But what I remember from those days is how textual the discussion was. And my sense from talking with students here is that while that's still a core of what you're trying to do with the book... that the way you're teaching it has really evolved. and changed in its own way. In one sense, it's a much larger, it's no longer just around a small seminar table that we're having a reading group. It's a much larger group. You've certainly got a lot of the same mix of academic students, faculty.
activists and so on who are involved in it. But at the same time my sense is that your approach to the book has changed somewhat too. So I wonder if you might want to try and... spin that out a bit. One of the great things about doing this all this time, when you think about it, teaching the same book for nearly 40 years sounds like an incredibly boring thing to do.
And most people, if they taught the same course for 40 years, would go nuts just doing it. But every time I go through it, I find a fresh angle on it. And the fresh angle is sometimes something I didn't see in the text before, which now jumps out at me as being very significant. And the other thing that happens is that circumstances change. People's interests change. the intellectual background with which they come to capital changes. So actually taking this text and sort of putting it with...
The changing historical and geographical circumstances is actually in itself a very interesting exercise. I've always found a great deal of excitement about that. But the other thing that happens is that... Yeah, there are many things I see in the book now which I didn't see before, in part because I've gone through it with so many different people seeing it from different angles that I start to see it from their angle and then I see things that I didn't see before.
but partly also because I think my own intellectual interests have grown and shifted and therefore, in a sense, I'm... changing the way in which I think about capital and teach capital depending very much on the kind of circumstances that I'm writing about today. I'm curious to know how many of you actually read these two chapters. Wow, how many didn't? Don't do it again. One of the things I suggested last time was a good idea when you're looking at a particular section to
go over what the main idea is, because that way you can chart your way through what's going on. And last time we dealt with section one. of chapter one, and I suggested that you could decompose this into a very simple sort of structure, which looked like this, that Marx starts with the commodity. as the foundation for his investigation of a capitalist mode of production, immediately suggests it has a dual character, it has a use value, and it has an exchange value.
that the mystery about the exchange value was that the tremendous heterogeneity which existed of use values is somehow or other rendered compatible, commensurable, and so Marx argues there must be something that lies behind exchange value which explains that commensurability. What it is that lies behind is the notion of value, and he defines that as socially necessary labour time.
In order to be socially necessary, the labour expended on something has to be a use-value for someone, so Marx reconnects to use-value and so you start to see value. as a coming together of both use value and exchange value in the concept of socially necessary labour time. Now, if you ask yourself this question of what is the structure of the next two sections, they go something like this. He concentrates on labour time. He's already distinguished between
the tremendous variety of labour times that might be actually spent, and something which he calls abstract labour. So here he takes a concept which was just simply referred to in the first section, and splits it out and says, well socially necessary labour time has two aspects, concrete labour and abstract labour.
and he talks about the difference between the two. But in the end there's only one labour process. It's not as if one labour process is doing the concrete and one's doing the abstract, no, there's one labour process and it has this dual character. It is both concrete and it is abstract. The question is, how do you find out what the abstract value is in the commodities that you've produced?
And the answer to that can only be found at the moment where abstract and concrete labour come together at the moment of exchange. So we're now going to look at exchange and the way in which exchange generates a way of expressing value, representing value, because we know that value is a social relation, therefore it's immaterial. So what we get coming out of exchange is a duality again, relative and equivalent forms.
forms of value. And these relative and equivalent forms of value eventually coalesce at the end of this long and, in my opinion, somewhat turgid third section. into the idea that there is a way in which value gets expressed, and it gets expressed in the form of a money… commodity. If you want to take this further into the next section, the money, commodity, conceals something. It conceals the social relation.
So the next section is about the way in which there are social relations between things and material relations between people. Now you can see a certain pattern emerging here in the nature of the argument. There is an unfolding going on. There is an expansion of the argument going on. And actually, if you look at the logical structure…
of the argument in capital, you see it is in continuous expansion of this kind. Now the classic way of thinking of the Hegelian logic is, of course, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But these are not synthetic points, these are points which internalize a tension, a contradiction that needs to be further expanded and looked at. In this section, the first section,
we have the argument that there is a distinction between abstract and concrete labour, but now we expand it. And out of that comes an understanding of how exchange processes produces a representation of value… in the money commodity, the money form. The universal equivalent, as he puts it. So you see how this process of representation unfolds in capital. But of course, at each point in this, he's going to make many other observations. This, if you like, is a sort of
skeletal structure of the argument. But as he builds this argument, he builds in extra elements. And as those extra elements are built in, so what we see is a gradual expansion not only in the terms of this kind of linear way but it sort of expands in this way as well. It goes from a very narrow conception of the commodity to a broader and broader and broader conception as he works through these different…
elements. So let's look very concretely then at this section two. He starts off on page 132. where he makes the very modest claim that I was the first to point out and examine critically this two-fold nature of the labour contained in commodities. As this point is crucial to an understanding of political economy, it requires further elucidation. This is a polite way of saying, to the degree that classical political economy never made this distinction,
they've got their political economy all wrong. And I'm going to get it right because this distinction is fundamental. Now, the first part looks at concrete labour. And in much the same way that he's looking at the heterogeneity of use values, he's looking at the immense heterogeneities of concrete labour processes.
producing different items, shirts and shoes and apples and pears, and all the rest of it, different skills involved, different techniques involved, different raw materials involved, and therefore the labour process. is itself heterogeneous. It's not simply that you're producing heterogeneous products, you're also witnessing a heterogeneity of labour processes. Spinning and weaving, shoemaking and…
bread baking and all the rest of it call for different skills there. The heterogeneity of it is simply stunning. So he goes over that heterogeneity. In the process, however, he makes… one move to broaden the argument, and that move is, I think, of singular importance. And this move occurs at the bottom of page 133, well, to be honest, about halfway down.
He says, labor, then, as the creator of use values, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence, which is independent of all forms of society. Now usually you don't find Marx saying that in Capital, because he's interested only in how things work under capitalism. But here he's saying, use values have to be produced no matter what kind of society you're in.
He says, it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature and therefore human life itself. What we're doing here… is at this point we're introducing the whole idea of a metabolic relation to nature as being something which has to be integrated into the argument, integrated into the analysis. He doesn't pay that much attention to this in capital, but the point of him making this statement here is to say there's no way in which you can examine
this whole process without actually looking at this metabolic relation to nature. And he goes on to explain a little bit, the physical bodies of commodities are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature and labour. If we subtract the total amount of useful labour of different kinds which is contained in the coat, linen, etc., a material substratum is always left.
This substratum is furnished by nature without human intervention. When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself. That is, you have to proceed in accordance with natural law. he can only change the form of materials. Furthermore, even in this work of modification he is constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of use values.
As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. That gendered metaphor is very common, of course, from the 17th century onwards. So Marx is simply repeating something that had been there from the enlightenment onwards. But, notice something here, material wealth is not the same as Value. Material wealth is going to be the total quantity of use values available to you. The value of those use values…
can vary in all sorts of ways. You can have a lot of use values, and very little value because there's very little labor input, or you can have very few use values and a lot of labour input. So the relationship between wealth and value is not one-on-one at all. So Marx's conception of wealth is about the material assemblage. of use values which are available to us." He then goes on to make some comments.
This heterogeneous labour contains a bit of a conundrum. Different skills, different capacities for productivity of different labourers. And we have to look at that, which he does over the next two pages. And he says, in order to really advance his analysis, what he has to do is to create a simple standard of value. And this standard is going to be called, as he says on 135, simple average labour.
Now, simple average labour is not constant. He points out, it is true, it varies in character in different countries and at different cultural epochs, but in a particular society it is given. This is a move that Marx will often make. For purposes of analysis I'm going to assume it's given, even though I know it varies all over the place. But for purposes of analysis I'm going to assume there's something there called simple average labour, which is
what the abstraction of value is about. Furthermore, what I do is I take the issue of skills and complex labour and simply say, more complex labour counts only as intensified or rather multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour. He then adds, experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. He doesn't tell us what experience it is that shows us this. This is actually a rather problematic argument.
and it goes under the title of the reduction of skill to simple labour problem in a lot of Marxian theorizing. And it poses certain difficulties for the way in which certain people have used Marx's value theory. So I want to signal the fact that this passage conceals something which is a bit problematic and which has been a matter of some controversy in the field of Marxian studies.
What I'm going to do, therefore, is to ask the question, which we, I think, have to ask of this, what experience is it that shows this reduction is being made, and how is that reduction being made. And we'll come across some examples where we will find that argument laid out.
So at the bottom of that paragraph he says, in the interest of simplification we shall henceforth view every form of labour-power directly as simple labour-power. By this we shall simply be saving ourselves the trouble of making
the reduction. As I've indicated, this is a strategy that Marx sometimes uses. He hits a complication, says, okay, I recognize the complication, I'm going to simplify it away and for purposes of argument go on as if this datum of simple average labour is adequate to my argument. On page 136-137, he starts to talk more about the abstract qualities of labour.
the examination of the concrete, both looking at the relation to nature and the problem of skills, and goes to look more concretely, if I can put it that way, at the abstract side of this argument. And of course on the abstract side we're dealing with a quantitative relation. And he has to say certain things about the temporal duration of labour, how the temporal duration of labour works.
And the first thing he notices on the top of 137 is that an increase in the amount of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous the simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. Value is dependent upon human productivity. Highly productive people can produce a large amount of material wealth.
very quickly. And they can work less hours. So actually the amount of value that they make can be very low, but the amount of material wealth they generate can be enormous. So again, he's going to emphasize that distinction between material wealth. and value. He goes on to point out that while changes in productivity affect material wealth, they don't necessarily have any effect at all on
value creation. We will see instances where this is the case but nevertheless the changing productivity is itself not directly connected. to transformations in value." That leads him to the bottom of 137, to a definition. All labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in the physiological sense.
And it is in this quality of being equal or abstract human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in the quality of in this quality of being concrete, useful labour, that it produces use-values." It just simply means that if it takes so many hours of simple
labour to produce a coat, and you produce ten coats, the amount of value is ten. If you produce fifteen coats, it's fifteen. The value per coat remains the same. He then goes on to talk then about what happens when the value per coat goes down, which is why the changing productivity then comes in. Section three, the value form. or exchange value. Again, what we see is an opening argument which specifies the nature of a problem.
And he begins with this discussion about the objectivity of commodities. And the fact that even though they have objective qualities, Nevertheless, he says about the middle of page 138, not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values. In this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely, sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects.
He then goes on to say, let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only insofar as they are expressions of an identical social substance, human labour. that their objective character as values is therefore purely social. From this it follows, he says… that it can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity. Now, this is a little bit strange, in the sense that Marx is saying
that the value of a commodity is immaterial. Not an atom of matter enters into the value of a commodity. Marx's foundational concept, value, is immaterial. but objective. This doesn't fit very well with the image of Marx, right, as someone who kind of is a grubby materialist, who everything has to be sort of fixed and material, if it's not material then it's nothing. Here's his fundamental concept, value, which is immaterial but objective.
and it's immaterial because it's a social relation. Can you see social relations? Can you actually have iotas or atoms or molecules of social relationships? you can't trace them that way, yet we know that social relationships are objective. There's a social relationship between you and I.
And you could look at what's going on in the room and say, okay, there's a social relationship between teacher and taught. And you can talk about it and it has objective consequences in the grade you get and all that sort of stuff. You can't actually measure it in terms of atoms of movement and you can't actually find the molecules floating through the air, you know, from my brain into your brain or from wherever, you know. It's not like that. It's immaterial but objective.
So Marx is saying value is immaterial and objective, like that, it's a social relation which becomes objectified in the commodity. And that process of objectification is of course also an objectification of a process in a thing. Because the process is socially necessary labour time. So the process is objectified in the thing. how it is objectified in the thing is a matter of some considerable interest. And furthermore, how the commodity expresses that value relation.
objectively is a thing. And Marx's answer to that is, you cannot go to a commodity, this table, and dissect it and chemical composition and everything else, you can't go to this table and find out what its value is, internal to the table. You only find out what the value of this table is when it is put in an exchange relation with something else. Later on he will actually use the notion of gravity as a similar example. It's very difficult, impossible in fact, to take a stone
and dissect it and find gravity inside of it. You can only find gravity when you put the stone in relationship to another stone, it's only a relationship between bodies. So it's immaterial but objective. So this is Marx's fundamental concept and it's very important that you recognize this at the outset. So when somebody comes along and says, well, Marx is just one of those boring materialists who doesn't have anything, well, how come?
His foundational concept is immaterial but objective. And what is this about? And the immateriality is, of course, socially necessary labour time. But in order to figure out what socially necessary labour time is, you've got to have a form of appearance. So, on 139, again he makes a modest claim,
Now, however, we have to perform a task never even attempted by bourgeois economics. That is, we have to show the origin of this money form, we have to trace the development of the expression of value contained in the value relation of commodities from its simplest almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money-form. When this has been done, the mystery of money will immediately disappear.
What then follows is, I think, a very boring exegesis of how this works. And we can simply go over the general line of argument. actually look at some very important, again, seeming sidebars like the relation to nature, which actually are now going to become integrated into the argument. The argument goes like this. I have a commodity. I don't know what its abstract value is. And I'm desperate to know and have a measure of the abstract value in my commodity. You have a commodity. So I say, okay.
I'm going to measure the value, abstract value of my commodity in terms of your commodity. You have the equivalent form, I have the relative form. If we were in a barter situation… you would have the relative form relative to my equivalent. There are as many equivalents as there are commodities, and as many relatives as there are commodities as well. So this is the simple version.
that kind of says, I only find out what this table is worth when it's in exchange with something else. And therefore it is your labour input which is going to be the measure of abstract labour in mine. he then expands it and says well what happens when for example i have shoes and you don't want shoes but on the other hand i want
the shirt you have, so I trade my shoes for your shirt and then you take the shoes you've traded and trade them on. In other words, you can imagine something going on and on and on and on and on like that. Or you could also imagine somebody sitting there with
cans of tuna, and they're the only person who's got cans of tuna. And everybody wants to trade with cans of tuna, so suddenly cans of tuna turn out to be very significant and therefore multiple commodities are exchanging with the same thing. So Marx goes through these various… forms of this and at the end of the day we start to see crystallizing out the idea that there is one commodity or a particular bundle of commodities which start actually to be a stand-in.
for the equivalent. And out of that we see crystallizing the universal equivalent. One commodity becomes the central equivalent for all exchanges. And that one commodity we call the money commodity and the most obvious one to look at will be gold. So one commodity crystallizes out. There are a number of points which have to be made about this and Marx is going to make this point several times. In order for this to happen, exchange has to become generalized.
It has to become what he calls a normal social act. It can't be just an occasional exchange, it has to be generalized and it has to be systematic. If it's not generalised or systematic then it's unlikely that gold is going to emerge as the universal equivalent. But what you can see him doing here is very different from the argument of
classical political economy. He's saying that the money form arises out of the exchange relation. It's not superimposed from outside, it's not that somebody had a good idea and said, oh let us have money. Nothing of that kind, no, it arises in Marx's view out of simple acts of exchange which gradually expand to the point where they become generalized for the whole of society.
Now, there's an interesting question here. Is this a historical argument or a logical argument? Actually, we're often going to find that arising in capital and it's something you should think about. In the nineteenth century there was a tendency sometimes to interpret Marx as making a historical argument as well as a logical argument. I think most people who are familiar with
works in archaeology and anthropology and history and all the rest of it, would now kind of say you can't really treat this as a historical argument. There were too many symbolic systems like coins and so on, floating around of various kinds, historically and archaeologically and all the rest of it, in the absence of kind of clear exchange relations of this sort.
It's probably best not to treat this as a historical argument. But what it does do, and I think this is the way to look at it, is it actually constructs a logical argument.
about the relationship between the money form and commodity exchange. And what that would say historically would be this, that while there may have been all kinds of different systems that you might call monetary systems, floating around, exchange of cowrie shells or stories or whatever, while there may have been all kinds of systems of that kind floating around.
to the degree that capitalist commodity exchange becomes generalized, so it disciplines all of those forms to this singular relationship between the money form… and the commodity form. So in that sense you could kind of say the logic of capitalism and a capitalist system would say that as… exchange proliferates and becomes a normal social act. What this means is that money and commodities will move into this kind of relation.
no matter what the original foundation of the monetary form may have been. But then there are some very specifics about this argument. I want to just pay attention to occasional bits of language which I think are significant. On 142, for example, In the middle there, he's talking about human labour in general, however, he goes on to say, it is not enough to express the specific character of the labour which goes to make up the value of the linen. Human labour-power and its fluid state…
and will often draw your attention to the way in which Marx concentrates on the fluidity of things. Human labour-power and its fluid state, or human labour, creates value but is not itself value. It becomes value in its coagulated state in objective form, through objectification." So again, there's this process-thing relationship. And that is always kind of lurking, and you'll always find passages where Marx will be re-emphasizing that. But then there's something odd about the way in which
these relative and equivalent forms of value work together. And he identifies three peculiarities, the first is identified on page 148. The first peculiarity which strikes us when we reflect on the equivalent form is this, that use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite value. That relation is entitled in the very beginning of this argument. It's the use-value you have which is the equivalent of my relative.
And it's that use-value, it's not the generality, it's just that use-value. And we're never going to escape from that contradiction. That a specific use-value, at the end of the day, is going to be gold. becomes a form of appearance of its opposite value. The result of that, 149, is he starts to talk about the way in which, and this is where you start to get a precursor of the fetishism argument,
He says, the relative form of a commodity, the linen, for example, expresses its value existence as something wholly different from its substance and properties, as the quality of being comparable with a coat, for example. This expression itself therefore indicates that it conceals a social relation. Now, in the fetishism section we're going to be dealing a lot with the way in which things get concealed. But here he's kind of saying that concealing…
goes on in this logical relationship which is being built up between commodities and their monetary expression. And he then goes on a bit further down that paragraph to say, hence the mysteriousness of the equivalent form. which only impinges on the crude bourgeois vision of the political economist when it confronts him in its fully developed shape that of money." He then goes on to sort of have a little… cut at the classical political economists for their failures. So, he says 150 in the top.
The body of the commodity which serves as the equivalent always figures as the embodiment of abstract human labour and is always a product of some specific useful and concrete labour." Specific concrete labour is what…
makes gold. But gold is supposed to be an expression of abstract human labour. The second peculiarity at the bottom of that page… The equivalent form therefore possesses a second peculiarity, in it, concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour. Top of 151. The equivalent form has a third peculiarity. Private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely labour, in its directly social form.
you can see all sorts of contradictions emerging out of this. The expression of value is a particular commodity, a particular use-value produced under a particular concrete conditions of labour, which is in principle appropriable by any one individual, and at the same time it's meant to be the general expression of the whole world of commodity production. Tension. Just to give you an example, you don't have to take the private appropriation.
If gold is the money commodity, if gold is the one commodity which is the center of all of this, then who are the producers of gold? Now, there was a very interesting moment towards the end of the 1960s, when the two most important producers of gold in the world market were the Soviet Union and South Africa. capitalism was not terribly happy. I mean, the Soviet Union of South Africa could actually mess up the whole gold supply system.
by flooding the market or doing something or other, you know. So in a sense, one of the reasons, many reasons actually, that we went to a demetallic, a non-metallic… monetary base from the 1970s onwards had everything to do with the fact that the powers that be in Washington and London and Tokyo and all the rest of it decided that,
We can't keep gold as a base. There are other reasons why they couldn't keep gold as a base. We can't keep gold as a base because of the political liability that lies there. So these contradictions that he's talking about here are likely to erupt. in very specific ways. Who controls the money supply? Who controls those use values? What are the conditions of labour? What happens, as happened in 1848, when suddenly gold is…
discovered in California. And there's a flood of gold into the world market. What happened when the Spaniards went into South America and stole all the gold from the Incas and all the rest of it? and flooded Europe with gold in the 16th, 17th centuries, creating the grand inflation. In other words, the fact that a specific commodity…
has this capacity to be the universal equivalent, with all of those particularities about it, creates a problem. It is, as it were, a simple relationship between a particularity and a universal. And the particularity… is standing in as a measure of the universal. Tension, contradictions, monetary contradictions fly all over the place later on in the analysis, but what he's doing here is laying in…
A little bit of a basis for that. Also in 151, he points out something else which is very important about exchange. He's very fond of quoting Aristotle. And he notices that Aristotle says, well, if things exchange, there must be something equivalent in the exchange. So that what Aristotle began to lay out was the notion that exchange implies equivalence. But Aristotle couldn't have a labour theory of value.
Why not? Because of slavery. No free market and labour, this kind of stuff. So, Aristotle saw something very significant about the nature of exchange and about the nature of economies. which is the equivalence principle. It didn't necessarily mean there's equivalence between people but there's equivalence somewhere in this system that says that is equivalent to that. And that equivalence principle is something which is going to be very significant in the way in which markets work.
151 says, there can be no exchange without equality and no equality without commensurability. This is something which is very important for how markets work. Now, what happens as this universal equivalent starts to become more and more present in the argument is this. And he points this out again on 153 towards the bottom.
He says, the internal opposition between use-value and value, hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition, i.e. by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed counts directly only as a use value, whereas the other commodity in which that value is to be expressed counts directly only as an exchange value.
That is, what we begin to see is the beginnings of an emergence of something which is going to be crucial to the argument. An internal opposition within the commodity between use-value and value is eventually going to be expressed as an external opposition between the world of commodities and the world of money.
those two worlds suddenly become separate from each other. And as they become separate from each other they can be antagonistic to each other. In other words, you go from an internal opposition to an external… opposition with the potentiality for an antagonism. The end of the story then is about how the expanded form of value morphs into a universal equivalent. and that therefore what this means is that money becomes the expression. The money commodity becomes the expression of value.
He says 160, he says this in the middle of the page. Finally, a particular kind of commodity acquires the form of universal equivalent. because all other commodities make it the material embodiment of their uniform and universal form of value." Then notice the next sentence, "...but the antagonism between the relative form of value and the equivalent form…"
The two poles of the value-form also develops concomitantly with the development of the value-form itself. And that takes us into the final section just on… the money form. What we've done here is looked at the way in which concrete and abstract come together in an exchange, how the relative and equivalent forms of value build in certain ways to generate this money commodity. Then that leads us into fetishism but let's have a… questions you have about this section and the preceding section. Yes.
Well, they're not absurdities so much as I think Marx is all the time talking about the internalizations of contradictions. And those internalizations of contradictions also become generative. and it is the tensions there, and here we will get from a kind of complicated argument, which I don't want to go into in any great depth, but a complicated argument which says…
You know, are we talking about Marx's mode of representation here? And his talking about contradictions, or are we talking about real contradictions that exist? I've already indicated what I find fascinating about Marx is that he sets up, just in this chapter, this notion of a contradiction within the money form.
And then what I'm looking at and kind of saying, well, why did they go off the gold standard in the late 1960s, you know? And then I kind of thought to myself, well, actually this helped me understand something about that. and I think it was very real, and if you go to the literature you find indeed it was real. There was a sort of nervousness about the empowerment of the Soviet Union and South Africa.
The relationship between Marx's argument and the realities around us and the tensions we feel in our daily lives is always a complicated one, and you have to work that through for yourself. and work it out for yourself. But what you have to see him doing is making a logical argument here where he's talking about the way in which these contradictions get internalized in something like money. Like, what is money?
It's a very interesting kind of question. How many of you have thought about what is money? Where did it come from? And I don't know if you know, if you go to Dickens' Dombian son, you know, there's this Mr. Dombian, little Paul is dying, and he kind of says, Papa, what's money? And Mr. Dombie, the great entrepreneur, can't give him an answer. and little Paul's mother has died, so he said, well, can money bring her back? And Mr. Dombey doesn't know what to say. What is money? What is it?
And we're with it all the time and we use it all of the time but it's deeply contradictory. Also in terms of our relationship with it, in terms of the fetish. I mean, even I wake up sometimes and sort of go and check what's happening to my stocks and my pension fund, you know, so we get a fetish about it, you know, well, what is it, you know, oh, it went up by two percent, yay, you know.
Or I went down by 10, you go, oh my God, you know. So I have a contradictory relation to collapses of the stock market. On the one hand, I like it politically. On the other hand, I hate it personally. Because there goes my pension fund, you know. So these kinds of contradictions and tensions are there all the time in our daily lives and so I think that we need to think about them. One of the interesting things about this section is that it's written in a completely different style.
The last section is Marx with his dull accounting hat on, you know, this equals that and that equals that. This is Marx kind of going off with… mysteries and werewolves and all the rest of it. And it's a very different writing style. One of the things that's happened as a result of that is that… Quite a lot of people actually regard this as some kind of extraneous piece of argument in capital, some sort of thing that's sort of on the side, and that therefore they don't take serious
note of it too much when they're talking about the general theory that Marx is laying out in capital. The other side kind of doesn't pay much mind to the general theory of capital and treats the section on the fetishism as the golden piece. the golden nugget in Marx and kind of expands it into great sorts of literary theory and all the rest of it. I think it's very important to recognize that…
Marx imported this into the second edition from an appendix, as he did the third section. He rewrote them and brought them into the second edition and therefore it was a very conscious move on his part to do this. But it also says something about Marx's technique that he feels perfectly happy switching writing styles as he moves from one kind of topic to another, and he matches his writing style to what it is that he's really trying to convey.
So I think one of the questions we have to ask is what is the positionality of this in Marx's general line of argument? And I think that the positionality is already partially being revealed with his talk of how things get concealed, how things become mysterious, how things get buried, how we can't see quite what's going on,
there is a complication of this contradiction between the money-form with its particularities and the universal equivalent which it's supposed to be functioning as. So these kinds of relations… have already been set up in such a way that they start to become the focus. As happens with all of these other pieces of the argument, they become the focus. Ideas which have already been latent there suddenly become the focus of general…
kind of argument. And what he's interested in here is really two sets of things. First is the unraveling of the the notion of fetishism as a commodity, in which an ordinary sensuous thing gets transformed into something which he says on the bottom of 163 that transcends sensuousness. 165 he says, sensuous things which are at the same time super-sensible or social. The enigmatic character of a commodity, as he puts it, arises out of its social character.
As he says in the bottom of 164, the mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. A bit further down. What we find, he says, is
that this is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here for them the fantastic form of a relation between things." He then makes a brief sidebar about religion. but then goes on to say, I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
This inseparability from the production of commodities is extremely important. It says that fetishism is not something that you can sort of just brush away. It's not a matter of consciousness. It's a matter of something that's deeply embedded in the way in which commodities get produced and exchanged. As he goes on to say, right at the bottom of 165, which is the key passage really.
In other words, the labour of the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products. and through their mediation between the producers. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are.
i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things. Now, the argument in a way is simple enough. People under capitalism do not relate to each other directly as human beings. They relate to each other through the myriad products which they encounter in the market.
But when we go into the market and we ask the question, why does this cost twice as much as that, what we're encountering is an expression of a social relation which has something to do, in Marx's view, with value. socially necessary labour time. Now what are the ramifications of this? There are a number of ramifications. First off, We can't possibly know about the conditions of labour of all of the people who work to put breakfast on our table. We can't possibly know it.
It's so intricate, it's so far-fetched, it's so far-flung, and when you take the inputs that are going into the inputs that are going into the inputs, the coal that makes the steel that goes into the tractor that goes into the… Millions and millions and millions of people are involved in putting breakfast upon our table. And the big question then arises, well, where does our breakfast come from? I used to like to start my
introductory geography classes with that question, where does your breakfast come from? Now, go and think about it. And the first answer was, well, it came from the supermarket. Well, no, come on, go back a bit further than that. And what do you know about the people who produced it? And by the time I got to about the third week, people would say things like, I didn't have breakfast this morning. I think it was a kind of sense of guilt.
bubbling up you know, the typical response is kind of something like that. So the point here is that the social relations between things mediate between us and everything that's going on out there. Now Marx doesn't make this argument, but, you know, I've had this argument, for instance, with
religious folk who insist upon, you know, good moral behavior or something of that kind, and it's always about face-to-face relations. I'm good with my neighbor, I'm good with the person next door, I help the person on the street, I see, this kind of stuff.
And you kind of say, well, what do you do about all those people who are putting breakfast on your table? What's your moral responsibility to all those people? And the answer is, well, no, I am not interested in that. Well, that is where our real social connectivity to the world of labour lies. and it becomes very complicated to find out. So occasionally we do find out that this
The product has been produced under appalling conditions of labour somewhere, so we should boycott this product or boycott that product. But you can see how incredibly complicated this world is. the market system, and in particular the money commodity, conceals from us so much of what's going on in the world around us. And so Marx is starting out by kind of saying, confront the way in which that world works and recognize that it is concealed from us by virtue of the way the market is.
And in so doing, he comes back to going back over the idea that commodities are objective, they exist. You can't go into the supermarket and look at a lettuce and find out whether it's been produced under conditions of exploitative labour or anything else, you can't do that. So you have no means of knowing, and if you do
have a boycott of grapes from this place, you find the grapes turn up as if they had been produced in another place. But then he goes on a bit further, he says this, We have to understand, he says at the bottom of 166, that men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values, because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour.
The reverse is true. By equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it. Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead. It rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, he says, we try to…
decipher what this hieroglyphic was. But, the belated scientific discovery that the products of labour, insofar as they are values, are merely the material expressions of the human labour expended to produce them, marks an epoch in the history of mankind's development, but by no means banishes the semblance of objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labour.
Now again what he's talking about here is the generalization of the exchange process. The global, the world of commodities. The global structure. And again he's coming back to this idea that value does not walk around saying what it is. Value arises, the notion of value arises out of all of these processes. It doesn't precede them, it arises out of them.
And the value relation is something which is produced specifically within a capitalist society. And it was a capitalist society that actually unraveled the labour theory of value. one of the first to actually come up with some version of the Labour theory of value was Hobbes. And then we get a whole kind of line of Locke and Hume and all these kinds of people talking about this, and eventually
When you get to Adam Smith you get a labour theory of value in Adam Smith and a labour theory of value in Ricardo. So the labour theory of value is not something that's been around forever, it is something which essentially arose with the rise of capitalism. But, as we've seen, the labour theory of value, as classical political economy saw it, was labour time.
not socially necessary labour time, no distinction between concrete and abstract labour, all of these things that Marx has been talking about. So the labour theory of value then, and the rise of the labour theory of value, was concomitant with the rise of the bourgeois epoch. And it follows from that, that the destruction of a bourgeois
economy. The destruction of capitalism would require the construction of an alternative value structure, an alternative value system. Or conversely, If you don't like the value system of capitalism and you want something else, then you better become a revolutionary very fast, because this is the dominant form of value which operates in our society, and it operates, as he says, behind our backs.
We don't see it, we don't understand its consequences. We end up with the schizophrenic forms of value, like good face-to-face relationships but I don't give a hoot about what goes on through the market. Those kinds of divisions. And then we get the introduction of something. which is also going to become very significant in the next chapter. The bottom of 167, he talks about the way in which Proportions of products get exchanged. And clearly these exchange relations vary a lot.
These magnitudes, he says, vary continually independently of the will, foreknowledge and actions of the exchangers. Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them." That is, the producers. Who's in control of this system? The producers? Or does the system control them? Now, of course, the argument that the system controlled them
is not unique to Marx. The person who pushed it most strongly was Adam Smith, in the terms of the hidden hand of the market. It was the hidden hand of the market that guided things. Individuals, in a properly functioning, perfectly functioning market society, would not have any kind of control over the system. The market would be the controlling mechanism. And it would be the hidden hand of the market that guided us to the grand capitalist utopia.
But, says Marx, within this market system , is that the reason for this reduction is in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products, you can treat that as fluctuations of supply and demand, The labour time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature, in the same way the law of gravity asserts itself when a person's house collapses on top of him.
The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent movements of the relative values of commodities, by the ups and downs of the market. Its discovery destroys the semblance of the merely accidental determination of the magnitude of value of the products of labour, but by no means abolishes that determination's material form."
So within all of these market fluctuations, in the hidden hand of the market, there is a regulative principle which emerges. And the regulative principle is going to be that of socially necessary labour time. embodied in commodities which establishes their average exchange ratio with other commodities. And this is going to be the regulative principle.
So this is, if you like, the first part of the fetishism argument. The second part begins immediately after, when Marx takes it into the realm of thought. How do we think about the world when the physical indicators say it looks like this, when we understand it to be like that? The notion of fetishism suggests that there is a deep way of looking at something which is other than it appears upon the surface.
somewhere else kind of made the comment that if everything were as it appears to be on the surface, there would be no need for science. And he's trying to construct a science of political economy. And he's very serious about that science. So he's trying to construct an apparatus which is going to get behind the fetishism, get behind the surface appearance. How do you do that? And how have other people approached that question?
What he finds, of course, is that many people have not approached that question, they've been deluded by the surface appearances. But, go back to that very crucial thing, they appear as they really are. The surface appearances are not simply illusions. Indeed we do go into a supermarket, indeed we do shop, we do put down money, indeed we do all of those things. what we do, and we watch ourselves doing it. There are actions, it is real. And you have to take account of that reality.
In other words, you have to deal with the reality at the same time as you're dealing with the underlying structure. Now this is a familiar way of proceeding in a lot of scientific endeavors. What does psychoanalysis do if it's not about saying, well, look, the surface appearance of behaviour conceals something else? Then a psychoanalyst wouldn't say,
oh well, that person who's aggressive and wields a knife like that is just feeling insecure so don't worry about them wielding the knife, you get out of the way. You don't say this is an illusion. No, it's real. but you do know that there's something going on behind it which is other than what it appears to be on the surface. And so Marx is making a similar kind of argument, in fact he's a pioneer of that mode of argumentation in social science.
and many people, I think, have taken that ability from him. But he then is interested in how the surface appearance has been interpreted in classical political economy. And, as he says , reflection on the forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course directly opposite to their real development.
Reflection begins post-Festam and therefore with the results of the process of development ready to hand. That is, we've got to understand the world we're now in and we have to work backwards to where it all came from. Consequently, he says, it was solely the analysis of the prices of commodities which led to the determination of the magnitude of value. We started in the supermarket and said, well, what's the common value?
It is precisely this finished form of the world of commodities, the money form, which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects.
instead of revealing them plainly. He then goes on to talk about the categories of bourgeois economics. He says they consist precisely of forms of this kind, they are forms of thought, which are socially valid and therefore objective for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production.
The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production."
a great deal of fun with the Robinson Crusoe myth. The Robinson Crusoe myth was used by the political economists at the time to fantasize about how somebody operating in a state of nature would decide on how to regulate their lives, how to regulate their relation to nature, what to do, how to do it, all this kind of thing.
have produced this kind of myth and actually the Crusoe economy has been a very important aspect of the whole political-economic theorizing. But what Marx does is have some fun with it and point out that Our friend Robinson Crusoe learns by experience, and having saved a watch, ledger, ink and pen from the shipwreck, he soon begins, like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books.
In other words, the fantasy was based on English political economic life, and then what the economists did was to fantasize that this is how a rational being in a state of nature would actually regulate. their lives. So Marx is having kind of fun with this. And he says, well, let's go away from Robinson's Island. By the way, I think that The Economist got the wrong Defoe novel, they should have taken Moll Flanders. It's much better, I mean, Moll is a classic kind of commodity.
character, she actually moves around and speculates on the passions of everybody else, and has everybody else speculate on her passions, and there's this wonderful moment in Moll Flanders where…
she spends all her last money and everything she's got to sort of hire a carriage and dress very elegantly to go to this ball and she goes to this ball and she meets this guy and they both dance together and they decide to elope and get married and they elope and get married and they're the local inn and they wake up the next morning.
And he says, I hope you've got some money, because I'm dead broke. And she says, I'm dead broke too. And they both laugh and kind of leave. It's kind of a wonderful moment of how commodity collisions can take place. And she goes to the colonies, she goes to Virginia, she's in debtor's jail. It would be a much better metaphor for what capitalism is really about than Robinson Crusoe. But anyway, we go from Robinson's Island and we go and we look at a situation
which is pre-capitalist. The world of personal dependence in medieval Europe. He talks about the corvée. in which social relations between individuals and the performance of their labour appear at all events as their own personal relations are not disguised as social relations between things, between the products of labour. If you're working for the Lord, you know you're working so many hours for the Lord on the estate. That's it. There's a personal relationship of dependency.
obscure about that, nothing opaque about that. And he says the same thing about a patriarchal, rural industry, a peasant family. And he even then goes on, in the bottom of the page, 171, to talk about, let us finally imagine for a change, an association of free men working with the means of production held in common and expanding their many different forms of labour power and full self-awareness as one single social labour force.
This is one of the rare passages where Marx actually talks about some sort of fantasy of socialism, and what socialism would be about. He says, all the characteristics of Robinson's labour are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual. And he goes on to talk about the way in which the social relations in a society of that kind would
172, be transparent in their simplicity in production as well as in distribution. So, he's talking about the very specific quality the opaque quality of social relations as they emerge under capitalism, contrasting them with alternative modes of production in order to highlight the specificity of the world in which we have our being. And he then goes on to make some comments which are kind of interesting and controversial.
For a society of commodity producers whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material form bring their individual private labours into relation with each other… as homogeneous human labour. Christianity, with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion.
Now, as you know, Max Weber reversed that thesis, much later to say that capitalism was actually an expression of that religious belief, where Marx is kind of saying actually that religious transformation was a refraction, a reflection.
if you like, of these rising commodity relations and the rise of the value theory and the value of… human labour in the abstract and all those kinds of things, and that the specific form of religious beliefs, at some point or other, moves in parallel with the transformations of the economic and political structure.
And he goes on to comment in the ancient Asiatic, Classical, Antique and other such modes of production, the transformation of the product into a commodity, and therefore men's existence as producers of commodities plays a subordinate role. And he talks about the impacts of market exchange upon patterns of belief. And those patterns of belief, of course, also
effect, what he calls on 173, the umbilical cord of his natural species' connection with other men, or on direct relations of dominance and servitude. They are conditioned by a low stage of development of the productive powers of labour… and corresponding limited relations between men within the process of creating and reproducing their material life, hence also limited relations between man and nature. These real limitations are reflected in the ancient worship of nature.
And he then goes on to talk a little bit further down, the veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life process until it becomes production by freely associated men and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society possess a material foundation or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development.
this is marx in his speculative mode talking about how ideas and beliefs are not immune
And that, of course, is something that carries over into the next two or three pages. And, of course, there's a lot of debate on the degree to which we can put credence upon this, but it's very clear as he says at the bottom of 175, that he is reiterating a reductionist argument, in effect, when he says, In the footnote, my view is that each particular mode of production, and the relations of production corresponding to it at each given moment, in short, the economic structure of society
is the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness, and that the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political… and intellectual life." Now this is the argument he laid out in the introduction to critique of political economy, and he's sticking to it in Capital.
It's a reductionist argument that says that, beginning with an understanding of the labour process, and the nature of the labour process, and what the labour process is about, how human beings are organising their production… on that basis you can say a great deal about politics, about legal structures, patterns of belief and the like.
the reductionist argument and you can disagree with it, but I think you should be very clear that Marx is saying that. That is what he believes, that's what he thinks is significant. My own view of it is that it's an inspired idea, but like most reductionist arguments, ultimately it fails. But by taking that reductionist position you start to see all kinds of things that you wouldn't otherwise see.
and that without that reductionist impulse, Marx would never have understood all manner of things. You'll find analogous reductionism, by the way, going on in biological sciences where evolution gets reduced to… and micro-physics and all the rest of it. And again, you could argue that ultimately the attempt fails, but the fact is that evolution and genetic histories and so on are now sort of embedded in each other.
search for the reductionism has actually produced incredibly important insights in the biological field in exactly the same way that I would argue that Marx's holding-to principles of reductionism here plays. a very significant role in his method of inquiry, in his impulsion to inquire, and one of the things that I get annoyed at, I have to say, is that people who kind of say, oh, it's reductionist, therefore, don't believe it.
If people were not prepared to be reductionist about things, we would hardly know anything about anything. And in fact, a lot of the time we're constantly trying to reduce complexities to simplicities. And that has been a lot of what understanding and knowledge construction has been about. And okay, we understand the world is a very complicated place. On the other hand, once you've got some of the simplicities…
there you can understand the complexities in a different kind of way, and that's what Marx, I think, does for us. But he's very upfront here, this is what he's doing, and in these passages he's being very explicit about how… these belief patterns cannot be isolated from the nature of the political-economic process which is being engaged.
And the footnote 174, towards the bottom, footnote 34, is a very important footnote, because there he goes over what he calls the chief failings of classical political economy. And what he's pointing about here is that we should not make the same mistake of treating the value theory, the labour theory of value… as the eternal natural form of social production. It is a historical construct, and as such it can be historically deconstructed.
The classical political economists treated the labor theory of value as natural. And that's why you got back to sort of Robinson Crusoe. What would a natural person do in natural environment? Well, they would do what Robinson Crusoe did. which is what bourgeois folk thought should be done in the 17th century.
And as he says on 174, bourgeois political economy, he says, has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value.
and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. These formulas which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man instead of the opposite, appear to the political economist bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself.
This is a pretty devastating critique of classical political economy. And in a sense it was so devastating that with all the fussing that went on after Marx… economics had to abandon the labour theory of value. So what the marginalist economists did in the middle of the nineteenth century was faced with this kind of criticism, they kind of said the only way we can deal with this is
junk the whole labour theory of value. And so we end up with a marginalist theory of value which is a completely different value structure. And economics is reconstructed as a neoclassical economics rather than classical political economy.
But with this kind of thing going on, it's very hard to hang on to a labor theory of value. And it had to be junked, or else you would end up being a Marxist, and nobody wanted to be that. So, you know, classical political economists kind of… were pushed aside largely because Marx produced a kind of critique that made it impossible to hold that positionality anymore without actually acknowledging the power of what Marx was saying.
And he goes on 176 to say this, the degree to which some economists are misled by the fetishism attached to the world of commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour is shown, among other things, by the dull and tedious dispute over the part played by nature in the formation of exchange value." This still goes on, of course.
Since exchange value is a definite social manner of expressing the labour bestowed on a thing, it can have no more natural content than has, for example, the rate of exchange." Then he goes on to talk about The physiocratic illusion that ground rent grows out of the soil, not out of society. And then some amusing ends where he talks about the way in which if commodities could speak, what would they say?
language of commodities has been here, and I haven't commented on it, but it's something which is a bit intriguing. Okay, so that's the fetishism of commodities then. Has anybody got any… observations. I don't want to debate too much Marx's major theses, though we can do that some other time. I want to get through chapter two, so let's zip into chapter two. too difficult. What Marx is doing here is simply setting out the conditions of exchange.
by showing that, well, of course, commodities don't go to market on their own, they have owners. So we have to say something not about commodities but about the relationship between commodities and their owners. and what he does is to imagine a society in which, in the first page there, 178, he says, the guardians must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property.
This juridical relation, whose form is the contract, whether as part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills which mirrors the economic relation. The content of this juridical relation is itself determined by the economic relation. Persons exist for one another merely as representatives, and as he says, we're now going to look at characters who appear on the economic stage personifications of economic relations. Let's take the last bit first.
he's going to look right throughout capital in terms of personifications of social relations. He's not going to be talking about individuals. He's going to be talking about buyers and sellers. capitalists and labourers. It's going to be talking about people in roles. So the analysis is going to be about what people do in those roles. individuals may adopt many different roles. But it's a very familiar trope to actually say, well, we're going to look at roles rather than people.
And you wouldn't make the argument that a discussion of the relationship between drivers and pedestrians in the streets of Manhattan… is illegitimate because people are both drivers and pedestrians, and you're not talking about individuals. You say, well, no, it's still worth talking about relationships between pedestrians and drivers.
because there's something important going on there, and what you find of course is that on a given day when you're the driver you cuss the pedestrians, and when you're a pedestrian you cuss the driver, you know, so this kind of… So Marx is going to be talking about roles, he's going to be talking about that all the time. And he's not going to be talking so much about individuals. Occasionally he will, but by and large he's just going to be talking about roles.
in this case are strictly defined, that he's recognizing individuals who have private property relation over the commodity they command. And they trade it under non-coercive conditions. That is, there's a reciprocity of respect for juridical rights of individuals. And this is actually a description of the kind of legal and political framework for properly functioning markets. And in that context, he points out, the commodities are, as he says on page 179, born levelers and cynics.
is always ready to exchange not only soul but body with each and every other commodity. The owner is willing to dispose of it, the buyer is willing to take it. All, as he says, all commodities are non-use values for their owners and use values for their non-owners. Consequently they must all change hands. Now again… His argument here is historically specific. So he has a good old crack at Proudhon in the footnote, in the anarchist kind of vision.
Because basically he says what Proudhon did was to take the notion of justice, the bourgeois notion of justice, and the bourgeois notion of labour, and labour input as the basis of the construction of an alternative society, which as far as Marx was concerned was ridiculous, because all you were doing was taking the the pure form of bourgeois consciousness and saying this is the way in which to escape from bourgeois society. Marx kind of saying that's nonsense.
What we then go through, to some degree in here, is a recapitulation of the way in which money crystallizes out. As he says on 181, money necessarily crystallizes out of the process of exchange. And the historical broadening and deepening of the phenomena of exchange develops the opposition between use value and value which is latent in the nature of the commodity." We've come across this idea of this opposition before, he's now coming back to it, expanding it a bit.
The need to give an external expression to this opposition for the purposes of commercial intercourse produces the drive towards an independent form of value which finds neither rest nor peace until an independent form has been achieved by the differentiation of commodities. into commodities and money." In other words, this again is about the process of exchange proliferating, generating, making that separation. This separation, however,
presumes, he says on top of 182, that we're dealing with individuals and private owners and that things are in themselves external to man and therefore alienable. Alienable in this case means they're not part of my being, I can freely dispose of them. And you can freely dispose of what you have. If you have some deep attachment to something you're not going to be able to dispose of it.
the assumption is that all commodities are alienable in this way. And, as he says in the middle of that page, we're talking here about the constant repetition of exchange which makes it a normal social process. And this universal and social equivalent starts to work its way through different social orders. In 183 he talks about the way in which, in the same proportion as exchange bursts its local bonds.
and the value of commodities accordingly expands more and more into the material embodiment of human labour as such, and in that proportion does the money form become transformed to commodities, which are by nature fitted to perform the social function of a universal equivalent. Those commodities are the precious metals, gold and silver. This then leads him, however, into some important reflection on 181, 183. Bottom of 184, sorry, 185.
We have seen that the money-form is merely the reflection thrown upon a single commodity by the relations between all other commodities. That money is a commodity is therefore only a discovery… for those who proceed from its finished shape in order to analyse it afterwards." This then leads him to talk a little bit about the way in which money can take on symbolic forms. But he then goes on to say, in a sense, every commodity is a symbol. A symbol of what? Well, a symbol of value.
It is only the material shell of the human labour expended on it." Now, frequently you'll find people talking about, you know, well, what do we do about symbolic…
aspects of economies. How do symbolic economies work? What Marx is opening up here is the possibility to absorb that kind of analysis, and it would take… adjustments and all the rest of it, but you can absorb that kind of question into his analysis because he's very, very well aware that from the very get-go all commodities are symbolic, symbolic of labour content.
Therefore, in a sense, we're dealing with symbolic economies all along. The nature of those symbolic economies, however, can be transformed and shift. look at that in terms of our contemporary society. But what we have to do, however, is to be careful of detaching the symbolic qualities from its rootedness. in the value theory. And we always have to bring those symbolic qualities back to this rootedness. And as he says…
at the bottom of 186, the difficulty lies in comprehending that money is a commodity. Not in comprehending that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why and by what means a commodity becomes money. That's the conundrum he's been playing with right the way throughout over these last few sections. So this leads him to talk about the magic of money, towards the bottom. Then comes a very, very important sentence.
Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action. This situation is manifested first by the fact that the products of men's labour universally take on the form of commodities. The riddle of the money fetish is therefore riddle of the commodity fetish now become visible and dazzling to our eyes."
What Marx is doing here is accepting Adam Smith's vision of a perfectly functioning market economy. in which the hidden hand guides decisions. No one person is in charge. No one person can command. Everybody has to function. according to what Marx will later call the coercive laws of competition in the market. Now Adam Smith's thesis was that actually individual motivations
of entrepreneurs and autonomous individuals acting in the market didn't matter. They could be greedy, they could be selfless, they could be whatever. They could be nice, they could be horrible. But at the end of the day, Adam Smith argued, autonomous individuals acting freely in the market, following their own wants, needs and desires in whatever way they wanted. would be led to produce a social result when mediated through the hidden hand of the market that would redound to the benefit of all.
Marx is accepting that vision. And I think it's very important to understand why. Marx's Capital is a critique of classical political economy. Classical political economy held that if only you would let the market do its work, everything would be great. If only you would get the state out of the picture, if only you would eradicate monopoly control, if only you would do all of those things, you would end up with a social order that would be incredibly dynamic.
and socially just. That was Adam Smith's utopian dream. That was Ricardo's utopian dream. That was the utopian dream of liberal theory. continues to be the utopian dream of neo-liberal theory. Only let the market do its work and everything will be okay. Now Marx at this point has a choice. he could say either, markets don't work, we all know there's monopoly, there's power, and all the rest of it, messing around and destroying everything, so I'm not even going to accept…
that utopian project as being ever possible. Or he can, as he does here, accept the conditions of that utopian dream, and then ask the question, Is it really going to benefit everybody? And the big thesis that's going to come out in Capital is, no. It's just going to benefit the bourgeoisie.
is just going to benefit the haute bourgeoisie. And it's going to screw the workers. Left, right and centre. The closer you come to implementing this utopian project of liberal… theory, neoliberal theory, the greater the levels of social inequality, the greater the degrees of injustice in society, and the greater the destruction.
of both environmental qualities and labour qualities will ensue. So Marx is accepting the terms of classical political economic debate in order to show that in their own terms they are wrong about the outcome. And he's going to prove it step by step by step. But in so doing he's going to confine himself to the argument that the classical conditions which are laid out in Adam Smith's hidden hand are actually there, and have actually been achieved.
when we know they've not been achieved and they never were achieved, but we have gone through certain historical periods where people have tried to achieve them, as over the last thirty years, for example. So what Marx is doing is really trying to deconstruct the classical political economic vision of the liberal bourgeoisie. In order to show
that it's self-serving. But, it puts him in a problem, and it puts us in a problem. When we're reading his analysis we have to be very careful in saying, is he talking about a real capitalist society? or this theoretical society which Adam Smith dreamed of and the classical political economist dreamed of. And sometimes those two things run interference with each other.
Sometimes they mess each other up and we have to watch out for that. Sometimes he ends up saying things which are not unrealistic precisely because of that presumption. So that's where we are. We're out of time. Next week I want you to read the chapter on money. The whole of the chapter on money. Think about the structure. It's a very difficult chapter. It's a chapter that everybody gives up on. If you get through it, you'll be okay. So we'll go through it next time, okay? Thanks.