drowning,not waving

From the perspective of mainstream economics, Marxism is hopelessly out of date. Where are the models? From the perspective of Marxism, mainstream economics is hopelessly naïve. It is still engaged in creating creatures behind its own back which bite them in the ass.

A case in point is the causes of the current crash. The NYRB features a review, by Roger Alcaly, of two books, Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis by John B. Taylor and The Fundamental Principles of Financial Regulation by Markus Brunnermeier, Andrew Crockett, Charles Goodhart, Avinash D. Persaud, and Hyun Shin, which is a beautiful instance of the blind reviewing the blind. All participants are acolytes of the Great Moderation principle that the economists have invented a magic machine, the Central Bank, that creates the best of all possible worlds once it is correctly tuned up. This belief rests, of course, on a host of other barbarian superstitions, including the belief that if markets don’t really clear, they are best analyzed as if they do, and if they don’t perfectly compete, they are best analyzed as if they do, and if they don’t really efficiently allocate capital, they are best analyzed as if they did. You could call this the three fiction pillar of the perfect economy. Once you have swallowed these romantic premises, you can swallow others without flinching: that there really is an ontological divide between public and private enterprises, that governments don’t produce anything, etc. etc.

Alcaly sadly agrees with Taylor that it is all the fault of the Fed. If only the magic button had been pushed in 2003! If only interest rates had been raised, the crash would have been avoided.

This is a tale for and by simps.

I am a dissenter from the current patriotic slogan, give me amnesia or give me death. Thus, I actually remember the 00s.

And so I know this: what caused the current crisis solved the last crisis. In general, the slowdown in compensation to the working class - and the middle class is largely a working class that aspires to be thought a gated community, although they only own the means of the production in the distorted sense in which the fans own a band - and the unemployment that was bound to result from the crash of 2001 was solved by the same clever economists who are now bemoaning their Oops moment. The solution was a boom that largely depended on milking the one real asset people had - houses. It was a political solution to insure the survival of the politically constructed "Great Moderation", which in turn depended on extruding the care and maintenance of social welfare goods into the private sector and the destruction of labor bargaining power. Economists, now, have flipped the question not to whether the solution to the last crash has delivered us to a bigger crash, but the more sportif question of who predicted the crash. Amnesis requires bread and circuses – in our current parlous state, it requires the destruction of our narrative intelligence through a media regime of absolute pablum and the framing of the debate about our national fate in terms that would shame a seventeenth century peasant. If we want to know what caused the present crash, we have to have an answer to the question, who benefited most from the solution to the last crash? Who benefited from the housing bubble that was the response to the tech crash of 2001? The political answer is, of course, the plutocrats, the financial sector, big oil and defense, and their political proxies, the Bush administration and the Republican congress. The larger answer is the same class of oligarchs that have made such huge strides in entrenching their economic and political power since the country chose to the path of conspicuous consumption, loose credit, and a completely impotent and unorganized labor force – also known as Morning in America. When Alcaly gravely agrees with Taylor that the rates should have been raised and the houseing bubble crushed in 2003, he turns away from the consequences of this retrospective policy choice. It there had been no housing bubble, there would have been no surge in consumption. Instead, the real consequences of the tech bubble crash – overproduction, an unaffordable seizure by the wealthiest 1 percent of a quarter of the nation’s wealth, an out of control rise in the prices of welfare goods – education, medicine, infrastructure upkeep – would have had to have been faced. Taylor can face these consequences with equanimity: he would find decrease in the average median income of the American household a wondrous thing, preparing us for a competitive future. Preparing us, that is, to largely impoverish the working class, so that it is on the same level as, for instance, the Mexican working class. This is exactly what ‘equilibrium’ means. The middle class in this country, which routinely swallows the idea that the problem is the government, is the direct outcome of government action.
There are certain obsessive gestures in Alcaly’s article that one will notice in all mainstream economist’s articles. The funniest by far is the notion of “full employment”.

“Nonetheless, housing is still depressed and nearly 10 percent of the labor force was unemployed in January. We have lost more than eight million jobs, over half of them permanently, since the recession began in December 2007; and long-term unemployment is at record highs. Even if the economy grows 5 percent a year over the next three years, which seems unlikely, the US will probably not return to full employment before 2013.”

What is this “full employment”? You don’t have to dig far to find out that the economists routinely equate employment with non-government employment. That is the presupposition behind the 5 percent figure – that the private sector will do all the hiring.

This is, of course, a joke. In the developed world, no nation has that kind of full employment. In the U.S., government employment is the largest employer, and has been since the fifties. We made it out of the Great Depression partly by accepting the terms of the Great Depression – the private sector will never, ever lead to full employment. It was one of Keynes’ insights that you didn’t even need, as Marx thought, overproduction – underemployment, he showed, is endemic in a money economy – in capitalism. Since then, every state has operated in its own way to sop up unemployment through the state. The U.S., having a massively refracted government structure – not for us the centralizing tendency of the French – consequently shove much of the work, here, onto state and local governments. But the result is the same.

What Alcaly means by full employment is: that the private sector will again employ around 75 –80 percent of the employed population. In other words, we will have a normal underemployment situation, solved via Keynesian means.

Yet I doubt very seriously he knows that is what he means. Economists have not only developed a jargon to keep out snoopers, but to blind them to the obvious.

There comes a point in any kingdom or principality when even its cynics toil in the grasp of its superstitions. We are surely in that moment at the present. And it seems to me that we will remain there, drowning not waving, as our ruins pile up.

Marx and his darling

Marx is an altogether slippery subject for biography; the reason lies with the biographers. On the subject of Marx, libidinal investment is always just below the surface. Do you want a demon? Fritz Raddatz’s supposed “political biography” of Marx, written during the Cold War, is a hit job by a ‘leftist’ who has been blinded – in the midst of the 1970s – by the brilliant truths of Bakunin. Politics, in other words, as an infantile disorder, which made Raddatz a tool for the Springer media types. He went on to pathographies of Heine, etc. Of the biographies I have picked up so far, I’d recommend Jerome Siegel’s for its judiciousness. Wheen has written a popular biography which makes good points as well. So often, as in the case of Raddatz, one feels like one is reading a flea with rabies – the manic biting into poor dead Karl’s hide is an itchy business.

Of course, the other, hagiographic tendency was its own curse – censoring letters, providing infinite defense lawyer explanations for Marx, and never, ever putting him in historical context – thus pressing him into the stamp album of “heroes” and thus tossing out the window everything he’d ever written about the historical method.

That method, of course, would ask about the material determinants and opportunities within which Marx lived.

One of my favorite essayists, James Buchan, whose book on money, Frozen Desire, is written with a range and a style I absolutely love, falls down on the job, alas, when it comes to Marx. He has the intuition that Marx’s life and Baudelaire’s should be seen together – with which I heartily agree – but then fails to understand both Marx’s life of exile and agitation and – what is worse for the book – Marx’s theory of money. Worse, from his description, one would think that Marx was a humorless and tragic figure – and so one would be, to say the least, surprised that Capital is, among other things, a very funny book – at least the first volume. The humor of political economists is usually as thin and dry as port at the high table, but Marx, with his Goethean culture, is continually surprising the reader with this or that reference or connection.

There’s a much commented upon love letter – a lovely love letter, called, by one of Marx’s cold war commentators, Frank Manuel, with his narc’s vulgate, a “bombastic” love letter – unlike the sweet modest ones that were presumably being penned by the leaders of the Free World at the time - that Marx wrote his wife Jenny from Manchester in 1856. Jenny was in Trier at the time, and Marx evidently missed her – he begins it with the tone he so often takes in letters, of the complaint: “… it annoys me to converse with you all the time in my head without you knowing or hearing or being able to answer me.” Thomas Kemple, in his book on the Grundrisse, Reading Marx writing, puts this letter in relation to Marx’s writing at the time – and one does overhear, even in those common words, a note that is sounded in the Grundrisse and in Capital concerning commodities – they run through our head all the time, and yet they never speak to us. As Kemple points out, the letter, which is an outpouring of love to Jenny mediated through Marx looking at her photograph, is very much about the power of fetishes. This isn’t a Freudian reading – it is a Marxian one. For Marx is teasing himself as well as his wife in this letter: [My translation]



“Bad as your portrait is, it gives me the best service and I now understand how even “the black Madonna”, the most disgraceful [schimpfiertesten] portraits of the mother of God, can find indestructible admirers, and even more admirers than the good portraits. In any case none of these black Madonna pictures have been more kissed, ogled and adored then Your photograph, which really isn’t black, but sour, and completely fails to mirror your sweet, kissable ‘dolce’ face. But I improve the sun’s rays, that have painted falsely, and find that my eyes, as much as they are decayed by lamplight and tobacco smoke, can still paint, not only in dreams, but also waking. I have you bodily before me and I carry you in my hands and I kiss you from head to foot and I fall before you on my knees and I moan out, “Madame, I love you.” And I love you in fact, more than the Moor of Venice ever loved. False and foul the false and foul world mistakes all characters. Who of my many detractors and snake tongued enemies have charged me with the fact that I am called upon to play a staring lover’s role in a second class theater? And yet it is true. Had those rogues the wit, they would have painted the “relations of production and trade” on one side, and me at your feet on the other. Look to this picture and to that. [in English] – they would have captioned it. But dumb rogues they are, and dumb they remain, in seculum seculorum.

Momentary absence is good, for in the present things look too like in order to be distinguished [ in der Gegenwart sehn sich die Dinge zu gleich, um sie zu unterscheiden.] Even towers appear dwarflike up close, while upclose the small and everyday grow too big. Thus it is with passions. Small habits, that through the nearness through which they adhere to the body, take on passionate forms, disappear, as soon as the immediate presence of the eye is withdrawn. Great passions, which through the nearness of their objects assume the form of small habits, grow and take their natural measure once again through the magical effect of distance.”

To be continued

Leap into the void - the critique of Say's law

It is said – I think by John Kenneth Galbraith in his book on money – that Keynes, rejecting Says law, did not know Marx had been there before him, because Keynes found Marx’s writing repellently obscure. Joan Robinson – the Oxford economist [note - Cambridge economist, as Luke gently reminds me in the comments] and Keynesian – wrote: Keynes could never make head or tail of Marx…But starting from Marx would have saved him a lot of trouble.” [Quoted in Claudio Sardoni, Marx and Keynes in Jean Baptise Say: critical assessments of leading economists, vol. 2, 112] Say’s law is usually conveniently abridged as the idea that markets will always clear. Sardoni defines it as “underemployment from insufficient effective demand is impossible.”

Sardoni sums up Keynes position as follows: Keynes held that Say’s Law could apply only in an economy with characteristics far removed from those of a capitalist economy. In order for the law and all its corollaries to apply, the analysis must imply an economy where money is never kept idle, so that all savings are invested. Keynes labeled such a type of economy a ‘non-money economy’. In contradistinction, in a capitalist economy – a ‘monetary economy’ – a demand for idle money can exist, implying that the level of effective demand can be insufficient to ensure full employment.”

In econo-speak, where a thing is, a demand is – hence, if idle money exists, there is a demand for idle money. Such is the way to make the wheel turn round. But let’s disregard this.

Sardoni refers to Marx’s 1862 Theories of Surplus Value:

All the objections which Ricardo and others raise against overproduction etc. rest on the fact that they regard bourgeois production either as a mode of production in which no distinction exists between purchase and sale—direct barter—or as social production, implying that society, as if according to a plan, distributes its means of production and productive forces in the degree and measure which is required for the fulfilment of the various social needs, so that each sphere of production receives the quota of social capital required to satisfy the corresponding need. This fiction arises entirely from the inability to grasp the specific form of bourgeois production and this inability in turn arises from the obsession that bourgeois production is production as such, just like a man who believes in a particular religion and sees it as the religion, and everything outside of it only as false religions.

On the contrary, the question that has to be answered is: since, on the basis of capitalist production, everyone works for himself and a particular labour must at the same time appear as its opposite, as abstract general labour and in this form as social labour—how is it possible to achieve the necessary balance and interdependence of the various spheres of production, their dimensions and the proportions between them, except through the constant neutralisation of a constant disharmony? This is admitted by those who speak of adjustments through competition, for these adjustments always presuppose that there is something to adjust, and therefore that harmony is always only a result of the movement which neutralises the existing disharmony.

When Marx, in Capital, speaks of the double face of the sale-purchase relationship, you can see how thinking in terms of form and content – the emancipating gift given to him by Hegel that helped him understand ‘negative identity”, a barbarism to English ears, a leap out of the circle of common sense (much like that made by Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, when she finally understands Darcy) – helps him to see through Say’s law, and its presumed equilibrium. Common sense is common blindness - it is a tacit compact not to see certain things. What he sees is precisely what Keynes saw – that the presumption, here, fundamentally misunderstands the difference introduced by money, or rather, capital money. Just as the capitalist advances money to realize, at the end of the production process, a profit on selling the commodities that result from that process, so, too, can the capitalist wait with money on hand – ‘idle’ – within the market economy. Both of these are aspects of the degree of freedom the capitalist has captured by his position. There is no invisible hand forcing him to the optimum and socially beneficial effect of keeping his money continually mobilized. But, at the same time, the capitalist always has an interest in expanding the market – finding ever new markets – because of the peril posed by the fact that markets don’t always clear – that is, without destroying the sellers. Thus, crisis is folded into the very core of growth in the capitalist economy.

I should add a historical note here. Mainstream economists in the West still speak, as though zombified, of ‘full employment.” This is their way of reciting the Apostle’s creed. But if you decompose the economy of any Western country – any developed economy – you will find that full employment – if this is meant to refer to the private market – is a thing of the past. In the U.S., the most ‘laissez faire’ of developed economies, government employment – by which I mean all government employment, country, city, state and federal – has consistently accounted for around 15-18 percent of the employed population since the fifties. This bothersome fact is simply bracketed by economists who speak of full employment as though Say were alive and we were ruled by the Indian civil service of 1840. Here we see one of the great effects of what Polanyi called the ‘double movement’ – for not only has the state expanded to supply social welfare goods and services, but, in so expanding, has become the ultimate stopgap for the permanent underemployment created by the capitalist system. Marx, of course, lived in an era where employers having the whiphand could force down pay and increase work hours far beyond the point they are able to in most of the developed world today – and even in places like China, the brief period of Wild West capitalism is certainly coming to an end.

But to return to our hero.

The deeper meaning of the rejection of Say’s law is not that it mistakes the capitalist economy for a barter economy – but rather that the fundamental variables of classical economics, supply and demand, are not, in fact, fundamental.

Let me get all excited here – and in the next post, I’ll translate a bit from the third chapter. [Note: no - I'll leave the translation at the end of this post.]

Marx’s attack on Say (or similar errors in James Mill and Ricardo) is not just a technical matter, for it is here that the great machinery starts switching to full power. The alienation that is, as we have seen, the socially determined level of the unbearability of social arrangements by those disadvantaged by them of a given historical period – in this case, the proletariat; the increasing pace of the division of labor, which produces both specialization and a generalization of skills that has the effect of de-skilling, with the dynamic always tending to make the workers interchangeable; the secret of the commodity, happening behind the back of both the capitalist and the laborer; and, a constant in Marx, the global scope of capitalism, its outward push for new markets – something to some extent seen in the classical economists in their notion of decreasing returns to scale, but which Marx understood in terms of the complex given by capitalism, distinguishing it from past global enterprises of conquest, those attempted by the Alexander the Greats and Napoleons, because this conquest is driven by traveling salesmen and rentiers invested in railroad stocks and bonds. Where the liberals thought that trade would lead to peace, of course, Marx knew that it was founded on profound violence and would create the conditions for war. Marx’s rooting of the economy in the relations between the capitalists and the workers – defined in terms of the ownership of the means of production – gives him the perspective to see that the the equilibrium models of supply and demand that form the common stock between the classicals and the neo-classicals represent an idealization of a surface phenomenon, putting them at a loss to explain the crises that traverse the system, and forcing them to concoct romantic poems – models – that premise perfect competition and full employment, an entry point that cannot help but distort our understanding of the economic system, and that must buttress itself with a host of other fictions – the perfectly rational economic agent, rationality as a sort of perfect vision of the path to gain in the future, an agreement about gain as the most desireable of economic activities, etc.

So, I will translate the passage here:

Nothing can be more foolish than the dogma that the commodity circulation conditions a necessary equilibrium [Gleichgewicht] of sale and purchase, because every sale is a purchase and vice versa. If we mean by this that the number of really realized sales are equal to the number of their purchases, this is a flat tautology. But what demands proof is that the seller leads his own buyer to market. Sale and purchase are identical acts as the mutual interchange between two polar opposite persons, the commodity possessor and the money possessor. They depct two polar opposite acts as the actions of the same person. The identity of purchase and sale thus encloses the fact that the commodity becomes useless when it is thrown into the alchemical retort of circulation and comes out not as money, not sold by the commodity possessor, and thus bought by the money possessor. This identity further contains the fact that the process, when it succeeds, comes to a resting point, points to a portion of the life of a commodity, that can extend for a longer or shorter period. Since the first metamorphosis of commodities is simultaneously sale and purchase, this partial process is also at the same time an autonomous process. The buyer has the commodity, the seller the mone, which means, a commodity that has preserved the form of being capable of circulation, whether it appears in the market sooner or later. None can sell, without another buying. But nobody needs to buy unconditionally, because he himself has sold. Circulation breaks through the limits of production exchange, be their temporal, local or individual to the point that they divide the immediate present identity here between the exchange of own’s own and the intake of an alien product of labor into the opposition of sale and purchase. For the processes standing independently of one another form an inner unity, meaning that the inner unity moves in external oppositions. If the external becoming independent of the internal dependency of the moments (because they complete each other) continues up to a certain point, the unity makes itself felt through a violent crisis. The immanent opposition of use value and value inhering in the commodities, of private labor, that must present itself as immediately socialized labor, from specific concrete labor, that at the same time must be understood as abstract general labor, of the personification of things and the thingification of persons – this immanent contradiction contains in the oppositions of commodity metamorphosis its developed movement form. These forms thus invoive the possibility, but only the possibility of crises. The final development of this possibility demands for its realization a whole circuit of relationships, that from the standpoint of simple circulation do not yet exist. [My translation]

Our foundation is an earthquake: Marx doubts...

“The first work, that I undertook to resolve the doubt that assailed me…[zur Lösung der Zweifel, die mich bestürmten]

Marx is the Leo among philosophers. It is rare that he will express himself in terms of a personal “doubt.” The method of Descartes may have been all very well for his era, slowly freeing itself from the chains of scholasticism – but Marx did not see his own period as one in which the confession of doubts was at all helpful. Like the inventor of a machine who proposes to solve a material problem, Marx wanted, in his published work, to include those things of material relevance for describing and promoting the overthrow of capitalism. James Watt does not tell us of his doubts and woes, but tells us of the trials he makes of his machine, its failures and successes.

But in the introduction to the Critique of the Political Economy, Marx does feel the need to introduce himself a bit. Thus, the lion, for a moment, a mere flash, reverts to the pussy cat.

What is this doubt about? It regards the very fulcrum of society, and thus of social change. Marx first approaches the question through the study of jurisprudence, in its most philosophical form. But outside of his university classes, out there in the real world, what he sees is that the philosophical view of the law is unable to account for the basic movements that are occurring within the law – say the law of property. In fact, the law was being pulled along by economic forces. Instead of enforcing a definition of property arrived at logically, or from a study of legal precedent, legal precedent was being picked apart and re-arranged to justify vast shifts in property relations. And were these shifts decided by the state and imposed on the population? While his training in both law and Hegel might make this seem to be both the rational and real course of things, it seemed, instead, that the law simply caught up with exogenous pulls.

It is this simplified picture of social change that made Marx reach for a model that had an all too successful career in Marxism: the base/superstructure model. As so often in Marx, his postulates are announced with a certain music, a soundtrack, consisting of the noise of chains – fetters being dragged, or fetters being burst asunder:

“The general result that pressed itself upon me and, once I had gained it, served as the leading thread of my study, can be briefly formulated like this: In the social production of their lives persons enter into determined and necessary relationships independent of their will, that correspond to a specific stage of the development of their productive forces. The collectivity of these relationships of production depict the economic structure of society, the real basis, upon which a juridical and political superstructure is raised, and which corresponds to specific social forms of consciousness. The modes of production of material life condition the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of persons that determines their existence, but, inversely, their social existence, which determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development the material forces of production of a society come into contradiction with the prevailing relations of production, or (which is only the jurisprudential expression of this), with the relations of property, within which it have moved up to this time. Out of the forms of development of the forces of production, these relationships suddenly change into fetters. There then enters an epoch of revolution.”

Even here, where the base/superstructure notion – first mentioned in The German Ideology, I believe – makes its appearance as a ‘Leitfaden’, the metaphoric tends to metamophose. The superstructure becomes fetters, which implies that the superstructure is imprisoning the base upon which it rests.

This idea has, unfortunately, led to an infinite amount of writing in which all cultural, legal or political events and artifacts become the ‘expression’ of the base – a base which is a very funny thing for a base, as it keeps changing. The metaphoric difficulty here is not just a mere epiphenomena – since the metaphor is the way the model is pictured.

And yet, even if the misery generated by the base/superstructure metaphor makes me want to give it the evil eye and pass on, that would be a foolish thing to do. For Marx is in some ways more right than he knows, here; in addition, by making the base itself a source of change - merging the foundation with the earthquake – he finds the way out of his own model.

The clue that the imperfectly vertical metaphor of the base and the superstructure (in which the former operates not as a secure foundation, but as the very locus of change, and the latter operates not as a house, but as the prison that seeks to cage the earthquake on which it is built) made Marx uncomfortable is found in one of those footnotes in Capital in which the choral id of the system receives its play – although perhaps this is to confine the Marxian id too much, since surely it is at work in one of the first example of exchange in the Critique, that of a volume of Propertius against 8 ounces of snuff.

This is what Marx writes in note 34 of the first chapter of the first volume, breaking off from giving Bastian a drubbing:

“I will take this occasion in order to briefly address an objection which was made to me on the appearance of my text, To the Critique of the Political Economy, in 1859, in a German-American pamphlet. It was said that my insight, that the specific mode of production and its corresponding relations of production, in brief the ‘economic structure of that is the real basis, on which the juridical and political superstructure which are erected and to which specific social consciousness forms correspond that ‘the mode of production of material life in general conditions the social, political and intellectual life process – all of this was true for today, where material interests dominate, but not for the middle ages, where Catholicism, or for Athens and Rome, where politics ruled. Firstly it is strange that someone presumes that these well known clichés about the Middle Ages and Antiquity are unknown to a person. It is at least clear, that the Middle Ages could not live from Catholicism, nor the antique world from politics. The manner in which they gained their life explains, on the contrarcy, why in one case politics, and her Catholicism played the major roles. Anywy, it requires little acquaintance with the history of the Roman Republic, for example, to know, that the history of landed property images its secret history. On the other side, Don Quixote already paid for the error that he incurred by imagining that wandering chivalry was equally in accordance with all the economic forms of society.”

This is, in one way, a robust defense of the idea that the ‘secret history’ of the politics of a society is – to use an image Marx couldn’t have used – like x raying the politics and finding the mode of production behind it, the skull, or caput mortuum, behind the skin. And yet this actually changes the terms – the base and superstructure won’t stand still. For how has the base now become a secret history? In a sense, the base, here, is a secret shame – it is abasing. But surely there was nothing the Church or the Roman senate talked about more than rents, tithes, production, land, interest, etc. It was, if anything, an open secret, known to all men. There is a sense in which Marx, reaching to strip off the justifications of politics, becomes a sort of negative image of Don Quixote – mistaking politics or the law as pure epiphenomena, which, by stripping it of anything but a justificatory character, begs the question of why it needs to be justified in the first place. If Don Quixote mistakes the windmills for giants, isn’t Marx, here, mistaking the giants for windmills? The function of politics and law is utterly lost if they are utterly superstructure. By combating the dualism between the idealist and the materialist, we lose, here, our sense of the dense knitting of reciprocities of which politics, religion and culture must be a part.

There’s a passage in James Buchan’s Essay on Money, Frozen Desire, in which he, too, examines Don Quixote, in the light of the influx of gold from the Indies. Actually, it is in light of the confrontation between a society that is already on its way to fetishizing money, in terms of Gold, and a society in which gold is primarily an ornament. The latter should not be taken to mean ‘only’ an ornament – the only is introduced by the cash nexus. Buchan, a marvelous rifler of the old books, quotes Cortes’ words as recorded by Gomora’s History of New Spain – asked by the Mexican ambassadors sent by Monteczuma why he had landed in Mexico, Cortes explained the ‘disease of the heart, that infirmity, that we have, my companions and I, and that we cure with gold.” Yet in Spain itself, which like all of Europe in 1492 suffered perpetually from a lack of money in circulation, the disease and the cure weren’t well understood – and of course, by understood, I mean felt. Buchan takes up not the fight against the windmills, but the first aventura, in which Don Quixote, mounted on Rosinante, comes to an inn which, of course, he doesn’t see as such:

“In the adventures of the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, we at last have a hero who confronts the world of money in all its fluidity and relativity, not on its own terms,

“He [the innkeeper] asked if he had any money on him, and Don Quixote replied that he hadn’t a penny on him, for he’d never read in the histories of the knight-errant of anyone who had.”

but on his own. Like Columbus, he hadn’t got a blanca; unlike Columbus, he doesn’t care. He mounts his steed, which has more quarters than a real, and sets out to do battle not just with the world of capital – configured in the famous windmills – but with money itself. In the process, Don Quixote inaugurates in prose, which is the language of commerce, the novel of the modern West, whose very greatest exemplars – Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, the Wings of the Dove –re-stage that combat to the death of money and romance.”

From the margins, I’d put my two cents in here, that the narrative regression that we are experiencing in our culture can be measured precisely in terms of the fact that Hollywood, unblickingly, has created whole worlds in which the heros, villains, comedy and tragedy contend with money only, if at all, as an intermittent plot device – their clothing, houses, food, autos, all are simply givens, existing to cretinize the audience into a sort of compromise Quixoteism of absolute greed.

But to return to our texts.

Marx’s rather worried footnote is not false – but it falsifies the import of the base superstructure image. Which, as we have seen, does more dancing than the wooden table in the Commodity Fetishism chapter.

I am reminded of Karl Polanyi’s notion that the economy as defined by the non-Marxist political economists of the nineteenth century – that is, in terms of self-regulating markets – actually induced a political remedy – what Polanyi called the double movement. On the one hand, the movement to “free the markets” – on the other hand, the movement to regulate them. This movement responds to the collective effect of capitalism, or the Great Transformation – disembedding economics from its place in the social and attempting to embed the social in economics.

“… never before our own time were markets more than accessories of economic life. As a rule, the economic system was absorbed in the social system, and whatever principle of behavior predominated in the economy, the presence of the market pattern was found to be compatible with it. The principle of barter or exchange, which underlies this pattern, revealed no tendency to expand at the expense of the rest. Where markets were most highly developed, as under the mercantile system, they throve under the control of a centralized administration which fostered autarchy both in the households of the peasantry and in respect to national life. Regulation and markets, in effect, grew up together. The self-regulating market was unknown; indeed the emergence of the idea of self-regulation was a complete reversal of the trend of development. It is in the light of these facts that the extraordinary assumptions underlying a market economy can alone be fully comprehended.”

Marx makes, then, a valid point through the use of the base/superstructure metaphor, but the metaphor can’t really contain that point, overdetermined as it is with both an implicit value system that comes with vertical metaphors (the base as, indeed, base) and failing to structure the relations between the base and the superstructure in such a way that we understand the way in which an economic dynamic axis is embedded in society. Life, for humans, is social life – you are not going to get down to the natural basics, food, sex, shelter, and find some a-social element. But the vertical ideology is a powerful reaction formation to the money economy in the West, a disguised piece of nostalgia.

Money just seems to make the world go around

There is a drop of blood on the ground
And it seems to me that it's not my kind
but I can't be sure if its yours or mine


Substitution. Replacement. Fungibility. I have so far been hammering home a point about one of the great, novel features of capitalism, but it is a point that is, inherently, difficult to express. When money is paid for an object, in one sense it operates as a substitute for the object – and in one sense it doesn’t. For the object does not operate as a substitute for money. If I pay 2 dollars for a bag of sugar, as we all know, this does not mean that I can then go into a store and trade my bag of sugar for 2 dollars worth of oranges. In this way, money is a commodity unlike any other in the body of commerce. “It is a matter of complete indifference to money into what kind of commodities it is transformed. It is the universal equivalence form of all commodities, which already show in their prices, that ideally they represent a specific amount of money, awaiting their transformation into money, and only through changing places with money maintain the form in which they are convertible into use values for their possessor.” [Capital II, 36 – my translation] The principle of substitution, the universal equivalence seemingly embodied in cash, not only supplants the system of in-kind payments which, theoretically, held together the feudal world – it becomes a sort of multiplier of other substitutions. Or, to put it another way, it reveals the variables that structure the new world of capitalist production, most notably in the convergence of the specialization and fungibility of the worker.

But is money really, then, impervious to all social boundaries? On one level – for instance, in buying a bag of sugar – money holds its place as a great converter. But though the capitalist would like to think that the worker is merely a screw, a stopgap, Marx clearly does not believe that the human – the social - is so easily liquidated. Rather, we must operate one of those inversions of the terms in place to help us see what is happening here:

“If M-L appears as a function of money capital, or money here as the existence form of capital, thus in no simply because the money steps out here as a means of payment for human activity, which has a useful effect, that is, for a service; thus absolutely not through the function of money as a means of payment. Money can only be disbursed in this form, because the labor power finds itself in the circumstance of being divided from its means of production (including the means of subsistence [Lebensmittel as the means of the production of labor power itself); and because this division can only be abolished through the fact that the labor power is sold to the possessor of the means of production. Thus, even the mobilization of labor power, whose limits are not synonymous with the limits of the necessary quantity of labor involved in the production of its own price, belongs to the buyer. The capital relationship emerges during the production process because it exists in the act of circulation, in the different basic economic conditions by which the buyer and seller confront each other, in their class relationship. It is not in the nature of money that the relationship is given; it is rather the existence of this relationship that makes it possible to transform a simple monetary function into a capital one.” [Capital bk. 2, 36 – my translation. Compare with the David Fernbach Penguin translation, p. 115]

As a character says in Moulin Rouge, “a girl has got to eat/or she’ll end up on the street.” Money’s power as a universal equivalent, in the capitalist era, gives to the capitalist a weapon. That weapon derives from the division of labor. The weapon does not fall from heaven. Rather, all must agree on the weapon, as in a game in which the opponents moves against each other reference agreed upon rules. Why would the worker agree to these rules? Because of the division of labor that separates the worker from the means of production. In this game, one side created the rules – we will call them, as Marx did, the bourgeoisie. I hasten to say that this is not a whole truth – Marx sometimes considers that the rulemakers, the state, are only tools of the capitalist class, and sometimes complicates the base/superstructure model. In fact, he would have no interest in democracy at all if a strong version of the base/superstructure model held – whereas he is always politically throwing his weight on the side of democracy, suffrage, all the gains of the French revolution. However, leaving this aside for the moment - it is in the interest of the (variously changing members) of those who own the means of production that the weapon will be agreed upon in as much as the can valorize their ownership of the means of production. Notice, you tastemongers of dialectics, that this means only that the form of money is agreed upon – the substance – including its practical loss or gain of value, inflation or deflation – is not under the control of the ownership class. Seeds here for future drama.

There is no such thing as good work

I absolutely love the following excerpt, which better captures what it is like to hang around with Chicago economists than just about any quote I have ever seen:

“We should have a recession,” [John] Cochrane said in November, speaking to students and investors in a conference room that looks out on Lake Michigan. “People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.” - Freakonomics blog

In a famous passage in The German Ideology (which I take to be ironic), Marx writes that, as a result of the revolutionary takeover of society by communism, the person will be able to “do this today, to do that tomorrow, in the morning hunt, in the afternoon fish, in the evening herd the cattle, after dinner criticize, as I have a mind to, without becoming a hunter, fisher, herder or critic.” Of course, Marx, more percipiently, warns against dreaming of communism in terms of the beatific everyday life – communism is not a state of affairs but a movement within society.

Why this emphasis, however, on not becoming a hunter, fisher or herder? In other words, why this push against the division of labor?

As Marx well knows, the division of labor did not start with capitalism. And as he also knows, it is precisely due to the specialization of labor that capitalism has released the enormous productive potential of human society. In fact, when we read about cities that have been besieged, struck by earthquake, or undergone some other disaster, the key note is the collapse of specialization. All tasks become arduous precisely because the division of labor that we unconsciously rely upon vanishes. When reading Lydia Ginzburg’s Blockade Diary of the great siege of Leningrad, we are acutely aware that people are being worn down to grubby points because they have to do everything in their private lives themselves, from figuring out how to find a way to heat whatever shelter they have found to scrounging for food and disposing of their wastes in subzero temperature. In Port au Prince, the earthquake that destroyed an already weak and incompetent state left people to fend for themselves – and they did so by spontaneously dividing up the labor in neighborhoods, some guarding houses, some rescuing the wounded, some going out for water, etc. Even so, these ad hoc divisions were extremely inefficient, as the material embodiment of specialization – the tools of all sorts that they needed – were hard to come by.

In fact, the life of doing one thing today, and another thing tomorrow, and not becoming one thing – the life of the jack of all trades on the American frontier – is not a sustainable or desirable proposition. It is a boy’s life vision of society.

Marx was no utopianist. He decisively shifts ground in the Communist manifesto, and changes the focus of the communist negation to private property.

But the original attack on division of labor should not be dismissed as simply a mistake. It is, rather, a response to one of the great structural paradoxes of capitalism, which is that increasing specialization of labor takes place at the same time as the increasing fungibility of the laborer. On the one hand, Marx knows that if the division of labor is dissolved, the cities will tumble into ruin, and we will be left with the rural idiocy of the peasant or the a-social cunning of the frontiersman. On the other hand, let specialization metastasize, and it produces a strange result – the worker gradually sheds, at least from the point of view of the capitalist, all skill whatsoever. He becomes, as Nietzsche puts it, the stopgap for some future machine. The assembly line worker who puts screws into such and such a machine in precisely the right order has himself, in Nietzsche’s words, become a screw – a mere devise. In Alfred Chandler’s Visible Hand: the Managerial Revolution in American Business, he gives this account of an early ‘traditional’ American enterprise: “As early as 1795, Oliver Evans constructed a continuous process flour mill on the Brandywine Creek in Delaware. This mill annually milled 100,000 bushels of wheat into flour. It employed six workers who spent most of their time closing barrels.” [55] The six workers were exercising little skill in closing barrels. They were employed for their willingness to close barrels and their physical capacity to do so. Another employee of a different kind of mill in the 1830s, this time in a novel, is described first in relation to the mechanism by which the mill ran:

“The roof is held up by rafters supported on four stout wooden pillars. Nine or ten feet from the ground, in the middle of the shed, one sees a saw which moves up and down, while an extremely simple mechanism thrusts forward against this saw a piece of wood. This is a wheel set in motion by the mill lathe which drives both parts of the machine; that of the saw which moves up and down, and the other which pushes the piece of wood gently towards the saw, which slices it into planks.”

[Scott-Montcrieff, trans.]

The employee, who was also the son of the sawmill owner, was Julien Sorel – the novel Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. The ingenious mechanism that made the sawmill work was, at the same time, the emblem of the unrelieved tedium that Julien saw before him if he remained in his father’s house. He wanted – as so many of the young men in novels did - a profession. And as so many young men of the 1830s did, his idol was Napoleon, the ultimate emblem of upward mobility.

Thus it comes about that to be both specialized and absolutely fungible was the condition of the worker under capitalism. This, of course, gives rise to a diffuse but socially palpable form of melancholy. For within the social order as a whole, the worker was faced by the fact of his enormous non-necessity. There is, still, a trace left by the craftsman or the peasant – the touch, the style – which was constructed within an order in which necessity is the product of a chain of being reaching up to God and down to the devil. However, that trace is vanishing. And when one comes to the service sector proletariat, that lack of a trace, that feeling of absolute fungibility, that absence of style, can become overwhelming in exact proportion to the fact that the labor required to be a clerk is educated labor. The literature of the clerk, from Charles Lamb to Pessoa and Kafka, is one of ever more ferocious daydreaming, in response to ever more monotonous tasks. Style, here, becomes Bartleby’s I prefer not to – stopping the machine. Which is, as the clerk is educated enough to know, not a real response.

There is, of course, another potent symbol of the effect of specialization and absolute fungibility: the mass layoff. Laying off workers according to some formula that quantifies over them is the overt acknowledgement, on the part of the capitalist, of what is otherwise hidden by the system: there is no such thing as good work.

Capital from the point of view of Revolution

Take! Take! Take! Take! Take! Take! Take! Take!

In number 206 of Dawn, Nietzsche addresses the worker problem under the heading of three “phooeys”:

The impossible estate [Stand] – Poor, joyous [froehlich] and independent! – all of that together is possible; poor, joyous and slave! – that is also possible – and I don’t know what I could tell the laborers of factory slavery better than: given, that you do not feel that it is generally a scandal to be exploited to such a degree, as it were, as a screw of a machine and something like a stopgap of human ingenuity! Phooey! [Pfui] to believe, that through higher pay the essence of your misery, I mean, your impersonal enslavement, will be lifted! Phooey! To let yourself be persuaded that the scandal of slavery can be made a virtue through an increase in this impersonality within the mechanical enterprise of a new society! Phooey!to have a price for which one becomes no longer a person, but a screw! Are you co-conspirators [Mitverschworenen] in the present folly of nations which, before all else, wants to produce as much as possible and get as rich as possible!”

The Dawn was written in 1881, at a time when, as the British quarterly review put it that year, “some Social Democrats have deserted Lassalle’s standard and openly gone over as State Socialists to Bismarck as their leader. Both the so-called “Christian socialists” and the “State Socialistts” calim for the new programme of Bismarck that it has effected the commencement of a separation of the reasonable portion of the Social Democrats from their revolutionary dreams and associations.” [Vol. 75, 443]

Nietzsche’s contempt for Bismarck’s combination of strategic aggression abroad and social insurance at home permeates his writing, and makes him difficult to locate on any map of modern politics – like de Maitre, but for different reasons, he sets himself against the entire project of political modernity, which Bismarck’s politics prefigure.

Given this nihilistic political position, what is Nietzsche’s solution to a problem of Gogolian dimensions – that is, the transformation of man into screw?

After leaping to another metaphor – that of the pied piper of Hamelin, or ‘pipers’ – as Nietzsche conceives of the socialists – who make the workers warm [brünstig – literally, put them in heat] with wild hopes of the day of the ‘bestia triumphans’ – against this Nietzsche has some advice:

Against this each should think to himself: “rather to wander out to become Lords in wild and fresh areas of the globe, and to become lord firstly over myself; to change places so long as any kind of sign of slavery still marks me [Zeichen von Sklaverei mir winkt]; to not avoid adventure and war, and in the worst cases hold myself prepared for death: only to no longer this indecent servitude, only no longer this becoming acidic and poisonous and conspiratorial.” This would be the right idea: the laborer in Europe should make themselves advocates as an estate for a human impossibility, and not only, as mostly happens, declare themselves as something hard and pointlessly instituted; they should lead an age of great swarming out in the European beehive, as has never yet been experiences, and through this act of freedom in the great style protest against the machine, Capital and the current threat of suffrage, to have to become either the slave of the state or slave of the overthrow party. Let Europe be lightened by a quarter of its population: it and they will be lighter at heart! In the distance, only, by the employments of the swarming colonists, there will emerge recognizable features, how much good reason and cleverness, how much healthy mistrust of mother Europe has been inherited by its sons – these sons which could not longer bear to stay in the proximity of the dull old woman… [My translations]

Nietzsche’s advice, of course, takes no account of the populations that might be living in those ‘fresh’ places of the earth. On the other hand, this is no call for state imperialism. In fact, as Nietzsche well knew, that swarming out was going on already.

Which leads us back to the limit of the bearable in Marx. In the wake of the failure of 1848, there was a massive immigration of Germans to America. From 1852 until the Civil War, nine hundred thousand Germans immigrated – and after the Civil War until the 1890s, there was a remarkable influx of between 100-200 thousand per year on average. Of course, in the wake of the Irish famine, the flow of Irish also increased – although of course the Irish also emigrated to England – with the numbers averaging between 70-100,000 from the much smaller population of Ireland. And so it goes. According to Raddatz, Marx’s pathographer – to use Joyce Carol Oate’s term for biographers who present themselves as hanging judges – Marx exchanged letters with the Burgomeister of Trier, his home town, in 1845, in which he claimed to be planning to emigrate to America – which, in Marx’s case, was only a ruse to get the Prussian spies off his back.

The 19th century was a time of the great movement of the peoples – one could even say that the choice, in Europe, seemed to be that between revolution and emigration. As I’ve tried to show, the concepts Marx is dealing with in the forties – alienation, universal history, ideology – all converge on revolution –the dynamic force in history. But revolution doesn’t automatically arise out of oppression. It works to make history in as much as it disturbs history’s ‘manorial’ process – the inheritance – the passing down - of the “historically created relation to nature and the individual” of one generation to the next – which plays a part in the general rule in The German ideology. That massive inheritance – in Edmund Burke’s words, traditional society – has a tendency to get out of synch with the real social conditions that arise in these generation, where the sum of the forces of production tend to transform quantitative change into qualitative change.

All of which give us the general outline of a problem that is eclipsed, in the Communist Manifesto, by the broad historical sweep, and the listing of proletariat grievances. As we’ve pointed out, the basis for the worker’s ‘uniting’ requires that we retain the notion of alienation, even if it is translated into the analysis of the exploitation at the root of the capitalist valorization process. Still, victimization is not enough. Marx’s writings in the forties treat the working class mainly in terms of its lack of property (they have nothing to lose but their chains). A world historical lack – as Marx well knows – does not the overthrow of a system make.

We pair socialism or communism so naturally with the working class that we don’t notice, as Kautsky did, that this synthesis was forged by Marx.

Thus – in my view, there’s no epistemological break in Marx’s work, but rather the creation of a research problem that the economic works address, always with revolution – rather than any model, including that of labor value economics – as the central truth-maker. It is in relation to revolution that Marx writes Capital. To use notions that fill out this problematic ground in Capital itself is unnecessary – what Marx wants to do is see if these notions can be derived from the analysis of Capital, rather than imposed from without. Marx, the insider from the outside.

the sensual reality of time/the social reality of time

History is made of time – evidently. But time, we should remember, is a socially processed parameter in our lives. It is to this parameter that Marx will turn in Capital, putting to use insights from the theoretical phase of his work in the 1840s. This is from the German ideology – I would love to be able to spin on at length about the tree that ends this passage, since wood – and the organic growth time embodied in wood – is a sort of background noise in much of Marx’s writing. Trees have a special place in Marx – after all, it was the forest laws that he criticized in Köln which, on his own account, started his intellectual journey from philosophy and law to the political economy.

“He [Feuerbach] doesn’t see, how the sensual world around him is not immediately given by eternity, an always self-same thing, but instead is the product of industry and social circumstances, in the sense of actually being a historical product, the result of the activity of a whole series of generations of which each stood on the shoulders of its predecessors, constructing its industry and commerce, modifying its social order according to its altered needs. Even the objects of the simplest ‘sensual reality’ are present to him only through social development, given through industry and commercial interactions. The cherry, as almost all fruit tress, was, as is well known, only planted a few centuries ago through trade in our zone and was thus first through this action of a determined society in a determined time given to the “sensual certainty” of Feuerbach’s.”
…
As is well known, Marx cast a jaundiced eye on country life – the idiocy of country life, as he liked to call it. Of course, Marx’s phrase has a scholastic side – the idios, the private man, is the man who doesn’t participate in the life of the polis. He is the clown in Shakespeare – for clown, etymologically, takes us back to the inhabitant of the backwater, cultivators of the soil, colonnus.
One of the social aspects of country life that creates the clown is the allotment of time. Marx, in Capital, uses the time of the day as the great natural parameter with which the worker, under capitalism, deals. But this natural parameter is, as is always the case in Marx, not simply a given ‘sensual reality” – rather, it is an indicator of a great change in the mode of production. The temporal determinants in the cultivation of the soil are seasons. Of course, under the season comes the working day – but, in the 1840s, there is nothing to do but wait upon the time of growth of the plant or animal. A few years ago, I reviewed Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and I made much of the sparsity of his data in relation to the generality of this conclusions. One of his data points irritated me more than most – a comparison of the use of time of the European peasant compared to the use of time of the Chinese peasant. Gladwell took a passage from, I believe, Robert Gildea about the 18th century French peasant, who went into semi-hibernation during the winter, as opposed to the rice cultivating Chinese peasant, who was active all the year round. This was wrong on every count. Historians, work in the line of Charles Tilley (among whom Jan de Vries, with his notion of the “Industrious revolution”, is important), have destroyed the clownish image of the peasant as the simple herder or cultivator – as James Richard Farr points out, even in 1600, there were probably more looms than plows in Picardy, as cottage production was a vital source of peasant incomes. De Vries quotes a study by George Grantham of the increase in agricultural productivity before the 1840s – when Marx, of course, wrote the Communist Manifesto – which attributes that increase to more productive time use:
“Technical innovation was not a central feature of the growth of agricultural output throught he 1840s, when the appearance of commercial fertilizers and the elaboration of mechanical harvesting equipment began significantly to affect methods of production. Rather, up to that time, the growth of output depended more on intensive use of known technology than on novel methods.”

But even given this more complex picture of economic life, the peasant world was governed by longer increments of social time. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the capitalist system was to replace this parameter with another – the time of the working day. Even as we have developed the information networks that, in many ways, seem to make the factory working day an anachronism, capital still clings to it fiercely.

What did the bourgeoisie ever do for us?

XERXES: Medicine.
COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh...
COMMANDO #2: Education.
COMMANDOS: Ohh...
REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
COMMANDO #1: And the wine.
COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah...
FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.
COMMANDO: Public baths.
LORETTA: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.
FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.
COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.
REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?



Marx never wrote a romance about the future. Not for him the Icarias, the Fourierist tract, the utopias of the Saint-Simonians. Not for him Robert Owen’s communes. All those infinitely detailed plans. The scheduling. The inversion of society. At Menilmontant, Enfantin designed the shirt with buttons on the back, so that the principle of association would be obeyed even when dressing – for it required two to button the shirt. And by such easy uses we dissolve egotism...

Marx’s comments on the future communist community are sparse, and often ironic – as when he writes in the German Ideology, a work that criticizes the critical critics, that that abolition of the division of labor will allow each to fish, hunt, and criticize during different parts of the day. That many have not seen the humor in devoting a part of the day to the critical critique is not Marx’s fault. This vision of utopia as a grand hobby shop seems massively below the level of the revolutionary impulse.

Still, the Communist Manifesto breathes a science fiction air. If Marx did not fantasize about the future communist community, he did draw a fantastic – if accurate – projection of history’s revolutionary class up to then – the bourgeoisie.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune(4): here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. [From Samuel Moore’s translation]

Many of the world historical actions of the bourgeoisie in the Manifesto are, at most, in the seed. The industrialization of agriculture, for instance, really doesn’t get on its feet until the 1870s, and even then Europe’s population, in 1914, was predominantly rural. In Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the narrator, Zeitblom, choses 1914 as the date when the ancien regime really collapsed – and there is a lot to say for that position.

Given the most revolutionary part allotted to the bourgeoisie by Marx, what are we to say of the proletariat? In the manifesto and in the German Ideology, the proletariat play a puzzling role. They are, Marx assures us, the class that, secreted by the industrial system of capitalism, will be its undertakers. But when we get down to it, the bourgeoisie does all the creative work here. To be Nietzschian about this, the proletariat seems to exist solely as a reactionary body – a body of labor and a victim of history. How is such a reactive force supposed to become an active force? We know that the bourgeoisie developed an incentive structure that not only made feudal inhibitions unbearable, but that also served as a weapon to overthrow the feudal structure. Why, though, should we believe this is true about the working class?

Up to now, I’ve been pressing on the seeming contradiction between Marx’s assumptions about the laboring class uniting and his vision of the absolute penetration of the commodity relationship into all spheres of the worker’s life. My point has been twofold: on the one hand, if capitalism has truly stripped the worker of any form of association except through the cash nexus, than the sense of solidarity that Marx is appealing to in the Communist Manifesto is doomed. Workers cannot unite, because they have no vision of themselves as united, and no medium through which to be united. If their interest is in pure cold cash, their association is extremely friable: having done away with the protocols that would justify sacrifice, they are more likely to make patchwork treaties with the bosses than to sacrifice their immediate interest for the sake of international solidarity as workers. On the other hand, this picture of the worker is simply wrong. Too often Marx uses his macro sense of historical development to analyze the microworld of family, friendship and association. Far from being outside of economics, emotional and social life is dependent on a vast and intricate structure of reciprocities that are not “feudal” but are as modern as money. We can’t leave the household, the kin system, etc., in the shadows, so to speak, but we should see it connected to the social whole. Modernity, in my view, is an intrinsically heterogenous system in which social relations defined under the regime of capitalism are not only juxtaposed with systems of barter and giftgiving, but are interpenetrated with them down to the factory floor itself. This doesn’t mean they are equally weighted down at the factory or in the stock market – it does mean that the compliance of the working population upon which capitalism depends is, itself, dependent on the working of these other reciprocities.

As we see with emotional labor, that by no means that there is a truce between the different systems. Emotional labor – looked at as one way of explaining what Elias called the civilizing process – and commodification form a fault line in the social whole. From such fault lines, massive earthquakes come.

However, suspending for the moment the issues resulting from that fault line – we are left with the question of the working class as a reactive class, shaped by the productive forces of history rather than shaping it. I think Marx was well aware of this question, and that it was partly to respond to this problem that the First book of Capital was written.

Kautsky, summing up the achievement of Marx and Engels, divides it between achievement in the world of thought and achievement in the political sphere. The latter achievement was in bringing together socialism and the worker’s movement – for, as he points out, they did not begin as one thing.

Socialism had arisen earlier. But in no way in the proletariat. Really it is, as is the worker’s movement, a product of capitalism. The former as the latter arises out of the pressure to work against misery, that capitalist exploitation imposes on the working class. Meanwhile, the defending forces of the proletariat in the labor movement arise autonomously wherever a numerous working population is gathered against which socialism premises a deep insight into the nature of modern society. Every socialism rests on the knowledge, that on the basis of civil society, there will not be an end to the capitalist misery, that this misery rests on private property in the means of production, and can only disappear with it. In this are all socialistic systems united, they only deviate from one another in the ways that they have suggested in order to achieve the anullment of this private property, and in the ideas, that they elevate of the new social property that they want to put in its place.”

from Frankenstein to Raskolnikov

I like to think of degrees of separation, of connecting links, that come about because “the production and consumption of all lands have become cosmopolitan” as a result of the relentless bourgeois search for markets.

Take, for instance, Pavel Annenkov. It was Annenkov who happened to visit Belinski right as he was reading an ‘extraordinary’ novel, one that, one that, Belinski said, ‘reveals such mysteries and such characters in Russian life as never discussed before.” The novel was Poor Folks, and the novelist Dostoevsky. Pavel Annenkov happened to be in Russia in 1846, which is why a friend of his from Brussels, Karl Marx, was writing him letters there.

Poor Marx, of course, had had to move to Brussels at the prodding of the French police, although in truth it was a strange affair. Why should the wrath of the Prussian government – pressuring the French government – come down on him? He was not even involved in the article that was the cause of his expulsion – an article applauding an assassination attempt on the Prussian king in an exile German journal.

Annenkov and other Russians were attracted to the milieu around Proudhon and Bakunin, It was through this circle that Herzen met – to his later regret- the German poet Hedwegh, Marx’s great friend. Annenkov had attending a meeting of the communists in Brussels. I like to think that Annenkov might have mentioned the names of some of the new Russian writers to Marx – for instance, Gogol.

Marx’s letter to Annenkov is well worth reading – and, for those of us with a keen eye for the intersigne, there is something so very right – so almost uncannily right – in the fact that Annenkov, in this year, is involved as an observer both with the beginning of Dostoevsky’s career and with Marx’s. Annenkov had asked Marx’s opinion about a book written by Proudhon. Remember that Proudhon is, at this time, a European celebrity. Marx – well, he was known by some, and admired greatly by Frederick Engels, but he had trouble focusing.

The letter is here. It is a letter about, among other things, God and money. A subject that Dostoevsky has been attuned to from the first – although we are far from Crime and Punishment as yet.

“Why does M. Proudhon speak of god, of universal reason, of the impersonal reason of humanity, which is never mistaken, which has been, at all times, equal to itself, of which is it enough simply to have the correct consciousness in order to find oneself in the true? Why put on the feeble Hegelianism in order to pose as an esprit fort?
Himself, he gives you the key to the enigma. M. Proudhon sees in history a certain series of social developments; he discovers the progress realized in history; he finds at last that men, taken as individuals, do not know what they have done, have been deceived in their own movement, that is to say, their social development appears at the first view as a distinct, separate thing, independent of their individual development. He does not know how to explain these facts, and the hypothesis of universal reason manifesting itself is all ginned up [est toute trouvée]. Nothing easier than to invent mystical causes, that is to say phrases, where common sense can’t supply any.
But doesn’t M. Proudhon, in avowing that he does not understand anything of the historic development of humanity – and he avows this once he resorts to sonorous words about universal reason, god, etc. – doesn’t he avow implicitly and necessarily that he is incapable of understanding economic developments?”

As I pointed out in my last post, the moment in which the monster opens its eye – in which man’s creation, to speak in Frankenstein’s terms, seems to operate behind man’s back, and subject man to its will – is the moment in which, rightly viewed, a whole series of developments falls into place. This moment – which is a moment, I would say, in the ‘becoming unbearable’ of social conditions, and thus is intimately entangled with the history it sees – is the condition for understanding what the forces of production have wrought.

At the end of Marx’s letter – which is obviously connected to the work he is doing, at that time, on the section of the German ideology representing a history that does understand economic developments – Marx makes an observation about Proudhon’s theory as an expression of the class views of a group he knew well, since they constituted the Communist League – the petit-bourgeois.

“The petit-bourgeois, in an advanced society and by the necessity of its status, is made up of one part socialist, and one part economist, that is to say, he is awed by the magnificence of the high bourgeoisie and sympathizes with the griefs of the people. He is at the same time bourgeois and people. He prides himself, in the depths of his consciousness [dans son for intérieur de sa conscience] to be impartial, to have discovered the right balance, which he has the pretention to distinguish from the golden mean [juste milieu]. Such a petit-bourgeois divinizes the contradiction, for contradiction is the basis of his being. He is only a social contradiction put into motion. He has to justify by theory what he is in practice, and M. Proudhon has the merit of being the scientific interpreter of the French petite-bourgeoisie française, which is a real merit, because the petite-bourgeoisie will be an integral party of all the social revolutions that are in preparation.”

And let’s end this with another quote. This one is from Gerard Cornio’s Figure of the Double in European literature. For Cornio, Balzac’s Rastignac and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov are doublets, and both encounter doubles in their lives:

‘Raskolnikove is also placed at the crossing, at the crossroads of doubles, but between [this pair] reigns incompatibility: Raskolnikov cannot, like Rastignac, accommodate himself to social and moral contradictions, accommodate himself through his personel consumption, he has to chose, to cut, to make choices which are sacrifices.” [50]

note on schools of Marxism

Writing a beginner's guide to Marx allows me the freedom to pretty much not discuss schools of Marxism. Since nothing reminds me so much of Swift’s Tale of the Tub as the disputes between different schools of Marxism, I suppose I should be grateful for this small favor.

I have – as the reader can see – a pretty firm view of what is important in Marx. The ideal, for me, in reading Marx, is to combine Nicole Pepperell’s amazingly wise and sophisticated reading of the first book of Capital at Rough Theory with the kind of materialist history that Benjamin believed he was doing in writing about Baudelaire.

Unfortunately, one does have to deal sooner or later with schools of Marxism – they do influence us as readers. I am not sure how to do that yet. I do, however, have an idea about where the schools go wrong, which is mainly by following one of two courses. One way is this: they take some thesis about Marx – say Althusser’s thesis that Marx dropped his ideas about alienation in order to make an epistemological break in Capital – without inquiring about the larger picture, our very motive for reading Marx. So, even if Althusser was correct, is alienation still a viable concept in the social sciences? While the Althusserians and the Thompson-ites were slugging it out in England, I think Arlie Hochschild showed that, yes, alienation can be revived to explain a very important feature of our social life as workers, emotional labor. Myself, I don’t think there was an epistemological break in Marx, but rather an increasingly complexity within the outlines of what he wrote in the forties. I’m anything but an Althusserian. But if Althusser was right, tant pis for Marx – alienation is still an important heuristic in understanding capitalism.

The second way is to put Marx in dialogue solely with a very narrow group of academics. Hence, the interminable study of Marx and Hegel. This seriously mischaracterizes Marx. Even at the height of his financial misery in the 50s, Marx never – to my knowledge – thought about teaching. He departed from academia quite early in his twenties. Just as Baudelaire’s poems came from the poet’s experience of the city as much as from Poe or Saint-Beuve, Marx’s method and ideas, I think, clearly came from reading newspapers, meeting disgruntled tailors in smoky tavern rooms, and his larger awareness of the science and technology around him that he used, or observed. As a man who edited one paper and founded another, and as an agitator who used the railroads quite a bit, Marx was well aware of the changes wrought by communication and transportation technology. In the German Ideology, although there is a certain underdevelopment of the notion of communication, Marx’s model of manufacture – pressed onto the ‘spontaneity’ of ideas – comes as much from seeing how, in front of a piece of paper that you have to fill up to make a deadline, “ideas” come obediently forward, like parts of the pin in the pin factory, as it does from correcting the mistakes of the critical critics. There is a side of Marx that very much resembles Jules Verne or H.G. Wells.

On Rough Theory, a couple of days ago, NP referenced Paul Lafargue’s obituary of his father in law, Marx. I had not read it. I loved these two paragraphs:

Karl Marx was one of the rare men who could be leaders in science and public life at the same time: these two aspects were so closely united in him that one can understand him only by taking into account both the scholar and the socialist fighter.
Marx held the view that science must be pursued for itself, irrespective of the eventual results of research, but at the same time that a scientist could only debase himself by giving up active participation in public life or shutting himself up in his study or laboratory like a maggot in cheese and holding aloof from the life and political struggle of his contemporaries.

Alienation - can't do with it, can't do without it, part 2

Moretto comme ta bouche
Est immense quand tu souris
Et quand tu ris je ris aussi
Tu aimes tellement la vie
Quel est donc ce froid
Que l'on sent en toi?



Arlie Hochschild begins her book, The Managed Heart (1983), by contrasting two stories. One is a story in Capital, about a boy in a wallpaper factory who works at a machine, 16 hours a day. The other is of a training session for Delta stewardesses, who are instructed to ‘really smile” because a smile is your ‘asset’. This was the eighties, and this is what stewardesses did. One of the stewardesses told Hochschild, “Sometimes I come off a long trip in a state of utter exhaustion, but I find I can’t relax. I giggle a lot, I chatter, I call friends. It’s as if I can’t release myself from an artificially created elation that has kept me ‘up’ on the trip. I hope to be able to come down from it better as I get better at the job.”

Hochschild defined emotional labor this way:

“This labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others – in this case, the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place. This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality.”

Marx, of course, knew – as did factory owners and blue book writers, as did Dickens and Mill and Hugo – that a vast injury was being done to the boy in the wallpaper factory. But how was one to translate that injury? What, to speak as a certain type of philosopher, was the harm, here? Lack of pay? Was the harm that the boy did not pocket the surplus value he created?

Marx gives many indications over the course of his work that the harm, here, is not really translatable into ‘assets’. In that way, the harm can’t be put in an account book, a double ledger of benefits and costs – that is, without losing sight of the fact that benefits and costs, which seem, to the economist, to be scientific bits of quantified information, only make the leap to the quantifiable through gross metaphysical mystifications.

It is interesting – even, from my viewpoint, telling – that Hochschild’s term ‘emotional labor’ was gradually processed, in the literature, into ‘emotional management’. While the two terms may seem, at first glance, to be synonymous, one – emotional labor – actually attributes to the emotional a real position in the social world, while the other – emotional management – retreats to the traditional notion that emotion is a kind of savage thing, outside of which stands control. At the same time, sociologists soon started pointing out that those successful ‘emotional managers’ expressed more satisfaction with their jobs. Sociologists, in the 80s and 90s, were taking the turn away from such fuzzy and oppositional concepts as alienation and towards more friendly and professionally successful ones as public and rational choice. Businesses do not hire you as a consultant unless you are with the program, of course.

Still, the question is posed: on what scale should we quantify the quantifier? If our stewardess finds herself giggling and chattering a lot, if she fills out the questionnaire about job satisfaction with happy faces, are we not talking about a woman who is not a ‘bitch’, but a fully self empowered gal, who might even find feminism to be a useful ‘accessory’.



Yet, of course, we could pull back a bit on the question, even from the quantificational view, of what this training in smiles brought her. In the early eighties, indeed, the Delta stewardess was riding high. I knew a few in New Orleans in 1983, around the time that Hochschild’s book came out, and they were, indeed, leading a lifestyle full of chatting and artificial highs – usually cocaine.

It was about that time that three satisfied stewardess even proposed buying Delta a jet, purely out of their satisfied hearts. This became a locus classicus of business management books about implementing a “collaborative culture” – to use William Schneider’s phrase in The Re-engineering Alternative: “In 1982, three stewardesses for Delta Airlines announced that they and other Delta employees were pledging nearly $1,000 each to buy a $30 million Boeing 767 jet for the airline. “We just wanted to say thanks for the way Delta has treated us,” one of the women explained. By December they had raised enough pledges to buy the 767. Seven thousand employees turned out at the Atlanta airport for the christening of the Spirit of Delta.” [44]

Schneider presents this as a model of the company as family. The two stewardesses I knew presented it as the model of company as blackmailer. Delta’s public announcement that the management had ‘nothing’ to do with this was, of course, nonsense – as in any ‘family’, who contributed and who didn’t was quickly known.

As anybody who has flown Delta in the last twenty years knows, the smile culture gave way, after de-regulation, to a more traditional herding the beasts into the slaughterhouse culture. Notoriously, Delta’s management ripped off the pension plans of their employees, which was supposedly accrued during all the days of happy flying. As Scheider says, “the collaborative culture springs from the family” – and Delta’s management proved to have modeled their family feelings on those of the famous painting by Goya, Saturn eating his children.

However, the question of what the ‘pay’ for emotional labor is – and how emotional labor is standardized as labor - forces us back, inevitably, to the fully social self, the one whose aches and ecstasies might not be things that come in separate units, to be weighed on Bentham’s pleasure/pain scales.

Okay, now, here’s my translation of the next sentences in the German Ideology. I’ve tried not to smooth out the almost agonizing structure of these sentences, which remind me of nothing so much as Laocoon in the toils of the snake:

That it thus becomes an “unbearable” ["unerträgliche"] power, that is to say, a power, against which one revolutionizes, is integral to the fact that it has produced the mass of mankind both as thoroughly propertyless [“eigentumslos"] and at the same time as in contradiction to a world of wealth and culture spread before them, which both presuppose a great increase of the force of production, a higher level of its development; on the other side, this development of the forces of production (with which already the empirical existence of persons is put on a world historical rather than local footing) is, as well, an absolutely necessary practical pre-supposition, because without it only lack is universalized, and thus with neediness also the struggle for necessities begins again and we have to reconstruct all the old shit [die ganze alte Scheiße sich herstellen müßte] – and because, furthermore, only with this universal development of the forces of production is a universal commerce of people posited; thus on the one side, the phenomenon of the “propertyless masses among all peoples is produced all at the same time (universal competition), each making themselves dependent on the overthrow of the other, and finally the world historical, empirically universal individuals replace the local ones.”

The complex that is built around “alienation” here goes through certain recognizable steps.

First, we have what I’d call the Frankenstein moment. This is the moment in which the people who are collaborating realize that somehow, without their choosing it, the division of labor has taken on a life of its own. This in itself is an important clue that alienation is unthinkable without division of labor of some kind: between men and women, between adults and children, etc. It appears again and again in Marx’s writing, every time giving us a sense of the social uncanny. The monster, it appears, is alive:

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”

Beautiful! And hideous. At the same time the system produces the most astonishing beauty – such refinement and cultivation [Bildung] as has never been seen before -- and a wretchedness, and evacuation of life, that has also never been seen before. This evacuation is described in two terms: of unbearability and of propertylessness. Unbearability is, Marx claims at this point, the condition without which the masses won’t revolutionize. In the sixties, when Marx was good and thoroughly Nietzschefied, this moment would give rise to doubts – is it a fact that the bourgeoisie, here, is the great producer, and the proletariat merely the reactive social body? If this were true, of course, it would truly put a spoke in the whole system – for the rising of the proletariat would only create the old filth, the old shit of fighting for survival.

I want to press more on that unbearability – Unertraglichkeit – in order to think clearly about the chains that the workers of the world “possess’. But not in this post.

The second moment has to do with located this unbearability in relation to the instantiation of universal history – the world market – in goods and labor that characterizes the modern system of production. Marx never takes back this insight. At the time he is writing the German ideology, very few business enterprises spanned the globe, and the logistics of manufacture, trade and communication are – in spite of his comments in the Communist Manifesto – only at the beginning of their irresistible rise. Certainly, the velocity with which silk moved from Canton to London was faster than the days when it had to go to Manila, then Acapulco, then across Mexico to Veracruz, then to Europe – or through Central Asia to Turkey, through Italy and up through Europe. Marx saw that already, branches of industry in one country would manufacture goods for sale in a far away country – as for example, Chinese ceramics, produced for the European and American market – and that there was a greatly increased commodity and money flow. Marx’s emphasis on this – even when explaining alienation – is another clue that alienation has to do with a vast and seemingly monstrous system that has arisen behind the backs of the worker. Before human beings become the subject of world history, their monster already is. Earlier revolutions against the unbearability of the system of production were as local as the system itself. The transatlantic revolutions might be said to be the first true revolutions - the French revolution, spread across Europe and fought out, in an unexpected way, in Santo Domingo, kept working in the liberation of Latin America and even, one could say, in the 1910 revolution that overthrew the Chinese Imperial court. Marx, in a famous 1881 letter to a Dutch socialist, Domela Nieuwenhuis, wrote: “The general demands of the French bourgeoisie laid down before 1789 were roughly just the same, mutatis mutandis as the first immediate demands of the proletariat are pretty uniformly to-day in all countries with capitalist production.”

In the German Ideology, the interweaving of the high level of the forces of production and their global scale leaves its impress on the chance of success of communism:

“Without this, 1, communism would be able to exist only as that of one locality; 2, the powers of commerce themselves could not have been developed yet as universal, and thus unbearable powers, they would have remained domestically-superstitiously “circumstances” ["Umstände"], and every expansion of commerce would negate local communism.”

Alienation - can't do with it, and can't do without it, part 1

Alienation

In the German Ideology (as Duncan pointed out to me last week) there are textual indications that Marx is disowning part of sketch of alienation he made in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

As always, though, Marx never simply erases or annuls the conceptual contents he has used in the past – rather, he continually switches from the content to the form and back again to both ironize a content and locate it in a conceptual system that is always at work, one way or another, in the practices of everyday life. It is usual to attribute this method to Hegel, but myself, I think that is being much too philosophisch. Lenin once remarked that “Communism equals Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” – and I would say, along similar lines, that Marx’s method equals Hegelian dialectic plus the railroad. That may seem like a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but Marx was well aware that one of the unintended results of technology was a revolution in perspective. While it is easy enough, abstractly, to dream of going sixty miles an hour in a vehicle from point a to point b, the “industrial experience” (to use Schivelbusch’s term) of being a railroad passenger and seeing something never seen by human beings before – to wit, a landscape going by at sixty miles an hour - was a distinct and disturbing sensation, one that had to be absorbed by nineteenth century populations, along with other industrially created perceptual experiences. The list of technological improvements in the Communist manifesto is also a list of changing sensory models. Thus, if Marx takes over and revamps the technostructure of Hegel’s dialectic, it is in coordination with the questions posed by modernity’s sensorium.

The questions I’ve been posing about the affectual structure of the commodity and money circuits of capitalism all point us to alienation. As I have said in an earlier post, nothing about alienation in Marx leads one to think that it transcends historical epochs. On the contrary, Marx, here, is employing a term that should be adapted to the circumstances – the mode of production – dominant in a historical epoch. Marx’s game, in the German Ideology, is to knock down the trans-historical sense given to certain concepts by the school of “critical critique.” However, that isn’t the same as saying that these concepts are empty. This isn’t therapeutic nihilism. They do have a communicative use – even if the notion of communication is oddly missing in the German Ideology. I should point out here that this is the one a-modern gap in that text, which is otherwise so fiercely concerned with words, so determined to bring ‘down to earth’ the flights of the philosophers, and which does so with a language in which we recognize ourselves – a language that so often seems so very contemporary. This is why we expect Marx to recognize the pragmatic, communicative dimension of language – it seems so obviously important to his project – and are surprised by the fact that it is not really there – that the brain/hand duality eclipses it.

Thus, we come to the word, which is strung with quote marks: It comes in the subsection entitled history, right after Marx has discussed the larger meaning of the division of labor:

“The social power, meaning the manifold force of production that arises through the coordination of different individuals conditioned through the division of labor, appears to these individuals, because this coordination is not chosen, but naturally generated, not as their own, united power, but rather as something foreign [fremde], a power standing outside of them, of which they know neither the whence nor the wherefore, which they thus can no longer master; and even on the contrary moves, now, through the series of phases and steps of development on its own, not only independently from the will and actions of people, but even directing the will and actions of people.

This alienation ["Entfremdung"], in order to remain understandable to the philosophers, can naturally be abolished only under two practical premises.”

The quotation marks do their disowning work here – but what is disowned is still used. I could, of course, apply my fine Derridean sniffer to root out this use of the denied – and even ask some questions about its use value. But that I will set aside for another time- since of course we “know” (o speak, denial) that Derrida in the Spectres has misunderstood something as simple as use. But the point I want to make here is that the quotations which suspend alienation also return it to one set of its property holders – the philosophers. Marx, one should remember, did study law, so for him this is a word with at least two property holders – the philosophers and the lawyers. And a lawyer could ask whether the chain of title is quite correct here – whether the philosophers have mistakenly taken property in this word as though it were not a metaphor. Indeed, as the term appears in the Corpus Juris of Justinian, which was translated into German in the 1830s, alienation is continually contrasted with Diebstahl – robbery. A proper alienation of property – making it exchangeable – is set up in contrast with the theft of property, which also makes it exchangeable. And it is from this context that alienation is taken into the language of the philosophers – whether properly or not is the question posed, but not answered, and perhaps not answerable, by placing the quotation marks around the term.