FINISHED!

Well, I finally completed my re-reading of Capital Volume One today.  Here is an odd fact.  Marx wraps up his long discourse with a dramatic, powerful five page Chapter XXXII entitled "Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation."  The mists have dispelled, the veils have parted, and the raw story of the development of modern capitalism is laid before us as clearly as one could desire.  The chapter concludes with this marvelous paragraph:

"The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already resting on socialised production, into socialised property.  In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers;  in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people."

That ought to be the end of the book, right?  But then, unaccountably, Marx adds one more chapter, "The Modern Theory of Colonisation."  It is in every way an anticlimax, engendered, so far as I can tell, by Marx's desire to beat up on a wretch named E. G. Wakefield. 

When I teach the book next semester, I plan to end with Chapter XXXII. 

THE INHERITANCE OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERISTICS

My grandson, Samuel, has expressed an interest in learning to play the violin, so I shall foot the bill for a half sized instrument for his birthday present [he will be nine in December].  I have dreams of playing duets with him.  What is it with little Jewish boys and violins?  I think half of the little boys in Vilna must have studied the violin in the early twentieth century.  Samuel's six year old sister [the one who is a shark at Backgammon] would like a pair of boots.  So I went on line.  Do you have any idea how many styles of boots there are for little girls?  This business of being a grandpa is more complicated than it looks.

WHAT WOULD SOCIALISM BE?

Inasmuch as Chris has done me the honor of addressing me by the title I have affected these past  fifty -six years [I think of it as the academic version of a patronymic or matronymic], I think I owe it to him to pause momentarily in my re-reading of Capital in order to address the question he raises, viz, how exactly would a socialist society work?  It is worth reminding those of you who have read a great deal of Marx and telling those of you who have not that Marx said almost nothing about this subject.  Indeed, if we were to add up all the pages that Marx devoted to an analysis of capitalism and the critique of theorists of capitalism, we would certainly pass 5000, and perhaps many more.  If we were then to gather together every passing comment, aside, and ephemeral remark he made about what a socialist society would look like, we might manage, generously, to cobble together five pages, but even that would be in large print.  There were, of course, many nineteenth century authors who speculated extensively about the lineaments of a socialist society.  Marx and Engels had nothing but contempt for them, referring to them as "Utopian Socialists."

There are a number of reasons why the high priest of socialism never wrote about it, the most profound of which is that Marx understood, better than anyone before him [and perhaps after as well] that how the transition to socialism was made would shape what emerged from the transition.  This idea, of the relationship between the character of a socio-political transition and what emerges from it, is the subject of a truly great book by my old friend [and the godfather of my younger son] Barrington Moore Jr.  I refer, of course, to The Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy:  Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World.

What follows are some thoughts I had during my morning walk.  The temperature at six a.m. was hovering just above 20 degrees, so a good deal of my energy was devoted to staying warm, which may explain why these thoughts are a trifle scattered.  [Wearing thermal underwear, two sweaters, and a scarf under my hoodie, I looked rather like a miniature version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters.]

I shall begin with a point Chris makes, about which Marx has a very great deal to say in Volume One:  At the present stage of economic development, an extremely extensive division of labor has long since taken place, with the result that few if any of us actually reproduce our own means of existence by our own individual labor.  Those of us who are city dwellers , which I assume includes virtually all the readers of this blog, do not grow our own food or spin, weave, and tailor our own clothes, nor have most of us had a hand in the building of the dwellings in which we reside.  [I have, as it happens, carded and spun raw wool into thread, but that was at an upscale leftwing work camp for middle-class teenage boys and girls, so it does not really count.]

For this reason, Marx, for certain analytical purposes, speaks in Capital of the assembled labor of the entire working class as though it were the labor of a single worker, a portion of whose day is devoted to reproducing "his" conditions of existence [i.e., wage goods], the remainder being devoted to producing the surplus value that is transmuted into the money form as profit for the capitalist. 

Thinking in this way is useful for reminding us that in a socialist society, a certain amount of labor must be done in each cycle simply to produce what is consumed, one way or another, by the workers, and also to reproduce the capital that is used up in the processes of production.  If the population is growing, or if a decision has been made [by whom?  Ah.  That is the question] to raise the standard of living, in either case requiring an expansion of the scope of output through economic growth, then "the" worker will have to labor longer than is required for simple reproduction, either to produce the capital goods to which the additional working population will apply itself productively or else to expand the output of wage goods available to the existing population.  What is more, if the demographic composition of the population is shifting, perhaps with fewer persons of working age doing the labor required to support the entire population, then those who work will have to labor longer than would be required merely to sustain themselves.  All of this is obvious and has been well understood for a long time.

A good deal of the labor performed by our "worker" goes to produce wealth for those who control or own the means of production, and are therefore in a position collectively and individually to compel the workers to perform surplus labor by threatening to withhold from them the food, clothing, and shelter that they need to survive.  There are more pages in Capital devoted to this doleful subject than to anything else.  It is the fundamental fact of capitalism [and also of all previous economic formations, but that is several other stories.]

How would things differ in a socialist society?  Indeed, what would a socialist society be?  Well, the traditional answer -- and I am in this, as in so much else, a traditionalist -- is that in a socialist society capital, which is to say the means of production, would be collectively owned, and decisions about what and how much to produce would be made collectively.  [This is why the transition process matters.  If a small cadre of revolutionary leaders act as the commanders of the revolutionary process, you can bet that after the revolution, even if we are all eating peaches and cream, they and their epigones will be making all the big decisions, which they will no doubt call Democratic Centralism, without irony, alas.]

At the present time, decisions about the allocation of capital are for the most part made by private owners who are motivated by a desire to expand the value of their holdings through the making of a profit.  These decisions may, but they also may not, serve the human needs of those doing the labor in the society.  In America today, for example, a good profit can be made by manufacturing in expensive, nicely designed, reasonably well made clothes.  Hence even the poor are well-dressed by historical standards.  But in the housing business, the real money is to be made in high-end luxury housing.  Hence the poor, who are well-dressed, are ill-housed.  In a socialist society, it would be possible to allocate capital in such a way that the workers are well-housed.  It would not be cheap.  Even under socialism, there is no free lunch [except at Apple headquarters].  It would be a deliberate decision, made with full knowledge of the costs, which include what would have to be foregone.

Shifting the capital around looks easy on paper when one is working with dollar equivalents.  Take so many billions out of this industry and put it into that industry.  Things are a bit trickier when we get down to the real economy.  One cannot simply issue an order that an aircraft manufacturer making Lear Jets must forthwith start producing nicely designed workers' dwellings, nor can one require a Rolex Watch manufacturer, by fiat, to start churning out nutritious school lunches for poor children.  However, with a little Schumpeterian "creative destruction" the changes can be made.

Thus far, I have been talking about America, but it is time to acknowledge a fact that requires some deep thought.  Those cheap, well-designed clothes I mentioned that you and I are wearing [leaving to one side my utter lack of clothes sense] are made by girls and women working twelve hours for a wage that we would not consider adequate pay for a day.  So are those making our cell phones.  They just don't happen to be living in America, so a socialist transformation in America will do them precious little good.  [Oscar Wilde is reported to have said of socialism, "It will never work.  Too many meetings."  I shudder to think what would happen to me if I were to explain to a gathering of revolutionary youth that they might have to give up their IPhones.]

Well, this is a great deal more in a connected way than Marx ever wrote about socialism, and since I am now all warmed up, I am going to go back to reading Capital. 

CLASS NOTES

I begin my daily portion of Capital today on page 668, a little more than one hundred pages from the end of Volume One.  My careful reading notes, filled with notations of passages I must call to the attention of my class, now fill almost nineteen pages.  Inasmuch as there is more to say about this extraordinary book than even thirty-seven and a half hours of class time will allow, I need to begin the difficult business of deciding what is essential and what can, albeit reluctantly, be set aside.

Happily, I have already identified what seems to me to be the single most important sentence in the entire volume.  It appears in the middle of a long paragraph that begins at the bottom of page 307 [in the Aveling and Moore translation] and continues on to page 309.  The context is not important, because what Marx says could as easily have been said on every single page of the book.  Here is the sentence:

"If this labourer [who is being hired for a year by a capitalist] were in possession of his own means of production, and were satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day."

Literally everything in Marx's long, complex, detailed critique of capitalism is contained in this simple sentence.  Why must the nineteenth century English worker labor for ten or twelve or fourteen hours?  Because, by an historical process that Marx will analyze in the final pages of Volume One, he has been deprived of access to and ownership of the means of production that he requires in order to reproduce his own existence.  Why, as the productivity of the workers improves and grows, does the work day not shorten?  If only six hours, or four, come to be required to reproduce the worker's means of existence, why must he still labor for eight or ten or twelve hours?  Because those means of production, which his labor and that of other workers has created, are owned not by himself and his comrades, but by the capitalist, who in his role as capitalist [not as plant manager -- that is a separate matter] does nothing save own the means of production and "allow" the workers to use them.  Whence comes his profit, that grows and grows as the years roll by?  From the unpaid labor extracted from the workers.

If this is the sum and substance of Capital, why is the entire academic Economics profession incapable of grasping its truth?  The great old American novelist Upton Sinclair had the answer:  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

CORRECTION

Well, a reader more knowledgeable than I tells me that the site of the cafe La Regence was 161 rue St. Honore, quite close to the eastern end of the Louvre, and now apparently [if I can trust Googlemaps] occupied by a shop called Maroc.  Oh well.

TIDBITS FROM GOOGLE AND WIKIPEDIA

I am not what you would call a scholar.  Even when I write two books on someone, I am liable to be a bit dim about that person's actual life.  So it was with considerable surprise that I learned only today that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels met for the first time, in 1843, in a Paris cafe, cafe de la Regence.  The cafe, which I also learned is famous in chess circles as the site of many storied matches in the 19th century, lies on a little side street between rue de Rivoli and the Right Bank.  If GoogleMaps is to be trusted, it is still there, though it is now a restaurant, not a cafe.  When I return to Paris in March for a brief visit during Spring Break, I shall be sure to visit it.  I shall also ask my chess grandmaster son, Patrick, whether he has ever come across the name.

READING NOTES

1.  As I plowed my way through the seemingly endless passages in Chapter XV, "Machinery and Modern Industry" in which Marx copies out and reproduces detailed descriptions of the appalling conditions of life and work of children in early industrial capitalist enterprises, I reflected that since all of this took place almost two hundred years ago, my students would probably have difficulty seeing it as anything other than a tale of horribles from an era long past.  A few moments with Google turned up a very nice story about the fourteen hour days put in by twelve year old girls and boys in Apple's Chinese factories, where they earn less than a dollar an hour for making the IPhones that I and my students carry about with us.  At an appropriate time, I shall read it to them.

2.  Deep in Part VI now, "The Production of Absolute and Of Relative Surplus Value," territory frequented only by the most fanatic of Marxist loyalists.  Grinding through Marx's rather tedious ringing of the changes on variations in the length of the work day, the intensity of the work process, and the productiveness of labour, I come upon a four-page chapter, "Various Formulae for the Rate of Surplus-Value," in which, suddenly, unexpectedly, wonderfully, I find the following passage:

"The habit of representing surplus-value and value of labour-power as fractions of the value created -- a habit that originates in the capitalist mode of production itself, and whose import will hereafter be disclosed -- conceals the very transaction that characterises capital, namely the exchange of variable capital for living labour-power, and the consequent exclusion of the labourer from the product.  Instead of the real fact, we have the semblance of an association, in which the labourer and capitalist divide the product in proportion to the different elements which they respectively contribute to its formation."

It may not be immediately obvious to some of you, but this is a brilliant attack by Marx on the neo-Classical use of Euler's Theorem to prove that labour and capital each receive their marginal product, and hence, as Professor Pangloss says, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Since I am morally certain that Marx did not know Euler's Theorem, and since he published this book ten years before Walras, Jevons, and Menger each bestowed the marginalist revolution on a world hungry for enlightenment, it is simply wonderful that Marx had the genius to expose the meretriciousness  of that "gift" before it was even given.  [I use "meretriciousness" in its original meaning.]