inexistent goats. The same holds for currency tokens and material repositories of value.

Except, there's a tension between a unit of account and money needing a material representative. I can say I am in Moliere's debt, needing to pay him 5 goats. But if Scotland was in debt to Moliere's nation to the tune of 56 million goats... We wouldn't have enough goats, even in principle, to pay. Thus units of account, being notional, can be regulated differently than material repositories of value like gold.

I'm not going to be able to write more notes this late in the day. But shall try to finish them. Turns out cramming before class never gets old.

Quoting fdrake

Turns out cramming before class never gets old.

:D

Page 284... just shy of the mark. Luckily, looking ahead, March 7th is Spring Break/Book Release, so there's a lull for us to catch up in just around the corner. I have captured some good highlights, but my reading was more through the dead leaves this time so I'd be less distracted. I'll type some of them up as I listen to class

Quoting Moliere

Page 284... just shy of the mark. Luckily, looking ahead, March 7th is Spring Break/Book Release, so there's a lull for us to catch up in just around the corner.

Will be good to catch up on it. Found these readings a real slog. How'd you find them?

Reply to fdrake Oh, these are harsh to get through, I'm not going to lie. Capital was poetry in comparison :D

"Capital is not a simple relation, but a process, in whose various moments it is always capital" -- this makes me think of what you were highlighting @Number2018, under the section titled "Transition from circulation to capitalist production -- Capital objectified labour etc. -- Sum of values for production of values." on page 258.

Harvey's lecture: "When you isolate equality, freedom, and reciprocity as admirable attributes, then you are admiring bourgeois attributes" -- I like Harvey pointing out how these are bourgeois values in class, and argues that bourgeois constitutions, like the United States, already sustain those values in terms of exchange.

A good definition of capital right across the page of my last quote on 259:

"As soon as money is posited as an exchange value which not only becomes independent of circulation, but which also maintains itself through it, then it is no longer money, for this as such does not go beyond the negative aspect, but it is capital"

--- Harvey just mentioned a phrase that keeps coming up in the reading "point of departure", still trying to wrap my head around that one in a technical sense, but I'm thinking that might be a ghost chase too

Posit/presuppose from Harvey -- that was nice to hear. I'd never thought of "posit" as "you have to add something else"

This is a good picture Harvey points out between Use-value and Exchange-value, where use-value disappears, but exchange-value lives on in circulation.

Interesting highlight between simple exchange, and capital on page 272:
"Labour as mere performance of services for the satisfaction of immediate needs has nothing whatever to do with capital, since that is not capital's concern. If a capitalist hires a woodcutter to chop wood to roast his mutton over, then not only does the woodcutter relate to the capitalist, but also the capitalist to the woodcutter, in the relation of simple exchange"

Harvey highlights this from page 278:
"It must be kept in mind that the new forces of production and relations of production do not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky, nor from the womb of the self-positing Idea; but from within and in antithesis to the existing development of production and the inherited, traditional relations of property. While in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system. This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality"

Interesting that Harvey believes the Grundrisse is a prelude to a new society. Whereas Capital is strictly a scientific treatise, Harvey decides to read the Grundrisse as a sort of answer to the proverbial question "OK, what now?" -- and he gives an answer which allows us to answer the question, which is interesting. As if the "what now?" is purposefully not addressed.

Hrm! Interesting Harvey's reading about totality/organism as opposed to syllogism (ala, bourgeois economics).

Made dinner listening and now I'm at the part I've yet to read in the lecture.

Again, I like how Harvey keeps connecting the text to our world.

Hrm! "Labor is the yeast" -- interesting analogy, given that yeast reproduces itself, and you're able to scoop some off at the end before it dies to keep making more product!

I'm glad to hear Harvey emphasizing "roles" too -- "worker" is a role within a process, and not a macho man pouring molten iron with his bare hands just to feed his family. "the worker" is a role as is "the capitalist"

***

And into Q&A.

"Do not come out of the Grundrisse expecting to have a coherent labor theory of value" interesting.

"you could say there are 5, or rather 4, or rather 3 classes" :D -- I'm glad Harvey's responding to the questions with honesty, in saying "I admit this part is odd, and this is why": some motivation to dig deep

On the question of bourgeois freedoms: good question. And I like how Harvey doesn't just say "Yes", but points out how these are still bourgeois values. "not so much the transformation of the ideological concepts, but the practices which will allow those ideological precepts to make sense"

"remember it's an alienated labor and an alienated capital, right throughout for next time"

Quoting Moliere

"remember it's an alienated labor and an alienated capital, right throughout for next time"

I was going to write this down here too.

Reply to fdrake :D Great minds and such.

His little snippets after the fact have been quite useful in looking back, so I was glad he gave us one to think through rather than just the pure text as it is -- which we both agree is pretty hard, even though we're interested in it!

Quoting Moliere

so I was glad he gave us one to think through rather than just the pure text as it is

Me too.

Quoting Moliere

Posit/presuppose from Harvey -- that was nice to hear. I'd never thought of "posit" as "you have to add something else"

This was also a great highlight. I'm going to try and read it with the analogy: presupposition as "part of the foundation", positing as "the next bit of how it's being built". Need the first to get going, need the second to keep going.

Quoting fdrake

This was also a great highlight. I'm going to try and read it with the analogy: presupposition as "part of the foundation", positing as "the next bit of how it's being built". Need the first to get going, need the second to keep going.

Right! That's a good breakdown as I understood it.

“A developed determination of prices presupposes that the individual does not directly produce his means of subsistence, but that his direct product is an exchange value, and hence must first be mediated by a social process, in order to become the means of life for the individual.”

A good reminder that the process by which prices are assigned to commodities piggybacks off extant social processes. In that regard price assignment isn't generative of the value of products, instead the production of products for exchange/production being production of value is generative of price assignments - in totality and in amount.

Money thus circulates in the opposite direction from commodities. It appears as the middleman in commodity exchange, as the medium of exchange. It is the wheel of circulation, the instrument of circulation for the turnover of commodities; but, as such, it also has a circulation of its own – monetary turnover, monetary circulation. The price of the commodity is realized only when it is exchanged for real money, or in its real exchange for money.

... M-C-M-C-M ...
Is the transfer of money ( M ) to commodity ( C ) to money to commodity of exchange. If you start off with a commodity - like labour power or an egg - your path "forwards" is C-M-C-M... If you start off with money, your path "forwards" is M-C-M-C... which is the same as reversing the direction of the transition of commodities. Just like {1,2,3,4} and {4,3,2,1} are reversed sequences.

The real circulation of commodities through time and space is not accomplished by money.

I think this amounts to saying that circulation is more than a sequence of barter like trades, or direct exchanges.

Money only realizes their price and thereby transfers the title to the commodity into the hands of the buyer, to him who has proffered means of exchange.

Money, instead, works as a standard of entitlement to a commodity. Thou shalt pay me at least $3.50 to obtain the sandwich. Whether you pay $3.50 for the sandwich or not still needs more than the price.

What money circulates is not commodities but their titles of ownership; and what is realized in the opposite direction in this circulation, whether by purchase or sale, is again not the commodities, but their prices.

Money's direction of circulation: M-C..., A person uses an amount of money M1 to buy a commodity C1 which transfers M1 to the previous owner of C1 (still first step). That takes C1, which was owned by a shop or something, and transfers its ownership rights to the purchaser.

Commodities direction of circulation: C-M......, a person has a commodity C1 which has a given value, that value is realised in an act of exchange of money amount M1 for commodity C1. This simultaneously uses a valuation of C1 and realises it as a price M1.

The quantity of money which is, then, required for circulation is determined initially by the level of the prices of the commodities thrown into circulation. The sum total of these prices, however, is determined firstly: by the prices of the individual commodities; secondly: by the quantity of commodities at given prices which enter into circulation.

Every link in the circulation ...-C-M-C-M-... thus needs a given amount of money to allow the transaction. That money is also tradable - as gold. The money must be realised in the transaction for it really to have taken place. That means for an economy (totality!?)'s circulation to be ongoing, it posits enough money existing at a given time point to enable every exchange. Marx gives an example:

“For example, in order to circulate a quarter of wheat at 60s., twice as many s. are required as would be to circulate it at 30s. And if 5,000 of these quarters at 60s. are to be circulated, then 300,000 s. are required, while in order to circulate 200 such quarters only 12,000s. are needed. Thus, the amount of money required is dependent on the level of commodity prices and on the quantity of commodities at specified prices.

“Thirdly, however, the quantity of money required for circulation depends not only on the sum total of prices to be realized, but on the rapidity with which money circulates, completes the task of this realization. If 1 thaler in one hour makes 10 purchases at 1 thaler each, if it is exchanged 10 times, then it performs quite the same task that 10 thalers would do if they made only 1 purchase per hour. Velocity is the negative moment; it substitutes for quantity; by its means, a single coin is multiplied.”

“Still, as already mentioned, the circulation of money does not begin from a single centre, nor does it return to a single centre from all points of the periphery (as with the banks of issue and partly with state issues); but from an infinite number of points, and returns to an infinite number (this return itself, and the time required to achieve it, a matter of chance). The velocity of the circulating medium can therefore substitute for the quantity of the circulating medium only up to a certain point. (Manufacturers and farmers pay, for example, the worker; he pays the grocer, etc.; from there the money returns to the manufacturers and farmers.) The same quantity of money can effectuate a series ”
“of payments only successively, regardless of the speed. But a certain mass of payments must be made simultaneously. Circulation takes its point of departure at one and the same time from many points. A definite quantity of money is therefore necessary for circulation, a sum which will always be engaged in circulation, and which is determined by the sum total which starts from the simultaneous points of departure in circulation, and by the velocity with which it runs its course (returns). ”

Holding the number of simultaneous exchanges fixed, if there are 5 simultaneous exchanges per second of a quarter of wheat, each at 60s, you'd need 300s per second to facilitate this. If instead there were 2 simultaneous exchanges. You'd need only 120s. Furthermore, if the price of a quarter was 30s, you'd need 150s and 60s respectively.

Putting this in explicitly mathsy terms: circulation of a commodity priced at M1 at a number of exchange per unit time N1 requires M1*N1 total money per unit time to facilitate the trade of that commodity. Thus the total amount of money required to circulate N1 simultaneous trades of M1, called T1, would be: T1=M1*N1.

This holds when we have N1 exchanges of M1 for C1 at the same time. This is N1 multiples of the M1 for C1 step. Like C-M, C-M, C-M .

However, if the exchanges are instead seen as sequential and simultaneous - a series of M1 -> C1 -> M1 -> C2 -> M1.... a number of sequential trades P1 occurring per second t1 of a definite fixed value M1, then you'd need only T1=M1/P1 money to execute all of those exchanges. eg 10 purchases of value 1 thaler, considered as the above sequence, would only need 1 thaler each. This would also hold in the aggregate, over all commodities.

Putting both ideas together you end up with T1 = M1*N1/P1 money required per unit time (t1). M1*N1 seems to be called the "mass of commodity prices" and M1*N1/P1 is called the "velocity of money".

Marx then takes this quantity and says that it behaves as a constraint for the total quantity of money required, rather than an iron law at any given time. Approximately correct unless something's gone very wrong. Hypothetically if there was no money, there'd be no trades. If there was 1 thaler per unit time and the total volume of trade required 100 thaler per unit time, there'd be no trades. And there being a lot more money in circulation than M1*N1/T1 for trades involving C1 only makes sense if M1 was somehow greater than M1 (for a fixed time point), or if there was an overabundance of money allocated for circulation at one time point, which was then carried forward to the next.

That look about right to you @Moliere?

Reply to fdrake There were two "buts" I had while reading (I'm sticking to my no working on weekends commitment.;) )

Quoting fdrake

Thus the total amount of money required to circulate M1,

I can't tell if we're supposed to be able to derive how much money should be in circulation at a given time, or if it'd be better to somehow substitute, for M1, some function of the quantity of goods in a market, something like a supply-demand function. At times it seems like he's focused on a single commodity market, almost as literally as the market metaphor would have us think, and then he quickly expands to say "of course the banker pays the grocer pays the clerk pays the gas man and that would influence how much money is needed too".

Also, and this may be nothing I'll say up front -- I'm wondering about the differences between M-C-C-M/C-M-M-C and the latter, as you've broken it out. (EDIT: Just to be clear, "the latter" I mean M-C-M/C-M-C, "latter" as in coming from Capital)

But, with that being said, I think that the mathematization is a nice clean picture, and while I'm still trying to tease out this possible difference in meaning ala the M-C-M-C... formulations, I do tend to think of each one of those parts of exchange as forming a chain as you've laid it out, and you can look at each dayd as a moment, and depending upon which side you start with tells you which moment you're dealing with.

Quoting Moliere

There were two "buts" I had while reading (I'm sticking to my no working on weekends commitment.;) )

Please show me your buts when you can be arsed. Assuming you haven't already laid them bare.

Quoting Moliere

I can't tell if we're supposed to be able to derive how much money should be in circulation at a given time, or if it'd be better to somehow substitute, for M1, some function of the quantity of goods in a market, something like a supply-demand function. At times it seems like he's focused on a single commodity market, almost as literally as the market metaphor would have us think, and then he quickly expands to say "of course the banker pays the grocer pays the clerk pays the gas man and that would influence how much money is needed too".

I also get that impression. There's a sleight of hand too, I think. The first example talks about exchanges only for quarters of wheat - and as if all the trades occur at once. Effectively multiplying the trade volume at any given time. The second example instead talks about consecutive trades involving the same thaler - independent of what commodity is traded. Like how much each thaler changes hands within a given time period.

for M1, some function of the quantity of goods in a market, something like a supply-demand function

Makes sense. I guess a rejoinder could be M1 is already a function of those things as Marx has construed? Though there's certainly not enough information presented, so far, to determine why the commodity has a price in particular. I think Marx is aware of the difficulty:

Marx:With circulation, the determined price is presupposed, and circulation as money posits it only formally. The determinateness of exchange value itself, or the measure of price, must now itself appear as an act of circulation. Posited in this way, exchange value is capital, and circulation is posited at the same time as an act of production.

Marx:exchange value itself, and now no longer exchange value in general, but measured exchange value, has to appear as a presupposition posited by circulation itself, and, as posited by it, its presupposition. The process of circulation must also and equally appear as the process of the production of exchange values.

If you took supply and demand as inputs into the process of circulation, in determining price, and each instance of commodity circulation was a trade, it would involve both shifts in supply and demand depending on the frequency of trade for the commodity (demand proxy?) and the volume of that commodity already in circulation (supply proxy?). In that regard determinants of price are also part of the circulation process. In that regard circulation "appear{s} as the process of production of exchange values".

The only way I can think of resolving this strangeness is thinking of Marx's analysis of "mass of commodities" and "velocity of money" as a formal determination rather than a concrete one. It says "given (whatever makes this commodity trade at this value), circulation behaves (thusly)". Maybe that's why "measured exchange values" must appear "as a presupposition posited" by circulation. Not only are determinate values of commodities presupposed as foundational for circulation, the fact that they are presupposed as foundational is maybe posited for the process's continuation.

An analogy; letting agent can fix a house's rent at $1000 dollars per month if they want and still turn a profit. The letting agent will also perceive that the house would have a market rate of $1200 per month rent. Maybe a "market rate" is like positing of a presupposition , there needs to be such a price for a valuation of the house to return a specific value (presupposed), but also that $1200 has been posited as the "going rate" for agreeing to that rent.

Still thinking about that.

Quoting Moliere

Also, and this may be nothing I'll say up front -- I'm wondering about the differences between M-C-C-M/C-M-M-C and the latter, as you've broken it out. (EDIT: Just to be clear, "the latter" I mean M-C-M/C-M-C, "latter" as in coming from Capital)

I'm not sure about this either. Thanks for pointing this out, I love the value theory in Marx!

Marx, Grundrisse:When we now examine the original form more closely, the direct form in which circulation presents itself, C–M–M–C, then we see that money appears here as a pure medium of exchange. The commodity is exchanged for a commodity, and money appears merely as the medium of this exchange. The price of the first commodity is realized with money, in order to realize the price of the second commodity with the money, and thus to obtain it in exchange for the first. After the price of the first commodity is realized, the aim of the person who now has its price in money is not to obtain the price of the second commodity, but rather to pay its price in order to obtain the commodity.

I'm reading this as a sequence of C-M into M-C, which is like a sale and then a purchase. Of two distinct commodities. So may as well write it C1-M, M-C2. I don't think it's clear that all of this process is really occurrent, some parts of it are abstract. The final M-C step seems to be "to pay the price {for C2} in order to obtain it". The first step seems to be "to turn C1 into the amount of value it represents as a price form/numerical magnitude". I think the M-M step in the middle is thus the connection of those two prices as equivalent - which employs the medium of exchange.

I say "employs" rather than "is" because this act fictive in the same way as squaring accounts would be. Unit of account as imaginary representative != money as a physical quantifier of value which may be used in exchange.

“Regarded as measure the material substance of money is essential, although its availability and even more its quantity, the amount of the portion of gold or silver which serves as unit, are entirely irrelevant for it in this quality, and it is employed in general only as an imaginary, non-existent unit. In this quality it is needed as a unit and not as an amount.

So maybe C1-M-M-C2 is a single "instance" of exchange which is part of circulation. It also begins with a commodity and ends with one; to "obtain" the commodity C2 might also make it drop out of circulation. Like if you buy food to eat it.

What about M-C-C-M? It's seen as "just as correct" as C-M-M-C. But it's treated differently.

“We now pass on to the third function of money; which initially results from the second form of circulation: M–C–C–M; in which money appears not only as medium, nor as measure, but as end-in-itself, and hence steps outside circulation just like a particular commodity which ceases to circulate for the time being and changes from marchandise to denrée.

“Money, then, has an independent existence outside circulation; it has stepped outside it. As a particular commodity it can be transformed out of its form of money into that of luxury articles, gold and silver jewellery (as long as craftsmanship is still very simple, as e.g. in the old English period, a constant transformation of silver money into plate and vice versa. See Taylor) [72] ; or, as money, it can be accumulated to form a treasure."

"“This comes from its independence as a result of M–C–C–M. In the case of money as capital, money itself is posited (1) as precondition of circulation as well as its result; (2) as having independence only in the form of a negative relation, but always a relation to circulation; (3) as itself an instrument of production, since circulation no longer appears in its primitive simplicity, as quantitative exchange, but as a process of production, as a real metabolism”

Thus this seems to be start with money M, get commodity C (purchase), use commodity C to get Commodity C', sell commodity C' to get M'. The C-C relationship in the middle seems to be construed as production.

But first it must be noted that, once the quality of money as an intrinsic relation of production generally founded on exchange value is presupposed, it is possible to demonstrate that in some particular cases it does service as an instrument of production. ‘The utility of gold and silver rests on this, that they replace labour.’ (Lauderdale, p. 11.) [71] Without money, a mass of swaps would be necessary before one obtained the desired article in exchange. Furthermore, in each particular exchange one would have to undertake an investigation into the relative value of commodities. Money spares us the first task in its role as instrument of exchange (instrument of commerce); the second task, as measure of value and representative of all commodities (idem, loc. cit.). The opposite assertion, that money is not productive, amounts only to saying that, apart from the functions in which it is productive, as measure, instrument of circulation and representative of value, it is unproductive; that its quantity is productive only in so far as it is necessary to fulfil these preconditions.

M-C-C-M thus seems to be M-C-M' from Capital:

Marx, Capital Vol 1:Buying in order to sell, or, more accurately, buying in order to sell dearer, M—C—M?, appears certainly to be a form peculiar to one kind of capital alone, namely, merchants’ capital. But industrial capital too is money, that is changed into commodities, and by the sale of these commodities, is re-converted into more money. The events that take place outside the sphere of circulation, in the interval between the buying and selling, do not affect the form of this movement. Lastly, in the case of interest-bearing capital, the circulation M—C—M? appears abridged. We have its result without the intermediate stage, in the form M—M?, “en style lapidaire” so to say, money that is worth more money, value that is greater than itself.

Because the C-C aspect of circulation is seen as a productive relation, it's thus not necessarily exchange value preserving.

Furthermore, that also comes up in the discussion of money capital in Capital in Vol 2 . The general formula being:

M — C ... P ... C' — M'

investment -> stuff (less means of production and reproduction of workers) ... workers do stuff ... investors have new stuff -> sell the new stuff for more money than you started. To quote:

Marx, Capital Vol 2:The circular movement [1] of capital takes place in three stages, which, according to the presentation in Volume I, form the following series:

First stage: The capitalist appears as a buyer on the commodity- and the labour-market; his money is transformed into commodities, or it goes through the circulation act M — C.

Second Stage: Productive consumption of the purchased commodities by the capitalist. He acts as a capitalist producer of commodities; his capital passes through the process of production. The result is a commodity of more value than that of the elements entering into its production.

Third Stage: The capitalist returns to the market as a seller; his commodities are turned into money; or they pass through the circulation act C — M.

Hence the formula for the circuit of money-capital is: M — C ... P ... C' — M', the dots indicating that the process of circulation is interrupted,and C' and M' designating C and M increased by surplus-value.

M-C-C-M' is an abbreviation of that process too. C-M-M-C' may arise by sandwiching two circulations together:

M — C ... P ... C' — M' ; M' — C ... P ... C'' — M''

You have C'-M'-M'-C as a subprocess. That's reinvestment, which is also construed (here) to be taking the produced commodity basket C', selling it for M', which is alchemised through equivalent valuation (the medium of exchange) into a quantity of your inputs C. That's a "circulation of commodities" through capital. C-M-M-C thus seems to be equivalent to "simple exchange" in Capital Vol 1, with M-C-C-M equivalent to a (nonspecified) advancement of capital.

Hopefully this isn't too much of an asspull.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
More circulation stuff:

Couple of brief notes on circulation in general:

( 1 ) It takes the alienation and divestment that occur in production and embeds it in every social process. Every point of life marked by exchange becomes part of alienation and divestment. Thus, all points of life.
( 2 ) Circulation also thus appears as alien to those who are part of it. The mediation of circulation by the total social process, value for value - secretly labour for labour, takes the world a capitalist economy is supported by and presents it back to those within it as a social reality in which they determine no part. Circulation appears and behaves as if it were autonomous, independent of the agents which collectively maintain it through their actions and self sustaining, but in reality is not and cannot be that way.

Chapter on Capital

“Out of the act of exchange itself, the individual, each one of them, is reflected in himself as its exclusive and dominant (determinant) subject. With that, then, the complete freedom of the individual is posited: voluntary transaction; no force on either side; positing of the self as means, or as serving, only as means, in order to posit the self as end in itself, as dominant and primary [übergreifend]; finally, the self-seeking interest which brings nothing of a higher order to realization; the other is also recognized and acknowledged as one who likewise realizes his self-seeking interest, so that both know that the common interest exists only in the duality, many-sidedness, and autonomous development of the exchanges between self-seeking interests. The general interest is precisely the generality of self-seeking interests. Therefore, when the economic form, exchange, posits the all-sided equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual as well as the objective material which drives towards the exchange, is freedom. Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom.”

An amazingly concise set up of the bourgeoise conception of freedom and how it's rooted in exchange. Two people are equal in exchange, equal in need, and their volition alone seals the deal between equals. Equals as economic subjects ("reflected in himself as {exchange's} exclusive {determinant} subject").

“In Roman law, the servus is therefore correctly defined as one who may not enter into exchange for the purpose of acquiring anything for himself (see the Institutes). [22] It is, consequently, equally clear that although this legal system corresponds to a social state in which exchange was by no means developed, nevertheless, in so far as it was developed in a limited sphere, it was able to develop the attributes of the juridical person, precisely of the individual engaged in exchange, and thus anticipate (in its basic aspects) the legal relations of industrial society, and in particular the legal relations of industrial society, and in particular the right which rising bourgeois society had necessarily to assert against medieval society. But the development of this right itself coincides completely with the dissolution of the Roman community.”

The economic subject is further rooted in the concept of a "juridical person" "engaged in exchange". The juridical person is an abstraction of a person which nevertheless has social force - that's pretty similar to the generic worker considered as a value creator, and they are also situated in exchange; like selling their labour power. This seems to simultaneously argue that these concepts in Roman law prefigured and paved the way for subjectivities in exchange relations, and also that the mechanism which generate abstract kinds of people with a pre-specified relationship to exchange (the servus) came along with it. The legal subject of a worker and its subordinate status came from the same idea.

Quoting fdrake

M-C-C-M thus seems to be M-C-M' from Capital:

Think this really holds in Grundrisse:

“Capital comes initially from circulation, and, moreover, its point of departure is money. We have seen that money which enters into circulation and at the same time returns from it to itself is the last requirement, in which money suspends itself. It is at the same time the first concept of capital, and the first form in which it appears. Money has negated itself as something which merely dissolves in circulation; but it has also equally negated itself as something which takes up an independent attitude towards circulation. This negation, as a single whole, in its positive aspects, contains the first elements of capital. Money is the first form in which capital as such appears. M–C–C–M; that money is exchanged for commodity and the commodity for money; this movement of buying in order to sell, which makes up the formal aspect of commerce, of capital as merchant capital, is found in the earliest conditions of economic development; it is the first movement in which exchange value as such forms the content – is not only the form but also its own content. This motion can take place within peoples, or between peoples for whose production exchange value[…]”[

“Commercial capital is only circulating capital, and circulating capital is the first form of capital; in which it has as yet by no means become the foundation of production. A more developed form is money capital and money interest, usury, whose independent appearance belongs in the same way to an earlier stage. ”
/quote]

M-C-C-M looks to be money capital of some kind. Labelled "merchant capital", but by the looks of it a "more developed form" of it is the "money capital" of the initial analysis of money capital in Vol 2 of Capital.

The C-C transition also seems to be construed as production:

[quote]“Circulation therefore does not carry within itself the principle of self-renewal. The moments of the latter are presupposed to it, not posited by it. Commodities constantly have to be thrown into it anew from the outside, like fuel into a fire. Otherwise it flickers out in indifference. It would die out with money, as the indifferent result which, in so far as it no longer stood in any connection with commodities, prices or circulation, would have ceased to be money, to express a relation of production; only its metallic existence would be left over, while its economic existence would be destroyed. Circulation, therefore, which appears as that which is immediately present on the surface of bourgeois society, exists only in so far as it is constantly mediated.

And in that regard mediates exchange, just as in M-C...P...C'-M'.

Finally Marx shows the reciprocal dependence of production and circulation.

“We have therefore reached the point of departure again, production which posits, creates exchange values; but this time, production which presupposes circulation as a developed moment and which appears as a constant process, which posits circulation and constantly returns from it into itself in order to posit it anew. The movement which creates exchange value thus appears here in a much more complex form, since it is no longer only the movement of presupposed exchange values, or the movement which posits them formally as prices, but which creates, brings them forth at the same time as presuppositions. Production itself is here no longer present in advance of its products, i.e. presupposed; it rather appears as simultaneously bringing forth these results; but it does not bring them forth, as in the first stage, as merely leading into circulation, but as simultaneously presupposing circulation, the developed process of circulation. (Circulation consists at bottom only of the formal process of positing exchange value, sometimes in the role of the commodity, at other times in the role of money.)

“This movement appears in different forms, not only historically, as leading towards value-producing labour, but also within the system of bourgeois production itself, i.e. production for exchange value. ”

Moreover, as part of the process of production - as production for exchange - production generates circulation. Presumably in the same manner as production generated exchange, distribution and so on in the first chapter.

Reply to fdrake I came across a good passage today that relates pretty directly. Honestly, this section is proving to be a lot easier than the previous ones. And his splitting up into a alpha and beta "result" when taking the production process as content of capital gets along with your guess along the lines of concrete/formal characters of capital. (And, in this, I'm beginning to glimpse a distinction between material and both of those -- because Marx refers to the exchange value in capital circulation which does not exist circulation as a kind of rarified, formal value that still exists, and in a way is more material because of its alien character than, say, the concrete description of the labor process, which intentionally points out how the worker is a part of that)

I've never seen a passage in Marx that puts together the labor theory of value and how it relates to supply/demand until this one. It's so clear that there certainly must be another passage in Marx that disproves it somehow ;) :

The use value of a thing does not concern its seller as such, but only its buyer. The property of saltpetre, that it can be used to make gunpowder, does not determine the price of saltpetre; rather, this price is determined by the cost of production of saltpetre, by the amount of labour objectified in it. The value of use values which enter circulation as prices is not the product of circulation, although it realizes itself only in circulation; rather, it is presupposed to it, and is realized only through exchange for money. Similarly, the labour which the worker sells as a use value to capital is, for the worker, his exchange value, which he wants to realize, but which is already determined prior to this act of exchange and presupposed to it as a condition, and is determined like the value of every other commodity by supply and demand; or, in general, which is our only concern here, by the cost of production, the amount of objectified labour, by means of which the labouring capacity of the worker has been produced and which he therefore obtains for it, as its equivalent.

So, supply-demand as a more particular force on commodity price, or in the more general form, the cost of production, or the amount of objectified labor, but in this much wider sense where the laboouring capacity is what's being produced along with -- so not an individual firm, the economics of the firm, supply/demand, but rather the total, and therefore political, economy.

At least, it's a quote from the Grundrisse I can now flip out to support my general interpretation of Marx.

Reply to fdrake Oh, yes, I forgot to mention -- that your theory between the Grundrisse/Capital forms works! (ala M-C-C-M/M-C-M, etc.)That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for taking a stab at it.

I'm not holding back "buts" in this conversation either -- I'm just really open-ended on a first reading, even if I'm familiar with a writer. And this being notebook selections, rather than a worked out whole, ups the difficulty in making strong assertions even more.

This seems to be a relatively concise picture of of the relationship of exchange value to circulation and capital at this point in the book. It specifically regards how capital is distinct from, but reciprocally dependent on circulation and exchange. In particular, capital explicitly requires labour which produces for exchange as simultaneously a link in the circulation of capital and a break within it. This break is a generative tension - capital needs labour there to amplify produced values with each advancement.

“Differently expressed: Exchange value, as regards its content, was originally an objectified amount of labour or labour time; as such it passed through circulation, in its objectification, until it became money, tangible money. It must now again posit the point of departure of circulation, which lay outside circulation, was presupposed to it, and for which circulation appeared as an external, penetrating and internally transforming movement; this point was labour; but [it must do so] now no longer as a simple equivalent or as a simple objectification of labour, but rather as objectified exchange value, now become independent, which yields itself to labour, becomes its material, only so as to renew itself and to begin circulating again by itself. And with that it is no longer a simple positing of equivalents, a preservation of its identity, as in circulation; but rather multiplication of itself. Exchange value posits itself as exchange value only by realizing itself; i.e. increasing its value. Money (as returned to itself from circulation), as capital, has lost its rigidity, and from a tangible thing has become a process. But at the same time, labour has changed its relation to its objectivity; it, too, has returned to itself[…]”

This paragraph seems to be a break down of M-C-C-M circulation and what this circulation/money capital advancement does to the concept of exchange value.

An exchange value "was originally" (in simple circulation) an "objectified amount of labour, or labour time. As such it passed through circulation, as an {object representative of a given amount of labour time} until it became money, tangible money". It then gets transformed through the advancement of money capital. The progression M-C-C-M. Each letter and - is a distinct part.

M: "It must now again posit the point of departure of circulation" - exchange value came from objectified labour considered as a representative of value, it posits an item that will exchange for it. When exchanged, it realises the value assigned to it by the totality of the economy - through the conditions of labour and market forces. It was taken "out of circulation", from a previous M-C-C-M cycle, as a previous terminal point. This is exchange value as some store of money, which is entering the circulation again.

M-C: " ; but [it must do so] now no longer as a simple equivalent or as a simple objectification of labour, but rather as objectified exchange value, now become independent" - the money re-enters circulation, only to drop out of it again as a commodity, but the commodity considered as a repository of value. This will be grist for the mill of production, but that production is for exchange. Thus the commodity remains considered as a representative of its exchange value.

C-C: " but rather as objectified exchange value, now become independent, which yields itself to labour, becomes its material" - , the commodity, as a representative of exchange value, has its use value modified (work done on it), but the labour done to assemble and shape the product's use value simultaneously increases the "labour done in the past" to that product, and thus the advancement accumulates more labour, which increases value. The modification of the input use value turns to an amplification of the output exchange value. That modification, as production for profit, posits a final transformation to realise the amplified value in this step. A sale.

C-M: "only so as to renew itself and to begin circulating again by itself. And with that it is no longer a simple positing of equivalents, a preservation of its identity, as in circulation; but rather multiplication of itself." the C-M step is the realisation of what was posited in C-C - the transformation of the output value of C into a generic representative of value (like gold),

That returns the process to a generic representative of value which "must now again posit the point of departure of circulation". And the cycle repeats.

Exchange value posits itself as exchange value only by realizing itself; i.e. increasing its value. Money (as returned to itself from circulation), as capital, has lost its rigidity, and from a tangible thing has become a process. But at the same time, labour has changed its relation to its objectivity; it, too, has returned to itself

The transformation money capital has performed on exchange value is that, instead of exchange of equivalents - which occurs in the M-C and C-M steps - the middle link is no longer an equation of values, it's a production of value itself. In that regard, exchange value itself no longer can reasonably be seen to derive from a process which renders commodities equivalent, exchange value itself requires production and maintenance ; and the name of this process is capital.

Page 322 -- there are these quotes and times in Marx which crack me up because the arguments he's responding to are old even then, and I hear them today. One such quote in today's reading:

Thus the economists take refuge in this simple process in order to construct a legitimation, an apology for capital by explaining it with the aid of the very process which makes its existence impossible. In order to demonstrate it, they demonstrate it away. You pay me for my labour, you exchange it for its product and deduct from my pay the value of the raw material and instrument which you have furnished. That means we are partners who bring different elements into the process of production and exchange according to their value

"That means we are partners" is what made me smile. Might as well say we're all a family while we're at it :D

Reply to fdrake This breakdown is really good. Especially with the interweaving of the quotes.

I have one but: I thought the first "C" in "M-C-C-M" was the purchase of the labor commodity. Fortunately, I think this doesn't really do much against your breakdown. Flip 'em around and it works. The commodity labor is purchased and then does work on raw materials with the instruments(means) to create a commodity to be sold on the market which then yields money, having been sold.

Another good Grundrisse quote, p 328/329 -- for thems who believe that workers are strictly factory workers making things:

Actors are productive workers, not in so far as they produce a play, but in so far as they increase their employer's wealth

What counts as a commodity can be, say, a Starbucks coffee. Service.

Quoting Moliere

I have one but: I thought the first "C" in "M-C-C-M" was the purchase of the labor commodity. Fortunately, I think this doesn't really do much against your breakdown. Flip 'em around and it works. The commodity labor is purchased and then does work on raw materials with the instruments(means) to create a commodity to be sold on the market which then yields money, having been sold.

That's interesting. M-C-C-M is given a directional connotation though right. A big deal's been made about money going the opposite way around the cycle than commodities. I agree with you that both make sense. Though maybe they should not.

Are the raw materials interpreted as commodities in your view? Are they there "before" this step of circulation?

Quoting fdrake

That's interesting. M-C-C-M is given a directional connotation though right. A big deal's been made about money going the opposite way around the cycle than commodities. I agree with you that both make sense. Though maybe they should not.

I agree there's definitely a direction to M-C-C-M -- I interpret it as the second moment in the process of circulation. The C-M-M-C moment is from the one side of the laborer, and the M-C-C-M moment is from the other side as the capitalist.

And maybe they should not -- I'm definitely still playing around, and only sharing thoughts here. I'm not firm on anything yet.

Quoting fdrake

Are the raw materials interpreted as commodities in your view? Are they there "before" this step of circulation?

Nope! I agree that the raw materials are a commodity. The means of production (the factory, the spinner) are a commodity, the raw materials (wool) are, and so is the living labor purchased. In order for raw materials, like gold or iron or what have you, to enter into the economic relation, even though they are there beforehand, they must be worked, so they have labor time invested in them.

Page 350 before class started today. Glad to hear some of the comments up front about how this section is when we hit a turning point, because that's what I was thinking -- that it started get interesting at this point.

I'm looking forward to being caught up next week, since it's a skip week.

Quoting Moliere

Nope! I agree that the raw materials are a commodity. The means of production (the factory, the spinner) are a commodity, the raw materials (wool) are, and so is the living labor purchased. In order for raw materials, like gold or iron or what have you, to enter into the economic relation, even though they are there beforehand, they must be worked, so they have labor time invested in them.

Oh I see. You're interpreting the first C as a composite of raw materials and labour, the - as the expenditure of labour power, and the second C as the output commodity. I think that's actually more correct. Because you need to buy+renew the means of production and labour in the M-C step; which would also make it consistent with the Capital volume 2 analysis I think!

Reply to fdrake Yup! that's what I was thinking. (though it being consistent with V2 is pure luck, since I've yet to get that far!)

Reply to Moliere

"Money is a claim on future labour" is mindblowing.

Reply to fdrake :D

I agree. There's been a lot of bits like that throughout, for me -- where there's been a slog, but then there's something that finally clicks, and it really does change the way I look at things. Like money.

Though for me, I'd actually not want to de-emphasize the numbers as Harvey did. One of the things that would excite me is if I could utilize these to begin to understand a way of setting up formulas, make measurements, etc. -- that is, I'm interested in Marx, in addition to the many ways he's used, but in his original purpose: as a scientific project of economics. It's one of those questions that's always interested me.

But it's worth noting that Marx is a philosopher first, and has been read in many ways. And I like that Harvey says that too :D.

By the way, for 14MAR23, marxists dot org link and final paragraph:

Finally, the result of the process of production and realization is, above all, the reproduction and new production of the relation of capital and labour itself, of capitalist and worker. This social relation, production relation, appears in fact as an even more important result of the process than its material results. And more particularly, within this process the worker produces himself as labour capacity, as well as the capital confronting him, while at the same time the capitalist produces himself as capital as well as the living labour capacity confronting him. Each reproduces itself, by reproducing its other, its negation. The capitalist produces labour as alien; labour produces the product as alien. The capitalist produces the worker, and the worker the capitalist etc.

Quoting Moliere

Though for me, I'd actually not want to de-emphasize the numbers as Harvey did. One of the things that would excite me is if I could utilize these to begin to understand a way of setting up formulas, make measurements, etc. -- that is, I'm interested in Marx, in addition to the many ways he's used, but in his original purpose: as a scientific project of economics. It's one of those questions that's always interested me.

Same! We've got a shared interest in that. I did some work years ago on the value theory in Capital here! Lots of abstract algebra.

Reply to fdrake That's awesome.

Now, how to intregrate this into a formalization of Hegelian dialectic, and the beginnings of analytic Marxism will be complete! :D

"The labourer is not only producing surplus value, they're maintaining past value" - another mindblower.

Heh. While the reading material became more interesting, I have to say halfway through that makes the conversation less about the text. But that's not bad. I'm glad to hear the class talking and asking questions they're thinking about. If the book doesn't connect to our lives then it's purely academic. And, honestly, the text became more interesting so I don't need Harvey to connect as much in explaining why something is relevant. I'm just noting feelings.

"If you look at the statistics in Marx's times the largest category of labor was domestic service" -- that's interesting. And I like how Harvey is connecting that to how in Marx's time domestic labor was not organized by a firm, so it didn't seem relevant. But Harvey even mentioned the actor quote I posted, and noted how at the moment it didn't make sense where today it does. (hah! though he doesn't want to spend too much time on productive/unproductive... fair enough. It's kind of an "ad hoc" theory, looked at from a certain view, though I always like to note that it didn't take us long to figure out, in practice, what was productive/unproductive during COVID-19, so maybe that's why it's wise to not spend time on it -- it doesn't matter except as a political decision, rather than as theory)

Harvey has a wonderful mastery of Marx in his reading. He's so comfortable with all the texts and concepts he's fielding questions about difficult concepts with ease. And he's not fudging it: there are times I can tell the students in class (as an aside, the students questions have been great, and I admire the work they're putting in) have questions with some kind of hope, but Harvey is straightforward and doesn't mind dampening hopes in the name of a consistent and honest reading.

Very side note, but "labor is purposive activity" reminds me of Kant's aesthetics. I try to de-emphasize the Kant-Marx connection, now, because I've come around to saying their similarities make sense through the common influence of Rousseau. And I think that the angle of Rousseau has gone underemphasized -- no one wants to admit to Romantic influences, it's all about the Enlightenment! :D

Reply to fdrake Heh. posted my notes to respond, because I lost them last time when trying to respond.

But, yup! All that responsibility placed on you making so much sense.

Heyyy... question for you @fdrake -- question about "workers retain past value" -- that wasn't what I was thinking in the question. But yup, I like this too. In a sense I've looked at the Labor Theory of Value, since it uses an SI unit, as being a possible conservation law.

Quoting Moliere

But yup, I like this too. In a sense I've looked at the Labor Theory of Value, since it uses an SI unit, as being a possible conservation law.

I wrote about this here actually. There's some issues regarding logistics. How does transport add to socially necessary labour time? Does it? But I think it behaves very much like a conservation law. I think it follows from socially necessary labour time being additive, as a time, but products being made stagewise - assembly and production. Given that the SNLT of all commodities is fixed at a time point, a commodity's SNLT will be equal to the SNLT of its components plus their assembly costs. You can keep going down to the raw materials ("gifts of nature") which are unworked, and thus have no value, and thus no socially necessary labour time for their production. You end up getting an expression of each constituent in terms of time. So decomposition behaves like a linear operator (adding items to a recipe is linear), and so does valuation.

One rejoinder though, SNLT is time varying. So whenever there'd be a productive innovation, the SNLT of the input commodities to a productive process would retroactively degrade. Assuming the innovation occurs at an appropriate time.

ooo... nice question. "alienated labor -- alienated capital -- what is it they are alienated from?"

I'll admit that alienation is one of the harder concepts of Marx. "that capacity is alienated from the worker by going under the control of capital" -- perfect answer. The worker is there, and while they have capacity to do things, that capacity is owned by someone else. It was bought. And they don't control the process or product, either.

"Now, capital is alienated" -- interesting!

[s]2 reasons --[/s] the coercive laws of competition force capitalists to do things whether they like it or not. If child laborers are acceptable in a market, the other businesses which employ child labor will out-compete you. "in a market system, abstractions rule"

Reply to fdrake I've yet to do V3, but my understanding is that's where he tackles that very question and concludes that transit is a part of SNLT. (not read your posts there yet, definitely going to)

I think, in the most abstract sense, it does. If you think about a firm there are people who really just move things to where they need to be, when you think about it abstractly.

I think it gets really confusing because of the obvious conflict between "I drive things over here and back and don't make things, so what?", but then if they didn't do so the market wouldn't be expanded, and capital must expand.

I'm really interested that "species-being" came up. I thought that would drop dead.

My buddy would always made the joke that he's left of Marx because he didn't believe in a species-being, and only believed in freedom.

Quoting Moliere

I think it gets really confusing because of the obvious conflict between "I drive things over here and back and don't make things, so what?", but then if they didn't do so the market wouldn't be expanded, and capital must expand.

Yeah! I think Harvey referenced this too, that Marx towards the end of his life didn't find "productive labour" vs "unproductive labour" that useful a distinction. So the cleaners count as part of it, so do the logistics... I've not read all of Volume 3! Hardly any of it in fact.

Reply to fdrake Well, after we solve the foundations of analytic Marxism, maybe we can start a reading group ;)

Reply to Moliere

Yes. Then revise all starting assumptions. It's dialectical.

Reply to fdrake :D Got a good belly laugh out of me.

Hrmm... they did say "next week" in the stream. I'm going to be straight and say, I'm catching up. That's a good opportunity. For thems following along and who have the companion and who want to chime in, that'd be the time to do so.

Or, well -- "time to do so" -- sounds annoyed. I don't care if you do chime in. Only noting I won't have all the clever banter I've been putting up :D -- maybe I'll focus more on interpretation, as I ought to.

Quoting Moliere

For thems following along and who have the companion and who want to chime in, that'd be the time to do so.

Quoting Moliere

Or, well -- "time to do so" -- sounds annoyed.

I am annoyed with those who are following along without reading. Nyeeeer. We've got time to catch up now.

Reply to fdrake :D

What can I say, I'm a big softie, and I'm just glad that anyone is following along.

Reply to Moliere

Same. Also thanks for suggesting this. It's been fun so far!

Reply to fdrake Cheers!

(trying to adopt the phrase. this is the right time I believe)

The transformation of land into landed property, and its dependence on capital and wage labour.

“In the money market, capital is posited in its totality; there it determines prices, gives work, regulates production, in a word, is the source of production; but capital, not only as something which produces itself (positing prices materially in industry etc., developing forces of production), but at the same time as a creator of values, has to posit a value or form of wealth specifically distinct from capital. This is ground rent. This is the only value created by capital which is distinct from itself, from its own production. By its nature as well as historically, capital is the creator of modern landed property, of ground rent; just as its action therefore appears also as the dissolution of the old form of property in land.

“This latter himself then ‘clears’, as Steuart says, [47] the land of its excess mouths, tears the children of the earth from the breast on which they were raised, and thus transforms labour on the soil itself, which appears by its nature as the direct wellspring of subsistence, into a mediated source of subsistence, a source purely dependent on social relations.”

“We therefore always find that, wherever landed property is transformed into money rent through the reaction of capital on the older forms of landed property (the same thing takes place in another way where the modern farmer is created) and where, therefore, at the same time agriculture, driven by capital, transforms itself into industrial agronomy, there the cottiers, serfs, bondsmen, tenants for life, cottagers etc. become day labourers, wage labourers, i.e. that wage labour in its totality is initially created by the action of capital on landed property, and then, as soon as the latter has been produced as a form, by the proprietor of the land himself.

(Marx I cannot forgive you for the length of that sentence)

“There can therefore be no doubt that wage labour in its classic form, as something permeating the entire expanse of society, which has replaced the very earth as the ground on which society stands, is initially created only by modern landed property, i.e. by landed property as a value created by capital itself.”

This describes a historical progression. And a development of concepts. Running at the same time.

There was land. People worked the land. People got stuff from it. That's pre-capitalist agrarian labour. The people use the land, there's not really a notion of legal property entitlement or power relations to enforce it. People also lay claim to what they make out of the land and control its use.

Then some fucker claimed ownership of the land, turned the people into serfs upon it, and demanded tribute/tax from the serfs. That's serfdom for a property owner. There's a notion of property entitlement, and power relations to enforce those entitlements. Crucially, the labourers produce for the lord, who is deemed to already own what they later take. They no longer have claim to the land, they simply work it. Owning the land means owning a portion of its created products.

Then there's capitalist agrarian labour. The serfs now work the land to produce its products for exchange. They receive a wage. Those two things together make them wage labourers - production for profit where their labour is payed for. The land turns from a bunch of useful stuff to consume for the people who work it, into a bunch of products to sell. Selling the products allows reinvestment into the land and labourers. That's now a type of capital advancement. Once this is a possibility for the organisation of agrarian labour, it can and will be enforced by the proprietors of the land.

Capitalist agrarian labour presupposes prior developments of agrarian labour - like the creation of serfs through violent acquisition. It also posits for-profit production of the goods the pre-serf agrarian labourers produced for personal/collective consumption.

This transformation of land from use value productive to value productive is essential to the development of industrial capital. Industrial capital is posited by, and contained in, money capital. Despite the land itself and the work done upon it being an interruption of the circuit of exchange. M-C-C-M, the first "C-" is the interruption of production.

If you become the proprietor of land and labour power, you can do the "C-C-M" part of the chain to start circulation. That internalises the worked land and labourers into the circuit of industrial capital.

To the extent that land remains outside of for-profit production, it is a barrier for the expansion of capital. It is a hole in totality which must be filled. All such barriers are business opportunities.

It must be kept in mind that the new forces of production and relations of production do not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky, nor from the womb of the self-positing Idea; but from within and in antithesis to the existing development of production and the inherited, traditional relations of property. While in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system. This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality.

The expansive spiral of capital advancement trends towards seizing all opportunities for its own growth. That includes starting new instances of the "C-C-M" chain through violence, imposition of land ownership, and forced production for profit using wage labourers.

On the other hand, if within one society the modern relations of production, i.e. capital, are developed to its totality, and this society then seizes hold of a new territory, as e.g. the colonies, then it finds, or rather its representative, the capitalist, finds, that his capital ceases to be capital without wage labour,

Creating a colony is thus a good business decision - if you're already a capitalist country, you can export your own country's total subordination to the circuit of capital into another. Changing their land into for-profit production opportunities. That requires alienating people from the land - by violence, eviction, imposing rent... . And turning them into wage labourers to, nevertheless, work the same land. The circuit of capital must alienate people from the land to tether them to it as wage labourers.

The paragraph continues:

“and that one of the presuppositions of the latter is not only landed property in general, but modern landed property; landed property which, as capitalized rent, is expensive, and which, as such, excludes the direct use of the soil by individuals. Hence Wakefield’s theory of colonies, followed in practice by the English government in Australia. [48] Landed property is here artificially made more expensive in order to transform the workers into wage workers, to make capital act as capital, and thus to make the new colony productive; to develop wealth in it, instead of using it, as in America, for the momentary deliverance of the wage labourers. ”

while different strategies can be used to produce this alienation of the colonised from their land, it nevertheless remains true that the expansion of industrial capital always requires more land. Which means it will devour any land not already part of its circuit. Which creates such a pressure for expansion it will devour the land of other societies. Colonisation is a necessary strategy for capital's development, and it can be achieved in more than one way.

This movement transforms production as an internal moment of the advancement of capital to an internalising moment of capital; its expansion posits more production. Production posits more owned land and more alienated labour. The "C-C-M" step is, precisely, an instance of the labourer's alienation from their land. And of course requires the initial "M-C" step of capital investment to be an instance of capital advancement. In that regard, violent imposition which severs workers from the land goes from a historical presupposition of capital into a posit for its continued expansion. And thus a necessity, for capital in its essence is a process of continuous expansion.

Still, no economist will deny that if the workers generally, that is, as workers (what the individual worker does or can do, as distinct from his genus, can only exist just as exception, not as rule, because it is not inherent in the character of the relation itself), that is, if they acted according to this demand as a rule (apart from the damage they would do to general consumption – the loss would be enormous – and hence also to production, thus also to the amount and volume of the exchanges which they could make with capital, hence to themselves as workers) then the worker would be employing means which absolutely contradict their purpose, and which would directly degrade him to the level of the Irish, the level of wage labour where the most animal minimum of needs and subsistence appears to him as the sole object and purpose of his exchange with capital

If workers save too much, capital stops. Saving is also an effective crisis fund for capital. Why? Because people would starve, labourers would die and revolt, heads would role. So you save, and you need to, so you don't starve if your life gets disrupted. That also stabilises capital - since if you starve you can't work, since you can't reproduce your own labour.

A comment about labour and capital. Despite capital being an advancement, corralling and accumulation of labour (as value), labour itself cannot be considered as someone's capital.

This alters absolutely nothing in the nature of the thing and gives no grounds whatsoever for concluding that – because the worker has to sleep 10–12 hours before he becomes capable of repeating his labour and his exchange with capital – labour forms his capital”

Expending labour power doesn't make more of itself. It also has a limit, your body and its needs. In contrast, acquiring labour takes labour power and creates products with it - in that regard you make a claim on "future time" by buying labour's time.

Observation: in that regard the advancement of capital is separation of humans from their lifespans. An severance of (life as self creation) and (life as self maintenance). In other words, the advancement of capital has alienation as a core dynamic. As both a structural and psychological moment.

“However, regarded more precisely, it becomes clear that the worker who exchanges his commodity goes through the form C–M–M–C in the exchange process. If the point of departure in circulation is the commodity, use value, as the principle of exchange, then we necessarily arrive back at the commodity, since money appears only as coin and, as medium of exchange, is only a vanishing mediation; while the commodity as such, after having described its circle, is consumed as the direct object of need. On the other hand, capital represents M–C–C–M, the antithetical moment."

M-C-C-M = have money, buy stuff and labour, labour works to make new stuff, sell new stuff
acquisition, production, sale (for profit), That's capital.
C-M-M-C = have labour, exchange for money, use money to buy commodity ; sale, work, acquisition (for reproduction). That's labour.

“Separation of property from labour appears as the necessary law of this exchange between capital and labour. Labour posited as not-capital as such is: (1) not-objectified labour [nicht-vergegenständlichte Arbeit], conceived negatively (itself still objective; the not-objective itself in objective form). As such it is not-raw-material, not-instrument of labour, not-raw-product: labour separated from all means and objects of labour, from its entire objectivity. This living labour, existing as an abstraction from these moments of its actual reality (also, not-value); this complete denudation, purely subjective existence of labour, stripped of all objectivity. Labour as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth. ”

“The substance of value is not at all the particular natural substance, but rather objectified labour. This latter itself appears again in connection with living labour as raw material and instrument of labour.”

M-C-C-M requires C-M-M-C to work. Acquisition (M-C) in capital requires sale (C-M) in labour. Thus the divestment of labour from capital is simultaneously an interdependence; capital necessitates workers have no ownership of productive mechanisms (their own power and tools). It also necessitates total dependence of capital upon labour. The growth of wealth without work and the repetition of work without wealth.

The indifference of capital's growth to the specificities of the labourer's work equate value to toil. Abstracted, undifferentiated, dehumanised labour. Served in workday sized chunks.

“ As the not-being of values in so far as they are objectified, labour is their being in so far as they are not-objectified; it is their ideal being; the possibility of values, and, as activity, the positing of value. As against capital, labour is the merely abstract form, the mere possibility of value-positing activity, which exists only as a capacity, as a resource in the bodiliness of the worker. But when it is made into a real activity through contact with capital – it cannot do this by itself, since it is without object – then it becomes a really value-positing, productive activity.”

And in that regard labour only takes this character if it is part of capital advancement. It can only serve as a creator and circulant of value insofar as it produces value in the abstract; which is the constraint capital uniquely places upon it.

“the process of capital coincides with the simple process of production as such, in which its character as capital is quite as extinguished in the form of the process, as money was extinguished as money in the form of value. To the extent to which we have examined the process so far, capital in its being-for-itself, i.e. the capitalist, does not enter at all. It is not the capitalist who is consumed by labour as raw material and instrument of labour. And it is not the capitalist who does this consuming but rather labour. Thus the process of the production of capital does not appear as the process of the production of capital, but as the process of production in general, and capital’s distinction from labour appears only in the material character of raw material and instrument of labour”

From the perspective of a capitalist - someone who goes through the circuit of capital in the for M-C-C-M, the process of production occurs as the hole C-C step where sellable commodities are produced and old ones consumed through fabrication. In that regard, if you look at production from the view of capital, you will see the advancement of value (M-M), and labour only enters into it as the first C step (labour commodity as productive instrument and raw materials). Taking that perspective and not realising it construes production in general with the production of value. All production, thus, would take the form of capital's advance.

This is going to be a turbo long quote, but I think it's important for my understanding of Marx. I need to pick it apart. It is about what counts as productive labour.

“What is productive labour and what is not, a point very much disputed back and forth since Adam Smith made this distinction, [10] has to emerge from the dissection of the various aspects of capital itself. Productive labour is only that which produces capital. Is it not crazy, asks e.g. (or at least something similar) Mr Senior, that the piano maker is a productive worker, but not the piano player, although obviously the piano would be absurd without the piano player? [11] But this is exactly the case. The piano maker reproduces capital; the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue. But doesn’t the pianist produce music and satisfy our musical ear, does he not even to a certain extent produce the latter? He does indeed: his labour produces something; but that does not make it productive labour in the economic sense; no more than the labour of the madman who produces delusions is productive. Labour becomes productive only by producing its own opposite. Other economists therefore allow the so-called unproductive worker to be productive indirectly. For example, the pianist stimulates production; partly by giving a more decisive, lively tone to our individuality, and also in the ordinary “sense of awakening a new need for the satisfaction of which additional energy becomes expended in direct material production. This already admits that only such labour is productive as produces capital; hence that labour which does not do this, regardless of how useful it may be – it may just as well be harmful – is not productive for capitalization, is hence unproductive labour. Other economists say that the difference between productive and unproductive applies not to production but to consumption. Quite the contrary. The producer of tobacco is productive, although the consumption of tobacco is unproductive. Production for unproductive consumption is quite as productive as that for productive consumption; always assuming that it produces or reproduces capital. ‘Productive labourer he that directly augments his master’s wealth,’ Malthus therefore says, quite correctly (IX,40); [12] correct at least in one aspect. The expression is too abstract, since in this formulation it holds also for the slave. The master’s wealth, in relation to the worker, is the form of wealth itself in its relation to labour, namely capital. Productive labourer he that directly augments capital."

It begins with the postulate:

Productive labour is only that which produces capital

There is then a contrast between labour which produces material use values and labour which does not, illustrated by piano and piano player:

Is it not crazy, Mr Senior, that the piano maker is a productive worker, but not the piano player, although obviously the piano would be absurd without the piano player? [11] But this is exactly the case. The piano maker reproduces capital; the pianist only exchanges his labour for revenue. But doesn’t the pianist produce music and satisfy our musical ear, does he not even to a certain extent produce the latter?

This seems to construe the productive labour as labour which produces material use values (pianos) rather than entertainment (pianist). Nevertheless the pianist's labour produces something, but does not therefore count as productive labour.

He does indeed: his labour produces something; but that does not make it productive labour in the economic sense; no more than the labour of the madman who produces delusions is productive. Labour becomes productive only by producing its own opposite.

Productive labour in the economic sense is only productive "by producing its own opposite", which is capital.

hence that labour which does not do this, regardless of how useful it may be – it may just as well be harmful – is not productive for capitalization, is hence unproductive labour. Other economists say that the difference between productive and unproductive applies not to production but to consumption. Quite the contrary. The producer of tobacco is productive, although the consumption of tobacco is unproductive. Production for unproductive consumption is quite as productive as that for productive consumption; always assuming that it produces or reproduces capital. ‘Productive labourer he that directly augments his master’s wealth,’ Malthus therefore says, quite correctly (IX,40); [12] correct at least in one aspect. The expression is too abstract, since in this formulation it holds also for the slave. The master’s wealth, in relation to the worker, is the form of wealth itself in its relation to labour, namely capital. Productive labourer he that directly augments capital.

If I've read this right, it says that the pianist's labour is not productive, but the piano maker's is. Why? I think it makes sense to look at this in terms of the advancement of capital M-C-C-M.

Transparently, a piano making business takes money, invests it in materials and labour, produces a piano, then sells it.

A pianist's labour, on the other hand starts with a commodity (labour power), which has a price (money) which the labourer gets for their service (money), which is used to get other commodities (foodstuff, etc).

The piano making business thus has M-C-C-M as a transition of stages, the pianist however has C-M-M-C as its transition of stages, only the former is an advancement of capital. Any material resources the pianist buys to continue playing reproduces their labour, rather than their money (tools, food, fuel, electricity).

A slave isn't a wage labourer, they don't receive a wage. So they can't have the M or M steps as part of their C-M-M-C labour transition. Perhaps slaves create wealth, which is converted to value through the circulation of the commodities' values constituting that wealth. I'm wondering, however, if it makes sense to consider slaves as "wage labourers with wage 0" from the perspective of capital. All of their labour is surplus labour, every moment of their labour is uncompensated work.

In that regard, you could still have slaves in M-C-C-M. You start off with money, you buy slaves and commodities, the slaves work with the commodities to produce more commodities, which are then sold for money. Then, the next time you want to make something, you don't have to buy the slaves, you just have to buy something to reproduce their labour. If Marx is construing the M-C step to necessarily to contain an exchange of wages, then he'd be right to exclude slavery from capital advancement on that basis.

Maybe generalising it is illuminating. If all workers were slaves, there'd be no wages and selling of labour, which would mean there'd be no C-M-M-C transition. If some workers were slaves and some were wage labourers, it seems you can have C-M-M-C active in the economy at large with slaves providing a competitive advantage over those capitalists which use wage labourers.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

Quoting fdrake

If I've read this right, it says that the pianist's labour is not productive, but the piano maker's is. Why? I think it makes sense to look at this in terms of the advancement of capital M-C-C-M.

Transparently, a piano making business takes money, invests it in materials and labour, produces a piano, then sells it.

A pianist's labour, on the other hand starts with a commodity (labour power), which has a price (money) which the labourer gets for their service (money), which is used to get other commodities (foodstuff, etc).

The piano making business thus has M-C-C-M as a transition of stages, the pianist however has C-M-M-C as its transition of stages, only the former is an advancement of capital. Any material resources the pianist buys to continue playing reproduces their labour, rather than their money (tools, food, fuel, electricity).

I think that's good!

I get this mental picture that the pianist is, for whatever reason, an individual and so yeah, that's how I'd parse the music maker from the piano maker.

But I think it's interesting to raise the history of the music industry! There's a Marxist history of music to be written in there that'd be very interesting -- the proletarianization of the musician from the Concert Hall to Basement Punk Rock shows. :D

Quoting fdrake

A slave isn't a wage labourer, they don't receive a wage. So they can't have the M or M steps as part of their C-M-M-C labour transition. Perhaps slaves create wealth, which is converted to value through the circulation of the commodities' values constituting that wealth. I'm wondering, however, if it makes sense to consider slaves as "wage labourers with wage 0" from the perspective of capital. All of their labour is surplus labour, every moment of their labour is uncompensated work.

In that regard, you could still have slaves in M-C-C-M. You start off with money, you buy slaves and commodities, the slaves work with the commodities to produce more commodities, which are then sold for money. Then, the next time you want to make something, you don't have to buy the slaves, you just have to buy something to reproduce their labour. If Marx is construing the M-C step to necessarily to contain an exchange of wages, then he'd be right to exclude slavery from capital advancement on that basis.

Maybe generalising it is illuminating. If all workers were slaves, there'd be no wages and selling of labour, which would mean there'd be no C-M-M-C transition. If some workers were slaves and some were wage labourers, it seems you can have C-M-M-C active in the economy at large with slaves providing a competitive advantage over those capitalists which use wage labourers.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

I think that when slaves are the basis of labor that's a different mode of production as the theory is stated -- but then, you're right that we have these dual economies then simultaneously feeding into one another. Is it still labor-time that's being extracted in slavery, or even more? If so, not in the manner of a firm which is purchasing labor. And I'm curious about the causes of slavery and its interaction with capital, in particular, because one way to put it would be to say that it's basically the theoretical limit of exploitation of labor time, but that's sort of restating it in terms of capital when slavery is frequently said to be part of older forms prior to even feudalism, so I imagine the general theory would have to treat it somewhat differently.

But then.. there's the reality of them not being separate at all, and how the practice evolved with the economic form of capital rather than being some ancient thing. Marx's positivism showing through, it seems.

A morning thought -- slavery, parsed in the form of capital, is actually treating person's as capital, more or less. In a way they are living machines, and just as labor is the origin of value in capital so that holds in the general theory, but the organism is different because the mechanisms of capital are defined such that liberal free exchange is the basis of the analysis.

The laborer is the origin of value, and so is the slave -- the social position within the organism changes, though, from alienated-worker to being owned as capital. I think that's how I'd parse slavery in capital now, at least.

Going through some of my highlights...

This bit helps me think about productive/undproductive, because it shows how the laborer is simultaneously the origin of productive value, but not the owner of productive value -- what he gets in exchange is equal to what it takes for his physical living body to show up to work tomorrow, but what the capitalist gets for this is the ability to direct value-production and keep the products/capital/etc. due to owning it.

p 322:

What the Worker exchanges with capital is his labour itself (the capacity of disposing over it); he divests himself of it. What he obtains as price is the value of this divestiture. He exchanges value-positing activity for a pre-determined value, regardless of the result of his activity. Now how is its value determined? By the objectified labour contained in his commodity. This commodity exists in his vitality. In order to maintain this from one day to the next...he has to consume a certain quantity of food, to replace his used-up blood etc.

i.e. The body with its capacities, and especially the capacity to work. The price of a worker is that body and work-able capacities -- which itself is obviously historically situated and geographically situated as well, so changes depending upon how much objectified labor is required to have a body with work-able capacities.

This is the sort of thing I think that the "raises all ships" sorts have in mind in accepting the mechanisms of capital -- sure, it's unfair, but the price of labor in absolute terms of objectified labor time increases over time while the relative value of the classes clearly diminishes, even though the lower classes of an industrial nation will have access to more objectified labor time than the lower classes of a colonial or neo-colonial nation.

But, anyways, that's why wages are unproductive -- the purchase "drops out" of the circuit of capital, rather than remaining within that circuit to continue to increase the cycle of capital. I think that's a good rough estimate for productive/unproductive -- it's productive if it happens in a firm, because then a capitalist owns the capital and pays a wage to extract labor time and add it to the circulating whole of capital value, whereas the worker takes goods out of that circulation to live. (generally speaking)

Hrm, hrm, hrm.... thinking more about slavery...

The United States provides a pretty good example of capitalism + slavery. I'm looking at p 354, right after the section title which starts "Labour does not reproduce the value of the material in which, and of the instruments with which, it works"

Marx uses the unit of thalers in this analysis.

Capital at 100 thalers, divided for a given working day into -- 50 for cotton, 40 for wages, 10 for instrument. Supposing the wages of 40 thalers is set at 4 hours and the capitalist sets the working day at 8 hours then there are 40 thalers of necessary labor time, 40 Thalers of surplus value. The capitalist starts with 100 thalers, then through one "cycle" we'll call it (since the numbers are exaggerated) ends up with linen which started with 50 thalers of value, then absorbed 80 thalers worth of labor time.

Here at the middle section of M-C-C-M, in particular the second -C-.

At the end of third part in the cycle, then, what started as 100 Thalers ends as 130 thalers worth of linen, and 10 thalers worth of fixed capital. Insofar that the capitalist is able to successfully exchange that linen, then they can start the process again with 130 thalers where they started with 100. (hence highlighting how exchange is just as important as production for the cycle of capital -- else you just have a bunch of linen)

So, in this, the production of cotton was slave-based, and linen was worker-based. Is there an economic reason for this? Are certain modes of labor, i.e. that which exploits the natural goods we want, somehow more economically feasible under slavery than capital, and vice-versa?

There's a part of me that wonders if there's a kind of equilibrium point between slave-labor as capital and wage-labor as worker markets where the reasons for the transition from slave economies to wage economies are economic in character, i.e. profit maximizing, but the particulars of an industry are what incentivizes the economic organism between the two modes.

For instance, in the south you had to pay slave-drivers, which were wage-workers in the system of exploitation, to make sure slaves continued. In a similar vein, fast food industries have long said they'd replace workers with machines, but in fact you have to pay for those machines and the people to maintain them and it actually ends up being cheaper to just hire a person than to implement that style business -- i.e. it's a good threat, but a bad economic model.

Part of me thinks slavery is partially bad for business, but not entirely. i.e. sometimes it's cheaper to have workers who manage their own bills, and sometimes it's cheaper to pay soldiers to force people to work.

My stumbling notes from where I left off last time at about 350 to...


There's a part where Marx is trying to do the step-wise thing I just did above, but I'm getting lost as he jumps around too fast for me. p 368-370, or the part right before Notebook IV.

p 376 has the most succinct sentence to drawing the distinction between surplus-value and profit:

Just now the original capital of 100 was: 50-10-40. Produced surplus gain of 10 thalers (25% surplus time) Altogether 110 thalers

There's some bits in there that I don't follow right now. Especially has Marx is bouncing around between examples -- it's going too fast for me to follow immediately. But here I can see what he's talking about -- to figure surplus-value you have to look at the working day and split it into labor's reproduction, and surplus-value, whereas profit is figured with respect to the total firm , i.e. start with 100 thalers capital, end with 110 thalers: surplus-value at a 25% increase, while profit is at a 10% increase in the set up to distinguish between the two.

p400 -- coming to understand SNLT as the costs of reproducing labor setting the price of labor.

(the production of workers becomes cheaper, more workers can be produced in the same time, in proportion as necessary labour time becomes smaller or the time required for the production of living labour capacity becomes relatively smaller. These are identical statements)

An interesting question -- how many distinct processes are there? I can draw meaning out of a passage, but I mean -- at the end of the theory. Here thinking about the phrase "realization process", "production process", "exchange process" -- etc.

Basically, what's the final process map look like? Which processes are embedded in which? is there a consistent map between theses processes at any point in time of Marx's writings, or is it more like there are fair interpretations of what's written, and a more experimental-scientific spirit would be required to pin down the best map?

In the realization process, for instance, Marx has three processes. But there are many sub-processes at work within the three processes of 1) capital has maintained its value by means of exchange of money for living labor, 2) production-process (sub-process) whereby surplus value is created and accumulated to a commodity, then 3) demonetization, the commodity as container of objectified labor time that, if mismanaged, all value could go away i.e. one man owns 130 thalers worth linen (supposing I'm doing that right. I had some questions about how to add, but it seems to fit with Marx's 140 thalers math where he's including the 10 thalers worth of equipment as total capital) that then decay because of mismanagement, that then must be re-monetized in order to become the form of value once again. ie. sold for money.



p 407:
[quote]
The creation by capital of absolute surplus value -- more objectified labour -- is conditional upon an expansion, specifically a constant expansion, of the sphere of circulation. The surplus value created at one point requires the creation of surplus value at another point, for which it may be exchanged; if only, initially, the production of more gold and silver, more money, so that, if surplus value cannot directly become capital again, it may exist in the form of money as the possibility of new capital

Another process map in the next paragraph:

On the other side, the production of relative surplus value i.e. production of surplus value based on the increase and development of the productive forces, requires the production of new consumption; requires that the consuming circle within circulation expands as did the productive circle previously. Firstly, quantitative expansion of existing consumption; secondly: creation of new needs by propagating existing ones in a wide circle; thirdly: production of new needs and discovery and creation of new use values

A tripartite division of moments for a process of consumption which has to follow along the process of production -- i.e. if we decrease SNLT for a given commodity then, in order to realize exchange rather than just have even more linen, you have to expand the number of persons who are consuming that linen. Otherwise, you'll have the same profit rates from before, and some extra linen that will rot.

I like this paragraph. p 409

Thus, just as production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side -- i.e. surplus labour, value-creating labour -- so does it create on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility, utilising science itself just as much as all the physical and mental qualities, while there appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange. Thus capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means or production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. it is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces

In all the side notes and thoughts, this paragraph was a great little conclusion -- that capital, in its totality, is a revolutionary force which upends all previous ways of life and values in its pursuit of growth. (next paragraph talks about its internalt contradictions which lead to self-destruction... I'm not so optimistic :P )

Reading though this notebook I'm struck by how much Marx's method resembles Aristotle's in that he's constantly responding to and summarizing previous economist's work, but then attempting to point out how they are a one-sided expression of his own general theory. "they got it right up to this point, where they disagreed with me" :D

Hrm, here's a quote that might also help with "contradiction" in Marx:

as use value it is absolutely not measured by the labour time objectified in it, but rather a measuring rod is applied to it which lies outside its nature as exchange value

use-value as any need within a social system which is actually satisfied (at least under capital, where exchange is necessary), exchange-value as realized price, rather than ideal price. Contradiction in that need is in units of number-commodity-consumed, and exchange is in units of labour-time (which has a relation to money through the system of circulation at a given time)

So there is a relation between two entities with different units -- one set of units influences the other, and so there's a kind of "contradiction" in that neither use-value is exchange-value or vice-versa, but their identity simultaneously relies upon one another. I.e. without exchange-value there'd be no general use-value, even in simple circulation (the original problem of two incommensurate goods becoming commensurate through a third good, time). But, simultaneously, without actually satisfying real needs, the use-value would not have an exchange value. It'd be unproductive labor of the sort that falls out of circulation without even being consumed.

Something like that. It's honestly still the most confusing part of Marx's system for me. There are times when I feel the move is natural and others when I don't, and still can't figure out a real rule to it. My guess is there isn't a real rule in terms of interpreting Marx, since Marx is a philosopher, but it still leaves the question there for anyone interested in Marx as a scientific system -- how to turn dialectics into something that's not just a philosophical move, but can actually be checked by others? Something that doesn't just rely upon a demonstration and a judgment call (though, that could also be the very thing that's needed, and leaving it at that unspecified level might be best!)

another contradiction at p 415:

The contradiction between production and realization -- of which capital, by its concept, is the unity -- has to be grasped more intrinsically than merely as the indifferent, seemingly reciprocally independent appearances of the individual moments of the process, or rather of the totality of processes

Though that seems to make sense from everything -- in Hegelian fashion we could say that the contradiction between production-realization is a more developed form of the contradiction between use-exchange value (or whatever the appropriate mapping would be ... as I said I'm pretty uncertain what The Big Marxist Map really looks like)

Probably stop there for today. Looks like I'll be ready for tomorrow after all! 35 pages to go.

Reply to fdrake
Just my two cents in how anti-Marixists might respond to all of this:
That due to the general trend of the 20th century from the Progressive Era, post-WW2 programs, and just unfolding of the idea of protecting people's time (8 hour workday, labor laws, etc.), Marx's initial critiques, which were valid for the time have been somewhat overcome.

Then add to the idea that people can find value in their work, even if not making a profit and just a salary, takes care of the idea of alienation and even exploitation, as that seems to be based on the idea that people are complete pawns rather than satisfied producers of labor.

Now, mind you, I think all of the above I just wrote there is bullshit, but for reasons that are not Marxist. I am just giving you some counters people usually use. In other words, these critiques of exploitation and alienation, some might say (not me), have been generally overcome or moot.

Reply to fdrake
Further, the idea of exploitation of labor from those without industrialized means of production ("indigenous and third world populations), though maybe true, seems inevitable with two so asymmetrically different lifestyles clashing. This could happen under any system. That is more ethical than necessarily economic. You either decide to destroy populations and their lifestyles or you don't. Certainly, the "socialist worker" isn't necessarily going to prevent this exploitation any more than the capitalist class. Also, if Marx sees historical trajectory as inevitable, then this stage of exploitation has to have gone through (lack of contingency in history) for this socialist utopia to finally unite the exploited populations.

Morning thought on Marx --

One thing I've expressed in this thread and have always found frustrating is how Marxism is for the workers, and yet it is simultaneously wed to one of the most esoteric philosophical movements, Hegelian dialectic. Not exactly the most approachable philosophy, like one might like a philosophy for the working class to be.

But, on the other side, this is a kind of double-bind frequently visited upon workers: if it's simple then the worker hasn't grasped the true complexity, and if it's too complicated then the worker is confused with themself and clearly can't grasp the true complexity.

So, in a way, this was the leading philosophical movement of Marx's training. To choose something else would be to treat the subject as if it were not worthy of philosophical thought, which would be a self-contradiction in terms of Marx's philosophical project. (and, also, one of the reasons I've always liked Marx as a philosopher -- he treated the bronze-souled subjects as worthy of philosophy!)

Now, I think, dialectic is out of fashion so it's frustrating for us to have to learn not just Marx but then this philosophical move that's largely been pushed to the side. But, really, that's just part of reading historical works. What's fascinating to me is how Marx's picture of capital, in spite of all this esoteric trapping, still rings true today.

Quoting Moliere

What's fascinating to me is how Marx's picture of capital, in spite of all this esoteric trapping, still rings true today.

I wanted to bring your attention to the critiques I brought above, and see if you have any answers to that:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/788907
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/788908

Reply to schopenhauer1 Sure

Quoting schopenhauer1

That due to the general trend of the 20th century from the Progressive Era, post-WW2 programs, and just unfolding of the idea of protecting people's time (8 hour workday, labor laws, etc.), Marx's initial critiques, which were valid for the time have been somewhat overcome.

I'd say this is too narrow a scope. It's been somewhat overcome, for whom? Events from the New Deal to now validates Marx's description of Capital -- class bifurcation from capital expansion that through its economic power has come to revolutionize democracy itself, putting it up for sale, undermining New Deal era social programs to continue to accumulate and create an industrial reserve army. While the labor aristocracy -- the AFL-CIO -- is comfortable with the relationship and the negotiated peace, it's pretty easy to see that the reason they're comfortable is they lost faith in people power and really only believe in conciliation to keep their position in the board room. So, contra Hannah Arendt's view that labor unions bring representation to the liberal capitalist state, and so finally gives political voice to people who work, I'd say these organizations have become absorbed by capital, and most working people simply don't have representation in the United States.

tl;dr - Marx is still relevant to the events we see today, regardless of how we parse the New Deal and whether having stock-options as payment is owning the means of production.

Quoting Moliere

I'd say this is too narrow a scope. It's been somewhat overcome, for whom? Events from the New Deal to now validates Marx's description of Capital -- class bifurcation from capital expansion that through its economic power has come to revolutionize democracy itself, putting it up for sale, undermining New Deal era social programs to continue to accumulate and create an industrial reserve army.

Again, in first world nations, look at the rise of the middle class from the mid-1800s. That fact cannot be denied, would be the reply. Development theory trumps Core-Peripheral (Marxist) theory etc.

Quoting Moliere

tl;dr - Marx is still relevant to the events we see today, regardless of how we parse the New Deal and whether having stock-options as payment is owning the means of production.

While I agree with this, I can see your mixed-economy liberal types would just say it is making sure the "tinkering" is adjusted for better wages, services, and opportunities.

Reply to schopenhauer1 I suppose I'm fine with disappointing the middle class tinkerers-from-afar, the policy wizards and focus group addicts. For one, if Marx is right, they aren't the agents of change: their position within the social organism is such that they'd defend it, even when they see the possibility of being eaten up by it, because how else are you going to live? Democrats focus on the middle class for a reason. It's the carrot whereupon a person can finally live an individual life, now having enough access to the goods produced by the economic machine.

So why bother tailoring it to a group of people that just want things to remain the same? Obviously they'd dislike Marx.

“The surplus value which capital has at the end of the production process – a surplus value which, as a higher price of the product, is realized only in circulation, but, like all prices, is realized in it by already being ideally presupposed to it, determined before they enter into it – signifies, expressed in accord with the general concept of exchange value, that the labour time objectified in the product – or amount of labour (expressed passively, the magnitude of labour appears as an amount of space; but expressed in motion, it is measurable only in time) – is greater than that which was present in the original components of capital. This in turn is possible only if the labour objectified in the price of labour is smaller than the living labour time purchased with it. ”

M-C-C-M; You only get profit if the labour time in the product is bigger than the labour time of the input. The price for a given amount of labour time held fixed, and also determined by the aggregate conditions of labour. The input also retains its prior value, as an exchangeable basket of materials in circulation.

“If one day’s work were necessary in order to keep one worker alive for one day, then capital would not exist, because the working day would then exchange for its own product, so that capital could not realize itself and hence could not maintain itself as capital. The self-preservation of capital is its self-realization.”

The advancement of capital - its growth, profit, thus demands "more time" is squeezed out of the worker than "required". Those are scarequotes. The value of a working day is determined by the value of the produced products. If a labourer only laboured enough to satisfy their own needs, they would produce a basket of products equal in value to the value of their labour in that time. Since exchange realises value into price. The value, as price, of that day's labour would be equal to the value, as price, of the products. An equality of embodied time.

Thus the only way for profit to be produced would be if the value of a working day is less than the value of the products produced within it. Thus surplus labour. And surplus value.

“The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny [Bestimmung] is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves – and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht] – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased. ”

The expansion of capital is thus a growth of surplus labour. More surplus labour, more growth. "General industriousness" as a moral value promotes and enables the creation of surplus labour by workers and capitalists. Workers will want to work longer, or accept it. Capitalists will want to make that work more efficient. If the aggregate conditions of production become more efficient, the average labour time for society as a whole decreases for an average product. That simultaneously means more surplus labour per unit time at any given time, but also a devaluation of surplus labour as the socially necessary time for an average product's production has markedly decreased. This sets up a dynamic of competition, which Marx says later, that he will discuss later.

“The unit in which surplus value is calculated is always a fraction, i.e. the given part of a day which exactly represents the price of labour.”

“Thus the absolute sum by which capital increases its value through a given increase of the productive force depends on the given fractional part of the working day, on the fractional part of the working day which represents necessary labour, and which therefore expresses the original relation of necessary labour to the living work day. The increase in productive force in a given relation can therefore increase the value of capital differently e.g. in the different countries. ”

If a worker could reproduce themselves for half a day's labour, then they work half a day of surplus.
New production comes in for that workplace, it doubles production, thus doubles value production all else held equal. That means the worker can now work a quarter of a day. and 3/4 of the day is surplus. More surplus labour, more value. But this is expressible as a fraction, because the proportion of the working day which goes to surplus is the determinant of how much value multiplies from input to product through production.

The uneven development of productive processes allows value of products in capital to diverge from their global average locally.

“the more developed capital already is, the more surplus labour it has created, the more terribly must it develop the productive force in order to realize itself in only smaller proportion, i.e. to add surplus value – because its barrier always remains the relation between the fractional part of the day which expresses necessary labour, and the entire working day. It can move only within these boundaries. The smaller already the fractional part falling to necessary labour, the greater the surplus labour, the less can any increase in productive force perceptibly diminish necessary labour; ”

The uneven development is a feature of productive innovation, however its development has severe diminishing returns. If a worker could reproduce themselves at 1/100 of the working day, that means the surplus labour is 99/100 of the working day. A given worker's labour for a specific product thus imparts it 99/100 parts of surplus value.

For reproduction at 1/2 of the working day, that means 1/2 of the working day is imparted as surplus value.

An increase of added surplus value by 0.5% in both cases would mean 0.99*1.005 and 0.5*1.005 respectively. Which are 0.99495 and 0.5025 respectively. The difference in required working days in from each starting workday on are thus at 0.00505 and 0.0025. Which correspond to a 0.505% reduction and a 0.25% reduction. You thus need to reduce the required working day more, proportionally, when it's already lower to gain the same % increase in surplus value.

These changes in the required working day are called changes in relative surplus labour, and thus relative surplus value. Relative surplus value increases when the length of the required working day decreases.

The absolute amount of surplus value for that production process has not changed, since the length of the working day has not changed. Just the amount of value which is surplus changes. Thus the absolute surplus value has not changed, only its distribution has. Conflicts over the length of the working day thus correspond to conflicts of the distribution of surplus value; and thus, the apportioning of wealth societally.

A highlight here is that copying this exchange process, which would increase supply, does not change the surplus value extracted per product while holding the working day fixed. There's simply more product.

“Labour does not reproduce the value of the material in which, and of the instrument with which, it works. It preserves their value simply by relating to them in the labour process as to their objective conditions. This animating and preserving force costs capital nothing; appears, rather, as its own force etc."

Because wages are apportioned per workday, and not per surplus value unit created, surplus value thus costs nothing to obtain given the expenditure on wages. Because the production of surplus is a productive rather than exchange relation, and the ascription of wages for the working day depends upon the aggregate conditions of capital. Thus the maintenance and growth of capital, through labour, is capital's animating force. All value is, ultimately, surplus value. All money is, ultimately, a claim on another worker's time.

This preservation and growth is amplified when the materials are assumed "on hand" for the worker, since no amount of workday needs be spent to replenish the materials and means of production. Just in their use and expenditure. Initial investments in productive machinery, thus, increase the rate of production without incurring any changes in the workday for the labourers which use them. It does not touch their workday length, just required labour. Maintenance and installation is done by other workers.

In this regard the form of work done does not change the nature of the value of its products. The form of value is fixed in the aggregate relations of circulation, production and exchange. In the totality of capital. Work thus only transforms use values, while preserving the use values of the inputs in that society.

“t preserves the utility of cotton as yarn by weaving the yarn into fabric. (All this belongs already in the first chapter on production in general.) Preserves it by weaving it”

The production of fabric maintains the use value of cotton as yarn, all the while transforming cotton into yarn into fabric.

Quote from 414 as I pick it back up to prep for class:

(for we have not yet reached the aspect of capital in which it is circulating capital, and still have circulation on one side and capital on the other, or production as its presupposition, or ground from which it arises)

More a side note, but there are a lot of parenthetical notes like this throughout the text. A 2nd or 3rd reading project would be to pick out these "we have not yet reached the aspect..." to start drawing out these different aspects and their relations to one another. When do we reach the aspect of capital when circulation is no longer on one side and capital is on the other? What aspect are we at now?

For a first reading that's too much detail to ask after, I think, just noting something worth pursuing in drawing out The One Big Map of Marxism.

Also, noting a part of Marx which contradicts a thought I wrote earlier, where the concrete is how one resolves contradictions:

The contradiction between production and realization -- of which capital, by its concept, is the unity -- ...

So apparently concepts can unify contradictions in addition to concrete resolutions, so the directionality between ideal and concrete will not help in resolving "What are the rules for thinking dialectically, for sublating, or checking contradictories?"

Happens with me and Marx all the time.

Oh, Marx on slavery p 420 (awww yeah) -- apparently we're on the right track in our wonderings @fdrake:

What precisely distinguishes capital from the master-servant relation is that the worker confronts him as a consumer and possessor of exchange values, and that in the form of the possessor of money, in the form of money he becomes a simple centre of circulation -- one of its infinitely many centres, in which his specificity as worker is extinguished

There's a moving passage from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglas where he rejoices in having a wage and feels like his very humanity is restored due to being this possessor of money and exchange values, to be valued at all and treated like a man. It stuck with me as a lesson that there's a difference between slavery and wage-dependence. Good to see that reflected here, I think.

Another bit on contradiction, though here I think it's a little different because he's talking about cross-purposes tendencies, or telos:

By its nature, therefore, it posits a barrier to labour and value-creation, in contradiction to its tendency to expand them boundlessly

p 423/424 provides a passage that suddenly makes sense of simple exchange for me -- this interpretation would have it that simple exchange is between commodities and commodities only, rather than for goods and services, which is the part of the economy that Marx believes bourgeois economists skip over.

...Hence that overproduction comes from use value and therefore from exchange itself. This is stultified form in Say -- products are exchanged only for products; therefore, at most, too much has been produced of one and too little of another. Forgetting; (1) that values are exchanged for values, and a product exchanges for another only to the extent that it is value; i.e. that it is or becomes money; (2)it exchanges for labour. The good gentleman adopts the standpoint of simple exchange, in which no overproduction is possible, for it is indeed concerned not with exchange value but with use value. Overproduction takes place in connection with realization, not otherwise

The labor-time is already there in the product and an equivalence of time is exchanged between two commodities, so no profit can take place there. But as soon as you have enough money to control the origin of value, i.e. labor, then the possibility for more than simple exchange comes about (though clearly not always, as the discussion about productive/unproductive labor makes apparent)


I kind of like the following quote for an absurd plaque:

[quote=Karl effin' Marx]In practical commerce, capitalist A can screw capitalist B[/quote]

**

p432 has a lovely paragraph about the relationship between value and price -- not just a distinction, but a relationship -- more or less pointing that a cunning capitalist can split the surplus-value with the consumer to undercut other capitalists and ensure that the product sells (since unsold product is always worse than even selling it at a loss)

Marx talking about the general rate of profit on 435 has me putting together the dots: the general rate of profit is the rate of profit considered across the totality of capital, all the capitals put together, rather than the rate of a given firm. While that's what made sense to me it's nice to see some textual support.

It's honestly cracking up how much Marx brings up Proudhon to say how he's wrong. Proudhon really got under his skin. :D

p 456. So close. Might get the last 2 pages before class.

EDIT: Oh, yup. False alarm. Ready for class!

21MAR23 ending paragraph is right before the large title here.

(It will be shown later that the most extreme form of alienation, wherein labour appears in the relation of capital and wage labour, and labour, productive activity appears in relation to its own conditions and its own product, is a necessary point of transition – and therefore already contains in itself, in a still only inverted form, turned on its head, the dissolution of all limited presuppositions of production, and moreover creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production, and therewith the full material conditions for the total, universal development of the productive forces of the individual.)

(Also, looking at the number of pages ahead, this is about the halfway mark!)

I'll admit I didn't check the arithmetic yet. I feel like that's important, but not for a first reading. It'd be super interesting to try and parse the arithmetic examples with the bit that we ended on, with Capital I and Capital II

“ecause it presupposes that, despite the doubled force of production, capital continued to operate with the same component parts, to employ the same quantity of necessary labour without spending more for raw material and instrument of labour; † then, therefore, productivity doubles, so that he now needs to spend only 20 thalers on labour, whereas he needed 40 before.”

A note that increasing productivity incurs new constant capital costs. Constant capital being production material and other fixed expenditures. Variable capital is what is spent to acquire labour power.

(investing in lots of fixed capital - me) is only really useful when it acts on great masses, when a single machine can assist the labours of thousands. It is accordingly in the most populous countries where there are most idle men that it is always most abundant.

A good note that unemployment is a necessary feature of the conditions of production becoming more efficient. You need less labourers to produce the same surplus value. Note - though you may be able to have a higher net profit per advanced unit of capital if more workers are cheaper than (less workers + efficient production). Like outsourcing productive labour to Bangladesh is a means of increasing the surplus value to variable capital ratio for a firm based elsewhere.

“It is a law of capital, as we saw, to create surplus labour, disposable time; it can do this only by setting necessary labour in motion – i.e. entering into exchange with the worker. It is its tendency, therefore, to create as much labour as possible; just as it is equally its tendency to reduce necessary labour to a minimum. It is therefore equally a tendency of capital to increase the labouring population, as well as constantly to posit a part of it as surplus population – population which is useless until such time as capital can utilize it. ”

That outsourcing would thus be a change in the composition of capital - less constant capital and less variable capital when outsourced, more constant capital at home; keeping the rate of surplus value extraction per unit variable capital expenditure constant.

In general, to maximise surplus value, lengthen the working day and lessen the socially necessary labour per product.

“It is merely to be noted here in order to indicate how later developments are already contained in the general concept of capital. Belongs in the doctrine of the concentration and competition of capitals. – The devaluation being dealt with here is this, that capital has made the transition from the form of money into the form of a commodity, of a product, which has a certain price, which is to be realized. In its money form it existed as value. It now exists as product, and only ideally as price; but not as value as such.”

The tendency to lessen the socially necessary labour time per product decreases the living labour (time) required for its production for sale. When a good is produced for sale, capital "devalues" because it no longer has the money form of value with a distinct amount (investment into commodities), it takes on the form of a commodity which has a certain price. In that regard there is an inversion; in the first step M-C money stands as a potential for commodities which then becomes a commodity, in C-M commodities stand as a potential for money, which then becomes money. Initially M takes the form of an investment, then as a collection of commodity prices, but it must pass through a metamorphosis into a commodity, rather than a representation of a commodity's value.

This mirrors the transformation of living labour into objectified labour the transition from C-C (the dash) is a transmogrification of living labour (in production) to objectified labour (the potential value of the product which will be realised into price).

The C-M step also drops C out of the advancement of industrial capital simpliciter and into the circulation of commodities.

“The creation by capital of absolute surplus value – more objectified labour – is conditional upon an expansion, specifically a constant expansion, of the sphere of circulation. The surplus value created at one point requires the creation of surplus value at another point, for which it may be exchanged; if only, initially, the production of more gold and silver, more money, so that, if surplus value cannot directly become capital again, it may exist in the form of money as the possibility of new capital.”

That circulation requires other means of producing surplus value; other capital advancements. The spiralling growth of capital thus also requires the the expansion of circulation; as greater surplus value is realised, there must be greater circulation of commodities to realise it. The same holds for capital - to expand it must also more expansively circulate.

The circulation of commodities is of the form C-M-M-C, which is a labourer's wage relation to capital. Obtaining fixed capital is also a form of consumption. Thus consumption must increase along with circulation, and thus along with the growth of capital.

On the other side, the production of relative surplus value, i.e. production of surplus value based on the increase and development of the productive forces, requires the production of new consumption; requires that the consuming circle within circulation expands as did the productive circle previously.

The final step of that circulation is consumption; thus the growth of capital requires a tandem growth of consumption. More commodities must "drop out" of circulation in order for realisation to increase in scope.

These expansions are part of the spiralling growth of capital's circuits. However they are in tension with the nature of capital itself. In the following ways:

“(1) Necessary labour as limit on the exchange value of living labour capacity or of the woes of the industrial population;
(2) Surplus value as limit on surplus labour time; and, in regard to relative surplus labour time, as barrier to the development of the forces of production;
(3) What is the same, the transformation into money, exchange value as such, as limit of production; or exchange founded on value, or value founded on exchange, as limit of production. This is:
(4) again the same as restriction of the production of use values by exchange value; or that real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, a form not absolutely identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all.”

We want to decrease necessary labour while maximising exchange value, but necessary labour time is a constraint on exchange value.

We want to maximise surplus value, but the things that let us do that induce diminishing returns on reducing the necessary portion of the working day toward 0 - which can never be reached.

The need for commodities to turn into money through circulation; you need more circulation for any given production increase, where does it come from? It's just assumed to be there in an amount adjusted for the increase in surplus value through productive innovation, but must also be a distinct capital with sufficient money to circulate the new basket of products. 3 means that overproduction is a general state; there's always more commodities produced than can have their value realised. This is constant waste.


These mean capital necessarily has unsteady foundations. Necessarily may collapse. Crisis is baked in. These contradictions act as barriers, impediments, to capital's growth. Thus it must deal with them, but cannot remove them from its nature.

Not caught up, but nearly.

I'm glad he highlighted the disposable time quote -- goes back to communism is free time and nothing else.

An interesting thing Harvey is highlighting with respect to population. "Marx couldn't stand Malthus" -- when capital actually benefits from having population. And also it's interesting to think about population growth as a predictor of Marx's theories. That's the geographer's eye reading Marx at work.

"India has recently taken over China as the most populous country in the world." - I didn't know that. Looking at this it's plausible. I, for one, do not keep up on population rates on the regular as my day job, so it's believable.

I like his eye for labor reserves. Also I'd note on top of labor reserves, especially with respect to Africa, there are also raw resources as yet untapped by capital that are slowly making inroads that way.

Heh. Harvey explaining how Grandpa Marx hated the Lumpenproletariat -- the Gutterpunks are still welcome! Just ignore Grandpa then! ::lmao::

I can see how Harvey definitely disagrees with my thought that productive labor is within a firm too. Maybe best to keep the productive/unproductive question open @fdrake

There is no value without realization. If you work at something and you make a commodity and you can't sell it then the commodity has no value. The tendency in the Marxist tradition to fetishize production... no they equally important. You can't have realization without production, and you can't have production without realization. Value depends upon the contradictory unity....

Ahhhh! Nice. That's super cool to hear with all the questions I've been asking. You don't have to discuss realization in volume 1 of Capital because it's assumed away. That makes so much sense! Also why I'm confused so much in reading this, thinking back to Capital V1 :D "Barriers" were never mentioned, and here Harvey is saying "barriers" matter, which only occur in the field of realization.

"the thread of devaluation"

two forms of devaluation --

(1) you lose the value entirely. you make something take it to market and can't sell it. what then is lost. both labor put into it and also the constant capital was lost.

(2) you may partially lose the value, by selling it at a loss. Got back the raw materials, but not the labor, or whatever.

the transitions that go on from this to that point are potential places for devaluation -- every time there's a change from M to C to M.

First barrier to the realization process -- consumption capacity. Intensified because use-value does not have the boundlessness of value. Capital needs to take its spiral form and have an infinite growth. So you'll get a crisis of some kind from over-production.

"The creation of new needs and the discovery and creation of new use-values" -- I mean... eat it Hare! :D -- Marx clearly thought all needs were any use-values

"For the first time nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely an object of utility... so as to subjugate it under human needs" I'm happy to see p409 pop up in lecture. To be honest, I'm much more on Marx's side in being happy to see human beings having power over nature. I prefer having choice to not having choice.

Hrm. I'd be interested in the data Harvey is mentioning. I knew in the United States that wages have decreased in terms of real purchasing power since 1980, but not that many countries are. "The credit system" basically baring the burdens of capitalist over-production, but with them saying "OK, we'll lend more to others not in debt, just to make sure we keep the boot on the face of the ones we already got with this scam" -- makes sense of micro-loans in Africa. And anti-socialist military interventions from the United States to Middle and South America.

Hrm. A reason to also question my distinction -- if the oligarchy absorbs all productive activity, then there's a reason to question that all firms are productive insofar that they turn a profit. There's the perspective from an organizer who wants the people to unite on the shop floor, which is what I've been expressing, and then there's the perspective of what everyone ought to be doing if we all did productive labor. I think I'm OK with services because I think we need services, and that services clearly support social structures in good ways (nurses, for instance. Or janitorial staff -- yeah you should clean your own home, but should we all individually clean an entire building, or should people be compensated for what clearly is necessary? Guess a has-been SEIU organizer would say those professions...)

Just going to listen now that we're at Q&A. I had a couple thoughts but not a good question yet. And I like to hear the people there ask questions. Not just a middle-aged man thinking on his own :).

Reply to fdrake Hell yeah. I'm glad to have you still along.

Oooo listening -- I'm glad he mentioned "experiences" as a thing that's being produced! Super exciting. The reason for inventions of superfluity is the need for expanding consumption! (I mean... there are industries not only doing cruise lines, there are industries built on selling cruise lines!)

Ever wonder why loot boxes became a thing in video games? Or, even, video games? The revolutionary power of capital!

Quoting Moliere

Oooo listening -- I'm glad he mentioned "experiences" as a thing that's being produced! Super exciting. The reason for inventions of superfluity is the need for expanding consumption! (I mean... there are industries not only doing cruise lines, there are industries built on selling cruise lines!)

Increasing the "rate of consumption" due to spectacles being transitory is a way of solving the "growth of consumption" required for the growth of capital - more consumption per unit time, and it's repeatable due to needing to buy access each time you see a spectacle. The same thing could be said about rentier capital maybe? It counts as self reproducing consumption of something transitory, an engagement. That might apply to software-as-as-service business models too...

Reply to fdrake yup!

I thought Harvey fielded the restaurant question fairly well. I'd point that person asking to the IWW as a realized place to go for restaurant organizing, and I guess this is also why I have this sympathy for service workers as being productive. It's not like those factory workers did everything. And now that women have become part of the workforce those roles have become more public than private than when Grandpa Marx was alive. ;) (EDIT: Should note, this being the internet, that I think this is a good thing from capital. Just noting differences in attitude towards what were considered "womens work" roles before they became firms)

Well... attack upon labor began as soon as the CIO had power and flexed it, but I'm biased.

ADDON: Taft-Hartley Act is the first thing I think of.
ADDON2:
"The Taft–Hartley Act amended the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), adding new restrictions on union actions and designating new union-specific unfair labor practices. Among the practices prohibited by the Taft–Hartley act are jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns."

Quoting fdrake

The tendency to lessen the socially necessary labour time per product decreases the living labour (time) required for its production for sale. When a good is produced for sale, capital "devalues" because it no longer has the money form of value with a distinct amount (investment into commodities), it takes on the form of a commodity which has a certain price. In that regard there is an inversion; in the first step M-C money stands as a potential for commodities which then becomes a commodity, in C-M commodities stand as a potential for money, which then becomes money. Initially M takes the form of an investment, then as a collection of commodity prices, but it must pass through a metamorphosis into a commodity, rather than a representation of a commodity's value.

After Harvey's lecture yesterday evening, I realised there's an implication of devaluation that I missed. The same "devaluation" occurs when a product is not in circulation regardless of why. So when the EU's "butter mountain" accumulated, much of it couldn't be sold, it was thus out of circulation and therefore worthless.

Because capital's growth of production posits a corresponding growth of circulation to realise the value of produced goods, a break between circulation and capital is a disruption in realisation. Which is a potential for crisis.

When food is bought by a worker, is this not a devaluation? A commodity goes out of circulation to be consumed. I don't think this is a devaluation because the worker's consumption acts upon the use value, it does not zero the exchanged value through payment or remove the act of payment.

With capital itself, M-C-C-M, is the M-C-C transition a devaluation? Even when the commodities values are "maintained and renewed" by the workers? Marx has commented that the interaction of their work with the commodities, the capital flow it is part of, and that flow's relationship to circulation maintains and preserves the value; not the fact that workers assemble alone. The value added in their work is represented by the C-M relation, which requires a passage through circulation, and thus is a site for the relationship of capital and circulation to break down; a crisis of realisation.

Also thanks to @Moliere for highlighting something similar.

Reply to Moliere and for the next session's bookend.

21MAR23 lecture notes.

Haven't read the section yet, but still taking notes to share and listen for nuggets to think about while I do the reading.

"The recognition of capital is one of the themes of this section"

Marx is trying to name capital, give it a definition, and make it recognizable. From the previous capital is a process, not a thing.

Marx wants to name capital and the capitalist. So it's an exciting session but it's also a very complicated one because of the various ways Marx is trying to set up to understand the concept of capital.

"The true nature of capital emerges only at the end of the second cycle" -- that is at that point surplus-value has been used to create more surplus-value.... back in the chapter on money Marx talks about how we are ruled by abstractions, where no one is responsible.

The spiral form comes about when capital posits its presuppositions -- it presupposes labor and posits more labor through surplus value extraction.

Production -- Circulation: two moments that are separate and need to be separated, but then they merge. (after at least two cycles, so that surplus-value can be produced by means of surplus-value)

The circulation process as a whole incorporates the moment of production and now we are looking at a totality, or a unity.

There's a large section here about different modes of production through history. (this'll be interesting to me!)

The relationship to nature differed prior to capital. You cannot have a capitalist system that does not separate culture from nature, and which does not treat nature as a resource for exploitation. Whereas other economies people tend to see themselves as part of nature.

The whole conceptual apparatus of capital is to dominate nature, you figure out its rules and that permits us to rule -- these conceptual forms evolve from the economic engine requiring nature to become a resource.

This suggests there's something going on with the metabolic relations of nature -- capital works on the metabolic relations of nature. . . these transitions that have occurred deal with the understandings, ideas, and practices towards the metabolic relations of nature. If we treat everything from nature as a free gift then we can use them until they are gone. And we have this idea that it's not a good thing to do, but it would require a change in the mode of production, given this relationship between economies and nature. And capital cannot do this because it's committed to endless growth.

Conceptual apparatus for talking of transitions: barriers that exist, and dissolution. Capitalist mode of production dependend upon the dissolution of peasant forms, dissolution of institutional structures and modes of thinking of a peasant based society -- similar to the dissolution of the barriers to exchange.

Large discussion about disagreements between Stalin and Mao and interpreting China as a peasant society so Mao is leading a peasant rebellion and that's bad according to Stalin. "Oriental mode of production" came up but eh.

"Thus the old view, in which the human being appears as the aim of production, regardless of his limited national, religious, political character, seems to be very lofty when contrasted to the modern world, where production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth as the aim of production. In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc.,created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics -- and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds -- this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end. This is why the childish world of antiquity appears on one side as loftier. On the other side, it really is loftier in all matters where closed shapes, forms and given limits are sought for. It is satisfaction from a limited standpoint; while the modern gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar" -- p. 488. Harvey went too fast for me to type it out so I grabbed my copy to type it out because when he was reading it it hit a lot of points.

We're at a halfway point, in a sense, so we'll be looking at what capital posits, now that we've covered what capital presupposes.

And onto Q&A. Work being what it is I'm gonna skip out here, and post notes.

I should have done bookend last week. I think I'll be able to catch up this week. But, I haven't even caught up with last week's reading yet much less this week's, so I'm going to hold on posting notes as I listen until I catch up on readings. (the lectures are saved, after all, so I'll take advantage of that.)

The next bookend, though, ending on page 584:

… Apart from the circumstance that the preparation of a larger quantity admits of a more effective division of labour and the employment of superior machinery, there is in this matter that sort of latitude, arising from a quantity of labour and capital lying unemployed, and ready to furnish additional commodities at the same rate. Thus does it happen that a considerable increase of demand often takes place without raising prices.’(73.)>

Finished up p 515 today. I can see why the 21MAR23 lecture was a bit big picture now -- this section is a detailed counter pre-history for the rise of capital meant to counter the myth perpetuated by economists that Capitalism is pre-history. So we get a story which spans from the slavery of the ancient world to Marx's day, largely focusing on German Feudal history but at a very big picture view.

For myself I think that I'm not satisfied with Marx's history :D. It's surely better than what he's countering. It's at least attempting to make Capital into something which arises out of the movements of history, something which isn't eternal but rather came about -- as opposed to not even the end of history, but re-interpreting old relations in capitalist terms. However, it follows along with his notion of stages too much for me. I tend to believe that Marx defines capitalism well, but I'm uncertain about the rest. And I tend to emphasize the abstract portions of Marx's theory rather than the elements where he distinguishes between proto forms of capitalism and the vestiges of feudalism. The jumps from feudal Europe in its vestigial forms of capital to capital look good to me -- though I want details for a true history rather than Marx's counter sketch -- it's the comparisons to the ancient world and slavery that always seem sort of hand wavey to me. It feels too anachronistic to call "slavery" a mode of production, especially as it lives on under capital.

I’m sorry I missed this course. Seems interesting indeed. I meant to join, but life happens.

I haven’t read through the entire thread, but does he mention anything about the ruling class ideas? On his podcast he talks about this in relation to the Grundrisse. Very interesting.

Reply to Mikie It's all good. I'm still behind myself for the same reasons :D -- two weeks behind, at this point, and still at work during class today. Work picked up, eating into study time (or, for me, focused time -- I run out eventually)

Yes! At least my memory of the lectures is he mentions ruling class ideas pretty frequently. Something that's nice about the lectures is that he's doing a lot of the work in making it relevant to people. I know why I find it relevant, but he's doing a great job of connecting it to the class.