MARX BOOK DAY SEVEN

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 21^st century as tourists. Rather we go as faithful Catholics of the 15^th 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.