Apologies… and hopefully better from me at a later time…

the capitalist era is one in which there is a latent return to animism

It’s extremely difficult for me to voice – and, of course, I also think it was extremely difficult for Marx to voice, and this difficulty both drives parts of Capital’s presentational style, and also is the non-idiosyncratic core of why the text is so difficult to read – this issue that Marx is not really relying on a firm, intuitive distinction between subject and object, animal and human, person and thing – even living and dead. He deploys these sorts of distinctions regularly throughout Capital, but the driving force of the presentational strategy text is to be adequate to the practical (and therefore contingent, historical) genesis of the distinctions deployed.

So the text operates through an appropriation of materials that are not themselves understood as being in any way ontologically fixed or historically stable – but these unstable materials are nevertheless the most solid stuff with which we can build our critiques, our alternatives, our future histories.

This is an argument “about” a nature/culture distinction – in which this distinction itself, along with the qualitative attributes associated with either pole, are understood as contingent, transient – and practically real. So persons are treated as things – not as a mere semblance, but in the same manner as implied in the “hunger is hunger” passage from the Grundrisse: we enact ourselves (parts of ourselves) as things – and enact thingliness itself as a specific constellation of qualitative attributes, generating a particular historical form of materiality.

From this standpoint, the text has a very complex relationship to more familiar forms of politics – including politics fueled by a shock that persons should be treated as things. On the one hand, this sort of shock is acknowledged as something that is itself socially valid – a potential reservoir of collective outrage and contestation that arises in and through this particular enactment of materiality. On the other hand, the tacit politics of the text itself suggest that, in the topsy turvy mirror-image world that Marx understands capitalism to be, many political impulses that appear noble, have unintended consequences that generate specific forms of domination – so that, by the end, the major emancipatory possibilities that are teased out, emerge from unintended consequences of precisely the processes that treat humans as things.

So one way of looking at the major dramatic arcs in the text would be that the chapters from 1-6 look at how labour “realises” itself at the level of the individual (and then unintended negative consequences from this self-realisation), then from chapter 7, through the discussion of the working day, the text looks at how labour “realises” itself collectively (and then, in the chapters to follow, unintended consequences of this form of self-realisation as well), and then, from the discussions of detail division of labour and machinery, which are on their face horrific in their immediate implications, emerges the possibility for an unintended consequence that might be emancipatory – the abolition of labour. So the whole narrative reads like an appropriation of Hegel’s inverted world thesis – where what seems just and good on the outside, is unjust and bad on the inside – transposed onto the practical realities of capitalism, where the unintended consequences of good acts are often bad, and the unintended consequences of bad acts could – potentially, if appropriated for the creation of a new form of collective life – be good.

I’ve spoken with Nate before about how Marx sometimes seems a bit too taken with the theme of inversion – sometimes to the point of implying that horrific historical circumstances were somehow necessary in order to achieve emancipatory ends – as opposed to the more deflationary move, which would argue no more than that, however horrific history has been, if we want to build something else, we will end up working with the raw materials left behind in the wake of those horrors…

But while Marx is fixated on the issue of inversion – unintended consequences, how practices and ideals might have contradictory implications – what interests me are the anthropological tools used to make this argument, and the way in which those tools make it possible to think about historical forms of materiality in a way that both undermines ontological fixedness, but in a way that doesn’t sceptically question the “reality” of whatever form of materiality we currently have. So the argument undermines simple notions of anthropological projection – all the way back to the promissory note in Marx’s critique of Feuerbach – and doesn’t ask “how do we come to believe this obviously false thing?”, but “how do we constitute this particular truth for ourselves at this moment in time?”

Sorry this is a bit scattered… Bit exhausted at the moment…

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis.

But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.

Marx seems to think that, in order to know what needs to be transformed in practice, to dispel the particular fever dream characteristic of political economy, it is necessary to trace in great detail how that fever dream is generated in collective practical activity, so that some specific apotheosis of practical relations can be understood to be implicated in everyday practices. Capital is therefore written “backwards” – starting with the standpoint to be criticised, with the intention of tracing back from that standpoint to the contradictory practical activities that both render that standpoint socially plausible, and yet also convict it as unnecessary and as a form of domination.

Sorry – rushing badly here… but…

This is probably not the clearest way to say this… The original thesis plan was actually intended to cover this whole arc and do this more adequately… I just didn’t have the room… :-( So the thesis ended up collapsed back into just the very first major narrative arc – and couldn’t even get to the next arc, which leads up to the chapter on the working day, let alone get me all the way here… :-(

I really like your point about reading the early stuff in light of the later, as we’ve talked about before v1 is in some ways a really weird and hard book to start, intended as much for re-reading as for reading.

One other thought, just on subtle literary-ish qualities of the text, dramatic arcs and so on, the return to religious/theological -ish themes at the end of this part of v1 also provides a nice resonance for the opening of the stuff on primitive accumulation as original sin. One question, not sure how to put this more clearly – I’m convinced by your point that this ties off the longest dramatic arc in the book. In that case, what does that mean for the ending sections on primitive accumulation? In addition to the dramatic piece, it’s also a bit odd that they come after the most general and systematic presentation of capitalism in action.

take care,
Nate