Comments on: Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Random Metatheory

By: Roughtheory.org » Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: A Way of Visualising Abstract Labour and Value

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:35:50 +0000

[...] I find it useful to think about abstract labour in terms of sets and subsets, each enacted in collective practice. [...]

By: Roughtheory.org » Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: What Is the “Social Character of Labour” in Capitalism?

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 17:13:41 +0000

[...] thinking out loud a bit about what Marx means by the following comment, from the section on commodity fetishism:

This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.

So what is the peculiar social character of this labour? [...]

By: Roughtheory.org » Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: The Universal as Particular

Roughtheory.org » Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: The Universal as Particular — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 08:50:06 +0000

[...] I think that some important elements of Marx’s critique hinge on the notion that abstract labour is collective labour – but collective labour in a specific, alienated form – collective labour as a specific form of unintentional domination. [...]

By: N Pepperell

N Pepperell — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 01:10:13 +0000

Very little online time today, so this will need to be a rapid-fire response: I would see this sort of analysis setting up for "grounding" a particular kind of opposition, between a specific vision of "freedom" and a particular ideal of "equality". So the opposition Joe speaks of is plausible - is "real" - but is also situated as something generated, in ways we can begin to specify, in the process of capitalist reproduction. Once we recognise this, we can then begin to push on the "necessity" of the opposition - both by reaching for other possible determinations of "freedom" and "equality", and by exploring which elements of their current opposition are sustained by our failure to transform some specific element of the overarching social context. So, for example, in terms of the sketch above, the determination of "equality" in biological terms can be juxtaposed to the potential for equality in social terms - such that people are equal because we've learned that it is possible to treat them equally, to enact their equality, in collective practice - rather than understanding equality to flow somehow from people's presocial biological uniformity. Similarly, the "abstract" and "formal" character of equality could potentially be challenged, in favour of more "substantive" visions of equality. As phrased here, of course, this is all very compressed, and I haven't shown how such alternative visions might themselves arise immanently, but I would take this to be the general idea... Running!!

By: Mike Beggs

Mike Beggs — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:46 +0000

I really don’t see how freedom and equality can be opposed. They have fundamentally different dimensions. An individual is free or unfree, multiple people are equal or unequal relative to one another.

Of course human ‘freedom’ only makes sense in a social context. But it is not zero-sum, we can concieve of people in all of society being freer in some conditions than in others. Whereas it makes no sense to see some as more equal than others.

A fundamental point of Marx’s political philosophy is that property relations make some kinds of freedom dependent on other kinds of unfreedom. Bourgeois freedom to dispose of one’s capital as one wishes is socially depedent on a class of workers who are not free and are forced to play a role in reproducing the capital owned by others. It is unequal freedom, where one is free because others are not.

By: Joseph Kugelmass

Joseph Kugelmass — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:14:16 +0000

One of the things I find particularly valuable and interesting about this post is the stress on those two ideals of human nature, freedom and equality. Since both emerged during the Enlightenment, it is natural for us to semi-equate them. We think of both as goods; we think of both as realizable under ideal political conditions; and we often think of both as natural endowments.

At the root, these are deeply opposed concepts. Your analysis brings this opposition to light: equality is based on commensurability, which bears some relationship to the standardization of labor. Freedom tends towards incommensurability, and is a principle of deviation.

I am not aiming at discarding one of the two terms; nor, I am sorry to say, am I immediately persuaded of some new synthesis. I was inspired by what you’ve written above to reflect on how freedom is used to justify unequal hierarchies — individuals freely pursue advantages over one another — and how equality is used to limit freedom through appeals to the wisdom of the people.