The mysteries of Marx: on secrets

Someday, when historians look back on today’s communication technologies, they will marvel at the lag between our cut and paste technology, which is state of the art, and our sad blog commenting machinery, which gives you small squares and limited amounts of characters to work with. Now, as those of us who are longwinded, garrulous and quarrelsome – in other words, the philosophers and philosophes manques among us– well know, our best arguments tend to get diluted, chopped and lost as we pursue our labyrinthian arguments in this wilderness of faulty mousetraps.

Thus, I’m replying to Duncan in a post. Although LI has long become a blog in which the private language provides all the dim lighting – like a dying lightbulb in a refrigerator, spastically blinking on and off every time you open it – most of the time, I do try to be at least a little clear. But this will make no sense if you haven’t followed our argument in the post before last.

So, Duncan…
I heartily agree with your opening move in reading the German Ideology. It is a mistake that is often made to think that Marx invented ideology critique. Instead, Marx in the German ideology is criticizing the Young Hegelians exactly for their ideology critiques.

But your second step, I think, trips you up. What Marx is not doing is negating Ideology critique as a form. What he is doing here is best seen by comparing it with the critique of the classical economists. He does not say, your labor theory of value is wrong. Far from it. In the case of the labor theory of value, he does want to firmly base the classical economic theory on abstract, or socialized, labor – but this is just the entering shot in Marx’s campaign. Rather, he wants to know why the classical labor theorists go wrong. In other words, he wants to pull out of their models “points of view.” This is the overt language in which the section on the Commodity fetish is cast, until we come to the point of view of the commodity itself – and we end, significantly, on a line from a play. A play, of course, is in its dialogic form the narrative correlate of points of view. My thinking on this, of course, is overwhelmingly Pepperrelian. She has definitely demonstrated this, at least for me.

The usual word for this – immersion, or immanent critique – still tries to bottle up the irretrievably social element – that which constitutes the point of view – in terms of a purer logic. This, I think, is still a bad move. To use an analogy from old technology – you can take the needle off a record a little way or a long way – but the decisive moment is when you take the needle off the record. To get the music, you have to adhere to the text and its moves.

Now, the similarities in the wording of the German ideology and the section on fetishism are striking – as, I would say, are the approaches. Whether one takes the re-editing of Capital as simply pulling out its method, or, like Amie, thinks this signals an effect of the history of the Paris commune, the editorial reworking still gives us a text in which the approach and wording seems to fall more strongly along the lines that Marx laid down in the late forties.

I’m going to take up one of those similarities – the use of the term ‘secret’. But first, to continue the thread about the approach: it is a mistake to think that opposition, in Marx’s text, is the same as negation. While it is easy to say this, it is sometimes a difficult rule to follow. Thus, the object of ideology critique in Germany is, Marx thinks, a sign of Germany’s primitive development. One of the reasons Marx was so attractive, post WWII, was his sensitivity to issues of development – by the by. But the form of ideology critique is, in fact, employed in The German ideology with abandon. It is this that makes it – to use your words – a whacko text itself. As Engels worried, what possible use is this loggorheic settling of accounts with an obscure group of German professors? Especially when one has to challenge the wordy cabinetmaker Grun and his Proudhonist tendencies in the League!
Engels, however, was, in the end, wrong. He sort of acknowledged this in his famous letter to Mehring that Benjamin quotes in Eduard Fuchs:

“Namely, we have all put – and had to put - the major weight upon the deduction of political, legal and otherwise ideological ideas, and the actions mediated through these ideas, from the fundamental economic facts. But in so doing, we have neglected the formal side over the content of them, and the way in which these ideas, etc., emerge. That has given our opponents a lot of welcome allowance for misunderstanding. Ideology is a process that comes to completion in the consciousness of the so called thinker, but with a false consciouness. He doesn’t know the actual motives that drive him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process. He imagines for himself false or pseudo motives.Because it is a thought process, he deduces its content as well as its form out of pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with pure thought material that he unconsciously takes in as though produced through thought and otherwise investigates no further from processes independent of thought; it is certainly the case that this is self evident to him, since to him all actions are mediated through thing and even inn the last instance appear to be grounded in thought. The historical ideologue (‘historical’ stands in here the political, juridical, philosophical, theological, and in brief all disciplines that belong to society, and not simply to nature) – the historical ideologue has thus in every scientific field independent material that has been shaped out of the thinking of earlier generations and its complete and proper development has been processed through the brains of the generations succeeding one another. Clearly external facts, that may belong to one or another field, could have co-determinedly affected this development, but these facts are according to his silent premise again simply fruits of a thought process; and thus we remain always in the realm of simple thought, which has happily digested even the hardest facts. It is this semblence of an independent history of conceptions of the state, or the legal system, the ideological ideas in each special field, that do the most to blind people. When Luther and Calvin ‘overcome’ the catholic religion, or when Hegel does this with Fichte and Kant, and Rousseau with his contrat social does it to the constitutional Montesquieu, this is a process that remains within theology, or philosophy, or the political science, represents a stage in the history of these fields of thought, and allows nothing to spill out of the field of thought. And since the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and last instance-ness of capitalist production has come to this as well, the same thing applies to the overcoming of mercantilism by the physiocrats and Adam Smith as a simple victory of thought, not a the cognitive reflex of changed economic facts, but as the finally achieved, correct insight into the continuing and ever present factual conditions.” [My translation – I can’t find the german text of the whole letter, but this much is published in Masaryk’s work on Marx].

In fact, that reading within disciplinary lines is depressingly present in most secondary literature dealing with Marx. All too often, it becomes a matter of Marx ‘overcoming’ Hegel, or whatever. One of the things I like about Amie’s putting the editing of Capital in relation to actual events and an actual audience of French workers, who Marx will know, very well, have had a certain experience of revolution, is that it breaks through these disciplinary boundaries. Frankly, here I suppose I should confess that my own libidinal investment in Marx is not in the man who ‘responds’ to Hegel, but in the man who responds to the history happening around him, and is never too stiff to change. That change, however, does I think emphasize – as NP puts it in another great post here – the structure that was always already there in Capital. But I think it significant that to emphasize that structure, the commodity fetishism section is expanded. It is expanded using a rhetoric that casts us back, indeed, to the German Ideology. Indeed, commodities, abound in “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” – and if there is one book in which Marx goes into “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” with a vengeance, it is The German Ideology. I’m not going to clinch the case by some inexhaustible rundown, cause I don’t have time, but I think the link between the metaphysicians who are critiquing religion in Germany and the Political Economists who are theorizing capitalism in England runs through the commodity fetishism section.

But let’s remember the title of that section: Der Fetischcharakter der Ware und sein Geheimnis. When Secret appears in a title, it has a certain semantic force that shouldn’t be overlooked. Because the English translators didn’t want to make it seem – o double fetish, fetish of a fetish – that the fetish itself has a secret, they translated this phrase, infelicitously, as The fetish character of commodities and the secret thereof. Which acknowledges that a secret is “of something,” and “for some point of view”.

Now, in the “Holy Family”, we have already met some dealers in secrets – “Geheimniskramer”. They happen to be the critics of criticism – o double critique! The whole of the chapter is a catalogue of secrets, which are attributed to the great dealer in secrets – “The secret of the critical presentation of the Mystères de Paris is the secret of speculation, of Hegelian construction.

This is, to say the least, an interesting and –shall we say – ideological use of the notion of the secret. The secret, here, is not found in the substance of the text – as certain actions, in Mysteries of Paris, are kept quiet from the reader and the characters in the novel – but instead, the secret is in the very form of the text. It is, then, a secret instrument. But what is the secret of this instrument? One should remember that the doubleness we have seen with fetishism and with critique seems to reflect the structure of one kind of secret – for secrets possess the Hegelian charm that form and substance, here, intervene on secrecy. A secret of content that is a known secret – say, for instance, a phrase blanked out in a document released by the CIA – is a secret of a different type than a secret in which the fact that it is a secret is a secret – say, the operation that the CIA performed that, until the document about it surfaces, was not publicly known. A secret this is known to nobody, however, is no secret at all. Socially, then, secrets divide us, by definition, into insiders and outsiders.

The moves that Marx makes in the German Ideology mark him as an insider, in that he does understand the Young Hegelian jargon. In fact, here, as with the political economists, one of Marx’s character masks is the whistle blower. He has immersed himself in political economics so that – unlike the dumb French socialists, the crapauds, who don’t know what is happening across the Channel – Marx does. And it is his value as a whistle blower that he does not want to keep the secret.
But it is at this point that Marx ceases to be simply an informer. Both with the critical critics in Germany and with the political economists, his inside experience leads him to a secret that neither the one nor the other know. They can’t decypher it. They can’t read it. It is part of the very structure of their thinking – the form of their thinking. Which, in turn, is part of where they sit in society – their own insider/outsider relationship with entrenched power.
But more later on. I must do some work today!

d'un pas irrégulier

Readers should check out the comments in the last post, between Duncan and me. One thing we bring up - to disagree about - is Amie's essay on The German Ideology, which LI is especially proud to have published. I hadn't read it in a while, I was impressed not only by the text, but by how much I have taken from it.

Today I believe is going to be a special day for Amie and Michel, so I figure it is time to bring out Les Rita Mitsouko:

..les amants le font de coeur parce que l'union fait la force...
...et leur traits s'uniffiront jusqu'à se ressembler...
...pour le pire et le meilleurs jusqu'à y creuver leur forces...
...ils marchent sans sourcillier d'un pas irrégulier...

Revolution as method

In my post a few days ago, I proposed one way of looking at the ideology critique that runs through Marx’s writings – namely, in terms of a synchronic and diachronic grid. At the center of the grid, at the defining source of the synchronic and the diachronic, is an impossible present – which, from the Derridian perspective, joins – and logically can’t join – the synchronic and the diachronic, the modern and the historical. To my mind, this point is defined by revolution. Revolution here is the ground of the possibility of Marx’s own writing – his own thought, his own liberation. Marx is a unique social theorist in as much as his understanding of modernity, while it uses the apparatus of the positivist truth procedure and even offers predictions, such as those having to do with the crises of capitalism, does not stand or fall with the truth procedure, but with this revolutionary moment. Marx recognizes that the political economists are playing a kind of fixed game by presenting us with models that serve as the unquestioned reference points of our truth procedure. They, too, have a problem with the moment that ties together the synchronic and diachronic axes of their interpretation – but their strategy is to get around this moment by adopting infinite deferral, by changing the conversation, by promising to reform and repair a system that their very models mystify. The bourgeoisie have, indeed, made universal history possible – and in this sense have, indeed, operated on a worldwide revolutionary basis – but have done so within a sort of neurosis – to use a very non-Marxian term. The neurosis, or ideology, systematically trivializes its founding discovery – freedom – while encouraging the penetration of an economic system of commodity fetishism into every sphere of our private life. Marx likes to exaggerate this penetration – in fact, almost three hundred years after Adam Smith, altruism and a patchwork of non-fungible economic relationships are still the basis of private life. Prostitution has not replaced marriage; nor has the egotism of the marvelous Sadean fucker replaced the altruism of the harried parental unit.

In this sense, Lukacs is right in History and Class Consciousness:

“Materialist dialectic is a revolutionary dialectic. This definition is so important and altogether so crucial for an understanding of its nature that if the problem is to be approached in the right way this must be fully grasped before we venture upon a discussion of the dialectical method itself. The issue turns on the question of theory and practice. And this not merely in the sense given it by Marx when he says in his first critique of Hegel that “theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses.” [1] Even more to the point is the need to discover those features and definitions both of the theory and the ways of gripping the masses which convert the theory, the dialectical method, into a vehicle of revolution.”

While, at first glance, one might classify Marx, in Bakhtinian terms, as a great monologist, in actuality he is always pursuing a dialogue. The dialogue is not just with the masses – or rather, it is with the masses in the same way the dialogue of actors in a play take as a dialogue partner the audience that listens to them. Rather, his dialogue partners are very much in the mode of the figures that the Nephew of Rameau parodies in Diderot’s dialogue. Marx is an indefatigable ventriloquist. Like other highly sensitive post-Romantics – Flaubert, Baudelaire, Karl Kraus – he has such sensitive skin that the misuse of language can give him a rash. And so one feels him furiously scratching as he imagines his dialogue partners, from Adam Smith to Bastiat.

Thus, even as he pursues a serious theme, like commodity fetishism, and seeks to demonstrate the ideology that makes the classical economist attribute exchange value to nature, he goes off – like a blister in the sun – to do something more than argue against the ideologue. It is in this sense that he is more dialogic than monologic – by refusing the protocols of turntaking that structure argument, and using, instead, the full register given to him by world literature, that recent event to which he gives special mention in the Communist Manifesto.

Here’s an example of how sense and speech act cannot be separated in Capital:

“Since the commodity form is the most universal and most undeveloped form of bourgeois production – and for that exact reason is the first to emerge – although not in the same dominant, and thus characteristic manner as today – its fetish character seems relatively easy to see through. By concreter forms even this semblence of simplicity itself disappears. From whence stems the illusions of the monetary system? It isn’t in looking at the gold and silver themselves, for they are presented as money for a society’s production relationship, although in the form of natural things with curious social properties. And doesn’t the fetishim become palpable in the modern economist, who with a high and mighty air grins down at the money system, as soon as it is a question of capital? For how long has the physiocratic illusion been dissipated that rents on land grow out of the earth, and not out of society?

But yet in order not to get ahead of ourselves, it is enough here to mention an example with relation to the commodity form itself. If commodities could speak, so they would say, that our use values might concern men – but they don’t concern us as things. What thing-lishly concerns us, is our value. Our own intercourse [Verkehr] as commodity things shows this. We are related only as exchange values with each other. Now listen as the economist speaks out of the soul of the commodity. [Man höre nun, wie der Ökonom aus der Warenseele heraus spricht]
As so often in the first book of Capital, the serious point here is put in terms of a joke, a killing joke, so to speak.

As poor as a machine: from the economic philosophical manuscripts

“And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”.

“Während die Teilung der Arbeit die produktive Kraft der Arbeit, den Reichtum und die Verfeinerung der Gesellschaft erhöht, verarmt sie den Arbeiter bis zur Maschine. Während die Arbeit die Häufung der Kapitalien und damit den zunehmenden Wohlstand der Gesellschaft hervorruft, macht sie den Arbeiter immer abhängiger vom Kapitalisten, bringt ihn in eine größere Konkurrenz, treibt ihn in die Hetzjagd der Überproduktion, der eine ebensolche Erschlaffung folgt.”- Marx

“While the division of labor increases the productive power of labor, and the wealth and refinement of society, it leads to the impoverishment of the laborer until he sinks to the level of the machine. While labor incites the accumulation of capitals and thus the increasing well being of society, it makes the laborer ever more dependent on the capitalist, thrusts him into a greater competition, drives him into a rush of overproduction, from which follows an equivalent slump.”

Kolakowski has correctly written that Marx, unlike the socialists of the 40s, had a firmer grasp of the fact that capitalism was rooted in de-humanization. His economic analysis does not marginalize this insight, but builds upon it – which is why Marx never puts the market at the center of economic analysis, even as he is able to represent the reasons that mainstream economists do so.

In the Economic-Philosophical manuscripts, the figure for that de-humanization is the machine.

Not, I notice, an animal. Traditionally, the poor were compared to animals. I’ve done a number of posts on this already – see the posts beginning with this one, on animals and personhood - the conclusion of which was that Sergio della Bernardina was correct to see that the concept of the person, outside of philosophy, is a matter of degrees and situations, and not an absolute. Which means that how personhood intervenes in social practice can’t necessarily be predicted from our definition of personhood – in the cases Bernardina examines, the tormenting of a bear or a bull before it is killed does not happen because its tormenters lack a sense of the animals personhood, but precisely because they want to provoke aggression on the part of the animal to which they can respond, shifting the blame for the animal’s death to the animal itself as a person responsible for lashing out, for acting badly.

In the Christian tradition, it is only recently that environmental historians have pursued the thesis that Christianity, by entrusting nature to man, devalued the environment. I think, again, that this is a mistake. Christianity, in the broad ancient tradition, certainly did not ascribe property to animals. They owned nothing. Yet they did have holes and nests. They had families. Christian iconography is actually replete with peaceful animals, with the redeemed sheep, with the dove, etc.

The animal might not have a property relationship with the world – they could be hunted, they could be sacrificed, they could be eaten – but they were, of course, God’s creation.

Not the machine. The machine not only has not property claim on the world – it has no home. It has no family. The son of man would not say, the chariots have sheds, the hammers have a box – although he’d know it, being a carpenters son. In the double logic of the dissolution of the human limit, when Descartes and the early modern natural philosophers compare the animal to the machine – and man, too – they both advance a new claim about the human relationship to the world (dissolving any limit to its use) while advancing a new and unrecognizable form of human – the man machine, the Other – as the human subject.

The poverty of the worker, who sinks to the state of a machine, is the flip side of the glory of the proletariat, the Other who is the subject of universal history. What does the poverty consist in? Marx sees it, of course, in terms of wealth – but also refinement – the “Verfeinerung der Gesellschaft.” I would call this poverty an imprisonment in routines. It is hard to resist jumping ahead to Freudian terms, having to do with obsessive behavior and neurosis, which, after all, is the mechanical coming to the surface – the arm or leg that doesn’t work, that has returned to dead matter.


p.s. I should say a little more about the machine. It is easy to forget that the Descartes or Le Mettrie’s machine was an automaton, an entertainment. Court societies love F/X, whether it is Versailles, Hollywood or D.C. – but in real material terms, the automata did nothing more than demonstrate the uses of a winding mechanism. What Marx is talking about is not that kind of machine.

As Schivelbusch nicely puts it at the beginning of The Railway Journey, the Europe of the eighteenth century, which was still the Europe of wood and woods, of energy supplied by streams and forests, was losing its woods. He quotes Sombart – and I am going to give some elbow room here to exaggeration and the blind eye turned to the forests in America. Still, wood was becoming more expensive, and in this way an opportunity opens up for other means of energy and structure – notably, coal and iron. To which one must add that water, too, but in a new form – as steam – is part of the complex. In one of the historical ironies that the economic historian scrupulously skirts, even the Corn laws, decried for two centuries, actually contributed to the industrial revolution, for, by raising the price of grain and thus of keeping horses, they “helped replace horsepower by mechanical power in much the same way shortage of wood in 18th century Europe had accelerated the development of coal production.”

So, the older elements of life – that obsession of the romantics in perhaps the last final bloom of eotechnical Europe – were being reconfigured before Marx’s eyes. When Marx was expelled from Paris in 1845, he took the messagerie – the stagecoach – to the Belgian border. In 1848, when he was kicked out of Belgium, he took the train back to Paris.

So, the machine like worker is not, here, the automaton, but rather the new machines which incorporated an unheard of precision and standardization.

Schivelbusch, interested in how the consciousness caught the phenomenological changes being wrought by the machine, quotes a wonderful passage from an advocate of steam engine powered transport in 1825, who describes the imperfect movement of the horse: ‘the animal advances not with a continual progressive motion, but with a sort of irregular hobbling, which raises and sinks its body at every alternate motion of its limbs.”[12] Similarly, Schivelbusch notes that the steam boat was admired at first because it did not tack – it could move against the current and the wind.

A culture picks up in its proprio-phenomenological net such major changes to its habits, but often doesn’t express their novelty, because the vocabulary to express it is lacking. Marx is a monument of the modern moment because, among other things, he understood that the vastness of the changes taking place around him called for the deployment of an entirely different understanding of the world.

The fabulous freaks are leaving town

The fabulous freaks are leaving town

The concept of ideology in Marx must be located on two axes. Diachronically, ideology substitutes the individual for the work of the system. This gesture is present not only in the Enlightenment Robinson myth, which gives us the origin of society in the story of some one individual, but also in the attribution of systematic effects to the ideas of some individual. In reality, those ideas are grounded in the possibilities opened up by some specific historical situation. Marx happily would say the same thing about his own work, which he consciously places in relation to his education, his experience in a Germany emerging from the old order and plunging, inconsistently, into the capitalist order, the social advances produced by the French Revolution, etc. This is, by the way, Marx’s supremely irreligious gesture – although as a romantic writer he adopts a prophetic tone, he characteristically disclaims the prophetic relationship to the world.

Synchronically, ideology names the process of naturalizing the social. This, it is easy to see, is not synonymous with the diachronic axis. Far from operating in terms of individuality, here ideology appeals to such natural instincts as that of appetite, or the instinct for barter, etc., which orients the market in such a way that it can’t be interfered with. Iron laws rule there. Where the Marxist would claim that our future is in the hands of men, the ideological claim is that men are always subject to the iron laws of the market. Derivatively, the class structure of society will then reflect some natural hierarchy – those on top are alpha males, or whatever. Whereas, going back to the diachronic axis, Marxists would discuss the workings of the cultural system, while ideology would see the ideas and inventions of great men.

This is, obviously, a delicate interpretative grid. From the Derridean perspective, it is one that grounds itself in an impossible present which simultaneously joins the synchronic and diachronic and pulls them apart. Or, as Hamlet might say, the time is out of joint.

I meant, when starting this, to quote a lively bit from the Grundrisse. But just to mess up the implications of this post, or at least play with them, a quote, instead, from Bataille’s Interior Experience:

Small comic recapitulation. Hegel, I imagine, touched the extreme. He was still young and he thought he was going mad. I even imagine that he elaborated his system in order to escape (every kind of conquest, without doubt, is performed by a man fleeing a menace). To finish with it, Hegel arrives at satisfaction, turns his back on the extreme. Supplication is dead inside him. If someone searches for salvation, so it goes, and continues to live, one can’t be sure, one has to continue to plead. Hegel gained, living, salvation, killed supplication, mutilated himself. He left behind only the handle of a shovel, a modern man. But before mutilating himself, without doubt he touched the extreme, knew supplication: his memory carried him to the abyss he had perceived so he could annul it. The system is annulation. [EI, 56]

ps - I just saw that Nicole has written two new posts at Rough Theory about Marx. As usual, they are revelatory. Go here.

Cantrip

Many of LI's readers may recoil our friend and foil, Paul Craddick. Paul's been rather out of the blogging scene, but he sent me an email alerting me to a group he and his wife have formed, Cantrip. Go to Myspace and check them out! And then inundate EMI with letters and phonecalls demanding that these two get a ten year contract.

Selling my promise to y to z: money, the universalizer of universal history

A good part of our intellectual apprenticeship is spent learning truths about the world that completely deny our experience. Sometimes, this is a good thing. The earth moves around the sun, who would have thought it! Sometimes, this is an ideological thing. Every philosophy freshman is duly impressed by the proof that altruism is actually an impossible ideal, since behind the act of a man of a man jumping in the river to save a stranger, one can find the flicker of the ego’s satisfaction with itself. What is rarely done is to turn the play of the cards and inquire if there is, in fact, any egotistic action at all – since, as we all know, our days are most organized by and for others. In this sense, egotism is a mere epiphenomena, and altruism, crushing altruism, is the very base and bread of our days. So why do we dwell, with such delight, on the ironic discoveries of the moralistes, without of course the saving irony? Because interest, self interest, has to be posited in order to make the capitalist machine work. We learn to demystify our motives in order to more thoroughly mystify our system.

Thus, the work of demystification turns out to be a more complex game than one expected. The career of Karl Marx is proof of this. It is rare that one man held so consistently, so desperately to the project of demystification – which is why one instinctively groups him with Nietzsche. Both, like the creature in Kafka’s Burrow, restlessly paced their own structures.

It is in terms of the burrow that I like certain of Marx’s texts above all others. Not just the brilliant political writing, but, as well, the notebooks. The Grundrisse. All commentators are agreed that the Grundrisse shows a Marx who has still not yet subdued the philosophical vocabulary to his plain work. And I must grant it is a little unfair to compare the notes, which perpetually retain the freshness of writing on the verge of one’s great themes, with the finished work, in which that freshness is subordinated to mastery. Marx is preeminently a maitre – Engels, that blessed spirit, understood this right away, irritated as he was, sometimes, by Marx’s tendency to excess.

I have been so entirely wrapped up, lately, in my editing work that I haven’t had the time I wanted to use Faust as my totem for Marx – my way of thinking through the metaphoric of transformations within the money/commodity nexus. And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as I get older, start crowds me more and more – no matter how little sleep I get, I, like poor Faust, fall behind.

So: I wanted to make the connection between the organized and unorganized faces of freedom as Simmel sees them to Marx’s approach to money. The commentators say: there are two traditions concerning Marx’s theory of money. One is that he is, at root, a metallist – that, in order to make money as a commodity coherent with the labor theory of value, Marx is forced to mystify gold and silver as the universal types of money. The other is that the commodity theory leads him to see money primarily as a measure – and thus, puts him both in the camp of the nominalists and leads him to the same problem that the classical and neo-classical economists have – he can’t really distinguish the money economy from the barter economy. Or, as Ingham, the man who presses this critique the hardest, says, Marx missed the meaning of money-in-general because of his attachment to the labor theory of value. In an article in Economy and Society (2001), he sums up his desideratum like this:

“It is extremely important for the general analysis of money that the distinction between credit and credit-money is made clear from the outset. The new forms of money in question were not simple credit in the sense of deferred payment. Nor could they be adequately understood as direct symbolic ‘paper’ representations of precious metal, whether or not this was in coin or bullion form. Rather, these
first forms of credit-money were ‘money’ in the sense that mere ‘promises to pay’ circulated as means of settlement (payment). It was only later that they were backed by gold. I shall also contend that this negotiable (or transferable) debt – that is, ‘depersonalized’ debt that can be used as means of payment to a third party – is a form of money which is specific to capitalism.” (see Ingham 1999).

Later, in the same article, Ingham makes another neat point:

“Actually existing capitalism, as opposed to the ‘village fair’, was constituted by a new form of ‘dematerialized’ credit-money. From the early beginnings in late medieval Italy, state and bank debts – that is, their promises to pay – became accepted means of payment. In other words, debts could be discharged with a higher ‘quality’ form of debt that was trusted and/or enforced. This transformation
in the form of money required the signi. cant social structural change of the depersonalization and transferability of debt. It involved the transformation of a personalized bilateral debt relation (for example, an IOU) into the means of paying a third-party creditor (see Ingham 1999; Rowlinson 1999). A debt could be paid with another debt.20 It is precisely this fact – that money is constituted by a social relation of credit–debt – which mainstream economics, in its unremitting materialist preoccupation with the individual calculation of the utility of commodities, has found difficult to comprehend.”

Orthodox Marxists will tell you that Ingham is missing the fulcrum of capitalist history – abstract labor power – in this account. Myself, I think Ingham has the right intuitions about Marx’s formal model, but underestimates another theme in Marx – that of universal history. Universal history, in Marx’s hands, is not the history of unconvering the universals that really constitute mankind, but the history of the universalizing of mankind through force and the productive forces unleashed by capitalism –whch, remember, is represented in the Communist manifesto not just by free trade, but by World literature.

Marx prefigures Simmel in understanding barter and money in terms not just of their social relations, but in terms of different social circles. If I promise a friend to do x, because my friend has done y, I do not ‘sell’ my promise to my friend z – although one notices that, indeed, married couples, or long time couples, often tend to treat debts incurred by one of them as fungible enough to be ‘paid’ by the other. In my family, for instance, my mother often represented her gifts as coming from my father. She wasn’t being dishonest – this was exactly the way she saw – and he saw – the essence of being married. One flesh is one debt and one repayment.

Here’s Marx, noticing the way in which the social circle and barter are mutually determinative:

“Meanwhile the point we want to approach is the following: gold, in relation to the commodities in as much as it is supposed to be fixed as a coherent measure, is determined through barter, immediate acts of exchange; as the relationship of all other commodities to each other. In barter is, in the meantime, the exchange value of the product only in itself; it is the first phenomenal form of the same; but the is not yet posited as exchange value. Firstly this definition does not extend over the total production, but only its overflow [Uberfluss – surplus] and is thus more or less superfluous (as exchange itself); an accidental expansion of the circle of satisfactions, enjoyments (relations to new objects). It emerges then only in a few points (originally there, where the organic community stops being in contact with the foreign one), is limited to small circles and informs the ephemeralities, the supplements of production; extinguished as accidentally as it arises. The exchange act in which the superfluity of one’s own production is contingently exchanged against that of some stranger is only the first appearance of the product as exchange value in general and is determined through contingent needs, desires, etc. But if it becomes extended, as a continuing act, that contains in itself the means to its continual renewal, by and by there comes, just as externally and contingently, the regulation of mutual exchange through the regulation of mutual production, and the production costs, that are finally all resolved in labor time, will become the measure of exchange. This shows us how exchange becomes and the exchange value of commodities.”