DOIN' WHAT COMES NATURALLY

Re-reading Capital is for me a rare experience.  I feel as though I am once again spending my time as I was meant to do, not devoting it to the uncontrollable vagaries of the political world.  Those of you who have not read the book would, I think, be surprised by it, particularly if you have been following the rather arid and scholastic debates about matters Marxian that I have had from time to time with readers of this blog.  I am now working my way through the enormously long Chapter XV [in the English version], "Machinery and Modern Industry."  I venture to say there is not another major work of economic theory anything like Capital [and though I am an "autodidact" in Economics, to use Paul Samuelson's unfortunate description of Marx, I have read the major economic works of Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marshall, Schumpeter, Keynes, Morishima, Sraffa, Robinson, Pasinetti, Garegnani, and a host of others, as well as Samuelson's iconic textbook.]

To be sure, there are the famous passages, most of them early in the book, on the fetishism of commodities and the mystifications of the market, but in sheer length, these are dwarfed by the extended, detailed, terrifying, albeit dryly scholarly, descriptions of the life experiences of workers in mills and factories, culled from English, French, German, Italian, and Dutch sources, not to mention the quotations from classical Greek and Latin texts .  By the time he came to publish the first volume of Capital, Marx had spent almost twenty years of back-breaking research in the British Museum and elsewhere, reading, and seemingly remembering, everything he could lay his hands on that dealt in precise concrete detail with the making of glass, cotton fabric, woolen fabric, needles, pottery, and all the other commodities that dominated the early stages first of systematic organized manufacture [i.e., literally hand-making] and then of the introduction of machinery into factories.  And all of it, hundreds upon hundreds of pages, informed by a clear, elaborate theoretical analysis of the structure of capitalism.  In trying to find texts with which to compare Capital, I find myself thinking of the historiographical work of Leon Litwack, W. E. B. DuBois, Jacqueline Jones, and the other outstanding historians of American slavery.

Since I also plan, in my up-coming course, to explain in precise detail the formal mathematical reconstruction of classical and Marxian political economy and to devote time as well to a literary analysis of Capital, there is no way that I can even begin to call attention to the scores upon scores of passages in the later chapters of the book that call for commentary.  I shall have to rely on the students to spend the necessary time plowing through those pages even though it will be perfectly possible to get a good grade in the course without doing so.  But then, all I can do is offer them the most exciting course they have ever taken.  The rest is up to them.

A BLOG WORTH READING

Jerome Doolittle, who has just appeared here, and others collectively run a blog called "Bad Attitudes."  You can find it here.  Take a look.  I recommend it.

There are lots of good people out there.  If we could get all of them to the polls every two years, we could start to turn this country around.

Meanwhile, I am continuing to re-read Volume One of Capital.  I have just started Chapter XV, "Machinery and Modern Industry," and I am already on page 11 of my reading notes.  I do understand that my re-reading of this book cannot change the world one little bit, but we all have to survive, and this is my way of making a terrible world a tad more bearable.

I am also binge-watching "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries" on Netflix.  This is a charming series set in Melbourne, Australia in the 1920's.  It is the first thing I have seen that makes me want to visit Australia.

AND THE WINNER IS ---

Well, my "contest" elicited some wonderful stories, for which I thank you all.  The longest and the best came as an e-mail from Jerome Doolittle, novelist, former Jimmy Carter Speech Writer, and much more.  Here it is, with his permission:

One day in 1987 I announced a workshop on procrastination problems to my classes at Harvard, warning any afflicted students not to stall around. The deadline for registration was near, and "at my back I always hear time's winged chariot hurrying near."

The class chuckled appreciatively at this clever literary sally. Sure they did. Actually, the class sat there puzzled, as if I had broken into demotic Greek for some reason, waiting politely for me to revert to English.

Did anyone recognize what I just said? No. Did it sound like me? No. Was it, maybe, a quotation? Probably. Had anyone ever heard the first line of "To His Coy Mistress?" The title itself? Heard of Andrew Marvell? No, no, and no.

The next day I worked out the easiest poetry quiz I could come up with.  The students were to fill in the missing word or words from lines that they would be bound to have come across in their recent careers as high school over-achievers.

Wrong again. None of the freshmen got, "The boy stood on the burning _____." None got, "Half a league, half a league, half a league _____." One got, "Beneath the spreading chestnut tree the village _____ _____." One got, "I met a traveller from an antique _____." Only one got, "You're a better man than I am, _____ _____." (Two others guessed, "Charlie Brown.") The highest score was 14 right out of 20 questions; the lowest was two right; the average was seven. Nor was my class an exception. When a colleague, the poet Felicia Lamport, gave the same quiz to her students, they did no better.

Stupidity can hardly have been the reason. Harvard undergraduates are by no means as intelligent as the world imagines, but most of them are above average, many are very bright indeed, and a few are brilliant.

Nor were my students likely to have resisted or neglected their education in the poetry of their language. They had made it to Harvard by pleasing teachers, by doing the reading and handing in homework on time. If they hadn't learned poetry, probably no one had given it to them to learn.

And this turned out to be the case. One or two of my students had been made to memorize a passage from Shakespeare in high school. Most had been made to read a handful of poems; they seemed to have remembered the experience as a puzzling and unpleasant one. None of them had ever
memorized a poem on his own. When I told them I had done that very thing as a schoolboy, and more than once too, they couldn't see the use of it.

There they were then, empty of poetry but no more to be blamed for it than a glass is to blame for being empty. Nobody had bothered to fill them. On the other hand, nobody much had bothered to fill high school students back in the early 1950s, either, when I was one. A teacher named Jack
McGiffert, God love him, once went to the trouble of putting together a poetry study group in the prep school where we were both serving time. But that was about it.

To test whether there had ever been a golden age, I pestered other teachers of writing at Harvard to take my quiz. The scores pretty closely matched the teacher's age: the older they were, the better they did. The youngest teacher, who was working on his doctoral dissertation in English Literature, scored as poorly as my freshmen.

It may be that a shortage of Jack McGifferts has been developing over the years. Mr. McGiffert himself, come to think of it, had left teaching a few years after our poetry workshop to become a writer for television. Probably he wound up doing more teaching there, one way or another, than he ever had in school. His class would have been bigger, by a factor of millions, with most of them paying attention.

The only question on my quiz that everybody got right was a freebie I had thrown in: "This Bud's for _____."  Actually I thought I had thrown in two freebies, the second being, "Winstons taste good, like a _____ _____." But only four students knew the answer. This was puzzling until it occurred to me that the class of '91 was just out of diapers in 1973, when cigarette advertising disappeared from TV.

Well, what does all this mean except that each generation has its own language, its own poetry? After Felicia Lamport gave my test to her students, they made up a test of their own and gave it to her. Their quiz had questions like, "We all live in a yellow _____," and she only got two right. This misses the point, though. I could expect my father to be ignorant of Doonesbury, for instance, and he is. He could expect me to be ignorant of Krazy Kat, and I am. But neither of us is ignorant of Poe and Whitman, Keats and Shelley, and Harvard's freshmen are.

Still, what's the difference? Poetry is just the latest thing to have disappeared from our radar, after all; below our horizon it joins mythology, the classics and the King James Bible. And so what? What potato was ever better couched for knowing that the center, like Dallas's defensive line, no longer holds. And if you knew that ABC stole Golden Girls from Shakespeare, would it help you teach your pet stupider tricks?

Of course not, so then let me ask you something, Margaret. Are you grieving over Golden Oldies leaving? Of course you're not. Hey, who needs re-runs when you're living in the prime time. So, yo, Margaret - this crud's for you.

NEW COMPETITION

OK.  Here is a new competition for college-level teachers:  What is the most egregious student failure to recognize a cultural reference in one of your classes?  We could offer an old "What me worry?"  Alfred E. Newman MAD Comics T-Shirt as a prize.  I think I may have one around [very worn.]

YET ANOTHER INTERIM REPORT

Today I finished re-reading the great Chapter Ten of Capital, "The Working Day."  It is in this chapter that the clouds of mystification lift and the brutal reality of the factory system is revealed through the reports of the Parliamentary Factory Inspectors, most notably Leonard Horner.  It is here as well that we see the fruits of the endless hours Marx spent in the British Museum poring over volume after volume.

The challenge for me will be to help the students to see the connection between these stories of twelve, fourteen, eighteen hour days of grinding labor by children as young as nine and the world we live in now, where such labor, for the most part, has been "outsourced" so that it is out of sight and hence out of mind.  Part of my problem is achieving some sort of historical perspective in students who, after all, can only barely recall an American president before Obama.

I am reminded of my startling experience in a required graduate seminar I taught at UNC several years ago in the Public Policy Department, "Normative Dimensions of Public Policy."  One day, a propos I no longer recall what, I referred in passing to Gilbert and Sullivan, only to discover that not a single one of these intelligent, lively, socially committed students had ever even heard of Gilbert and Sullivan.  In particular, I must provide for my students some understanding of how much has been lost in the past two generations of the gains that American workers won through struggle in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.

Marx does not make things easy for the reader.  There are page-long footnotes in tiny print that are really an essential part of the book.  I must motivate the students to read all of it, not just the highlights.  Somehow I think spot quizzes are not the answer.

More and more I am coming to believe that this will be, at least for me, a truly memorable teaching experience.

TRANSLATIONS

Jerry Fresia raises a very interesting question.  He says "I would imagine too that the various editions of Capital (in languages other than German - and I am assuming this was Marx's essential language for writing) wouldn't carry along the subtlety and nuance from the original German."

Generally speaking, this is always true of translations, but here are some striking counterexamples.  At the very beginning of the crucial chapter on "The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power," in which the secret of profit is finally revealed, Marx writes, "müsste unser Geldbesitzer so glücklich sein etc etc."  The proper translation of this is: "the possessor of money must be so lucky as to find, within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value etc etc."

The correct translation of Geldbesitzer is possessor of money.  But in the English translation done by Marx's son-in-law [among others] and overseen by Engels himself, this passage is translated "Moneybags must be so lucky etc etc."  This is, of course, the source of the title of my second book on Capital.  Now Moneybags is a simply perfect translation of Geldbesitzer.  It conjures up those marvelous nineteenth century caricatures of capitalists as fat little men in top hats and tails with dollar or pound signs on their chests [see the old version of the board game Monopoly.]  It exactly renders Marx's mocking tone throughout the opening chapters.  And it references the etymological root of Geldbesitzer as someone sitting on something [a bag of gold.]

Here is another example.  In the famous Chapter One, in which Marx goes on for pages about the relative and equivalent forms of value [see Chapter Three of Moneybags, "Mrs. Feinschmeck's Blintzes, or Notes on the Crackpot Categories of Bourgeois Political Economy"], he speaks of linen exchanging for coats.  He says at one point, as Aveling et al. translated it, "the coat officiates as the form of value."  The German verb is gelten als, which means to be regarded as or to be considered as.  But throughout the chapter, Marx is playing brilliantly with the idea, which is central to his critique, that in a capitalist society people are treated as things and things as people [this is why he was such a fan of Dickens, who does the same thing in his novels.]  Aveling, Moore, and Engels' translation "officiates as" captures this perfectly.  One can just see the coat bowing politely to the linen as they go through their minuet of relative and equivalent value.

As for the French edition, which Marx personally oversaw, I have read a good deal of it [to improve my French -- lots of luck], and found that in French Marx sounds like Descartes.  But then, I have read In Defense of Anarchism in French, and I too sound like Descartes.  It occurred to me that in French, everyone sounds like Descartes.

GUILT PLEASURES

I had forgotten the exquisitely leisurely pace at which Marx unfolds his theory in the opening seven or eight chapters of Capital.  It is such a pleasure to re-read the text and watch him as he carefully, brick by brick, cobblestone by cobblestone, erects the barricade from behind which he will launch his assault on capitalism, calling down two thousand years of European literature as his witness.  Even now, after having written two books and half a dozen articles about this text, I find that my breath is taken away by its power, its sweep, its majesty.  I also realize that this is the first time since the Fall of 1977 that I have actually taught Capital.  [That semester, I offered a graduate seminar in Classics of Critical Social Theory, in which the students studied Marx, Freud, and Mannheim.  Fifteen students enrolled in the seminar, only two of whom were from the Philosophy Department.]

In the Spring, I am going to be taking my twenty students on an extraordinary adventure.