The interpretations by Backhaus, Reichelt, and Heinrich may seem complicated. I believe that what they say can be more easily understood if the philosophical background to Marx’s conceptual construction is examined. But, before we do that (and thereby distance ourselves from both Heinrich’s and Backhaus’s modes of expression), we have to take a look at some other traditions of interpretation.
Robert Kurz, another German philosopher, was an original author who vigorously attacked anyone and everyone who interpreted Marx. His last book, published posthumously in 2012, was called Geld ohne Wert (Money without Value). There, as previously, he asserted that many of these people were continuing in a tradition from orthodox Eastern Bloc Marxism by talking about labour and about class struggle in an antiquated manner. Heinrich, on the other hand, was in Kurz’s opinion a postmodernist Marx interpreter.
The concept of crisis stood in the centre of Kurz’s own analysis. Inspired chiefly by Roswitha Scholz, he emphasized that the patriarchal element in capitalism – and here he warned about the development the world was now going through – could result in an endless catastrophe and not at all in peaceable socialism.56 Another subject of Kurz’s attacks was Wolfgang Fritz Haug, a German philosopher who became known for things such as being the publisher of Das Argument and of the enormous anthology Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism), which began publication in 1994.57 Haug, who has also authored a long series of books, is one of those who unhesitatingly asserts that there was not only a structural dimension, but also a historical one, in Capital. It is in this spirit that, over the last few years, he has begun dealing with what he calls ‘high-tech’ capitalism, the latest phase in the development that Marx only saw the beginning of.
Haug is also part of the growing group of specialists who have published detailed instructions on how Capital should be read. Over the last few years, this species of literature has increased drastically. Michael Heinrich is one of its most assiduous contributors; a shorter version of this pedagogical work exists in English under the title An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (2004); a more comprehensive, as yet unfinished version exists in German. A Swedish professor of cultural studies, Johan Fornäs, has authored a book of great merit called simply Capitalism: A Companion Guide to Marx’s Economy Critique (2013). Two renowned American specialists, cultural geographer David Harvey and literary historian Fredric Jameson, have also written similar guides. Moreover, Harvey has put out lectures on the subject on the Internet.
The English-language commentary already shows that ‘the new Marx reading’ has also made its entry into the Anglo-Saxon world. There is also other, less pedagogically arranged literature that bears witness to this. One example is Andrew Kliman’s 2007 book, Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’. We will return to this.58
Now, it is time to tackle a few important and controversial themes; here, I will also take my own position.
Essence and Appearance; Form and Content; Surface and Depth
In the substantial current literature about Capital, it is striking that many authors avoid exploring the devices according to which Marx created a dominant part of his conceptual apparatus, above all through categories such as ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’ (Wesen and Erscheinung) and the related ‘form’ and ‘content’ (Form and Inhalt). Even ‘surface’ (Oberfläche) can be considered as part of the same category, though its counterpart ‘depth’ is only implied.
But there are exceptions, of course. Backhaus is among those who point out that the thinking around essence, like other tools of classical philosophy, is central to Marx. The same applies to older Marx specialists from the Soviet era. But a greater or lesser dose of Leninism is thrown into the bargain, especially a firmly rooted conviction that Engels thoroughly understood Marx’s intentions and developed them further in his own work. This is the price that has to be paid for becoming acquainted with, for example, Jindřich Zelený’s works, which we have done in the previous chapter. One of the most thorough analyses of Capital is of the same type: the work of Russian philosopher Mark Rozental, translated in 1957 into German as Die dialektische Methode der politischen Ökonomie von Karl Marx. It is a solid work, certainly the best on Capital from the Soviet school, and the author did not conceal the fact that the concept of ‘essence’ has a fundamental role in Marx.59
The timidity of many other interpreters is likely due to the fact that the thinking about essence had become so unwieldy because it was associated with Marx’s early and soon abandoned ideas about the essence of humanity. This timidity is also discernible in the face of Marx’s later use of terms such as ‘alienation’ (or more precisely, of both the related German terms Entfremdung and Entäusserung). To choose a single example: Heinrich asserts that when the word Entfremdung turns up in Capital, it should not be interpreted in any literal sense but in the same spirit as when Marx and Engels laughed the word off in The German Ideology by using it so that the ‘philosophers’ would grasp what they were saying.60
But what Marx said about alienation in both the Grundrisse and Capital was completely serious. It is obvious that he was not using it in the same way he had in the Manuscripts. He now had another understanding of what humanity was, and what it could be.
His definitive reckoning with the image of humanity in the Manuscripts came in the sixth of the eleven Theses on Feuerbach, in which he said that the essence of humanity was not an abstraction residing in each individual person, but ‘the ensemble of social relations’ (das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse).
Marx’s choice of words is important. He did not assert that humanity did not have an essence. He said that this essence changes along with changes in society. The thinking around essence remains, also where humanity is concerned. But the essence of humanity is not stable; it was not the same in the thirteenth century as it was in the eighteenth (or the twenty-first).61
It is obvious that Marx in future would not try to interpret the essence of humanity, since it would become an unutterably lengthy affair. It would be much more fruitful to analyse society in its various aspects. People are social beings marked by their different roles in one type of society or another.
But the rather passive word ‘ensemble’ does not capture the dynamic in Marx’s idea of humanity’s interaction with society. Marx did not only talk about how we bear the mark of the external circumstances under which we live. He also talked about the possibilities that these circumstances opened up for us under certain definite conditions. The most beautiful example we have is, perhaps, from his journalism. He wrote about how the Indians’ possibilities for a modern life were being opened up by the British conquest of their country, but how these possibilities were closed off in the same moment by the oppression the new masters were committing. He drew a parallel with the lot of the workers in Great Britain. With their hands, the workers were creating the wealth of the age, which was nevertheless entrusted not to them but their masters.
This form of thinking was a recurrent one, from at least the Theses on Feuerbach forward. People are alienated from the possibilities that society opens up. The good life lay in full view of the proletariat, who were nonetheless compelled to live in poverty. Only in a radically different society could the prosperity that had been created be entrusted to everyone.
Humanity changes with society. But there is a danger in overemphasizing its variability. Marx did not run that risk, especially not after his encounter with Darwin’s theories. We will return to this in the next chapter.
It was not the essence of humanity that interested Marx in Capital. It was commodities, money, productive forces, capital, and much else of a more mundane character. But some of the central vocabulary of classical philosophy was put to use in their treatment. Essence and appearance, form and content, surface and depth can be seen as a kind of metaconcept in the abundantly rich world of concepts in Capital. The ordinary concepts can be related to one another using these me
taconcepts, often in an ingenious way.
The reader has already encountered the greatest challenges in the introductory chapters. Marx was aware of the difficulties: ‘Every beginning is difficult, holds in all science’, he said in the beginning of the foreword.62 Capitalism appears in an enormous accumulation of commodities. But these commodities turn out to be more mysterious than their appearance hints at. To attract buyers, they must have a use value that is dependent upon their concrete properties. This use value has nothing to do with their exchange value. Use value divides them – a coat is not an iron – but exchange value makes them comparable. Exchange value has nothing to do with their nature; society is entirely its arena. The boundary between nature and society is crucial in Capital. It is hidden away in spontaneous observations, but it can still be seen: society becomes second nature.
The distinction between exchange value and value is only made fully clear in the second edition. The relationship is less clear in the first edition, whereas the significance becomes evident from the Ergänzungen und Veränderungen (Supplements and Changes) to the first volume of Capital that Marx worked on between December 1871 and January 1872.63 In the completed edition, Marx emphasized that exchange value, also called the value form, is the value’s Erscheinungsform (form of appearance). Value is thus the essence of exchange value. It can also be called its content.
Why were these terminological subtleties now so important for Marx? The answer is rather simple: from exchange value, we cannot infer the secret behind the increase in value that occurs in production. Exchange value lies on the surface; it is immediately visible. If we are satisfied with that, we end up with the idea that what the capitalist invested of fixed and variable capital – raw materials, machines, and workers’ wages – has increased under its own power. But the increase in value, according to Marx, lies completely in the labour that the workers performed when they sold their labour power to the capitalist.
Value is thus the essence, exchange value the form of appearance. Or, in other words: value is the content, exchange value the form. But when we put the matter into words, we catch a difference between both pairs of concepts. The essence itself does not have an essence, whereas the content can very well be the form of another content. Or the same content can also have two different forms: value also has use value as a form of existence (a use value – a coat, for example – can be a ‘mode of existence of value’).64
There is no peculiarity in the Marxian conceptual apparatus; this relativity belongs to the ancient logic of the concept of form and content. Clarifying this requires a brief excursion into the fascinating history of these concepts.
Marx himself invited us on such a trip by citing Aristotle (also in Greek, for safety’s sake) in his text.65 Aristotle was the one who codified the terms ‘form’ and ‘substance’. His word for substance is hylē, a word that means wood or timber, and he indicates the relativity of the pair of concepts with the word itself. Wood that is cut down can be the substance for sawn boards, which in turn become the substance (or material, as we say) for a table. Aristotle used the same pair of concepts for most areas of knowledge: the acorn is the substance, the fully grown tree is the form; the body is the substance and the soul its form; the uneducated man is the substance, and the educated man its form. With Aristotle, the form is the goal of a process. It did not need to be so in later traditions, and absolutely was not so in Marx.
Only during the Renaissance, some 600 years ago, did content turn up as another paired concept to form. It spread the same way over many areas, and not infrequently would interact with substance. It is like this to a great degree in Marx. In Capital, he spoke more often about content than substance but he always had the word ‘substance’ at the ready as a synonym, showing that he had not abandoned his fundamental conviction that capitalist society had its roots in concrete, earthly relationships.66
Let us return to our example. The content of exchange value is value, which also has use value as (another) form – that is, what makes a commodity desirable to a buyer. But use value also has a content comprised of its various physical (and in certain cases also intellectual) properties. A slice of bread is desirable because it has material properties that both provide nutrition and taste good. A novel often attracts buyers more often for the sake of its aesthetic qualities than for its external assets.
Even labour has its use and exchange values. The use value is the concrete labour necessary to transform raw materials, using machines, into products that can be offered on the market. The exchange value is the power that the worker sells to the capitalist against a fixed working time. Labour has a twin nature, Marx said, and he himself was the first ‘to examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities’. Concrete labour produces concrete products: the weaver weaves cloth, the metalworker joins machine parts. Labour in its abstract form – labour power – is a commodity that the worker sells to the capitalist against a certain amount of compensation. This compensation is in turn exchangeable for other commodities: loaves of bread, clothing, or whatever is offered on the market.
Money is the general bonding agent between commodities. It does not matter what external forms they have; when Heinrich asserts that Marx perceived money as an actual commodity, it is possible that his criticism affects certain statements in Capital but hardly the central one, in which Marx does things like erupt in a quote from Revelation (in Latin!) where these important words are found: ‘no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name’. Here, it is thus the symbol of value that is the only thing of decisive importance in business. In the Latin text, suitably enough, the word ‘character’ turns up, and Marx has a convenient opportunity to talk once again about character masks and go into commodity fetishism. In the exchange of commodities, people exist for each other only as representatives of the commodity. They are nothing more than ‘the personifications of the economic relations that exist between them’.67
Here it becomes clear that money is only a form that can have any material content at all: gold or silver, paper notes, or – as it does today – numbers on a bank statement. Naturally, Marx knows that money also has a history; but this history has no significance in the conceptual construction of Capital.
In this construction, form has a distinct similarity with surface. The form is visible, or has been made visible through analysis; it is therefore accessible to the observer. In fact, surface figures even earlier – namely in the very first lines of Capital: the commodity is ‘an object outside us, a thing’.68 Immediately thereafter it says that exchange value ‘presents itself’ (erscheint) as a quantitative relation. ‘To appear’ means precisely to be visible on the surface. At the beginning of the section on commodity fetishism, Marx said that at first glance the commodity seems to be a trivial thing, but that analysis shows that it is full of subtle points and theological subtleties.
The concept of surface adds nothing new to the concepts of essence and appearance, or to the concepts of form, content, and substance. It only brings home the way Marx worked in Capital. The starting point is empirical material, which in turn is to be broken down and its secrets revealed. Empirical work meets theoretical.
Natural and Supernatural; Freedom and Equality
When Marx quotes Revelation in the middle of his presentation on the nature of money, it is not a temporary outburst of humour. On the contrary, the quote slides into a stream of Biblical or generally religious allusions that characterize the whole of Capital (as they did most other writings by Marx). The very first pages, as we have just seen, talk about theological subtleties concerning commodities, and a few dozen pages further on it says that the value of a commodity is something ‘übernatürlich’, actually ‘supernatural’ but toned down in the English translation to ‘non-natural’.69 This turns out immediately to be the same thing as ‘something purely social’, and the reader easily gets the impression that Marx was only playing with the
word ‘supernatural’. But he was being serious! The contradiction between nature and society is crucial. Use value is anchored in nature, or more precisely in the concrete properties of the object of use. This is not so with value. Value has its only origin in interpersonal relationships (where the one between capitalist and worker, who respectively buy and sell the commodity of labour power, is the decisive one).
People’s ideas also shoot forth out of interpersonal relationships. Nature as such provides no basis for religious or magical ideas. Society is their breeding ground. In one spot, Marx describes the transformation of commodities into money as a transubstantiation.70 The word is central in theological contexts, designating the transformation of the host and the wine into the body and blood of Christ in communion.
The specific superstition of capitalism is commodity fetishism. It is not a set of false ideas that can be corrected with a sufficient dose of enlightenment. It is a result of the way itself in which value is created in capitalism. The value form has nothing to do with the physical properties of the commodity. To find their counterpart, we have to look in ‘the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world’. The human brain’s own creations appear as ‘independent beings’. The religious reflection of the actual world can only disappear if people enter into rational relationships with each other and with nature, Marx said.
A World to Win Page 52