Marx's 'Capital'

Ben Fine, Alfredo Saad-Filho

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781783714544
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Comunismo, poscomunismo y socialismo

This brilliantly concise book is a classic introduction to Marx's key work, Capital. In print now for over a quarter of a century, and previously translated into many languages, the new edition has been fully revised and updated, making it an ideal modern introduction to one of the most important texts in political economy.The authors cover all central aspects of Marx's economics. They explain the structure of Marx's analysis and the meaning of the key categories in Capital, showing the internal coherence of Marx's approach. Marx's method and terminology are explored in detail, with supporting examples. Short chapters enable the meaning and significance of Marx's main concepts to be grasped rapidly, making it a practical text for all students of social science. Discussing Capital's relevance today, the authors consider Marx's impact on economics, philosophy, history, politics and other social sciences. Keeping abstract theorising to a minimum, this readable introduction highlights the continuing relevance of Marx's ideas in the light of the problems of contemporary capitalism.

1

History and Method

Throughout his adult life Marx pursued the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society, most famously through his writings, but also through agitation and organisation of the working class – for example, between 1864 and 1876 he was one of the leaders of the First International Working Men’s Association. In his written works, Marx attempts to uncover the general process of historical change, to apply this understanding to particular types of societies, and to make concrete studies of specific historical situations. This chapter briefly reviews Marx’s intellectual development and the main features of his method. The remainder of the book analyses in further detail other aspects of his work, especially those to be found in the three volumes of Capital, his leading work of political economy.

Marx’s Philosophy

Karl Marx was born in Germany in 1818 and began an early university career studying law. His interest quickly turned to philosophy, which, at that time, was dominated by Hegel and his disciples. They were idealists, believing that theoretical concepts can legitimately be developed more or less independently of material reality. For the Hegelians, reality is the outcome of an evolving system of concepts, or movement towards the ‘Absolute Idea’, with a structure of concepts connecting the relatively abstract to the increasingly concrete. The Hegelians believed that intellectual progress explains the advance of government, culture and the other forms of social life. Therefore, the study of consciousness is the key to the understanding of society, and history is a dramatic stage on which institutions and ideas battle for hegemony. In this ever-present conflict, each stage of development contains the seeds of its own transformation into a higher stage. Each stage is an advance on those that have preceded it, but it absorbs and transforms elements from them. This process of change, in which new ideas do not so much defeat the old as resolve conflicts or contradictions within them, Hegel called the dialectic.

Hegel died in 1831. When Marx was still a young man at university, two opposing groups of Hegelians, Young (radical) and Old (reactionary), both claimed to be Hegel’s legitimate successors. The Old Hegelians believed that Prussian absolute monarchy, religion and society represented the triumphant achievement of the Idea in its dialectical progress. In contrast, the Young Hegelians, dangerously anti-religious, believed that intellectual development still had far to advance. This set the stage for a battle between the two schools, each side believing a victory heralded the progress of German society. Having observed the absurdity, poverty and degradation of much of German life, Marx identified himself initially with the Young Hegelians.

However, Marx’s sympathy for the Young Hegelians was extremely short-lived, largely because of the influence on him of Feuerbach, who was a materialist. This does not mean that Feuerbach was crudely interested in his own welfare – in fact, his dissenting views cost him his academic career. He believed that far from human consciousness dominating life and existence, it was human needs that determined consciousness. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach mounted a simple but brilliant polemic against religion. Humans needed God because religion satisfied an emotional need. To satisfy this need, humans had projected their best qualities on to a God figure, worshipping what had been made to the extent that God had assumed an independent existence in human consciousness. To regain their humanity, people need to substitute the love of each other for the love of God.

Marx was immediately struck by this insight. Initially he criticised Feuerbach for seeing people as individuals struggling to fulfil a given ‘human nature’, rather than as social beings. However, he soon moved beyond Feuerbach’s materialism. He did this in two ways. First, he extended Feuerbach’s materialist philosophy to all dominant ideas prevailing in society, beyond religion to ideology and people’s conception of society as a whole. Second, he extended Feuerbach’s ideas to history. Feuerbach’s analysis had been entirely ahistorical and non-dialectical: humans satisfy an emotional need through religion, but the origins and nature of that need remain unexplained and unchanging, whether satisfied by God or not. Marx sees the solution to this problem in material conditions. Human consciousness is critical in Marx’s thought, but it can only be understood in relation to historical, social and material circumstances. In this way, Marx establishes a close relationship between dialectics and history, which would become a cornerstone of his own method. Consciousness is primarily determined by material conditions, but these themselves evolve dialectically through human history.

Whether in the minds of Hegel, his various disciples and critics, or Marx, this account reveals a common property in their thought – that things do not always immediately appear as they are. For Feuerbach, for example, God does not exist other than in the mind, but appears to do so to satisfy a human need. Under capitalism, a free labour market conceals exploitation, and political democracy suggests equality rather than continuing privilege and power. This divorce between reality (or content or essence) and the way it appears (or form) is a central aspect of Marx’s dialectical thought. It forges the link between abstract concepts (such as class, value and exploitation, for example) and their concrete and practical presence in everyday life (through wages, prices and profits).

The task that Marx sets himself, primarily for capitalism, and which he recognises as extremely demanding, with, in his own words, no royal road to science, is to trace the connection and the contradictions between the abstract and the concrete. It involves adopting an appropriate method, a judicious starting point in choice of the abstract concepts, and a careful unfolding of their historical and logical content to reveal the relationship between the way things are and the way they appear to be.

Significantly, as will be clear from Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism (in Chapter 2), appearances are not necessarily simply false or illusory as in religious beliefs. We cannot wish away wages, profits and prices even when we have recognised them to be the form in which capitalism organises exploitation, just as we cannot wish away the powers of the monarch or priest when we become a republican or atheist respectively. For, in the case of wages, prices and profits, the appearances are part and parcel of reality itself, both representing and concealing more fundamental aspects of capitalism that an appropriate dialectics is designed to reveal. How is this complexity to be unravelled?

Marx’s Method

In contrast with his extensive writings on political economy, history, anthropology, current affairs and much else, Marx never wrote a detailed essay on his own method. This is because his work is primarily a critique of capitalism and its apologists, in which methodology plays an essential but supporting role, and is generally submerged within other arguments. More generally, Marx’s method cannot be summarised into a set of universal rules; specific applications of his materialist dialectics must be developed in order to address each problem. The best-known example of the application of Marx’s method is his critical examination of capitalism in Capital. In this work, Marx’s approach has five important broad features. These will be added to and refined, often implicitly, throughout the text.

First, social phenomena and processes exist, and can be understood, only in their historical context. Trans-historical generalisations, supposedly valid everywhere and for all time, are normally either invalid, or vacuous, or both. Human societies are immensely flexible. They can be organised in profoundly different ways, and only detailed analysis can offer valid insights about their internal structure, workings, contradictions, changes and limits. In particular, Marx considers that societies are distinguished by the mode of production under which they are organised – feudalism as opposed to capitalism, for example. Each mode of production is structured according to its class relations, for which there are appropriate corresponding categories of analysis. Just as a wage labourer is not a serf or a slave who happens to be paid a salary, so a capitalist is not a feudal baron receiving profit in place of tribute. Societies are distinguished by the modes of production and the modalities of surplus extraction under which they are organised (rather than the structures of distribution), and the concepts used to understand them must be similarly specific.

Second, then, theory loses its validity if pushed beyond its historical and social limits. This is a consequence of the need for concepts to be drawn out from the societies they are designed to address. For example, Marx claims that in capitalism the workers are exploited because they produce more value than they appropriate through their wage (see Chapter 3); this gives rise to surplus value. This conclusion, and the corresponding notion of surplus value, are valid only for capitalist societies. It may shed some indirect light on exploitation in other societies, but the modes of exploitation and the roots of social and economic change in these societies must be sought afresh – analysis of capitalism, even if correct, does not automatically provide the principles by which to understand how non-capitalist societies are structured.

Third, Marx’s analysis is internally structured by the relationship between theory and history. In contrast with Hegelian idealism, Marx’s method is not centred upon conceptual derivations. For him, purely conceptual reasoning is essential but limited, because it is impossible to address how the relations evolving in the analyst’s head ought to correspond to those in the real world. More generally, idealism errs because it seeks to explain reality primarily through conceptual advance, even though reality exists historically and materially outside of the thinking head. Jokingly, Marx suggested that the Young Hegelians would be able to abolish the laws of gravity if they could just escape from believing in them! In contrast, Marx recognises that reality is shaped by social structures and tendencies and counter-tendencies (which can be derived dialectically, given the appropriate historical setting), as well as by unpredictable contingencies (which cannot be so derived). The outcomes of their interactions can be explained both as they unfold and retrospectively, but they cannot be determined in advance. Consequently, although materialist dialectics can help in understanding both the past and the present, the future is impossible to foretell (Marx’s analysis of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and its counter-tendencies, is a telling example of this approach; see Chapter 9). Marx’s recognition that historical analysis belongs within the method of study (or that history and logic are inseparable) is not a concession to empiricism; it merely acknowledges the fact that a shifting reality cannot be reduced to, let alone determined by, a system of concepts.

Fourth, materialist dialectics identifies the key concepts, structures, relationships and levels of analysis required for the explanation of the concrete, or more complex and specific outcomes. In Capital, Marx employs materialist dialectics to pinpoint the essential features of capitalism and their contradictions, to explain the structure and dynamics of this mode of production, and to locate the potential sources of historical change. His study systematically brings out more complex and concrete concepts which are used to reconstruct the realities of capitalism in thought. These concepts help to explain the historical development of capitalism and indicate its critical vulnerabilities. In doing this, concepts at distinct levels of abstraction always co-exist in Marx’s analysis. Theoretical progress includes the introduction of new concepts, the refinement and reproduction of the existing concepts at greater levels of concreteness and complexity, and the introduction of historical evidence in order to provide a richer and more determinate account of reality.

Finally, Marx’s method focuses upon historical change. In the Communist Manifesto, the preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and the introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx famously summarises his account of the relationship between structures of production, social relations and historical change. Marx’s views have sometimes been interpreted mechanically, as if the supposedly unilinear development of technology unproblematically guides historical change – in which case social change is narrowly determined by the development of production. This interpretation of Marx is invalid. There are overlapping relationships of mutual determination between technology, society and history (and other factors) but in ways that are invariably influenced by the mode of social organisation. For example, under capitalism technological development is primarily driven by the profit imperative across all commercial activity. Under feudalism, the production of luxury goods and (military) services and, to a certain extent, agricultural implements is paramount, which, in the absence of the profit motive and given the relative inflexibility of the mode of social organisation, limits the scope and pace of technical advance. In contrast, Marx argues that in communist societies technological development would seek to eliminate repetitive, physically demanding, unsafe and unhealthy tasks, reduce overall labour time, satisfy basic needs and develop human potential (see Chapter 14).

Marx’s Economics

In 1845–46, when he was writing The German Ideology with Engels and the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx had already begun to be influenced by the French socialists. Their ideas cannot be discussed here in detail. Suffice it to say that they were fostered by the radical heritage of the French Revolution and the failure of the emerging bourgeois society to realise the demands of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’. The French socialists were also deeply involved in class politics, and many believed in the necessity and possibility of revolutionary seizure of power by the workers.

Marx’s synthesis between German philosophy and French socialism would have remained incomplete without his critique of British political economy, which he studied later, especially during his long exile in London from 1849 until his death in 1883. Given his conceptions of philosophy and history, explained above, it was natural for Marx to turn his study to economics in order to understand contemporary capitalist society and identify its strengths and limitations, and its potential for transformation into a socialist (communist) society. To do this he immersed himself in British political economy, in particular developing the labour theory of value from the writings of Adam Smith and, especially, David Ricardo. For Marx, it is insufficient to base the source of value on labour time of production, as Ricardo presumes. For Ricardo’s view takes for granted the existence of exchange, prices and commodities. That commodities are more valuable because they embody more labour begs the question of why there are commodities at all, let alone whether it is a relevant abstraction to proceed as if, in general, they exchange in proportion to the labour time necessary for their production. This anticipates the next chapter, but it illustrates a key feature of Marx’s method and a common criticism by Marx of other writers. Marx finds other economists not only wrong in content but also inadequate in intent. What economists tend to assume as timeless features of humans and societies, Marx was determined to root out and understand in historical context.

Marx does take for granted the need (for society) to work in order to produce and consume. However, the way in which production is organised has to be revealed, and the dependence of other social relations on this requires explanation both structurally and historically. Very briefly, Marx argues that when working – producing the material conditions for their individual and social reproduction – people enter into definite social relations with each other, as slave or master, lord or serf, capitalist or wage earner, and so on. Patterns of life are determined by existing social conditions, in particular the places to be filled in the process of production. These relations exist independently of individual choice, even though they have been established in the course of the historical development of society (for example, no one can ‘choose’ to occupy the social position of a slave-owner in today’s capitalist societies, and even the ‘choice’ between being a capitalist or a wage worker is not freely available to everyone and certainly not on an equal basis).

In all but the simplest societies, the social relations of production specific to a particular mode of production (feudalism, capitalism, and so on) are best studied as class relations. These relations are the basis on which the society is constructed and reproduces itself over time. Just as freedom to own, buy and sell are key legal characteristics of capitalist society, so divine or feudal obligations are the legal foundations of feudalism. In addition, self-justifying political, legal, intellectual and distributional forms are also established, are mutually supportive, and tend to blinker and discourage all but the most conventional views of society, whether by force of habit or otherwise. The serf feels bound by loyalty to master and king, often by way of the church, and any vacillation can be punished severely. The wage earner has both freedom and compulsion to sell labour power. There can be struggle for higher wages, but this does not question the wage system or the legal and institutional framework supporting it, ranging from collective bargaining to the social security and credit systems, and so on. In contrast, probing into the nature of capitalism is frowned upon by the authorities and by other dominant voices in society. Whereas individual dissent is often tolerated, large anti-capitalist organisations and mass movements are invariably repressed.

In this context, Marx castigates the classical political economists and the utilitarians for assuming that certain characteristics of human behaviour, like greed, are permanent features of ‘human nature’ when, in reality, they are characteristics emerging in individuals through their living in particular societies. Consequently, they also take for granted those features of capitalist society that Marx felt it necessary to explain: the monopoly of the means of production by a small minority, the wage employment of the majority, the distribution of the products by monetary exchange, and remuneration involving the economic categories of prices, profits and wages.

Marx’s value theory is a penetrating contribution to social science in that it concerns itself with the relations that people set between themselves, rather than the technical relationships between things or the art of economising. Marx is not interested in constructing a price theory, a set of efficiency criteria or a series of welfare propositions; he never intended to be an ‘economist’ or even a (classical) political economist. Marx was a critical social scientist, whose work straddles, and rejects, the barriers separating academic disciplines. The crucial questions for Marx concern the internal structure and sources of stability and crises in capitalism, and how the will to change it can develop into successful transformative (revolutionary) activity. These questions remain valid into the twenty-first century.

Issues and Further Reading

Several biographies of Karl Marx are available; see, for example, David McLellan (1974), Fr...