MARX BOOK DAY FIVE

 In 1867, when Karl Marx published volume 1 of Capital, half a century had passed since the publication of Ricardo’s Principles, 91 years since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations had appeared. The discipline of Political Economy had flourished for a century or more. Countless books had appeared contributing to this intellectual discipline. Some, like Ricardo’s Principles, were spare, elegantly written, academic treatises. A few, like Smith’s Wealth of Nations, were gracefully written, with lovely turns of phrase and witty metaphors. But Marx’s Capital was absolutely unlike anything that had ever been written about economic affairs and, I dare to say, was absolutely unlike anything that would ever be written again about society or economy. The first six or seven chapters, in particular, are utterly mysterious and seem to have more in common with the writings of Jonathan Swift or Charles Dickens. Marx ranged widely over the entire 2000 year history of Western literature. His text was filled with odd metaphors, mysterious turns of phrase, and puzzling passages.

 

Consider simply one example among many, chosen from the fourth section of chapter 1, which by the way, bears the mysterious title “the fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof.” Marx writes, “when I state that coats or boots stand in relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident.”   The German original of the last phrase is “so springt die Verrücktheit dieses Ausdrucks ins Auge.”  No doubt “absurdity” was a fine translation in the 19^th century, but in the 20^th century, sophisticated literary critics gave “absurdity” a good name – Theater of the Absurd and the like. A more accurate translation of “Verrückt” would be “nutty,” “crazy,” or “crackbrained.”   The text poses so many problems for even the sophisticated reader that that most raffiné of French Marxists, Louis Althusser, actually suggested at one point that students skip the first chapter, read the rest of the book, and then return to the beginning only after they had mastered the rest.

 

What in heaven’s name was going on? Marx had read everything that had been written about Political Economy in all of the modern European languages.  He had labored for years on the manuscript of his great work, tinkering with it so compulsively that his lifetime colleague and correspondent, Friedrich Engels, actually at one point started making bets with him about when he would finally publish it, offering to give him a dozen of bottles of wine if he would only bring the book to completion. Why could Marx not write about political economy as all of his predecessors had?

 

One theory is what I like to think of as the childhood polio explanation. According to this hypothesis, when Marx was a university student, a particularly virulent strain of Hegelism was raging pandemically in Germany’s university communities. Marx, on this view, contracted a nearly fatal case of it, and although he survived he was permanently intellectually crippled. As a consequence, he could barely drag himself from the premises to the conclusion of a syllogism and it was simply thoughtless and unkind to expect him to move about in the realm of ideas like Michael Jackson moonwalking across the stage or Fred Astaire tip tapping up a flight of stairs.  The English had a simpler version of this explanation: Marx was German and therefore could not be expected to write simply and clearly like an Englishman.

 

Fortunately for us, we have indisputable textual evidence that these explanations are wrong. In 1864, The International Working Men’s Association (referred to sometimes as the First International) was formed and Marx was elected to the Governing Council. The next year, a British workingman named John Weston delivered a speech to the Council in which he argued, basing himself on the theories of Ricardo, that there was no point in workers striking for higher wages because the result would simply be that the food and clothing they purchased would rise in price to absorb what they had gained from the strike. Marx decided to respond to Weston, and being Marx wrote a response so long that it took two meetings of the Council for him to deliver it.

 

Marx wrote the response in English. He delivered it in English. After his death, it was published in English as a little pamphlet with the title Value, Price, and Profit.  If you read that pamphlet, you will find that it is written as clearly and plainly as Ricardo’s Principles.  Indeed, save for the fact that Marx takes a different view of matters then Ricardo did, there is no significant difference between the texts.

 

So Marx could have written Capital à la Ricardo, as it were.  Why he chose not to is a question whose answer reveals in the deepest way, Marx’s understanding of capitalist reality.