Andrew's Wiki
Contribution Critique

Introductory and Translator’s Preface material

• “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:” was to be a part of a larger series, which would create an entire treatise on political economy, but he swerved and decided to write Capital instead.
  • First published 1859, year of Darwin
    • cf “The bourgeois society is the most highly developed and most highly differentiated historical organization of production” 300 and “The anatomy of the human being is the key to the anatomy of an ape” but you can’t get ape until you see the higher form, human
  • He summarized the info in A Contribution in Capital, but in Contribution there’s more about money than you can find in Capital
  • Plus the “classic” formulation of hist mat is in the Introduction to the Contribution (which wasn’t published in the edition of 1859 b/c he thought it’d go better w/final vol of capital)
  • What’s neat about Contribution: talks about capital, landed property, and wage laborers. Not as polarized as you’d think, but w/a third term.
  • “the reader who wishes to follow me at all, must make up his mind to pass from the special to the general.”
  • He SAYS that he had to think about political economy after his experience at Rheinish Zeitung showed him how helpless he was in those matters (Rhineland full of “forest thefts” and fights over landed property and worries about peasants and free trade arguments
• His first step in backing up his wish to pronounce on these arguments with actual knowledge: a critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Law”
  • He realizes when reading Hegel that you can’t understand legal or state systems by themselves or explain them by the progress of the human mind; instead they are “rooted” in material conditions of life, what Hegel calls “civil society.”
  • Civil society he says should be the study of political economy
  • Material conditions: in course of “social production” men enter into “definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will” which occur in a definite stage of development. These relations are the true foundation of political economy.
  • They are also the true foundation of the state and the legal system
  • They also “correspond” to its own particular form of “social consciousness” (notice there’s not a superstructure/base argument HERE, only in previous point)
• In this intro, we have the definitive characterization of hist mat: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”
• Revolution: When the mode of production changes, it begins to strain with the set relations of production (ie property relations) that belong to the older mode of production. Social revolution is the bursting of this tension that will end in the creation of appropriate relations of production (property rights) that fit the mode of production. Legal, state, and philosophical forms will then change.
  • We can know the changes of the material conditions of production with scientific accuracy. That’s where science comes in. (The legal, state, and philosophical stuff are different: it’s where the conflict between mode of production and relations of production plays out.)
  • Thus, the first kind of contradiction Marx talks about: between new mode of production and antiquated relations of production
• Basis for an idea of Uneven Development
  • “No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.”
    • Thus the solution for problems is usually lurking around somewhere…hence, the solution to the problems it creates are already in it
• Development: epochs in development of society
  • Asiatic
  • ancient
  • feudal
  • modern bourgeois: the last stage of “prehistory of human society”
• Next stage of Marx’s career
  • Settles down with Engels in Brussels 1845 to work out relationship between idealism and their new understanding of material society: “to settle our accounts with our former philosophical conscience” that is create a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy
  • This manuscript they decide not to publish at last minute b/c “Conditions have changed:” this is a pattern where Marx decides that X is now wrong and abandons it…shows his commitment to now
    • Also is his pattern to write copious amounts of things just so he could clear things up in his own mind: writing creates meaning
    • The main points of this “lost” work were put into The Poverty of Philosophy against Proudhon 1847
• 1848-9: Neue Rheineisch Zeitung (stops study of political economy for this)
  • 1848 expulsion from Brussels
• 1850 settles in London (says it will give him good vantage point for capitalism esp given discovery of gold in Calif and Australia; and the Reading Room at British Museum w/wealth of material)
  • Work delayed by necessity of earning money as contributor to New York Tribune
• His defense of this work: “many years of conscientious research” which as an “entrance to science” he compares to the “entrance of hell” (abandon all hope ye who enter)

Main Text

• Political economy’s faults as method
  • Old political economy begins with the population, then goes to classes, then types of industries etc
    • Wrong: too abstract b/c classes are an “empty” word until you know the little bits that make them up: wage-labour, value, price
    • Reg political economy beings with “chaos,” a huge abstraction, then moves downwards to the smaller and more concrete
      • 17th c P E: begins with the “living aggregate,” using analysis and abstraction
    • Marx wants to begin with the building-blocks: which is what newer political economy does do; it’s good b/c you combine building blocks and are concrete the whole way through
      • Real method: use observation and conception to synthesize info, and understand P E concepts as the abstraction side of the coin, the other of which is the real, living and working conditions that already exist before the concept (not that the concrete is somehow the product of the thought)
      • Concepts should be “the consummation of observation and imagination” not seen as the generating force
  • Definition of labor
    • Theirs only fits their certain moment in history and could only have been conceived at this late stage
• Some economists see “bourgeois system” in every economic system in the world and in history, but that’s silly
  • Instead of organizing his work by historical development, which is silly b/c diff parts play diff roles in diff societies (ie “rent” is not the same in Middle Ages and say 18th century), you order by INCREASING COMPLEXITY
    • 1) talk about individual components (labor, wealth, money), 2) talk about how these components are organized, which for bourg means into a class structure (wage-labor, capital, landed property, circulation, the classes, private credit)); 3) state organization (in relation to itself) (taxes, colonies, emigration, public credit); 4) international organization, production, exchange; 5) world market
      • It’s like a calculus of increasing synchronic complexity
  • Misunderstanding of Exchange Value and of Money
    • Petty: believed is was the same as money, which for Marx is only its appearance
      • Loves money b/c encourages industrial development and imperialism; he was an “unprincipled adventurer”
    • Boisguillebort: “fanatical war against money”
      • Though he did care about the working classes, even though he worked for Louis XIV
      • Like the rest of the French, he tends to love capitalism one day and damn it the next; believing that capitalism as a way to exchange use-values is great but that somehow money was a usurper of this utopia
      • Failure: he confounded labor time congealed within commodity with mere “direct natural activity of individuals”
• Why does misunderstanding money matter?
  • “historical course of all sciences leading them by a labyrinth of intersecting paths to the real starting points. Unlike other builders, science not only erects castles in the air, but constructs several stories of the building, before it has laid the foundation” 64-5
    • haha!
• Hegel’s Problem
  • “considering the real as the result of self-coordinating, self-absorbed, and spontaneous thought”
• Process of Development
  • Anticipates uneven development and the dominant/etc/etc scheme of Williams
  • Says that X in one society will be the dominant feature, but later in the next step of the historical progression it will be subordinate to something else
  • Or sometimes one form will be there, but won’t be dominant until later: say, money, which historically only mattered around borders or in countries that had one-sided industry (say, trading in Mediterranean countries) or only in a particular industry (Rome = mostly for armies). Money only becomes dominant at late stages.
  • Uneven development: different categories (eg capital agriculture stocks) play diff roles in diff societies (so, the oddity of Jewish culture in Middle Ages was that they predominated in trade when everyone else was doing agriculture; the oddity of the Phoenicians was the same in antiquity)
• Hist mat: bourgeois form results from “antagonistic elements” from former societies

Quotes/Random

• “The whole…is the product of a thinking mind that grasps the world in the only way open to it”
  • Refers to the way P E conceives the whole, which is diff from an artistic or religious or practical way of looking at the world
• 295: possessing diff from owning; possessing is a different, older form; ownership is a legal relation
• mentions an old definition of wealth: “a thing [outside itself?] in money” 297 (an ecstasy of objects neat)
• Adam Smith apparently is the one who first conceived of labor in general, not just “Agriculture is wealth” or “commercial” or “industrial,” but labor in general; as well as wealth in general, “past incorporated labor”
  • A small history of P E: first they thought wealth was “a thing (outside itself) in money”; but then saw wealth being created as a result of human activity; then physiocrats, who only recognized agricultural labor as source of wealth but didn’t think that money was wealth itself but instead labor was wealth; the finally Adam Smith with his two total abstractions
  • Why does this development happen? B/c the society you look at has finally had so many diff types of labor that no one type looks like the source of wealth. And could only have been thought of in a country where you could pick up and move to a diff form of labor. See, it’s a material development. It’s that labor is concretely understood as labor in general (ie all types of labor give you wealth, and I could do any sort of labor and get money)...that’s when you get the category (the abstraction) of general labor.
    • All abstractions a product of definite conditions; and thus all abstractions only really fit to the epoch that made them
• Every society has a type of labor that predominates and “the universal light with which all the other colors are tinged…a special ether which determines the specific gravity of everything that appears in it” 302
  • Middle Ages, all things look like agriculture (the city organized like the country; capital organized under same rules as land property); whereas modern bourgeois, everything looks like capital, even agriculture
  • This is NOT the same as historical development: if you want to analyze bourgeois production, you have to talk about capital first, then you can talk about agriculture…even though the latter was created before the former historically
    • How does this jazz w/the historical narratives of German Ideology? which had been written earlier?
  • So you look at “organic connection within modern bourgeois society,” so that Marx begins to prefer synchronic forms to diachronic forms as he revises his ideas
• War 306: as developing tech and communication before rest of society; as having to run its whole way through before peace
• Idealistic v realistic historiography 306

Other Economists

• Aristotle: says that using a shoe for exchange value is the improper use of a shoe; it is proper to wear it, not to use it for barter
• From William Petty to David Ricardo in England, and from Boisguillebert to Sismondi in France, they say use-value is merely the commodity’s ability to be applied in labor, while exchange value is merely the labor time to make it
• Petty, regarded as founder of PE and the one who talks the longest about the benefits of the divison of labor, is a good example to talk about P E based on scientific rationalism
  • boasted about using quantitative analysis rather than philosophical speculation: “instead of using comparative and superlative Word, and intellectual Arguments,” he analysis “in terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundation in Nature; leaving those that depend upon mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular men, to the Consideration of others.” (1699 Political Arithmetick)
  • SO, can’t I say that Marx is somehow funny, anti-scientific in his scientism? Can I say that his “material conditions” which are his science are very diff from Petty’s numbers which are somehow erroneously Hegelian and idealistic?
  • Marx reminds us that Petty is the guy who suggests TRANSPORTING all the “moveables and people” of Ireland and Scotland into Great Britain (ie Wales and England at that moment of history) so that “the King and his Subjects would thereby become more Rich and Strong”
    • He’s also the guy who says that Britain will be the strongest in the world market, despite Holland’s ACTUAL domination at that time; says that Britain’s impediments to becoming The Best are easily overcome
    • See how all of this nationalistic domination perverts P E
    • Also, some parts Marx quotes in a footnote reveals that Weber’s Protestant work ethic is more based in truth than you might want to believe: Petty actually recommends religious tolerance MERELY because Dissenters “believe that Labor and Industry is their Duty towards God” and because they believe that the poor are richer in Wit, Understanding, and other godly traits
  • Petty’s Political Arithmetic was the first time P E was treated as independent science
• First “Sensible” understanding of exchange value as labor-time is… Benjamin Franklin 1721 “A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency,” a youthful paper
  • Labor is of more value than precious metals
  • Wealth of a country = the labor time its inhabitants can purchase
  • Trade should be measured accdg to labor time
  • But Franklin doesn’t “develop” this idea of abstract human labor, so Marx thinks he’s limited; doesn’t get that money IS alienated labor, but thinks that money is some instrument you IMPORT INTO the equation
• Sir James Steuart, 1767 (ten years before Wealth of Nations) “An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy”
  • made up “general system of bourgeois economics”
  • he got off on wrong track b/c wants to talk about “inherent worth” of raw materials (“real in itself”)
  • he is the first to say that wealth is made of possession of commodities, so that capitalist labor is the one that creates exchange values

Basic Marx

• Going from useful labor to labor as exchange value is for Marx already dangerously close to people focusing on labor that creates surplus value 64
  • Seems to me this reflects the rhetorical figure or pattern I saw in Veblen, where one thing does its one thing, stands for something and is valuable that way, metaphorically; but then the vehicle completely obliterates the tenor, and then you have the mere Sign acting as the holder of meaning itself. That is, the social process of wealth being first good b/c symbolizes your prowess but THEN becomes good w/in itself… seems the same kind of transformation to laboring for exchange value leading to laboring for surplus value: something that before was meaningful for a diff reason becomes valuable in and of itself. (Where exchange itself is seen as an opportunity for the creation of new value, where before it was only a SIGN of labor already done) Is this also similar to art getting focused on the signified?
• social wealth = exchange value
• Commodity two kinds of value, use value and exchange value. P E doesn’t care about use value; its use value completely independent of its status as a commodity, he says. They are means of existence (or make life more pleasant)
  • Instead, we care that the commodity has “materialized labor” as result of human labor “Expended.” When you compare commodities, the differences in the types of uses they have and they types of labor they use disappear
• Exchange value: created by the labor embedded in the object, “Congealed labor time”
  • What type of labor is embedded in the object? homogeneous, uniform, simple labor; abstract general labor
  • The difference between commodities is now just quantity, quantity of labor (quality has disappeared)
• Labor Time
  • “the vital substance of labor, independent of its form, composition, individuality” instead only in form of “natural time measures”
    • so capitalism is def part of the creation of homogeneous time, one of its main beneficiaries, I’d say
• Labor as Producing Use Value versus Labor as Producing Exchange Value
• Nietzschean resonance?
  • “Labor, thus measured by time, does not appear in reality as the labor of individuals, but on the contrary, the various working individuals rather appear as the mere organs of labor” 24-5
  • a type of transvaluation of values?
  • Anyway, whether it’s Nietzschean or not, it does mesh with the general complain that something’s been switched behind your back, cf Veblen again about the metaphorical transformation: a magic
    • It’s the disappearance of specificity, I’d say
• Social?
  • “Social labor” = when labor becomes a part of universal abstract labor
  • Social = abstract, uniform, homogeneous
    • Weird!