on the new society that forms within the old one

In Ma Nuit chez Maud, Jean-Louis, the Catholic engineer, bumps into an old college friend of his, Vidal, who is now a philosophy professor. Jean-Louis confesses that he is still an observing Catholic; but, he says, he has his own ideas about Catholicism. For instance, he recently read Pascal and felt that if Pascal’s rigorism was Christianity, he would rather be an atheist. Vidal, on the other hand, claims that, as a Marxist, Pascal has a peculiar meaning to him. His choice of Marxism, he claims, was decided by something like Pascal’s wager about the existence of God. As Vidal sees it, there are two ways of looking at history. Either it doesn’t make sense or it does. If the first view, A, has an 80 percent sense of being true, and the second a 20 percent chance, it is still rational to bet on the second view – as it fills one’s life with meaning.

I doubt that there are many Marxists today who would say, with Vidal, that Marxism is identical to the decision to see a meaning in history. They are far more likely to explain that Marxism points to the way in which the meaning of history changes with the historical circumstances of the interpreters – which tends to undermine any objective claim to discern the meaning of history. And, to an extent, I would agree with the disabused Marxist. Vidal is the mouthpiece of a fairly common strain of rhetoric in the years after WWII, when the defeat of Nazi Germany and decolonization of the Third World seemed to be objective proof that history was ‘on our side’. Which isn't to say that this was the only sense one could see in history – it could be an infinite abasement, as it appears to have been to Cioran. By the sixties, however, the notion that there was some inevitable development in history – inevitability being one way to construe the ‘meaning’ of history – was on the wane. The notion that there was a discontinuity in history tended to make the idea that there was a sense in it seem quaint. On the other hand, there was also positivist variant that stretches from the Rotary club booster to the University of Chicago prof, which opined that the progress of science was, in some general and vague way, the progress that had brought us liberal capitalist society. In the late 80s and 90s, a variant of this idea was that capitalism as globalism was the end of history. This sounded more apocalyptic than the Babbit insistence in this snatch of dialogue from Flannery O'Connor's The Life you Save May Be Your Own:

Mr. Shiftlet's eye in the darkness was focused on a part of the automobile bumper that glittered in the distance. "Lady," he said, jerking his short arm up as if he could point with it to her house and yard and pump, "there ain't a broken thing on this plantation that I couldn't fix for you, one‑arm jackleg or not. I'm a man," he said with a sullen dignity, "even if I ain't a whole one. I got," he said, tapping his knuckles on the floor to emphasize the immensity of what he was going to say, "a moral intelligence!" and his face pierced out of the darkness into a shaft of doorlight and he stared at her as if he were astonished himself at this impossible truth.The old woman was not impressed with the phrase. "I told you you could hang around and work for food," she said, "if you don't mind sleeping in that car yonder."
"Why listen, Lady," he said with a grin of delight, "the monks of old slept in their coffins!"
"They wasn't as advanced as we are," the old woman said.

Marx had a strong sense of history. This, it is usually said, is his inheritance from Hegel; however, even a glance at the Enlightenment and Romantic culture of Germany would show us that history as a “force” of some kind precedes Hegel. Herder, the translators of the Scots like Gentz, romantic critics like Schlegel were very invested in seeing history as a force. And who could blame them? Looking about, it was hard to find institutions that would help overthrow the impediments to modernity - everywhere were crappy small landholders and tax collectors, peasants and pastors. History was treated as all the more autonomous as the historian was all the more feudally dependent. The peasant society of the limited good was particularly strong in the German states, and the distrust of growth was shared by peasants and Junkers alike. Faith in history as a force was the face of the modernity longed for by a section of the intelligentsia.

Marx’s original views about history were, I think, entangled with his sense of Germany’s underdevelopment. The double aspect of Marx’s description of the capitalist system – on the one hand, as the expression of the revolutionary force of the bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, as a system that had to be overthrown – lead to a certain confusion in reading Marx chronologically. That double aspect allows Marx a lot of elbow room for his irony – and Marx always viewed irony as a high intellectual gift. I need to find that passage where he laughs about the political economist's blindness to irony. That was a fatal flaw.

It is in the Manifesto that Marx makes certain statements about history that, themselves, have a history leading up to the conversation of Jean-Louis and Vidal in Ma Nuit chez Maud. As with Baudelaire’s notion of the modern, history is obviously a bit of an intoxicant to Marx. And why not? Who has not known the sublime feeling of standing with the devil above it all, at say 6,000 feet above all human kind – although it is best not to bow down to the devil at that moment, no matter what he promises you.

“One speaks of ideas, which revolutionize a whole society; one thus only expresses the fact, that within the old society have been moulded the elements of a new one, for the dissoluton of the old ideas keeps pace with the dissolution of the old relations of life.”

The uncompromising phrase, a “whole society,” seems to infer a unilateral motion, pressing on all levels of society. Everything goes at once, for all pieces of the old relations of life are connected to each other. And we do see this. Who can’t see, for instance, that the old ways of human locomotion – mainly by walking, sometimes by horse – were so completely swept away, first by the railroad, then by the automobile, that walking in many places in the developed world – for instance, Texas – has become a minority option. The old times – the week it would take to go from London to Edinburgh – have disappeared – or exist only in the minds and careers of bums and tramps. But bums and tramps can’t simply walk across the countryside like they could in 1900 or 1800 – they are bounded by the roads they can travel, as they cannot walk besides a highway, and would certainly draw police attention if they walk along other roads. At the present time, China, in one of the greatest engineering feats ever attempted, is automobilizing its human locomotion. All over the world, the car is uprooting and changing the old relations of life.

And yet, is it true that the surface of life is so homogeneous that it can simply change like this?

That question gets to another aspect of Marx’s ironic praise of the bourgeoisie: that homogeneity is the result of capitalism. The homogeneous society, in which the archaic has no place to hide, is the effect of the features I’ve already alluded to in past posts. And, if we at this point give capitalism much more time than Marx could give it in the nineteenth century, we can watch the process. A recent book – which I must get! –about the pharmaceutical/psychology industry, Crazy like Us, by Ethan Watters, has pointed out that the variegated understanding of emotions in different cultures are being confronted with the American model – for the American model is the model of Big Pharma. This is from the NYT magazine article:

“We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.”

The marketing of mood management is by now a well known ongoing scandal – one that has produced almost no opposition. Whenever marketers change the laws to allow for the mass advertising, over tv, of various anti-depressives, the amount of anti-depressives goes up far, far over anybody’s estimate of the real number of pathological depressives. And so it goes – what, in an earlier age, would be considered an illness in itself, can now be dismissed as a side affect and become the locus of a new marketing campaign and a new drug. Here, the homogenization promised by the term ‘whole society” seems armed and should be considered dangerous.

And so, I’d contend, Marx began to think in the years after the Commune. I’m going to jump to that thought tomorrow – I’ve been rather pointed to this by some references Amie gave me, which have the excellent effect of throwing a certain retrospective ambiguity on Marx’s notion of historical ‘necessity’.

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.