A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
and socialist feminists like Flora Tristan. And it was in the 1840s in France that many radicals, for the first time, cared to call themselves communists, even though they had no clear idea of what that might mean. Marx was very familiar with, if not immersed in, this tradition, particularly when in Paris before his expulsion in 1844, and I think that he draws from it more than he willingly acknowledges. Understandably, he wanted to distance himself from the utopianism of the 1830s and 1840s, which he felt accounted in many ways for the failures of the revolution of 1848 in Paris. He didn’t like it when utopians configured some ideal society without any idea of how to get from here to there, an opposition made clear in the Communist Manifesto. He therefore often proceeds in relation to their ideas by means of negation, particularly with respect to the thought of Fourier and Proudhon.
These are the three main conceptual threads that come together in Marx’s Capital. His aim is to convert the radical political project from what he considered a rather shallow utopian socialism to a scientific communism. But in order to do that, he can’t just contrast the utopians with the political economists. He has to re-create and reconfigure what social-scientific method is all about. Crudely put, this new scientific method is predicated on the interrogation of the primarily British tradition of classical political economy, using the tools of the mainly German tradition of critical philosophy, all applied to illuminate the mainly French utopian impulse in order to answer the following questions: what is communism, and how should communists think? How can we both understand and critique capitalism scientifically in order to chart the path to communist revolution more effectively? As we will see, Capital has a great deal to say about the scientific understanding of capitalism but not much to say about how to build a communist revolution. Nor will we find much about what a communist society would look like.
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I have already addressed some of the barriers to reading Capital on Marx’s own terms. Marx himself was all too aware of the difficulties and, interestingly, commented on them in his various prefaces. In the preface to the French edition, for example, he reacts to the suggestion that the edition should be brought out in serial form. “I applaud [the] idea of publishing the translation of Capital as a serial,” he wrote in 1872.
In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else … That is the good side of your suggestion, but here is the reverse of the medal: the method of analysis which I have employed, and which had not previously been applied to economic subjects, makes the reading of the first chapters rather arduous, and it is to be feared that the French public, always impatient to come to a conclusion, eager to know the connection between general principles and the immediate questions that have aroused their passions, may be disheartened because they will be unable to move on at once … That is a disadvantage I am powerless to overcome, unless it be by forewarning and forearming those readers who zealously seek the truth. There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. (104)
So I, too, have to begin by warning all readers of Marx, however zealously concerned with the pursuit of truth, that yes, indeed, the first few chapters of Capital are particularly arduous. There are two reasons for this. One concerns Marx’s method, which we’ll consider further shortly. The other has to do with the particular way in which he sets up his project.
Marx’s aim in Capital is to understand how capitalism works by way of a critique of political economy. He knows this is going to be an enormous undertaking. In order to get that project under way, he has to develop a conceptual apparatus that will help him understand all the complexity of capitalism, and in one of his introductions he explains how he plans to go about that. “The method of presentation,” he writes in the postface to the second edition, “must differ in form from that of inquiry”:
The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection. Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately presented. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter [i.e., the capitalist mode of production] is now reflected back in the ideas, then it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction. (102)
Marx’s method of inquiry starts with everything that exists—with reality as it’s experienced, as well as with all available descriptions of that experience by political economists, philosophers, novelists and the like. He subjects that material to a rigorous criticism in order to discover some simple but powerful concepts that illuminate the way reality works. This is what he calls the method of descent—we proceed from the immediate reality around us, looking ever deeper for the concepts fundamental to that reality. Equipped with those fundamental concepts, we can begin working back to the surface—the method of ascent—and discover how deceiving the world of appearances can be. From this vantage, we are in a position to interpret that world in radically different terms.
In general, Marx starts with the surface appearance to find the deep concepts. In Capital, however, he begins by presenting the foundational concepts, conclusions he’s already derived by employing his method of inquiry. He simply lays out his concepts in the opening chapters, directly and in rapid succession, in a way that indeed makes them look like a priori, even arbitrary, constructions. So, on first read, it is not unusual to wonder: where on earth are all these ideas and concepts coming from? Why is he using them in the way he does? Half the time you have no idea what he is talking about. But as you move on through the book, it becomes clear how these concepts indeed illuminate our world. After a while, concepts like value and fetishism become meaningful.
Yet we only fully understand how these concepts work by the end of the book! Now, that’s an unfamiliar, even peculiar, strategy. We are far more familiar with an approach that builds the argument brick by brick. With Marx, the argument is more onion-like. Maybe this metaphor is an unfortunate one, because, as someone once pointed out to me, when you dissect an onion, it reduces you to tears. Marx starts from the outside of the onion, moving through layers of external reality to reach its center, the conceptual core. Then he grows the argument outward again, coming back to the surface through the various layers of theory. The true power of the argument only becomes clear when, having returned to the realm of experience, we find ourselves equipped with an entirely new framework of knowledge for understanding and interpreting that experience. By then, Marx has also revealed a great deal about what makes capitalism grow in the way it does. In this way, concepts that at first seem abstract and a priori become ever richer and more meaningful; Marx expands the range of his concepts as he goes on.
This is different from the brick-by-brick approach, and it is not easy to adapt to. What this means in practice is that you have to hang on like crazy, particularly through the first three chapters, without really knowing what is going on, until you can get a better sense of it all when you get further on in the text. Only then can you begin to see how these concepts are working.
Marx’s starting point is the concept of the commodity. At first blush this seems a somewhat arbitrary if not strange place to start. When thinking of Marx, phrases like the Manifesto’s “all history is the history of class struggle” come to mind. So why doesn’t Capital start with class struggle? In fact it takes about three hundred pages before there’s more than a hint of that, which may frustrate those looking for an immediate guide to action. Why doesn’t Marx start with money? Actually, in his preparatory investigations, he wanted to start there, but after further study he concluded that money needed to be explained rather than assumed. Why doesn’t he start with labor, another concept with which he is deeply associated? Why does he start with the commodity? Interestingly, Marx’s preparatory writings indicate that there was a long period, about twenty or thirty years, during which he struggled with the question of where to begin. The method of descent brought him to the concept of the commodity, but Marx makes no attempt to explain that choice, nor does he bother to argue for its legitimacy. He just starts with the commodity, and that is that.
It’s crucial to understand that he is constructing an argument on the basis of an already determined conclusion. This makes for a cryptic beginning to his whole argument, and the temptation for the reader is to be either so bemused or irritated