We are about to embark upon an extended interpretative voyage whose purpose it is to explain why Marx writes the opening chapters of Capital as he does. It will take me a while to explain all of this and if you are patient, I hope that what I have to say will be illuminating not just with regard to the text of this puzzling book but for our understanding of the world in which we now live. But I realize it will take some patience on your part to stay with me on this voyage, so I thought perhaps I could make this a little bit easier by suggesting that we begin by taking two field trips. Because these will be modern technologically advanced field trips, they will not be restricted by time or space or even, as we shall see, by the limitations of economic theory, but I think perhaps you will enjoy them and I hope you will learn something from them.
Our first field trip is to a late medieval cathedral. I have chosen to take us to Nôtre Dame de
Paris because, as you know, my wife and I had a small apartment near that great
cathedral for many years. But we go not
in the 21st century as tourists. Rather we go as faithful Catholics of
the 15th century. We are dressed in our best clothes, for this is
one of the great churches of the world, and we are devout believers. The
cathedral stands on the île de la Cité in the middle of Paris. It is much
larger than the surrounding buildings, an imposing structure with a dramatic
front, the roof supported by flying buttresses. As we enter, we find ourselves
in a vast dimly lit space. Light filters in through stained-glass windows high
above, quiet men and women kneel in prayer to our left and right. Far away in
the middle of the cathedral, lit by banks of candles, is the altar, the focus
of our attention. The men who work in the cathedral speak softly and wear
strange robes tricked out with iconic symbols. They speak Latin, a dead
language mysterious to commoners but understood perhaps by the lords and ladies
who come to the cathedral from time to time.
We are very much aware that we were in the presence of mystery, of
power, of ancient truths and rituals of which we understand very little.
The great centerpiece of all the activities of the cathedral
is the celebration of the mass. This is a ritual recreation of the Last Supper
which Jesus shared with his disciples shortly before he was crucified. At that
Last Supper, you will recall, Jesus offered bread and wine to his disciples
saying to them, “take, eat, for this is my body” and “drink, for this is my
blood.” When the priest celebrating the
mass raises the wafers and asks for God’s blessing, God works a miracle and
changes the wafers into the body of Jesus Christ. When he raises the wine and
asks for God’s blessing, God again works a miracle and changes the wine into
the blood of Jesus Christ. Thus it is the body and blood of Jesus himself that
is offered to the communicants as they kneel before the priest and accept the
wafer and a sip of the wine. But the wafer and the wine have been doubly
miraculously transformed, for while the substance of the wafer is changed into
the substance of the body of Jesus Christ and the substance of the wine is
changed into the substance of the blood of Jesus Christ, the sensory properties
of the wafer and the wine – the look, the feel, the taste, the smell – the
accidents, so called, remain unchanged. That is why this miracle is called “transubstantiation.”
This miracle takes place not only on the holiest of days in
the greatest of the Catholic cathedrals. It takes place every time a Catholic
priest celebrates a mass, no matter how modest the church or how distant it may
be from the centers of Christendom.
This is the central mystery of the entire society, whose
legitimacy and seeming eternity rest upon the authority of God. This incomprehensible divine intervention in
the ways of the world is the foundation, the justification, the bedrock on
which the entire society is founded. The art, the law, the philosophy, the
political authority, and also the subordination of the vast majority of the
population – all of them rest on, are justified by, are sanctified by this
incomprehensible miraculous transformation called the Catholic mass.
It took the combined efforts of the greatest minds of Europe
centuries to demystify these mysteries, to deprive them of their control over
our minds, to expose the exploitation and the domination that they sanctified
and justified. It is not for nothing that this struggle came to be called the
Enlightenment.
That is our first field trip. We have taken it to remind
ourselves of the burdens, both intellectual and social, that Europeans had to
struggle to free themselves from in order for the modern world to be born.
Now, if we are recovered from that field trip, I shall take
us on a second field trip. On this trip we do not travel back in time. Our
field trip takes place today. Once again I shall take us to a place with which
I am well familiar, not to Nôtre Dame de Paris, but to another building which I
know quite well, a building which might be considered the modern American counterpart
to a great medieval cathedral, my local supermarket. It is called Food Lion,
and is one of a chain of supermarkets in this part of North Carolina, where I
now live.
We are wearing our ordinary clothes, shorts, T-shirts,
flip-flops, because one does not dress up to go to the supermarket. We park in
the parking lot and walk into the store through sliding glass doors. The
building has a broad flat roof – no vaults, no stained-glass windows. It is
brightly illuminated by neon lights so that every part is brightly lit and as
easy to see as every other part. The men and women who work here speak the
local tongue, not a dead language. The
large room is filled with row upon row of shelves on which are stacked cans and
boxes and other containers of commodities. On the far left of this supermarket
are refrigerated containers for ice cream and other perishables. To the right is
a section with fresh vegetables and fruits.
After we have made our selections, we roll our shopping carts to the
checkout lanes where we exchange money for what we have selected.
While I am waiting to check out, it occurs to me that
instead of a bag of sugar I would prefer to have a box of granola. Fortunately,
these are priced equally, so when I get to the checkout counter I ask the clerk,
“Can I exchange my bag of sugar for a box of granola?” The checkout clerk replies, “certainly, since
they are the same price there is no problem.”
I thank him take my bag of groceries and leave the supermarket.
Putting my groceries into my car before leaving, I reflect
on how strikingly different this trip to the supermarket has been from the
field trip I took yesterday to a medieval Catholic Cathedral. Instead of my
best clothes, I dressed casually without a thought to the appropriateness of
what I was wearing. Yesterday, I had
entered a tall imposing building with a vaulted roof, stained-glass windows
dimly lit by candles and attended to by a special cadre of men in unusual dress
speaking a language I could not understand.
Today, I had gone into a low flat-roofed brightly lit building where there
were working young men and women speaking English. Yesterday, I had been awed by
the mystery, the majesty, the authority of my surroundings. Today, I had felt
completely at home – no mystery, no majesty, no authority, simply rows upon
rows of cans, bottles, boxes, bags of commodities.
And yet, this had been no ordinary supermarket for in fact,
as I knew but neglected to tell you, it was a Ricardian supermarket, which is
to say, a supermarket in which commodities exchange in proportion to the
quantities of labor required directly or indirectly for their production. Thus,
when I exchange the bag of sugar for the box of granola, I was exchanging two
bundles of commodities containing equal amounts of embodied labor. Now, the
sensory characteristics of sugar are quite different from those of granola. The
sugar is fine-grained, white, and dissolves easily in water whereas the granola
is tan in color, chunky, and does not dissolve very well at all. So the
accidents of the sugar are quite different from the accidents of the granola.
And yet, from the point of view of the salesperson in the store, since they are
of equal price, the exchange was an exchange of equals. The substance of the
sugar – the quantity of labor directly or indirectly required for its
production – being equal to the substance of the granola – the quantity of labor
directly or indirectly required for its
production, the exchange of the sugar for the granola, it occurred to me, was
actually metaphysically speaking the inverse of the miracle of
transubstantiation. In the miracle of the mass, the substance is change while
the accidents remain the same. In the quotidian swapping of sugar for granola,
the accidents changed while the substance remained the same.
And so I thought to myself: if transubstantiation is a
miracle and a mystery on which the authority of an entire society rest, perhaps
the same is true of commodity exchange. There is only this difference: everyone
recognizes that transubstantiation is a mystery and a miracle, whereas nobody
realizes that so is commodity exchange.
It is not difficult to persuade people that the medieval
church is a center of mystery and miracle, of power and authority. It is
therefore, relatively speaking, easy to disabuse people of the mistaken belief
in that mystery and miracle and the consequent submission to the power and
authority. But it is clearly going to be a great deal more difficult to
persuade people that our supermarket is also a center of mystery and miracle and
power and authority. It will take a quite extraordinary combination of
theoretical analysis and literary skill to communicate so profound and
implausible a recognition.
And that, my friends, is why Karl Marx wrote Capital as he did.
11 comments:
"This incomprehensible divine intervention in the ways of the world is the foundation, the justification, the bedrock on which the entire society is founded. The art, the law, the philosophy, the political authority, and also the subordination of the vast majority of the population – all of them rest on, are justified by, are sanctified by this incomprehensible miraculous transformation called the Catholic mass."
There is only a small percentage of Catholics that actually believes that is the body & blood of Christ. And I suppose it has been that way since the time of Peter & Paul's ministry in Rome.
I go to church mainly because God gave the commandment to Moses to honor the Sabbath. I also want to hear the priest's sermon. Plus the good feeling I get when I leave the church service, after being there a while, whether that be a Saturday or Sunday.
I will tell something I've noticed about the Catholic Church.
You are not supposed to partake of holy Communion unless you are in a state of spiritual grace. That means you've been to Confession with a priest and haven't sinned since. It's a miracle if 4 people are in line whenever I go to Confession. Most of the time no one is there except during an upcoming holiday like Christmas or Easter. The last 5 times I've been to Mass I have not partaken of Communion because of some lesser sin like telling a small lie etc. Usually 98% of the congregation walks up to experience Holy Communion. But I've never seen such groups of people at Confession. Meaning there is a lot of people that don't care. Now I don't judge them. But I think many Catholics have done what they do ever since the time of the first Bishop of Rome. Meaning St. Peter.
Just fyi for Michael above: the Catholic Church distinguishes between venial and mortal sins. Mortal sins are those that in some fundamental way sever your relationship to God. The idea is that you shouldn't accept the Eucharist if you are unrepentantly acting contrary to the will of God in some fundamental way. Small lies are precisely the kind of thing that don't count as mortal sins, and thus don't disqualify you. It's no doubt true that many Catholics don't care about the rules, but their participating in overwhelming numbers in the Eucharist doesn't prove it.
Prof. Wolff: I've heard you tell these two stories before, about the cathedral and the marketplace. But I don't quite understand the point. You say that the market's equalizing of commodities in terms of price/exchange value is "the inverse of the miracle of transubstantiation." But inverting it robs it of being in any way (even metaphorically) a miracle. There is nothing mysterious, is there, about a thing's underlying substance staying the same while its accidents change? There IS something mysterious about money, of course, and how it can be that the market can commensurate the values of various commodities. But I don't see how comparing it to transubstantiation really helps to see that. (Maybe this is a petty point. Or maybe you'll address it in what follows.)
"It's no doubt true that many Catholics don't care about the rules, but their participating in overwhelming numbers in the Eucharist doesn't prove it."
It doesn't absolutely prove it, but I'm judging by probability. I'm cynical when it comes to human activities. When I barely see anyone at Confession, and yet Mass after Mass 98% of the congregation is receiving Holy Communion, it makes you wonder: is everyone here a saint or are many not following the rules?
The Christian religion is an immortality scam- people want to sin while on earth and go to Heaven for an eternity.
Pretty good deal
And I don't blame Jesus who is a distant relative, for he was only trying to play the part of Messiah and knew nothing of the ssam devised by Paul et al
But Jesus is the front man for this scam he is so to speak the brand name for the scam called Christianity
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