Sorry to write in such a compressed way (and sorry you were caught in moderation for so long) – I’m not online much at the moment, so my comments won’t be very adequate…

It’s been a while since I read this, but I think the Darwin influence shows particularly in the chapter on Division of Labour (with all the discussion of the growth and withering of branches of economic organisation: both in the sense of a genealogy of the evolution of economic organisation and that economic organisation is itself kind of genealogical, or at least resembles it in its arborescent structure).

It’s even longer since I read Origin of Species (and then not closely) but I think there’s some talk of organs as a kind of ‘natural technology’ (I think John Bellamy Foster goes into this in Marx’s Ecology). I also think there’s some comparison to be made with Marx’s discussion of skills in manufactories and Darwin’s discussion of instinct, and if you want to go really out there a comparison of capital and Darwin on eusoical insects. This may be nonsense though!

Apologies that the passing reference above is a bit confusing – this post is part of a reading group, and so written with an audience in mind who are somewhat familiar with an overarching “read” of Marx that I’ve been putting forward on this site and in other places for some time. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can explain that reading in any convincing way in a single comment, but I can perhaps give some indication of the space in which these lines were written. There is a draft of my thesis under the “Thesis” tab at the top of the page, as well as a lot of other writing on Marx under the “Marx” tab – some of those materials will probably be clearer than I can be here. They will also, of course, be longer :-) – so it’s a matter of how much time you want to invest in the reading… :-)

I have tried to make an extended argument that Capital needs to be read as a deflationary text – meaning that, where other forms of theory tend to presuppose certain “givens”, on the basis of which they then conduct their analysis, Capital tries not to do this. It tries, instead, to show how the major tools in its analytical toolkit – including foundational categories like “society”, “history”, or “material life” – are actively produced by specific forms of human interactions, and therefore reflect the distinctive sensibilities that are primed by particular forms of collective practice.

I’ve written before about a passage in the Grundrisse where Marx praises Smith for developing the category of “labour” – where this term means any sort of productive activity, rather than some specific form of activity (like agriculture). Marx believes that Smith was only able to come up with this category because collective practices were in fact enacting “labour” in that way – there was some dimension of collective life in which we had become genuinely indifferent to whether someone grew food or made handicrafts or provided services. This practical experience made Smith’s theoretical achievement possible, in Marx’s account – which doesn’t mean that Smith didn’t have to work very hard to work out, explicitly, the implications of that practical process – to draw the conclusion that “labour” could mean something like productive activity of whatever sort, rather than being tied to some specific kind of production.

A lot of Capital offers much more complex versions of this sort of argument. It takes categories from political economy (and other forms of theory) and explores what is happening in our practical experience to make it “socially valid” to develop these sorts of categories at a particular period of time. In the process, Marx often also points out that particular forms of theory have seized on practical processes in a “one sided” way – so, a theory may legitimately express something happening in one dimension of social practice – and may be very accurate if applied only to that dimension. However, that same theory may be completely blind to some other dimension of practical experience – and, as a result, it may overextrapolate from the dimension it does express well. It may conclude, for example, that human nature has a certain character, because humans really do behave a certain way in some slice of their social existence. This conclusion can sometimes be undermined just by bringing other slices of social experience to bear on the question. Capital attempts to do this in a systematic fashion.

When analysing Smith’s category of “labour”, Marx notes that Smith achieved this great breakthrough – he articulated explicitly the implications of this great shift in social practices, which meant that it had become tacitly possible to think about productive activity in general, rather than specific kinds of production. By making this explicit, Smith performed – Marx believed – a great service, making this explicit category available and opening up new forms of perception and practice as a result. However, Smith’s insight was precarious – Marx notes that Smith didn’t always manage to hang onto the best implications of his own insight. Sometimes, Marx argues, Smith slid back into earlier physiocratic understandings of labour – this backsliding, Marx argues, indicates how hard it actually is to hang on, explicitly, to insights that are tacit in new sorts of collective practice – it takes a while for concepts to become intuitive and settle in.

I would suggest there’s something similar happening with Marx’s more crass or “vulgar” statements about the centrality of material life to human society. The overwhelming thrust of a work like Capital is that what matters is collective practical experience – of whatever sort. The text examines practices associated with material production – but it also examines law, the state, contract relations, customs, ideals, gender relations – basically anything it occurs to Marx to fold in. Moreover, when it does analyse “material” relations, it does so in order to show how we effect our material reproduction through customary practices that have nothing to do with the intrinsic requirements of material production per se – and the text also offers an extremely complex and sophisticated analysis of how we could come to believe in the existence of a disenchanted “material world” in the first place (where the answer is that we come to believe in such a world because, at this moment, we are in fact collectively enacting such a world – and then overextrapolating from the slice of social existence where that enactment takes place, losing sight of our role in making a material world of a certain sort).

Spelling all this out is complicated – too much for a comment. So this is probably not all that convincing as stated. But it’s what was floating in the background of the offhand comment above. Some of Marx’s explicit statements to the effect that, e.g., how people meet their material needs is more analytically central than, say, language – I view these as similar to Adam Smith sliding back into physiocratic concepts of “labour”: they fall behind the level of sophistication that Marx actually deploys in Capital – they are fundamentally metaphysical – and, since Marx mounts an enormous critique of the metaphysics of political economy in Capital, he really should know better.

The core of Marx’s deflationary critique of political economy is that, as soon as a theory starts presupposing or treating as given the constitutive moments of its subject matter, it has failed to examine how that subject matter itself came into being. When it loses the ability to examine how the subject matter came into being, it naturalises its subject matter – it becomes blind to the contingency of the subject matter itself, and therefore cannot conceptualise how the subject matter itself could be abolished or transformed.

Normally Marx keeps this squarely in view. Sometimes… not so much. Passages in which he insists that material life is always at the centre are, in my view, “not so much” moments of his work – they get in the way (not just abstractly – this is, historically, practically, the impact they have had) of understanding the sorts of transformations that might be possible, and how those transformations might be achieved.

But this is all very telescoped… Apologies… I’ve tried to unpack this better over time elsewhere… But hopefully this gives a small sense of where I’m coming from…

Take care…

…although he retains the sense that the way in which
material needs are met must be at the centre of any sort of social analysis (he should know better, given his own argument in Capital…

What should be the center of social analysis?
What are his own arguments in Capital?

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Thanx

Sorry I’ve not been posting or commenting anywhere recently – it’s the tail end of the teaching term here, and I’ve been in endless meetings making sure students get across the line of various assessments.

Duncan’s been pressing me to post here something I shared with him recently, which I wrote an eon ago, back when I was doing proper historical work (of a sort that I want to return to again, once the dust has settled on the degree). It’s the sort of thing that, if I post it, you would probably be the only reader interested in seeing :-) – on the concept of poverty in the early Franciscan order, and its relation to the notion that “necessity knows no law”… At some point, when I have time, I’ll try to work out how to toss it up here (I don’t have the piece in soft copy, so it’ll take some concerted time)…

I’m really looking forward to having the time to write regularly again… Soon… I hope…

Take care…

Now, we just need four more Pepperellians, and then we can violently argue about what you really meant and excommunicate each other. This should be fun!

On the timing of capitalism: Marx seems to date it to the 16th century, while also pointing out that you get factories in some locations in the 13th and 14th – and occasional examples in other times and places. I don’t think Marx incorporates a strong sense of any historical dialectic into his later works – in the sense of thinking that history progresses in developmental stages – although he retains the sense that the way in which material needs are met must be at the centre of any sort of social analysis (he should know better, given his own argument in Capital, but here his own work is a bit the way he describes Adam Smith’s work – where he will speak of the immense effort it took for Smith to distil a concept of labour in general, where the effort is attested by the fact that Smith often still falls back into physiocratic concepts that his own work surpasses. I think Marx often falls back into formulations his own work surpasses as well – he hits the centre of his insights, fumbles around them, loses them, contradicts them – but that centre is what binds the work together, no matter how much it sometimes struggles to hold…)

Sorry – very disorganised blurting… Essay marking is not the best preparation for thinking about this… :-)