A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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against empirical data. In each of these cases, dialectics gets stripped away. Now, I am not in principle arguing that the analytical Marxists are wrong, that those who turn Marx into a positivist model-builder are deluded. Maybe they are right; but I do insist that Marx’s own terms are dialectical, and we are therefore obliged to grapple in the first instance with a dialectical reading of Capital.
One final point: our aim is to read Marx on Marx’s own terms, but inasmuch as I am guiding that approach, those terms will inevitably be affected by my interests and experiences. I have spent much of my academic life bringing Marxian theory to bear on the study of urbanization under capitalism, of uneven geographical development and of imperialism, and that experience has obviously affected the way in which I now read Capital. To begin with, these are practical, rather than philosophical or abstractly theoretical, concerns; my approach has always been to ask what Capital can reveal to us about how daily life is lived in the grand cities that capitalism has produced. Over the thirty-odd years of engagement I have had with this text, all manner of geographical, historical and social shifts have occurred. Indeed, one of the reasons I like to teach Capital every year is that each time I must ask myself how it will read differently, what about it will strike me that I didn’t notice before. I find myself coming back to Marx less for guidance than for potential theoretical insights as geography, history and people change. In the process, of course, I have in turn amended my understanding of the text. As the historical and intellectual climate confronts us with apparently unprecedented issues and perils, so the way we read Capital has also to shift and adapt.
Marx talks about this process of necessary reformulation and reinterpretation. Bourgeois theory understood the world in a certain way in the eighteenth century, he remarks, and then history moved on to make that theory and its theoretical formulations irrelevant (95–98). Ideas have to change or be reconfigured as circumstances change. Marx understood and represented the capitalist world luminously in the 1850s and 1860s, but the world has changed, and so the question must always be asked: in what ways is this text applicable to our own times? Unfortunately, in my view, the neoliberal counterrevolution that has dominated global capitalism over the past thirty years has done much to reconstitute globally those conditions that Marx so brilliantly deconstructed in the 1850s and 1860s in Britain. So in these readings I insert some of my own commentary on both the relevance of Capital to today’s world and the reading of the text that seems best to fit the tenor of the times.
Mostly, though, I want you to come away with your own reading of Capital. That is, I hope you will engage with the text in terms of your own distinctive experience—intellectual, social, political—and learn from it in your own fashion. I hope you will have a good and enlightening time speaking to the text, as it were, and letting the text speak back to you. That kind of dialogue with the text is a wonderful exercise in seeking to understand what appears almost impossible to understand. It is the business of each reader to translate Capital into meaning for his or her own life. There is, and can be, no ultimate and definitive reading precisely because the world perpetually changes. As Marx would probably have said, Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the ball, now run with it!
CHAPTER 1: THE COMMODITY
Section 1: Use-Value and Value
Let me begin by looking at the first section of chapter 1 in considerable detail. I do so in part because Marx here lays out fundamental categories in an a priori and somewhat cryptic, take-it-or-leave-it fashion that could do with elaboration. But I am also interested in getting you, as quickly as possible, familiar with the kind of close reading of Capital that is necessary if you are to understand it. Don’t worry, I will not continue at this level of intensity!
The commodity is Marx’s a priori beginning point. “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails,” he says, “appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity” (125). But notice something about the language. “Appears” occurs twice in the passage, and, plainly, “appears” is not the same as “is.” The choice of this word—and watch out for it, because Marx makes frequent use of it throughout Capital—signals that something else is going on beneath the surface appearance. We are immediately invited to think about what this might be. Notice also that Marx is exclusively concerned with the capitalist mode of production. He is not concerned with ancient modes of production, socialist modes of production or even hybrid modes of production, but with a capitalist mode of production in a pretty pure form. It is always important to remember this in what follows.
Starting with commodities turns out to be very useful because everyone has daily contact with and experience of them. We are surrounded by them at every turn, we spend time shopping for them, looking at them, wanting them or spurning them. The commodity form is a universal presence within a capitalist mode of production. Marx has chosen the common denominator, something that is familiar and common to us all, irrespective of class, race, gender, religion, nationality, sexual preference or whatever. We know about commodities in an everyday way, and they are, furthermore, essential to our existence: we have to buy them in order to live.
Commodities are traded in the market, and this immediately poses the question: what kind of economic transaction is this? The commodity is something that meets a human want, need or desire. It is something external to us that we take possession of and make ours. But Marx immediately declares he is not interested in “the nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination.” All he is interested in is the simple fact that people buy commodities and that this act is foundational to how people live. There are, of course, millions of commodities in the world, and all of them are different in terms of their material qualities and how they are described quantitatively (pounds of flour, pairs of socks, kilowatts of electricity, yards of cloth, etc.). But Marx pushes all this immense diversity to one side, saying that the discovery of “the manifold uses of things is the work of history,” as is the “invention of socially recognized standards of measurement for the quantities of these useful objects” (125). But he needs to find some way to talk about the commodity in general. “The usefulness of a thing,” can best be conceptualized as a “use-value” (126). This concept of use-value will be vital in everything that follows.
Notice how quickly he abstracts from the incredible diversity of human wants, needs and desires, as well as from the immense variety of commodities and their weights and measures, in order to focus on the unitary concept of a use-value. This is illustrative of an argument he makes in one of the prefaces, where he says that the problem for social science is that we cannot isolate and conduct controlled experiments in a laboratory, so we have to use the power of abstraction instead in order to arrive at similar scientific forms of understanding (90). In this opening passage you see this process of abstraction at work for the first, but certainly not the last, time.
But “in the form of society to be considered here” (i.e., capitalism), commodities “are also the material bearers … of … exchange-value.” Be careful about the word “bearer,” because bearing something is not the same as being something. Commodities are bearers of something else which has yet to be defined. So how do we discover what the commodity is a bearer of? When we look at actual exchange processes in the market, we witness an immense variety of exchange ratios between, for example, shirts and shoes and apples and oranges, and these exchange ratios vary a great deal even for the same products according to time and place. So at first sight it seems as if exchange ratios are “something accidental and purely relative” (but note the word “relative”). From this it would “appear” that the idea of “an intrinsic value, i.e. an exchange value that is inseparably connected with the commodity, inherent in it, seems a contradiction in terms” (126). On the other hand, everything is in principle exchangeable with everything else. Commodities can keep