Marx lecture - John Hutnyk 1998 (updated 2011 and 2012) DRAFT notes (rough edit 2015)

This is not a book for recitation, we are not all going to sing from the same hymn sheet. There are reasons to reread over again and find different meanings and interpretation than before – times change, inspiration finds many ways.

Capital. I want to convince you of several things in the coming 14 weeks.

that commodities are not the be all and end all of Capital, though our obsession with trinkets would suggest so.

that shopping is civil war.

that the question of how we should live, and reproduce, is fundamental to the study of culture – but this is an ethical political question not a morality.

that without organisation there is no theory – without theory there is no organisation.

that you don't have to fuck people over to survive.

1

How to start reading that rich book that is Marx’s Capital of which an immense, even monstrous, accumulation of commentary on the Marxist mode of literary production appears to have already shaped its elementary forms?

A great many declarations of the relevance of Marx, asserted again for a long time and now more than ever, are available on the shelves. Bookstores are not quite but almost awash with explanations of why it is that, since Capital is global, Marx too has his global moment (again – ‘workers of the world unite’). Nor are we lacking in texts that explain how twenty years ago the eclipse of sausage-and-three-veg versions of socialism, the renunciation of Stalinism and really existing communism, the decline of bureaucratic left or the orthodox Leninist Party etc., means Marx, and Communism, can at last be freed of its bad reputation (as said by Guattari and Negri, but see also everyone from Jean-Luc Nancy to Slavoj Žižek and back again). I wish it were possible not to take sides, but these texts influence readings – so at least we can agree with Daniel Bensaïd that ‘we no longer have the excuse of his [Marx’s] capture by the bureaucracy and confiscation by the state to duck the responsibility of rereading and reinterpreting’ (Bensaïd 2002:xi).

There are dozens of commentaries and guides and introductions and prefaces on Marx and Marxism. Indeed the history of Marxism is an instructive lesson in how

2

reading is multiple and contested. A fratricidal spectacle even. The Marxism-Leninism of the Bolsheviks, the varieties of Stalinism, Council communism, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Lukacs, the Maoists, the Althusserians, the Surrealists, Bataille, Adorno, Heidegger even, of course the well meaning existentialists, Sartre, the eurocommunists, Trotskyists and autonomes, in a certain sense Foucault, and, with flying vaginas and speeding penises our favourite two-headed beast Deleuze-Guattari (a strange echo of the Marx-Engels head-birth, repeated again as farce as Hardt-Negri, then as Badiou- Žižek – and I think by now I’ve heard all the jokes about Badizek, Zizzidou) including a call to a return to reading Marx by Jacques Derrida in the 1990s – ‘when was it time to have ever left off’, said Spivak. After that implosion of communism in Eastern Europe, all manner of declarations that Marx was relevant again, rereleases of the Manifesto on the 150th anniversary, and recently, Harvey’s lectures on Capital – which reorders the book, and Jameson’s very good volume as well as Eagletone’s somewhat annoying, but pint-sised and so welcome response to the ten worst objections – if you think somehow Marx is too ancient to be relevant to contemporary capital, that its good in theory but impracticable and will lead to totalitarianism, has a deterministic view of history, is too economistic, too dry, that the working class is over, or that violent revolution will only bring in a bloodthirsty absolutist state (or that this might be a bad thing) and that Marx has nothing to say to

3

those of ‘us’ moderns, or postmoderns, who are committed to feminism, anti-racism, postcolonialism, environmentalism, gay rights, animal rights, ethnicity, individualism, transindividualism, grass roots collectivism, peace love and all – and assuming you can endure some of the wooden prose and somewhat tedious jokes – then Eagleton’s book is worth downloading from Pirate Bay (he certainly earns sufficient for us not to need to contribute royalties in every case). See also Michael Lebowitz’s Following Marx, Jacques Bidet Exploring Marx’s Capital, Peter Osborne offers How to Read Marx, Stephen Shapiro How to Read Marx’s Capital, Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho’s ‘expert guide’, the excellent Simon Clarke (available online) and Continuum gives us Marx for the Perplexed. More and more texts to read on how to read Marx. It is as if we can never be done with prefaces, never get to actually read Marx, instead to read about reading Marx. Even Žižek, who has voluminous introductions to reissues of the writings of Mao and an excellent volume of essays by Lenin, would seem rather have us read Lacan instead of Marx, or perhaps just Badiou. When Žižek does cite Marx, it seems as if it is by memory – he gets the opening line wrong, as we shall see. Jacques Derrida spends a lot of time talking about how to start. We will spend much of the second week discussing his feints and whispered asides to a certain spirit that haunts all reading of Marx. The ontological status of a preface is nothing to be taken lightly, pace Hamlet, as again we will see. But

4

let’s learn at least one thing – we would do well to open the pages up and actually read Marx, instead of all these others.

This is not to say the assembled prefaces are not useful or that they do not teach us many things. For sure they do – the commentaries that come down to us are a growing record of really important and relevant struggles, it is the history and record of Marxism. Even before looking at what others have said, even Capital has no less than 7 pre and post-faces before the text proper. Why would there be so many intros, prefaces and afterwords to the start of Capital if we were not supposed to be forewarned of certain difficulties – specifically of Hegelian coquettery, dangers of misreading, and the mechanics of abstraction. This deserves close attention, but so also does the words of Marx, and Engels.

Of course Engels also tampers with the text, but by now we know there is no originary text. We cannot read the text exactly as Marx intended.

The context has changed – Like Borges’ Pierre Menard rewriting Don Quixote 200 years after Cervantes but in totally new and profound circumstances, we can imagine a different contemporary context for Das Kapital. You will see Marx refer to shifts of emphasis and plan in Kapital several times, as of course does everyone.

5

Of course we should, and cannot not, read Marx for our own times. If there is some correspondence between theory and circumstance (economy and thinking, ideas and context, extension and interiority) we must also recognise we try to work out this relation with difficulty because we are already on the way. At least, now, with some hindsight, we can see how we invent a new Marx for our times each decade or so – 1960s Althusserian, which has shaped French thinking ever since; 1970s structuralist; 1980s the rise of autonomist interpretations and a Trotskyite revision, which has harmed English Marxism ever since;1990s and after, Derrida its spectral and naive abstract globalism; 2000s a techno-machine/immaterial/affective care and fear (of terror) – and in the 2010's it may well be apocalypse, end-times, revolutionary possibilities and ‘interregnum bursting asunder’ and the consequences of austerity and crisis – plus the coming war with China.

The course will offer us a chance to think about the importance of banks for Capital (credit as a force in production), the significance of Education and training, of race and white supremacy as a context for the so-called primitive accumulation (property) and wage labour trade union struggles (of which Marx was critical), as well as how to do research, research materials, class composition and recomposition of capital, time, technology and tactics... I

6

am not sure we can finally decide, in the last instance, which Marx is for our times, but some attention to the way we read and why is a good place to start.

An open reading of Capital can be very important for cultural studies no matter what the time, but also at this time. Open reading requires opening the book, not reliant upon the patina of speculation and rumour that surrounds it. Of course we must also read with a view to the dangers of that reading, and the way we too will read Marx through a prism that can become a prison. Suffice to say there is no guarantee that a new kind of quarantine and detention will be in store for Marx given renewed popularity. The primers and guides abound – the danger is that a clerical police countenance, having sought and found the correct attitude and which brave face to put up for the teaching and direction of Marx, may mean we soon suffer from too much instruction.

To which I can only add an attempt to trip up the security guards and try to smuggle in several counterfeit or contraband versions of the text for your edification. Read through the prism bars as an escapade in radical thinking, reading Marx promiscuously, without apology. You need no qualification to read, beyond literacy and a copy of the text, and, the damndest thing of all, a desire to question everything.

7

We need to prepare to read this book. This cannot be a clean slate, but we can try to trick ourselves into something like that. Hence the trick of a dead poets society moment where it would be possible, and even plausible, to insist on channelling Robin Williams and rip out spurious introductions, for example that of the Secretary of the Fourth International, Trotskyite Ernest Mandel, in the Penguin Edition. Although we should never trust a Trot, there is not much to be gained from this merely theatrical gesture. This is not to say the SWP are not annoying, patronising, parachuting in on campaigns, deep entryist, no real program except promotion of their own programme-less party, and responsible for the failure of the anti-war movement, and endless splits and almost annual divisions and expulsions, but just to suggest this is rather to remind us that all introductions are framing, and we should ask where they are coming from. This includes anything I can say.

For all the interest in Marx, in the past and renewed today, it is at least worth attempting at first to read anew. Yet this vast accumulation of commentary stands before us.

I will offer you my reading, and read with you. Of course perspectival, and sometimes naïvely so. In reading Capital, if anything about beginnings should be considered necessary, it might be good just to start with what is

8

immediately at hand. There are too many prefaces, No ‘one’ book. Even the authorship is a problem, except perhaps for Capital, the major theoretical text that the author Marx released into the world.There is much discussion and theory about this, and its probably naïve to simply say that materialism might start with things themselves, but why not start with the objects, commodities, souvenirs or detritus of our lives? There surely is enough stuff of which to take account in our contemporary world. Plenty of junk. Marx himself has much to say on waste and shit, that which is slurred off in the process of production gets incorporated again, not just recycling, but a number of circuits – in volume three of Capital this becomes crucial (see http://hutnyk.blogspot.com/2007/05/theory-of-shit.html)

But we are not at volume three as yet, by any means, though it is a key to the beginning of volume one, where Marx starts with an immense or monstrous collection or accumulation of commodities, it is also crucial that materialism as material-ism would have to take account of all this stuff from the perspective of the whole, of totality (Lukacs). This will never be easy or straightforward – an impossible accounting, which must nevertheless be our aim. The collection too is not that of a collector, but the monstrous accumulation of capitalist society. Though even if documentation of all this stuff is forever incomplete, and that in all the varied and multiple efforts, interpretations

9

are, or should be, always contested, to do so still betrays a totalising ambition. We might also call this a reckoning to come. And perhaps still the collection is messianic, the collector divine (Benjamin).

But that is to get ahead of things a little, the task here is to start to read a text, and then to relate it to our present conjuncture.

There are many possible starts

There are many versions of Marx, and of Capital, and it would be easy but false to say each reader reads anew, and this false-easy is most wrong if it goes on to hope that each reader can fashion their own reading and their own Marx. But how can we think that the vast apparatus surrounding this book – translations, versions, commentaries, pronouncements, parties, revolutions, trials, tributes, reaffirmations, libraries, academia, bookshops, footnotes, conferences, course guides – so as to do just that? And can we recover this book from all that? Of course not, and yet.

I want to begin with something, or even someone, who might seem the total antithesis of the celebrated critic of capitalism. Marx was not a rich man, however well bred, well married, well educated, he was in and out of the pawn shop, knew a lot, intimately, about debt, borrowing, credit,

10

and – as is very well known – relied upon a certain moneybags called Frederic Engels very often to get by. Engels though, whatever his peculiar foibles in taking up with two sisters, riding to hounds, effecting a mourning jacket and partial to fine liqueurs, does not deserve to be lampooned.

I want to start with some guidance on reading. Not to be prescriptive however – I will have a lot to say about such things. To attempt to clear away some of the hurdles to reading, yet also to acknowledge that there is no start that has not already started. We come to the book already opened, even before turning a page.

The dedication, for example, of Volume One is to Wilhelm Wolff, active in the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee and a member of the League of the Just in addition to being Co-founder of the League of Communists in 1848, having met up as an editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, he became, at his death, the benefactor of Marx providing money that was used for Marx to travel with the manuscript to the Hamburg publishers. The dedication reads ‘to my unforgettable friend, intrepid, faithful, noble protagonist of the proletariat, born in Tarnau on June 21 1809, died in exile in Manchester on May 9, 1864’ (Marx 1867/1967: preface). Note here the mention of exile and of Manchester – already significant code words in the Marxist lexicon. In a

11

reminiscence Engels wrote of his later years: ‘For several years Wolff was the only comrade I had in Manchester with the same views as myself; no wonder that we met almost daily and that I then again had more than ample opportunity of admiring his almost instinctively correct assessment of current events’ (Engels 18761).

Was Marx writing for Wolff, an old comrade from the German revolution of 1848? Marx has earlier times in mind. The Preface to the first edition – this is a Preface by Marx – tells us this is a continuation of a text from eight years before – Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie or A Critique of Political Economy. This text is summarised, in part – some thing consigned to later volumes – in chapter one and ‘The Presentation is improved’. The presentation is improved with French and German readers in mind. Marx then reminds us that ‘Beginnings are always difficult’ (penguin p89, Deutsch p11). Well, the value form is simple, but for 2000 years nutting it out has been a task. Some claim this!

In the first Preface Marx tells us that the work was delayed for so many years because of illness. I would add poverty and insert questions of biography here – how much do biographical details shape our reading. The journalist Francis Wheen makes much of this, but there is a possible

1 Engels, 'Wilhelm Wolff' Written: between June and September 1876; First published: in Die Neue Welt, July 1, 8, 22, 29; Sept 30; Oct. 7, 14, 21, 28; Nov. 4, 25, 1876; Translated: Barrie Selman for Collected Works; http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/wolff/index.htm

12

sense that when Marx writes of the bourgeoisie remembering his carbuncles till their dying day, he might well have meant this as a kind of barbed pun – they will remember my pearls of wisdom/lashings of them forever, sort of thing (thanks Rudy Nadler-Nir http://www.toingtoing.com/?p=15). Whatever the case, Marx in the period between writing the Kritik and the publication of Capital is doing significant journalism for the New York Daily Tribune, on India, China and European politics, and for a Swiss journal on the American Civil War. It is then perhaps not insignificant that the preface to the first edition ends with a reference to the abolition of slavery – a sign of the times, the foreboding of the ruling class… after mention of the factory acts, the summarising of the earlier work, the popularised style of the text (against the plagiarist polemicist comrade Lassalle). Marx says the first part (in the first German edition chapter one is what will be the more simplified layout of the first three chapters of later editions) will post the greatest difficulty, but the rest is not difficult. After some comments on microscopes and abstraction – which will be important later –we have another comment directed to us. Marx writes: ‘I assume, of course, a reader who is wiling to learn something new and therefore think for themselves’ (gendered language modified D.12, P.90)

After this, some varied comments – Medusa’s head… factory inspectors … child labour … magic and monsters,

13

plus a hero with a cap pulled down over his eyes (or are they ours). Various literary allusions – Horace, Dante – we can read Kapital as literature, or even as high opera. The Horace quote is to remind German readers that although the examples are from industrial England, that story is about to become a German narrative too – hence a bit of Latin! – De ta Fabula narratur. It is Horace, from the Satires. Later, the end citation of a Dante citation is slightly twisted with a wider audience in mind, instead of ‘follow me’, Marx substitutes ‘Go your own way’ before the second clause ‘let the people talk’.

What is significant here is that Marx gives us clues to all several themes that should guide our reading. One, he is rewriting, two, he is reading – the Factory Acts and factory legislation, the struggles over slavery, three the implied reader, four, the other protaganists, the ruling class – they are personifications of economic categories, bearers (trager) of class relations and interests – we come back to this.

In the Preface to the second edition – 1872 we have mention for Kugelman, who suggested Marx should make things clearer for readers. Here we find section 4 of chapter 1 is altered considerably – the commodity fetishism section that is perhaps the best known (perhaps unfortunately). Marx is proud of the ‘peculiar charm’ of his style, in that it is not ‘dry and obscure’ and his response to

14

the continental revolution of 1848 takes issue with bourgeois harmonisers like the shallow John Stuart Mill who tries to ‘reconcile the irreconcilable’ (P.98 D.21). Nevertheless, for Kugelman, but not only for him, Marx rewrites.

Marx anticipates.

Marx was born in 1818, dies 1883. A German-Jew in a family converted to Christianity. Student in Bonn and Berlin, met Friedrich Engels in 1844, from which his first important works date, together they wrote The German Ideology, a critique of right Hegelians, and The Communist Manifesto. We all know this.

Manifesto – this was written over the winter of 47-48 for the International Workingmen’s Association. First drafted on the train from Manchester to London, then finished in a frenzy of work by Marx in Brussels in January 48. It influence astonishing, global, relevant still, etc.

Everyone can quote from it: from its first words: ‘Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa’ (1848/1970:41) – ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’, to its last words ‘Mögen die herrschenden Klassen vor iner kommunistischen Revolution zittern. Die Proletarier haben nichts in ihr zu verlieren als ihr Ketten. Sie haben eine Welt zu gewinnen.

15

Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch’ (1848/1970:82-3) – ‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries, unite’.

Perhaps most important for us as students are the passages in the Manifesto on how the capitalist system forces the bourgeoisie to expand everywhere, to try to extend its mode of production to all lands, to recruit and co-opt all peoples, increasingly, through advances in means of production, communication and coercion, to draw all peoples and all lands into industrial production. Hence colonialism, imperialism, transition...and that this, still very much on the cards today, is the latest manifestation of a struggle at the heart of hitherto existing societies, that is set out in the first pages of the Manifesto as a class struggle. Of course, the class struggle, and the communists who were haunting Europe, were at this point nascent. There were probably only a hundred communists, the prospects for revolutionary upsurge were perhaps not apparent, or only as apparent as they were, say, just before August 2011.

The Manifesto was written just as Europe launched into a period of revolutionary turmoil. Marx was himself an activist, expelled from Brussels and Germany for political reasons, exiled in Paris then London. He was, apparently, a

16

rebel rousing type, turning up to demos and meetings not always sober, but able, in repartee, to make mince meat of any other ideologues. The printing of the Manifesto in April 1848 preceeded a revolutionary upsurge in Germany by a matter of weeks. Marx moved to Cologne with other revolutionaries from the Communist League entering Germany carrying 1000 copies of the Manifesto, and a list of 17 Demands of the Communist Party in Germany that Marx had paid to have printed – the demands included a State Bank, Nationalisation of the Railways, progressive taxation, Free education and confiscation of the lands of the princes (McLelland 2006:181). Marx published an increasingly agitational newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, organised meetings, considered running as a candidate, increased activity among factory workers and peasants, raised funds for the cause, met with Bakunin in Berlin, gave lectures to the Workers Association (‘Wage Labor and Capital’) and, with the Prussian State facing down uprisings in Frankfurt, Vienna, and later the Ruhr, Baden and Dresden (where a young Richard Wagner was behind the barricades), radical publications banned, Marx dragged to court on libel charges (acquitted after 300 plus supporters that had come with him, and he had delivered an impressive speech), confrontations with the army, Marx was arrested and expelled. The last issue of the paper printed in red. The revolutionary period of 1848-9, did not deliver freedom. It might be possible to gloss this as meaning Marx’s hope for the situation was disappointed

17

and he thus (re)turned to the library. His whole career seems to move between these two poles – although he never gave up activism – he also was keen to seek an explanation. Writing the 18th Brumaire as an analysis of the struggles in France. His work on economics that begins what would be Capital is taken up some several years later in the context of another crisis. Throughout the 1950s Marx writes often on Colonialism and India, and in 1857 the crisis of capitalism provides him with crucial material for the Grundrisse (see letters on capital for Engels discussion with him including reports from the factory management office of Ermine, Engels and Co). Following Spivak, I want to stress this pattern – the Manifesto, and his other works, including the most theoretical, are written in the context of actual political events – of the type I’ve been emphasising...

Marx’s most important work, published in his 49th year, is Das Kapital, first appeared in 1867. This is so whether you go by his own assessment, evidenced by his allocation of so many years to its writing, or the uses made of the host of Marxists which follow his work in a multiplicity of ways. By the time the edition we read comes out, Marx is Dead. Engels edits, and re-edits the notes for the subsequent two volumes, Kautsky – later a renegade – prepares the historical material (3 volumes Theories of Surplus Value).

18

Crucial is that Marx writes volume one of Capital as the first part of six projected volumes, that did not appear. Volume one is about the dynamics of simple reproduction of Capital. The subtitle of the first edition was ‘A Critical Analysis of Capital’, changed for the second German edition of 1872 to ‘A Critique of Political Economy’. Note the shift, more to say about this and how it signals that the book will not be just an analysis of how things are and yet is not a blueprint for action, however much the old 11th thesis excuses all to stupid lurches into adventures. Marx expected his readers to read, to lay bear the workings of capital and the failures to understand of the political economists, so that, when the fetters on the working class struggle are thrown off, the old political science will be impossible. We owe him at least recognition that the work is also about the politics of knowledge, even as it is also a call to arms.

Marx, of course its now boring to even tell this, was the first to announce that he was not a Marxist. The various interpretations and reinterpretations offer good reason for thinking there was never just one Marxism. Interpretation becomes key, much of it done by scholars in sociology, economics, cultural studies, and by some anthropologists, but also done in practical politics and the sometimes violent scene of really existing Marxisms ranged across the globe throughout the previous century.

19

We will start with Das Kapital, but any introduction to this book is a misconstrual. So often, like perhaps Don Quixote, or the Bible, only the first chapter is read. To read just the section on commodities, even as this is the key to the whole, would be only to begin and thus to misrepresent. Das Kapital though is a fat book.

Various examples and evidence might be offered for this argument. Best of all I think is Felton C. Shortall's book The Incomplete Marx (1994) which tracks the various et in advance closures of Marx's various plans for Capital and where you can read of planned but not completed volumes on the state and on foreign trade. Another example, that does not require us to leave volume one, is the notice that Ben Fine and Laurence Harris make that when Marx talks of exchange it is ‘only present to the extent that is necessary for the existence of specifically capitalist production’, and the exchange of commodities amongst the capitalist class themselves is not considered until volume two and more fully in volume three (Fine and Harris 1979:16). Of course any careful reader knows that Marx had already said as much, though the extent to which this has passed people by, especially in English translation, or perhaps I should say paraphrase, is astonishing.

Are we even reading Marx? The first chapter that we read is actually the rewritten version of 1872-5 (French

20

serialisation plus German annotated version by Marx). Marx was already revising Marxism just five years after publication. The version we read is not the one of 1867 (acknowledged year of publication), but the English rendering of Engels’ fourth German edition.

Before examining what is changed in the rewriting, and why, it might be worth thinking about rewriting as a mode of work. Marx was always revising – Manifesto, German Ideology, Grundrisse and Capital (volumes 123456). There is also the issue of the mode of preservation versus the analysis – these two construed sometimes as different, but not separate, moments of the writing.

Engels preface to the English edition noted that he – Engels – had made changes according to notes Marx had left ‘indicating the passages of the second edition [in German] to be replaced by designated passages from the French text published in 1872-1875 (Engels, preface 1886 Lawrence and Wishhart edition 1970:4). A footnote indicates that ‘the latter part of the book … contains considerable alterations in and additions to the text’ (Engels 1886/1970:fn4). Well, who did this is also open to question. Eleanor Marx – Tussy – was the wife of the first translator into English and Engels notes she had a hand in the work: in the preface to that work (the English translation by Moore and Aveling, 1887) is an acknowledgement from Engels:

21

Mrs. Aveling, Marx's youngest daughter, offered to check the quotations and to restore the original text of the numerous passages taken from English authors and Blue books and translated by Marx into German (get Ref)

Let us just keep the role of Eleonor – Tussy – in mind here. She translated Madame Bovery, she is subject of a recent engaging biography by Rachel Holmes (2014), she was a comrade of many, she deserves her own course of lectures…

But we need to read Marx first, as she translated him. And we are only at present dealing with issues in Marx’s lifetime, Marx’s own edits to the text that he carried on to the very end. See the edits he added to his onw copy, extant in his library, itself contested, struggled over, legacy issues described by Holmes. The edits Marx makes see geared towards reading: https://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/marxs-own-copy-of-kapital-page-one/

But this is the end, the start is important too, but the start of what. Anderson will have us read the French version, as yet not translated into English (get REF). We can speculate as to why the text of Capital was rewritten when it was. In 1872 Marx agreed to a serialised publication of Capital, a year after the Paris Commune, revising substantially for clarity. In English we do not get all of this, despite Engels

22

efforts after Marx’s death, and still (See Anderson 1983). Engels himself in the preface to the fourth German edition notes the difficulties of working with Marx’s notes written in Paris, before he knew English, where he read English economists in French translation – a double translation effected when Marx then translated these into German. For the fourth edition, Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor worked with Engels to track down the original texts, but meaning and idiom must mean slips. We are reading in translation and in a process of multiple editing-translation. Let alone errors and contextual changes that inevitably tamper with meaning. This is always a problem. Consider the title of the first chapter – is it a mistake in the Lawrence and Wishart editions, to have the German ‘Die Waare’ become ‘Commodities’ (plural) in English? Is it better rendered as ‘The Commodity’ (singular, Waaren is plural, Die Waare). Then the first sentence of the Moore-Aveling (Tussy) translation (1887) is better, could one say? Is this significant, or quibbling? It seems not so big a thing, unless we consider that the issue of what we start with and where we start – what is at the ‘apparent’ beginning or centre of the analysis, is a ingle thing or a class of things. If we are going to quibble about translations, then the Penguin edition does seem the worse. Let me linger with it, a sentence to spent much time on because I am sure Marx also spent time on it, and indeed, the copy in his own library shows marks of him revising still and his notebooks from 1863 show earlier versions.... When, we don’t know

23

exactly, but the copy Engels and Tussy found in his library has his corrections. So, let’s take an angular approach, thinking of these issues as significant, ass matters of the presentation of important categories, of the personification, in people and things, of economic categories – as Marx himself says in the first preface.

When Marx in that first sentence says collection of commodities – in the first sentence – he does not mean someone who collects, so not Kane – though something like Kane as ‘personification of the economic category is very much on the cards. Commodities plural means perhaps something like the accumulated display of the Great Exposition. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

What did Engels, or Tussy, change in the various rewrites? We must watch for these as we go – but not be afraid to read, not to try to restore some pristine text. Nevertheless, Anderson says the ‘omitted or alternate texts cover the subjects of the role of private property in capitalism, alienation and unskilled factory work, capitalist crises, unemployment, and imperialism’ (Anderson 1983:71) – interesting, but in the absence of a suitable English comparative text, this remains difficult to judge. Certainly, the analysis of commodities as enhanced, and there are changes not only to the latter sections, but important passages in chapter one were added. (Pages xxx to xxx).

24

In 1998 Anderson gave a summary indication of where the MEGA publication of Capital was then up to, with plans, and funding, to continue:

Series II. Marx's Major Economic Writings. Of 15 volumes now planned, 10 have been published. Significantly, what has already been published includes all the editions of Vol. I of Capital which either Marx or Engels prepared for publication. Especially important here is Vol. II/10, a reprint of Engels’ 1890 fourth German edition, but with an important addition, an appendix which gathers together 60 pages of text, much of it very significant, from Marx's 1872-75 French edition of Vol. I. This material was not included by Engels in Vol. I, and has yet to appear in standard German or English editions of Vol. I. (Anderson 1998: http://www.kevin-anderson.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/anderson-article-uncovering-marx.pdf)

This MEGA Vol II/10 appendix is unavailable in English. In the French, and in part incorporated into the German 4th edition and the extant English edition, it is still possible to see more clearly that the argument proceeds by abstraction, by abstracting the kernel of a wider and more complicated system and showing the workings of the unreal scene of exchange, and then increasingly in chapter and chapter, widening the analysis, adding

25

ethnographic examples and heading towards the – never completed – comprehensive understanding of capitalism as a global system.

Althusser in Reading ‘Capital’ starts with a declaration that we should read Capital letter by letter, line by line, but he also will have us skipping section one until we have read the rest all the way through at least once (Althusser). The issue here is not just to begin, but to ‘begin to understand’ (http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpalthusser11.htm). One year I may suggest we begin from the end, with the sections on history, since Marx says he wrote this section first (Letter to Shott, November 3 1877, Letters on Capital p188). Elsewhere Marx advises Kugelmann to tell his wife to start with the chapter on the Working Day (November 30 1867, Letters on Capital p120), the chapter on women’s and child’s labour (Ch 10 in English, chapter 8 in German). There are many options. And disputes over where to begin, you will be surprised to know, sometimes quite spiteful. Ranciere reacts to Althusser’s reading – the line by line comment – by saying that to read like that ‘we must first be assured that there indeed exists a book, Capital, that Marx wrote’ (Ranciere 2004[1998]:131) Althusser ‘in fact produces and extraordinary theatricalisation of the text’ of Capital, (Ranciere 2004[1998]:141). Why is this a surprise.

26

What do we want to do? – probably we want by now to begin to read Capital. But already we have moved far too fast – an understanding of capital as global system is more than we could hope for. Marx offers several warnings before we read:

As mentioned, Marx will ‘pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think (D.12.P.90 NI:8). The implied reader is something to which we might also aspire, since thinking for yourself and learning something new are the criteria for thinking and learning anything at all – as Foucault also wrote, the question of whether it is possible to think differently is the only reason for continuing to think at all.

What are we to think about: Capital as system, but starting with commodity. There are no people at the start. Marx warns ‘individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personification of economic categories, embodiments of particular class relations and class interests’ (Marx 1867/1970:10). But Capital is a social system – the commodity in this use is a social form. The code word that indicates this in the very first sentence, which will be looked at more carefully below, is ‘society’. Margaret Thatcher famously said there was ‘no such thing as society’. I can assure you, she was certainly not a Marxist.

27

Marx sets out a dialectical method – ever so briefly, but notes this is the opposite of the method of Hegel. Here is another personification I suppose. Like the protagonists – the capitalist class who has an interest in the development (and exploitation) of the working class – since a developed working class best develops the productive forces – we think Hegel dialectically, with a model of critique that comes from, yet inverts, reverts, the great suddenly out of fashion (today, very much the fashion) Hegel. Marx ‘coquettes’ – flirts – with Hegel and distinguishes between method of presentation and method of analysis (P102, D27). This too is important and we should keep it in mind when we ask why Marx starts as he does. In the preface to the second edition of Capital, Marx writes: ‘Of course the method of presentation must differ from that of inquiry’ and ‘my dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct opposite’ (Marx 1867/1970:19). I am not going to enter the swamps of spinning Hegels on this occasion (see Tom Bunyard’s book from his PhD, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths), but the question of method, presentation and dialectics is relevant to how we read. So, to stress this – the procedure is dialectical. Yet, not exactly the same as Hegel’s ‘mystified dialectic’, (it is always more complicated than thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis etc). Nicole Pepperell has prepared a useful primer to many of the various feints and staged voices in chapter one (See The Devils Party, essay one – Pepperell 2009) but it might be possible to gloss that set of

28

hesitations in a more progressive way – Marx offers a procedure that allows a stitching back and forth between complex examples and accumulating understanding.

Capital – we need to read this in several ways, as a dialectical versioning of Marx’s thinking and this first sentence announces the basic premise of critical Hegelian dialectics – that is, a Hegel stood back on his head by Marx after Feuerbach turned him upside down (this will have to be explained). We can read this sentence with the help of Adorno, for example as a critical Hegelianism that rails against identity. The work of showing that appearances of identity are non-identical. Capital is not an immense collection of commodities. Nor is it exchange, property, circulation, credit or labour. We will also read this sentence according to our time, but of course cannot but be influenced by reads of other times – there are perhaps an infinite number of readers, such that we do not read alone, but we read each time ourselves. Let us try to keep both these things in mind. We are about to read a text that is a carbuncle on the complacency of the ruling classes – at the end of the third preface discussion of crisis, unemployment and prospects for revolution leads Engels to insist that ‘the voice ought to be heard of a man whose whole theory is the result of a life-long study of economic history’. That this history would lead to social revolution was tembered witht eh realisation that the ruling classes would not submit ‘without a “pro-Slavery rebellion”’ (P.113) was yet

29

another reference to the context of the American Civil War and reason once again for all workers of all lands to unite.

The first sentence

Starting with the difficult scene of commodity exchange, this is nonetheless a very clear and accessible read. Marx presentation differs from the mode of inquiry. The commentary on commodities was not his first object of analysis, it is an abstracted presentation, a writerly, rewritten, text.

Marx’s introduction anticipates a great many themes that will recur over and over in the text. Readers are forewarned, the wealth of nations is at stake, there be monsters, in this drama, where production rules, and its very elements, and their abstract form, will be examined.

Look at the first sentence of the text (in English, Penguin translation):

‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of commodities”, the individual commodity appears as its elementary form’ (Marx 1867/

30

I think it is crucial that the commodity is the opening scene of a drama that has a wider purpose for demystifying. It is the opening to a work that will provide the ‘implied reader’ of Capital (I follow Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Scattered Speculations’ essay of 1985 in seeing this reader as first of all a member of the German socialist workers party here, and by extension today, you and I) with the x-ray vision to see through the trick of market exchange, control of production, distribution, valourisation, credit, the varieties of subsumption and the crises of capital, so as to sublate the productive power of capital away from the exploitative production for profit of commodity wealth into a more plentiful abundance of life and creativity for all…

Marx wrote his analysis of capital not only because he wanted to set down the answers, but so that the working class would have the wherewithal to make their own analyses, to read the world. We can have issues with this metaphor, which privileges text as unproblematic transcription, but Marx himself would not have difficulty here.

Who to write for as important as what to say.

So what to say? I would argue that the first sentence is of utmost important because the whole of Capital, in its presentation, is a staged drama. Throughout the literary theatrical code is prominent. Characters when they appear

31

(as personifications, as ‘Moneybags’) perform in Marx’s theatre, even at the very beginning – the ‘immense collection of commodities’ is characterised as something like the World Fair, those mad exhibitions of the produce of the world, before which – in 1851 for example – Marx had marvelled as a visitor at the plunder of the world. The society to be examined is one where the capitalist mode of production prevails – prevails as a kind of monstrous law or power over all (prevails is translated as herrscht , which might be better rendered as rule, govern or controls). And though we are starting with the commodity, the analysis will look to the provenance of all these things, and how production determines exchange, and what follows (see my dispute with Clifford in Hutnyk 2004 chapter 1)

The very first four words of Marx’s Capital are ‘The Wealth of Societies’, surely echoing, as Spivak notes, Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. ‘In the rational plan for socialism’, however, ‘there is no room for nationalism’ (Spivak 2008:100). Against Smith, Marx writes a book that is aimed at overcoming the exploitation and appropriation of wealth that prevails in the capitalist mode of production as a social (class) formation. He writes in order to expose the trick of capital, its deceit and deception.

The wealth of societies is a phrase that should be the first to stop us. Recall that society is not community, think of

32

Tonnies, soon to be writing on this distinction, recall Thatcher, recall Cameron's big one - the proposal that the support work of social reproduction be further socialised, via all manner of voluntarism, non-remunerated labour, free for all disregard of the hard won concessions that a strong labour movement had wrested fro capital - we will spend considerable time on struggles over the length of the working say, but this is relevant also for family, ethnicity, self-education and a range of other modalities of reproduction, including affective labour in sexual service, family reproduction, marriage and - lets call it compensation dating.

Now, I am not saying we should address each word of Capital with a view to thinking how it is relevant to our circumstances today, to the current conjuncture, etc., though that is pretty much the essay question, but i do think its worth keeping in mind that we read with a contexted eye. This year, of all years, threatens to be interesting and I would like to think reading capital again can help us think differently than we presently do - the only reason to go on thinking at all.

What clinches this argument? The very wording of the opening sentence includes two visual references. In the Penguin edition the German word erscheint is translated as ‘appearance’. The German reads:

33

‘Der Reichtum der Gesellschaften, in welchen kapitalistische Produktionsweise herrscht, erscheint als eine “ungeheure Warensammlung”, die einzelne Ware als seine Elementarform.’

The term erscheint occurs just the once here, rendered as two instances of the word ‘appears’ in the English (as cited earlier). This is grammatically acceptable; translation is no pure calculus, but I think there is an important significance that is lost. In the Lawrence and Wishart edition the translation is better: ‘The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”; its unit being a single commodity’ (Marx 1867/1967:35 my italic). Both editions then go on to say that our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity. Noting that accumulation is perhaps a better translation that collection, my point is that revealed in the gap between the two English translations of erscheint is the entire burden of Marx’s project – to expose the trick of the commodity as social form so as to teach the working class to see into the mechanics of industrial capital. Erscheinung, in German usage, has a double, or even triple sense. It connotes ‘appearance’ both in terms of how something looks, and in the theatrical sense of putting in an appearance, of staging something; in addition, it also has the sense of an apparition (which is what Derrida

34

makes so much of in Spectres of Marx, although not actually from this sentence; it seems he prefers the Manifesto perhaps because it’s a shorter read [‘A spectre is haunting Europe’]). The ‘presents itself’ of the International edition gets closer to the theatrical sense, but does not capture the doubling nor the monstrous spectre, the trick that is perpetrated by the animated commodity – animated by the masses themselves, though they do not see it as such, yet.

Another point to be made here is that Marx, in that first sentence, quotes himself. Others have pointed to this curiosity (see Pepperell 2009), but Marx had already quipped in a preface that he was ‘coquetting’ with the presentation style of Hegel in setting out his rendering of Capital. This flirtation, that we do not need to take at its somewhat flippant word, is itself a machine for seduction, for storytelling, repetition, and a gamble that starts with a kind of doubled disguise (self quotation from the start) as a tactic. The wealth of societies is Smith, but not Smith, ‘ersheint’ is Hegel, but not Hegel, the commodity is the elementary form, but social, the monster accumulates.

I will also take up, in this first sentence that has detained us already for a long time, and further holds the rest of the text in abeyance, another translation slippage that I think is significant. Within the self quoted quote, the English renders the accumulation of commodities as ‘immense’.

35

Ungeheure can certainly mean immense, or enourmous, but it also evokes a more Gothic meaning, that certainly fits the context – ungeheuerlich is ‘monstrous’, Ungeheuerlichkeit is ‘atrocity’. Perhaps it would be good, even in this first sentence, not to write out the evocations of Marx’s language – the theatrical and the gothic – a book populated by monsters is not merely comic, it is deadly serious, engaged in combat against demons and death.

Ungeheuer is immense but also monstrous. The demonic inflection is intended in Marx's language. What today is the most monstrous appearance of capital? No longer a commodity economy but an economy economy, an immense collection of abstract shares, interest margins, affective attachement to interest rates and other markers of well-being, all of course based upon property and privilege still, but somewhat more clearly only the appearance of wealth is mediated through salary and bonus and all that can afford. Good schools, white entitlement, supremacy and privilege have never been less obvious as the marks of accumulated wealth of society types.

Appearance is theatrical, yet also a machine of domination. The point is to see though this trick, to see through the plastic appearances. We are not only talking

36

of how things are, but also of how they are made to seem, and how we put up with them, even smiling as we do so. This needs a storyteller’s skill; so that rhetoric, metaphor, trope, coquetting; nothing escapes its role in the system. It might not even be impossible to imagine Marx as the system thinking itself in some contradictory, reflexive and critical manner (self quotation, doubling, haunting itself), but this is of course a fantastical deceit. Marx delivered a book that was itself a machine for narrative action (and still is, it gets inside your head and rewires thought, the tables dance). Now, the book could be read every time and for everyone as a potentially endlessly reorganised and renewed epic (it is hoped), still true to the project of teaching the implied reader to conjure with theory so as to unpack the real – to unpack the wealth of societies in which the capitalism mode of production prevails. Sure, it is a gamble to set out the analysis in a rhetorical style – inevitably part of the culture industry, the book itself still today engages with this gamble: Capital as a radical text sells more in times of crisis than not, and is sold as a commodity in bookshops for gain. It has its own commodity fetish format, precariously inserted into the DNA of the system of co-option and recuperation, even in the radical must-needs product. But the plastic will not remain forever – the reading of Capital is not merely system noise. We want people to read more than the first sentence, but also we want to read with care – and with a view to changing everything because, well – this is too quick, but we know

37

the co-constitution of industry and exploitation cannot be merely described. The point is to change it. Books are also tools, plastic wealth is a trick, the screams of pain are real.

Note: Hans Ehrbar has prepared a resource that presents large sections of the English (Penguin, but often amended) and German (4th Edition) text of Capital in parallel, with significant explication. (Ehrbar 2009 http://www.econ.utah.edu/~ehrbar/akmc.pdf).

Ehrbar notes that this ‘new’ translation and interpretation of Marx ‘is deeply indebted to Critical Realism, a philosophical current founded by Roy Bhaskar’. He also says, unfortunately, that ‘I did not try to reproduce all ambiguities of the German text. If the German can be understood in two different ways, and interpretation a is, in my view, clearly right while interpretation b is wrong, then my translation will only try to bring out interpretation a’ (Ehrbar 2009 http://www.econ.utah.edu/~ehrbar/akmc.pdf)

My reading of the first sentence, prepared before I found Ehrbar, follows Spivak and attends to what might be called ambiguities, but which I think may be better rendered as dialectical style. The reading of the rest of the book will confirm or deny this assertion.

38

Anderson, Kevin B 1983 ‘The "Unknown" Marx's Capital, Volume I: The French Edition of 1872-75, 100 Years Later’ Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 15, No. 4, 71-80

Anderson, Kevin B 1998 ‘Uncovering Marx's Yet Unpublished Writings’ Critique (Glasgow), No. 30-31 pp. 179-187

Althusser et al Reading Capital

Fine, Ben and Laurence Harris 1979 Rereading Capital New York, Columbia University Press.

Karl Marx 1887 Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production.Volume 1. Edited with a Preface by Frederich Engels. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Bibbins Aveling. London.

Ranciere, Jacques 2004 {1998} The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Stallybrass, Peter 1998 ‘Marx’s Coat’ in Speyer, Patricia ed Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Places London, Routledge pp 183-207

39

40