Capital Lecture #2 (draft)

1 Ghost Stories. In some sense, we have come to agree, or be persuaded, that Capital is a ghost book. It is conjured this way and that by all and sundry. Famously by Derrida of course, in Spectres of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international (Derrida 1993/1994), but also, as an object, the text you hold in your hands is itself spectral. It is a commodity that congeals dead labour. It is a fetish-like object which conceals social relations and labour that should be easier to see. Labour of writing, and labour of readings, many who work at, in and on the text – there are many missing persons. Marx wants the reader to see the relations of production clearly, and rewrites the book for clarity just a few years after its first publication – the version we normally read is not from 1867, and key passages were added for the French translation in 1872-5, Engels interpolates these into 4th edition of 1890 which has become the standard, and even still leaves out parts of the French version. Missing too, of course, is any sense that this was a completed project for Marx. Other volumes, other issues. There is much he still wanted to add. The order of the writing inverse to the extant volumes, the working out for presentation remains undone. Even as the book we do have comes to us both from another time, and in language and use is translated through veils and frames of incomplete perception, through interpretation, politics, and history that is never wholly transparently accessible. It helps to unravel the mythology, and the often too deep reverence, to remember and recall, even retrieve, the dead who are congealed in and by this book. I do not mean specifically the Gulags of the Soviets, but them too, also however the modern Gulags of labour exploitation as it continues, and labour exploitation then. The many who struggled and suffered and fought against forces of exploitation and oppression, and still do today. Also the spirit of a critique that would remember that workers of all lands in unity would be something profound. That the expropriators must be expropriated, and the ghost is also the possibility of emancipation for all is not just a fiction from some emancipation séance. Orson Wells was a great Shakespearean actor, but he is most famous as director of Citizen Kane, the embodiment of the Money-Bags capitalist. Yet curiously Kane, rebelling against capital, tries to fight for the ‘common man’ as a journalist, and both this and his sentimental attachment to things (Rosebud) gives him trouble. He collects, things accumulate, he is unhappy, and eventually co-opted and corralled, isolated and 2 lost within his wealth. Nevertheless he is still a representative of the capitalist class, a ‘personification of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests’ (Preface to the first German edition 1867, p10 L&W edn). Thus, Kane as figure of his class, a class who – as capitalists – do not care about things, is concerned ultimately only with the possibility of recouping profits (valourisation of appropriated surplus value) through the exchange of things, not things themselves. But Kane is alone in his never-finished already-decaying Xanadu. His wife Susan has left him, his first wife too, his son is dead. Lost them both, which is either very careless, or rather, a consequence of a general carelessness towards others. Even the servants in the mansion are invisible and hardly friends – they cash-in their stories with journalists after Kane is dead. All the while what is missing in his life is other people. Just as Sartre has one of his character lament that ‘Hell is other people’ in the Hades of Huis Clos, in Kane hell is the absence of other people, capitalist hell. Peopled by humans who are a shell of the real.i The Literature of the Undead. On the track of dead labour, we can read for the ghosts as Derrida suggests, but perhaps does not exorcise quite far enough. The figure of the Erscheiniungsform was already referenced in the first sentence of Capital, with its quiet nod to Adam Smith, its return to an already existing part one of this part one – the self quotation – the domination of the mode of production, the monstrous accumulation that merely appears as wealth. This ghost walks and haunts us still, 150 years on, but I am sometimes concerned that the allegory is too spooky – that it scares people off the track of an engaged commitment to collective work, to the need to band together to overthrow capital, rather than look for Ghostbusters or Vampire-slayers – Buffy+ – who will do the work for us. Is there a new ghost of Marx for every generation? Derrida’s Marx was quite a twist when he looked at first sentences and spectres. His initiative still guides us as so many ghosted introductions are possible. A vast apparatus of in-step pundits, marching like the zombie dead. I have been reading the offering from the SWP’s Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism and am disappointed somewhat not to see more of the metaphorics 3 of ‘zombie banks’ and ‘undead’ financial institutions (Harman 2009:11-12).ii Marx will tell us also of vampires and werewolves later, his literature tags that run through the book amount to a gothic meta registeriii – Shakespeare of course, but from the Greeks, to Dickens, Defoe, Hugo, Mandeville, Hinduism, Norse gods, Cyclops and fairytales from the brothers Grimm, horror stories, Voltaire and more. Today our exercises in Marxist hermeneutics – what Harman would decry as an ambush by scholasticism (Harman 2009:15) may seem like a retreat to a bunker (that is what Zombie movies expect you to do isn’t it?). Nevertheless, the literary allusions make it possible to reanimate the ghosts as tools for understanding, even if we need a word of warning so as to remember that this book is not just one book, and not even just one in a series. It has its own omissions and absences. As activist scholars we should still read carefully, and read more – which need not mean abdication from the movement – even if, as Spivak hints, there are some unfortunate consequences of Marxism having ‘a named book at the origin’ (Spivak 2012123). Does it have a named book, if so which one, the Manifesto or Capital? If it is Capital, then insisting that Capital is not bound within the scriptural words of volume one, or even chapter one, is crucial. There is always a supplement, and so although this discussion concentrates only on chapter one of Capital, and although some, by no means all (impossible), commentators of note stop there, or see this chapter as key to the whole, there are others who dismiss or move past too quickly. Instead, surely, the task becomes one of a discussion of the politics of the present after having read a chapter or section. This removes at least some of the anxieties of having been under the excessive influence of a preface, even if we know how we read is shaped, we do not always see the shaping as we go. To the extent I can, I say. Expecting more to be missed as it unfolds. These ‘exercises in Marxist hermeneutics’ betray scholarship as conservative just as much as deliberate disavowals and demarcations. Yet working out the Marx text with a view to understanding its meaning and lacunae so as to enlist its help in struggles against capital seems worthwhile. Can we revamp Marx for today just as Derrida did for the 1990s, and yet not do it his way – learn from his wonderfully erudite ‘goofs’ when he approaches Marx through Hamlet? We could ask why Derrida starts with Hamlet – why is he so obsessed with Marx’s apparent obsession with ghosts? A father complex, a debt to be repaid – speak to it Horatio, you are a scholar. 4 Does it matter that Marx keeps starting with ghosts? We should ask a more regular question. For example, why does Marx start with the commodity? (note, not commodities, – but the commodity form – we are not starting with the commodity because it is the core of capitalism, but because it is an elementary form of the appearance of value that must be understood first – dialectically – in order to make a critique of capitalism). We can see, if we look carefully, how to be guided by Derrida if we ask: what are the organising principles or protocols of the text (and are they consistent)? Have we grasped the distinction between use-value and exchange-value adequately? Abstraction? Fetish? Are there already problems and questions to be raised or should we read also the hints and feints that Marx would have us follow in his Hegelian style? Why does Spivak, for example, chastise Derrida for misreading capital as interestbearing or commercial capital and not getting the ‘“materialist” predication of the subject as super-adequate to itself’ (Spivak 1987:162 In Other Worlds) – i.e., that exchange value is superfluidity and at the edge of use-value – that labour is a power that reproduces itself and more? We will work through the key concepts of Capital - commodity form as appearance of wealth and disguise of social relations, division of labour, forms of value, exchange, equivalence, money form - surplus value, labour and class hierarchy - relative and absolute surplus, abstraction, necessary costs, constant and variable capital, average labour time, time and capital - modifications of surplus value extraction, technology, organization (factory…), training/education, reproduction - ideology, class struggle, violence - reserve army, immiseration, colonialism, lumpenproletariat - circulation, valourisation, credit, crisis, subsumption, general intellect, dialectical reason, theory and practice, revolutionary organisation, ethics, revolutionary ethics. The expropriation of the expropriators (looking ahead to the glorious spoiler) 5 There are many who can warn us not to rush. Even Zombie’s work at their own pace, and I want to take care not to lose what is important in the Commodity, but also not to only strip out a few useful key concepts and jettison reading the rest – as in a certain way does Harman, setting out in his first chapter the series called ‘Marx’s Concepts’ that in quick order include use and exchange value, labour, money, absolute and relative surplus value, accumulation, competition and primitive accumulation. We will unpack just what is primitive (bad translation of unsprunglich – originary) and how this is ongoing, but note in this chapter as yet no mention of machinery, training and education, struggles over time – these come later, but Marx might want us to hold them together. The analysis proceeds in a certain way and we already know from the preface that its presentation may differ from the way it was worked out. Marx also had said the first chapter could present the greatest difficulty. This was not a warning not to read, but to really read. Read to discover. Time is also a very important trope here – in Derrida and in Marx, and I think for us. The time to read slowly and not rush to judgement. It is also from Spivak that I take the imperative to read, since she says over and over volumes two and three ‘go unread’ (Spivak 1999:76). Daniel Bensaïd, who passed away in January 2010, was another to rail against too certain readings of Capital, taking the analytic Marxism current to task for being ‘blinded by the one-sided primacy of the productive forces’: ‘Where Marx searches out the secret of economic cycles and rhythms to renew historiography, they … miss the real contradiction of the “transition” inscribed in a rigorously immanent representation of historical development. … The germs of the future society supposedly develop in the pores of the existing society in a long gestation process. In one sense (but one sense only) this is indeed the case. The accumulation of capital brings about the concentration of the labour force, the expansion of productive capacity, expanded co-operation of labour, a tendency towards socialization of production, an unprecedented flowering of science and technology, and increasing integration of intellectual labour into the productive forces. The class struggle leads to the blossoming of new possibilities and new rights. … [yet] … the emergence of a new mode of 6 production is not the sole possible result of the proceeding mode of production’ (Bensaïd 1995/2002:46 Marx for our Times, Verso) The problem has been, as Spivak earlier pointed out, that some comrades had read Marx’s Capital Vol 1., as a blueprint. Marx in letters after the book’s publication called his historical study of the way capitalism developed ‘a sketch’ – meaning an illustrative example, not fixed in stone or cast in iron as the necessary trajectory for all societies in ‘transition’. A teleological optimism is un-Marxist, or at least anti-Lenin. Why would we need Marxists or Communists if the outcome of capital was inevitably communism by fateful decree? Lukács György Lukács (1885-1971) son of a banker, education in philosophy and literature, students of/influence upon Max Weber in Heidelberg, girlfriend suicides in 1911, married a ‘Russian terrorist’ Gertrude, in 1917-18 ‘converted’ to Marxism, as political commissar in revolutionary Hungary of 1919, he has eight deserters shot (Lukács 1983:65 Record of a Life London: Verso). He writes History and Class Consciousness in exile 1923. Lenin chides him for ‘infantile leftism’, yet Lukács praise of Lenin is extensive (1924) when Lenin is already dead. Polemical – Lukács calls Nietzsche ‘witty’ – Lukacs was very much engaged with Hegel – the question of alienation and the need to overcome the idealism that made bourgeois cultural critique merely philosophical. He leaves favourable comments on Heidegger in 1967 ‘alienation was in the air’, but was quite hostile in 1952, ‘not a single reference’ – Lucien Goldman makes the case that Heidegger’s Being and Time was a response, without mentioning him, to Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness. Heidegger’s knowledge of Marxism was scant, but his ‘Letter on Humanism’, sent to French co-thinkers, may be seen as an attempt at his own rehabilitation. Lukács assessment of History and Class Consciousness was that its over-valuation of revolutionary praxis ‘in the absence of a real basis in “labour” and “struggles” was akin to ‘messianic utopianism’ and a ‘relapse into idealistic contemplation’ (Lukács 1967:xviii – HCC reissue intro) Lukács key themes 7 – alienation (ontology of social being) – reification (of all human relations – fetish) – dialectical method (most important even if thesis of Marx all proved false) – totality – accumulation crisis – Rosa Luxemburg (an advance, she takes the perspective of the whole, uses volumes 2and 3 to continue the incomplete text of Marx) Alienation – ‘separation of the producer from the total process of production, the division of labour into parts at the cost of the individual humanity of the worker, the atomization of society into individuals who simply go on producing without rhyme or reason’ (Lukács 1922/1971:27) [I call this trinketisation]. On the method of Marx in Capital, Lukács writes: “we could begin by saying that its point of departure involves a large scale process of abstraction, from which a gradual path towards the comprehension in thought of the totality, in all its clear and richly articulated concreteness, is undertaken by way of the resolution of the methodologically unavoidable abstractions’ (Lukács 1978:32-33 – Ontology of Social Being: 2.Marx London: Merlin) There is not much on use-value here, and indeed in Marx use-value remains to be clarified in the excised transition chapter (‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ – included as appendix in the Fowkes Penguin edn), whereas abstraction in the method has us engage with exchange and clarify, labour, value, market and commodification in quick but careful succession. In the opening pages, section one, the two factors of the commodity – its use-value and exchange value – are quickly assumed and exchange is elaborated, with exchange as a ghostly value that remains even when use is set aside, or abstracted into exchange The use-value of commodities can be their exchange, and it is only as exchange values that commodities express their value. In use they are used up. In exchange, in the relation of exchange, they have an erscheinungsform – the manifest form of value. 8 Speaking in Tongues We have already opened the text. We can read much of the first chapter already into the first sentence. It also prefigures the entire book and the unwritten volumes, arguably. Robinson, and his late arriving ‘man’ Friday, will be our guides in due course, but even they have not yet appeared. In the footnotes we can read of ‘savage’ peoples who lick commodities, and money, to confirm they are real. Others bite down on coins. The commodity, nevertheless, is a thing which satisfies needs, of stomach or imagination (phantasie). But as values, commodities are definite masses of congealed labour time. Nothing can be a value without utility, but the value of a commodity is not fixed in use because for labour time is not fixed, thus exchange as measure is rather expressive of different, changing, quantities of labour according to its organisation, skill on average, physical conditions, changes in productivity and so on. The notion of average socially necessary labour time is introduced, giving labour a twofold quality – actual labour, subject to all manner of conditions, and abstract labour power, the capacity or work. These are different, and so socially necessary labour time is expressive of the value of commodities in exchange. Expressive? We should pay attention to this voice metaphor. Marx says, ‘If commodities could speak…’ And they even have dialects… (143 penguin, 51 L&W 66D). Fred Moten, at an event called ‘Black Skin White Marx’, glossed this part of the argument in his excellent book In the Break by emphasising Marx’s claim that the commodity recalls its origins (Moten 2003:214 – my emphasis). In his book, Moten is keen to celebrate the ‘lens’ of the fetish character of the commodity – the reference of the origin here for this black American theorist is of course slavery (Moten 2003:213). Money is a less transparent lens (Moten 2003:214). It is when commodities speak he is most interesting, and we cannot help but think of the first cry of oppressed masses… When Moten writes of ‘a muting all bound up with relinquishing the promise of communism’ (Moten 2003:229), I am keen to listen more closely. A ‘mutation’ of ‘a revolutionary tone’ that he hears – and he has the years after the civil rights and Black 9 Panther Party period in mind – revolution is ‘muted in black discourse’ (2003:229). Moten heard Angela Davis speak when he was a young man, and hears an ‘affirmation of the sound of resistance in a narrative of defeat’ in the lingering consonants of Davis’s voice (Moten 2003:230). He of course adds a warning that Davis, having seen through the commodity fetish of her own photographic image and so would take Moten to task for the way he fetishises her voice (and for that matter the drum), but the point is that the speaking commodity is, for Marx, as for Moten, a felicitous conceit. Moten says he would ‘echo Spivak’s call for a move beyond what she terms, following Balibar “commodity pietism”’ (Moten 2003:230). The last sentence of his paragraph is ‘Dance.’ (Moten 2003:231). So it is an impossible ‘speaking’ of the commodity, for Moten, also perhaps muting, that is perceptively linked to ‘the revolutionary force of sensuality that emerges from the sonic event Marx subjunctively produces without sensually discovering’ (Moten 2003:12). Does Marx not sensuously appreciate this – his Theses on Feuerbach might suggest so, even if in Capital this is glossed in a formula of the dancing table, that we will soon discuss, itself which is from Faust’s diabolic Mephistopheles, the table is a ‘supra sensual thing’ (sinnlich ubersinnliches Ding) in Marx – but in Faust this is a reference also to a ‘suprasensual sensual wooer, a slip of a girl leads you by the nose’ (see Pawler 1978:326). Is Marx seduced by this coquettery with his literature tags. I think not, the voice of the commodity is an enabling allegorical and real – sensuous, actual – thing. Nicole Peperrell suggests that in chapter one, what many commentators miss is that at least three voices are involved here. The voice of the author speaking, describing the commodity from a point of view – an empiricist ‘at first sight’ one; a transcendental ‘strange thing’ one; and a dialectical third, where the commodity form itself has a fetish character – which voice is speaking when ‘Marx’ says ‘As use-values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities’ (Marx 38/126). This is the political economy voice – is it Marx, or rather what he has to set out in order to make his critique? 10 All this commentary on voices and speaking in tongues means we should perhaps look first at the chapter headings of chapter one more closely. Authorial Marx adds these on Engels’ suggestion (letters) so that readers may more readily grasp the argument. 1. Substance and Magnitude of Value 2. Two-fold character 3. Form of value 4. Fetish-like character of commodities Section one. Substance and magnitude. The first section of chapter one looks at ‘first sight’ – how things appear as useful things and so use-values and as exchange values, in terms of quality and quantity, useful and exchangeable. Useful things can be looked at from two points of view – quality and quantity. Use value –usefulness of a thing – history reveals them and they are realised in use. Use value – at first – (not first of all, but as it appears) is a material thing. A use value has value because labour is objectified or materialised in it – it took effort to make it, it is of use. Yet things are also the bearers (trager) of exchange value – fist of all – ‘at first sight’ a quantitative relation, but exchange value is abstracted from use (quality). A commodity also has an exchange value and this is a form of appearance of value that is social. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a usevalue, by means of exchange’ (says Engels – inserted into the fourth edition). Is this an observable split in the commodity? Exchange value is an abstraction from use value – and doesn’t every capitalist manufacturer of toilets, guns, chocolate or saving bonds know just that? Commodities in exchange are useful in that they can be exchanged as embodiments of productive activity – this is common sense, but what else might be a determinant of value? Here we are talking of the materiality of useful things – useful in use and sensible. But next to clarify the question of substance Marx already edits: ‘If we leave out…’ – he sets aside use value to find what is common in commodities as they are exchanged, and that is the fact that they are products of labour. Abstracted from use value (the product of labour) ‘exchange value manifests as something totally independent of use value’. Labour too has an observable double character, quality 11 and quantity, and next specific labour, of a tailor or a weaver, and – less readily ‘at first sight’ as labour in general, as we ‘see’ in the next section. Section Two. Two-fold character. Then we will look at the matter more closely. Initially the commodity appeared (Unsprünglich erschein) to have a dual character. So also Labour – crucially. Section two rehearses the moves made so far and finds the body of the commodity to be one thing, the phenomenal form to be immaterial. The aspect of the ghost is here. Commodities come into the world – are born? – in the shape of use values, they have bodies – and…. They are commodities in a two-fold way, objects of utility and depositories of value. They also have substance and magnitude, use value and exchange value. Now we are introduced to the example of the value of a coat. The use value of a coat, as coat, is the same for customer or tailor, and the making of a coat and its value has both specific tailoring, and, when bought and sold by those who need coats, it has exchange value – a product of useful labour of some kind. Both some kind of labour and labour in general, since as exchange value it can be exchanged for other things that have required specific different kinds of labour, and labour in general. The twofold character here has exchange value as its appearance form – ‘valu can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity’ (Marx V35:57) and this only as part of a social system, a division of labour, that we recognise different values, 20 yards of linen is equal to one coat, which is to say that both are ‘identical’ insofar as they are ‘expressions of essentially identical labour’ (Marx 1970 L&W: 43) – but specific ‘human labour ... is not itself value ... it becomes value only in its congealed state’ (Marx v35:61) even as we also must posit labour in the abstract. ‘The body of a commodity that serves as equivalent [of another commodity], figures as the materialisation of human labour, and is at the same time a product of some specifically useful concrete labour’ (Marx V35:68). Let us follow this again to be clear: labour is identified as the common component of values, and this section offers a first exploration of the double character of labour and offers the concept of socially necessary abstract labour time, or average labour, the average socially necessary labour time it takes to produce coats, or linen – the analysis of this is offered at the end of the section. Marx says he was the first to identify the twofold character of the labour ‘contained’ in commodities. He does this with many provisos, ‘in this connection’, ‘at first sight’ and ‘leaving x out of consideration’, etc. For ‘simplicity’s sake’ this is taken as simple labour, homogeneous coagulated social 12 average labour. Tailoring or weaving are different kinds of labour, but for the purposes of figuring value we abstract to the average necessary labour required to make either a coat or 20 yards of Linen, or 100 plastic trinkets for sale in the High Street discount store, or a book like Capital. And, at the end of this section, we see these values may change according to place and productivity. Prices may change, labour expenditure may change, time of labour, changes in productive power, fluctuating productivity for various reasons – all this is mentioned but at this point in the unfolding analysis the notion of socially necessary labour time cannot take the changes into account. Section three. In this section Marx carefully works through the varied modalities of value in commodities insofar as they are in relations of equivalence. Here, ‘if commodities could talk...’ he says (143 penguin, 51 L&W 66 D), and they are negotiating sales like a market spruiker. What do they tell us, what do they say? Is this more important than the cast of characters for whom they speak? Remember that we are in the world of equivalences here, and that the equivalences we see as exchange are indicative of rather more substantial and corporeal characters than mere things. We are talking here about how value is measured – in quantity of labour, but averaged socially necessary labour – averaged time for a skilled labourer to make said item – average labour over time. These abstractions allow Marx to talk in two metaphors – a phantom-like double and a congealed presence. Averaged time for a skilled labourer at a given level of development of the productive forces – abstraction. This is as important a word as erscheinung – though Marx has some bawdy fun at the start of the chapter – Dame Quickly (the Witter Hustig) who Falstaff maligns with the sentence: ‘She’s neither fish nor flesh, a man knows not where to have her’. She replies ‘you know where’ Henry IV part 1 act 3 scene 3. But section three of the first chapter does seem to know where to have her – and has a careful plotting of equivalents to set out: Values – series of equivalents – I coat, 20 yards of Linen, however much of yarn – a dig at uniforms/military coats (p 143 penguin, 51 L&W 66 D)– a difference in the translation – gold braid in the Penguin, Mufti in L&W, a coat – note, Marx’s coat is woollen – it is not a coat made of 20 yards of linen. These are – abstractly – the same – in value – 20 yards of Linen = 2 13 coats. Maybe linen and oranges might be better examples, or chalk and cheese. I prefer hats, go figure. Later we will have fun with the bible. Here the fun is Marx showing that this analysis is simply beyond the then contending forces of political economy, on the on hand the Mercantilists, Ferrier, Ganihl, who favour Government regulation, and on the opposite side their opponents, the bag men of free trade, Bastiat, who want no government regulation, and in the middle Macloud who ‘dresses up the confused ideas’ of the bankers of ‘Lombard St’ – all three groups then, persist in thinking not ‘that the form or expression of the value of a commodity originates in the nature of value, ...[but] ... that value and its magnitude originate in the mode of their expression as exchange value (Marx 1867/2011: 70 Dover US Edn, part 1 ch1 section 3 part 4). We should look up these fellows, the first mentioned representatives of the political economy that this book will critique. The named figures here French, but both ‘superstitious’ Mercantilists and ‘modern hawkers of free trade’, known as the Manchester School, have their British representatives. Macloud himself of course representing the banker suits who still ‘work’ on that same street of the venerable austere austerity bonus avenues of the City of London. We can read for these names and we can read for the necessary absences that permit the schematic. Marx is still showing the reader his necessary abbreviations: ‘When, at the beginning of this chapter, we said in the customary manner that a commodity is both a use-value and an exchange-value, this was, strictly speaking, wrong … [exchange value only exists in a relation with other commodities] … Once we know this, our manner of speaking does no harm; it serves rather as an abbreviation’. All these exchanges reflect the hidden essence in what appears – the spectral form. This itself may seem mysterious and abstract. The next chapters will unfold value, and money, in far more detail, but for starters lets work through the forms – elementary, relative, quantitative, equivalent, elementary as a whole, total or expanded form, general form, money form. Lets rush through just the main three. 14 Relative form of value: 20 yards of Linen = 1 coat Expanded Relative Form of Value 20 yards of Linen = I coat = 20 lb of tea = etc General form One coat 20 lb or tea = 20 yards of Linen 40 lb of coffee Money form – much understood by political economists and subject of next week. It is enough to say now that it is also a commodity and also meets the requirements of membership of the General form. Money though is a developed form, but not the final form of value – it ‘can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity’ because use values are of value to others on occasion, and exchange value is the calculus of measurement that makes possible exchanges – first expressed in barter and symbolic systems, later as money, and then as universal equivalent (more on this next week) So far we have pursued a process of abstraction, and we mean to continue: Abstraction - of exchange values from use values - of labour as what is left common in things once use is set aside, they were made - of labour in general from actual labour - of the plan of Capital The abstract is a key. I want to argue that what it names, what it would speak, is the concealed labour of care. The exchanges of the equivalents are somehow expressive of a ghostly presence behind commodities – a social relation that only appears in distorted form in the relations between commodities in exchange. Commodities as product of useful labour and as congelation of abstract labour. The value of 15 commodities is the opposite of coarse material – ghostly, it cannot be properly seen. No atom of physical matter in exchange value, you cannot lay your hands on it no matter how much you twist and turn it – (p138 penguin, 47 L&W 62 D). Later: No chemist has discovered exchange value in a pearl (177 Penguin). This is slightly better than maligning the grand Dame. Section Four. The Fetish-like Character. Then comes the section which we most likely now should start to read with Derrida – although his occult practice reading earlier texts – Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa (1848/1970:41) ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’ and the German Ideology, has already set the protocols of reading. I want to read with Spivak as company, with the questions she raises, though I have no illusion that I can answer… There are metaphors congealed, doubles, ghosts and spirit tables… We should first note that the penguin section title is a bad translation –the fetishism of commodities is a slightly different thing than the fetish-like character of commodities. It is not that the commodity is a false thing that represents something else (a whisk as royal symbol, a foot as displaced genitals) but rather that it is that real things have replaced (intangible) relations between people. But what then is this move by Marx, that – as we now know – he mostly expands in the wake of the Paris Commune (Commune = March – May 1871) though the revising began before, and carried on for some three years? The commune inspires Marx. In the three months of its existence he writes hundreds of letters to various figures to support the communards, and many more later to defend those subject to a brutal repression. He writes the pamphlet the ‘Civil War in France’, and much more. Very practical activity. So, isn’t it a slightly strange piece of exotica for him to go looking for a metaphor in the misty realms of religion for something as materialist and grounded as an analysis of commodities. This I think is the key that shows that all that description of commodities we have just worked through is not Marx being descriptive, but – at first sight, holding things aside, abstracted, this is where we will mount a 16 critique of political economy. This is a critical reading of the generalities and descriptive inadequacies of the gentlemen of political economy and Marx wants to show they have been deceived by fakers, or rather, wants his implied reader – of the German democratic workers party – and the French workers – to see through the trick. What is the fetish? Is it only that I know it is not correct, but trust it as if it is? This analogy – ‘ the products of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relations both with one another and the human race’ (L&W 72) – Marx says ‘I call this fetishism’ This is a big sentence. P. 163 (p71 International edn). The table which evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas’ above its station and dances of to market. Derrida description: p149: It is a great moment at the beginning of Capital as everyone recalls: Marx is wondering in effect how to describe the sudden looming up of the mystical character of the commodity, the mystification of the thing itself — and of the money-form of which the commodity's simple form is the “germ.” He wants to analyse the equivalent whose enigma and mystical character only strike the bourgeois economist in the finished form of money, gold or silver. It is the moment in which Marx means to demonstrate that the mystical character owes nothing to a use-value. Is it just chance that he illustrates the principle of his explanation by causing a table to turn? Or rather by recalling the apparition of a turning table? This table is familiar, too familiar; it is found at the opening of the chapter on the fetishism of the commodity and its secret (Geheimnis). This table has been worn down, exploited, over-exploited, or else set aside, no longer in use, in antique shops or auction rooms. The thing is at once set aside and beside itself. Beside itself because, as we will soon be surprised to see, the said table is a little mad, weird, unsettled, “out of joint.” One no longer knows, beneath the 17 hermeneutic patina, what this piece of wood, whose example suddenly looms up, is good for and what it is worth. Will that which is going to loom up be a mere example? Yes, but the example of a thing, the table, that seems to loom up of itself and to stand all at once on its paws. It is the example of an apparition. (Derrida 1993/1994:149) It is worth mentioning the footnote added in the penguin edition that explains the reference to ‘table turning’ – Fn –occult – wieji boards and the like – China – the tables begin to dance – plates rattle – oooh, spooky. The context her is the Taiping rebellion and the second of the opium wars. This will be the code through which I read this section. Derrida also makes much of this occult table and that it might be able to speak, though he calls this rhetorical artifice ‘abyssmal’ (Derrida 1993/1994:157). This is the rhetoric of the economist who ‘naively reflects or reproduces this fictive or spectral speech of the commodity and lets himself be in some way ventriloquized by it’ (Derrida 1993/1994:157). Derrida suggests Marx too ‘makes’ them speak, implies they cannot – ‘Marx wants to give a lesson to the economists who believe (but is he not doing the same thing?) that it suffices for a commodity to say “Me, I am speaking” for it to be true and for it to have a soul’ (Derrida 1993/1994:158). Then Marx quotes Shakespeare (but Derrida does the same thing); ‘to write and read comes by nature’. Derrida’s reading is impressive, and he has long been haunted. First he wrote on Marx in Positions, then a silenced, even spectral conflict with the Althusserians, then a book when ‘time was out of joint’ on Marx – a return – revenant – to Marx. Spivak was astonished to find Derrida saying he had returned to reading Marx after many years – a great quip: she had not known there was a time to have stopped! But how closely does he read Marx – he rereads the Manifesto, and parts of Capital, Grundrisse etc. Yet can we challenge him for not getting the Industrial in Capital? For remaining only with the first chapter and the exchange of commodities and the fascinating little wooden table. We have not yet cracked the key pages of Capital – as Spivak points out. This is no surprise. Derrida himself is spectral. Derrida’s own early ghost is a mystic writing pad – way back in 1967 when he maps out what later became the archive, the 18 mystic writing pad is a Freudian imprinting machine. Later, in the Postcard, there is Sokrates behind Plato, guiding his pen (chisel?) and then of course there is Spectres of Marx, but even before that there were séances and occult goings on around Marxism and Communism for Derrida, such that already in the 1960s he was forced to keep silent – astonishing, Derrida silent – for fear of being misunderstood given the spirit of the times. But we should not read this too much as a symptom, should we? His social relation mediated by the occult mechanisms of international scholarship, he – as Spivak says – touched many. He is channelled by readers from afar, some of whom became friends, for example by Avital Ronnel, a translator of texts of his middle period works (eg 1980 ‘The Law of Genre’) and an enthusiast for Heidegger who wrote about him getting strange calls, who wrote about haunted writing in Goethe and of Freud’s phantoms – Freud who had such trouble with speaking parts… All the while Derrida is concerned to keep reminding us that Freud was also obsessed with haunting – the uncanny. Ronell helpfully (Dictations p 44) adds that Freud worried about his mouth – Sig-mund – and In this regard I would like to recall another death or tow that haunts here. Irma, dreaming of injections and such – but leaving out von Fleischl-Maxrow’s death (and indeed, like many – Ronell has to ‘cut Fleischl out of the picture ‘ (Dictation 40-1), Zizek, Boothroyd, see http://hutnyk.blogspot.com/2007/07/narcoanalysis.html - also omitting the second Marxow part of his name, strange in a text so name conscious) and again not exploring death and ghosts where one might expect it vis a vis Irma and bad advice, but citing Robinson, Jonah and the white whale, just as does Derrida, and as does Marx. (fix this) (see notes p9-11 capital notebook) <add Robinsonades essay here> I want to suggest Pippi Londstocking leads such a band when she grows up, her earlier experience aboard ship providing exemplary training. Women and reproduction of literature… 19 ‘definite social relations assume the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (165 penguin) but this was not in the 1867 version - p 164 ‘enigmatic character’, ‘mysterious character’ - p165 eyes, misty realm - p166 ‘sie wissen das nicht, aber, sie tun es’ - 167 ‘social hieroglyph. Alchemy of atmosphere - 168 gravity, collapsing houses - 169 incarnation Don Quixote mentioned by Marx in a footnote at the end of chapter one – another big fat book which many only read the first chapter of. Too many only get this far with Marx too. Avital Ronnel (Stupidity 280) is not her usual astute self when she renders Don Quixote fearful. Many others conjure with the knight. Marx himself sometimes portrays his opponents as the sorrowful knight, but later sees himself in that role. Worth remembering that Cervantes kills him off in volume two so as to avoid spurious sequels. Ronell is far better on Hamlet, ghosts and rumour. Hamlet’s father whispers to Horatio ‘I am dead’ For Heidegger, as Ronnel quotes, rumour is constituted by ‘a process by which an initial lack of grounds to stand becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness’. Ronnel adds that rumour belongs to that order of things which cannot be assimilated’ (Finitudes Score 217). Hamlet’s ghost-father can speak, but is forbidden to speak of that which he knows of the dead. If commodities could speak – but they cannot, they are congealed and ventriloquised manifestations of dead labour. And a social relation assumes the fantastic form of a 20 relation between things ‘the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with a life and entering into relations both with one another and the human race’ (Marx Int pubs 72) But Derrida’s book has taken only the metaphor of the tale and the ghost and jettisoned the argument. Here Lukacs anxiety about bourgeois idealism in culture critique comes home to roost. Remember Heidegger speaks little of Lukacs, saying nothing about History and Class Consciousness – though he knew it well. Heideger’s message is not to change the world however – even as he applauds a Marxist historical drive years later. His effort to put things right goes deeply wrong. So Derrida – also a philosopher out to change the world? In his Marx book, using Hamlet to say Time is out of Joint, Derrida offers a ten point telegram diagnosis on the ills of the world The time is out of joint, O cursed spirit that I was ever set to put it right. Derrida is talking of the responsibility to the ghost of Marx here – to not just interpret the world Derrida rejects party, organisation, categories etc etc – for a ‘spirit’ of Marxism see p11 of capital notes book on Derrida and why he promotes this Gothic Marx above all others. To approach capital only at the level of ghosts, commodities and exchange does not get to the spectral behind all this appearance. This is the scene when Derrida, in an essay written just after a visit to Moscow, tells us he still gets enthused, wants to go out onto the streets, when he hears the Internationale. We should wonder why these rumours of ghosts and zombie’s are walking the streets so happily, which the analysis that is congealed, that we need to see, that Marx wants his implied reader to get, is overlooked. We should also wonder why in the decade after Derrida’s text – which initially received a critical pounding from Marxists – there were released all manner of commentaries on the ghost metaphor in Marx – vampires ghouls and zombies abound, Chris Harman is only one of these, now walking with the 21 undead SWP. But perhaps we have to see how Derrida’s rendering of a version of Marx was not time out of joint so much as fitted for the times. From Mark Fisher’s hauntology to Harman’s Zombie banks – the idea that there are ghosts who walk through walls, and that anxiety about this becomes more prominent both after 2001 and after the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 should not really be a surprise. Ghosts come through the walls… Today we are perhaps suffering terror-fatigue, not least because the pantomime manufacture of monsters has become so transparent. The scholars may be worried by spooky stories. But what, I wonder, is all this anxiety about really? Haunting and ghosts are interesting as metaphor or trope certainly. But incorporeality and disembodied form just doesn’t do much – it seems intangible, somewhat vacuous. These ghosts on their own are a bit whispy, shady and faint. I need to find bodies that matter – and I want to know just what point of connection all the current death-talk might have to the socio-political world. It seems a bit abstract at present. So I have two sets of questions: A. Should not all this talk of ghosts first of all be connected to the forgotten inmates of Guantanamo? To the spectral dead of the twin towers? To the thousands killed by imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia? These ghastly scenes should surely scare us. Somebody needs to organise more than a séance to set the creaking of the system into context – this entire planet is haunted, the walking dead are legion. Vampires suck our flesh. B. The theme of ghosts might also be questioned as a focus for social theory – I mean, why have these apparitions returned with a vengeance just now? Perhaps the abundance of ghost writings that have appeared since Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx indicates the powerful return of Christianity and/or Christmas pasts: Scrooge and/or the Holy Ghost struts the world stage in a way not seen since temperance. Is this secularism in retreat before the new manifestations of fundamentalism(s)? Or was secularism always underpinned with a faulty reading of Marx’s opiate routine? The first cry of the oppressed masses is a commune with the dead… 22 Is this the fetish-like character of capital turned into demons and ghouls? The residue of the dead body. In many stories ghosts can travel through walls and now they seem to have infiltrated everything everywhere. I have been disturbed the past few days by a story Mick Taussig tells in his book Walter Benjamin’s Grave, where our intrepid anthropologist-hero is asked by a Putumayo farmer if he knows how to smuggle cocaine past the police and army guards. He did not. “Well, you get a dead baby and open up the abdomen, remove the intestines, pack cocaine paste in, sew up the abdomen and, with the baby at the breast the good mother cuddles her precious cargo through the roadblocks and, who knows, perhaps to Miami and New York as well” (in Taussig 2006:86). Can everything be rendered equivalent, made into a commodity for exchange? For example, if not too weirdly close at hand to be an example, the books of Derrida? These became more frequent the longer he lived. He produced an astonishing number of texts in the last ‘late’ period of his life – since 1994 some three dozen under his name, not counting those written with others. So is there anything useful to be said here about how even the generation of philosophical discourse becomes spectral, now he is dead, but even before that, Derrida’s social relation to readers who were scattered everywhere congeals into a commodity relation via Amazon or bookshops, or conferences or course guides, all of which are produced (as use-values) for sale (as exchange values). The social relations of philosophising congeal also into what appears as a relation between things, but of course we can see that this is not the be all and end all of philosophy, or even the be all and end all of Derrida. The quantitative calculus of equivalences does not equate like things. There is a contradiction right there at the heart of exchange. The spectral, mystical, fetish realm can tamper with the way we read. And the ghosts who are missing – the slaves, the women, the future communists? It is worth asking (hat tip Tom Henri) which voice is written for who, which voice haunts which implied reader? Cadavers, lifeless bodies, the return of the dead. Over the holiday period the quiet streets of London have been bothering me a little. Alarmed as I am with Christmas 23 carols and hangings on the news – a veritable hauntology has me walking about as if in a dream. Yet people keep on bringing me ghosts. Three times this week… frightening me to reach for my familiar references – Ghost of Chance by William Burroughs was my first suggestion – it’s a pirate story about Captain Mission (drug fiend, utopianist) and his pet lemur called ‘Ghost’, battling the Christ-Sickness and other plagues destined for the Museum of Lost Species. The Captain himself becomes a ghost on death – stranger than anything Johnny Depp saw Keith Richards do… Of course much more worthy reading on this theme would pursue spirits in Hegel, Marx, the spectral… The message at the end of the chapter? Everything is reversed – things are not how they appear, the dog has the wrong end of the stick, value in diamonds and pearls – silly alchemists. i A tragedy of Shakespearean proportions? I want to quote from a page of Peter Brooks’ Hamlet. “Stop anyone in the street and ask: ‘What do you know about Shakespeare?’ In nine cases out of ten the answer will be ‘To be or not to be’. Why? What is behind those six words? Who spoke them? In what circumstances? For what reasons? Why has this little phrase become immortal? Hamlet is staged and restaged everywhere, all the time… as a drop-out, a peasant, a woman, a bum, a businessman, a movie star, a clown and even as a marionette… Hamlet is inexhaustible, limitless. Each decade brings with it new explanations, fresh interpretations. Yet Hamlet remains intact, a fascinating enigma. Hamlet is like a crystal ball, ever rotating. At each instant it turns a new facet towards us and suddenly we seem to see the whole play more clearly. So we can always set off again in search of its truth” (sleeve notes to Peter Brook’s DVD The Tragedy of Hamlet 2004) ii ‘strangely and dangerously, in spite of... major transformations, our institutions, whether political, religious, military, health-related, financial, entrepreneurial, or other, continued as if nothing were happening’ (Serres 2009/2014:8). iii Neocleous points out the ‘obvious gothic connection between the ghost and the vampire’ but also, against Derrida, that this metaphor plays ‘a role perhaps even more significant than the ghostly or spectral’ (Neocleous 2003:669).