It is uncertain whether Kliman wishes to go that far. For him, the essential thing is that Marx’s theory is logically consistent. According to Heinrich, on the other hand, the transformation problem is not just a figment of the imagination with some interpreters; Marx really made an attempt at solving it, saw that he failed, and moved on after that. After Marx’s death, Engels tried to find new solutions but he also failed, though without himself admitting his failings.
This is also the interpretation that appears most plausible to me. But I would like to add that the transformation problem can be explained to a decisive extent from Marx’s ambitions of achieving a natural scientific exactitude. On the purely conceptual level, it seems given that the distinction between value and exchange value – so important for Marx in the second edition of Capital – deals with the relationship between surface or form; that is, between exchange value, expressed in money, and value, which is an intellectual construction necessary for the insight into the role of labour in capitalist development. Marx himself expressed the matter clearly and distinctly in Capital when he said that value had its form ‘only in the shape of money’.86 But he was not satisfied with this purely theoretical operation; he also wanted to see it expressed with ‘the precision of natural science’. That ambition led him astray at times.
Historical Development in Capital
For decades, readers have battled over the relationship between historical materialism and the fundamental theory of Capital. The ‘new Marx reading’ has largely wanted to get rid of the idea that Capital lies embedded in a general theory of human development. Marx’s more far-reaching statements – phrased most simply and clearly in A Contribution – on the relationship between humanity’s actual existence and its ideas and ideals have only a superficial connection with the specific theory he was busy developing, the most elaborate result of which is the first volume of Capital.87
This severe, nearly ascetic, standpoint becomes comprehensible in light of the conventional view of history that became a dogma in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. There were eminent – even brilliant – historians there, but they were always compelled in their works to pay at least lip service to a system of assertions that only had a vague connection with what Marx himself said on the subject. Most had been developed after him.
But the repudiation of historical materialism is not problem-free. The dominant idea seems to be that the core of Marx’s project on Capital has nothing to do with any form of philosophy of history. More than that, in fact: if an aspect of development is brought into the theory, it loses its acuity and its definite area of application. This applies both to ideas about pre-capitalist development and to ideas about different, more or less advanced stages within capitalism.
As regards the latter point, it is easy to find support for the ascetic standpoint in central portions of Marx’s texts. Back in the Grundrisse, as we have seen, he emphasized the difference between the capitalist system and the circumstances under which it arose. He was not as explicit in Capital, but the difference constitutes a condition for much of his argumentation. So, for example, he contrasted technological development in a capitalist society with what had occurred earlier in history. This is particularly evident in the immense chapter on ‘Machinery and Modern Industry’. In it, he emphasized that technological innovations since the eighteenth century are not the result of any isolated individual events but are part of the inevitable striving of capital to increase the productive power of labour. The more the machine produces, the cheaper – relatively – labour power becomes. This is why everyone who is to have a chance in competition has to put their trust in technological reorganizations.
It is also clear that Marx saw the epoch often called merchant capitalism as a condition for the actual (industrial) capitalism his theory dealt with. Certain portions of the wealth that were part of the primitive accumulation of capital were created thanks to the faraway trade that was made possible through Europeans’ combined procession of business, plunder, and conquest both eastward and westward. Another source was pure usury, in which unjustified interest rates meant that wealth could be piled up and then put to use for early industrialization.88
Only when both of the two decisive classes of capitalism – the capitalists, who wish to increase their assets through production, and the free workers, who are compelled to sell their labour power for their survival – are found on the social stage, only then does Marx’s theory of capital become valid.
But the question of the role of history in Capital is not finally answered with this. A theory always has assumptions that are not part of the theory itself. This concerns themes that are usually dealt with in introductions or only act as tacit assumptions. (External conditions of this kind are, incidentally, a logical necessity. A theory never stands entirely on its own, however exact it may be. According to Gödel’s theory, nothing of the sort is possible, even in arithmetic.89)
Marx commented explicitly on the further assumptions of his theory of capital in a long note at the beginning of the chapter on the development of machinery under capitalism. It is a very important note, perhaps the most important in the entire book. He pointed out there that a ‘critical history of technology’ was missing, which coming from him meant that a history would be needed in which technological innovations are related to material production in a scientifically satisfactory manner. He compares with Darwin, who in The Origin of Species was interested in how the organs in plants and animals developed in an endless adaptation to changing environments. The comparison is striking, but also very typical of the time: like his contemporaries, Marx saw biological evolution as a process of advancement that had similarities to the technological development of the age.
But the note contains more. From the comparison between biology and technology, Marx’s thoughts move to the eighteenth-century Italian thinker Giambattista Vico, who in his work from 1725, Scienza nuova (The New Science), argued that it was easier for humanity to understand history than nature because they themselves were the creators of history and not, on the contrary, nature. Technology, Marx said, reveals the active relationship of humanity to nature. Social conditions and the ideas that humanity recreates the world and themselves also proceed from this. It is easier to bring out the worldly core from these ideas through analysis than it is to go the opposite way, from material production to the ideas. But the latter way is ‘the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one’. This materialism differs from the ‘abstract materialism of natural science’, which ignores human history.90
The latter comment will be central in the next chapter. Here, what the note says about Marx’s view of history in general and under capitalism in particular is important. One thing is clear: Marx kept the general conception of history that appeared back in The German Ideology. As far as I know, there is no one who has denied this, either; the controversial issue instead is what significance these general, sweeping theses have for the theories of capital that Marx developed (and modified) over a number of years.
First, it can be shown clearly that Marx made no direct derivations from his general conception to the specific theory. The relationship between production and circulation, between constant and variable capital, or between concrete and abstract labour has no necessary connection with the theses on the relationship between humanity’s mode of production and its ideas. On the other hand, it can be asked whether the latter has any heuristic significance – that is, if they guided Marx in any way in his work on Capital.
The response is ‘no’ where the more specific development of concepts in Marx after the Grundrisse is concerned. A certain shift of accent from the sphere of production to the sphere of circulation can be spoken of, naturally without production losing its significance as the starting point for the economic analysis. But money is given a more prominent and dynamic role in the total process of capital. In the Grundrisse, Marx could still deal with value and money separately from each other, but in the manusc
ript he worked out a few years later – which would come to be called Theorien über den Mehrwert (Theories of Surplus Value) – this no longer appears possible. Value can only be expressed in money; money is the appearance of value, its form.91
Marx’s thoughts on the relationship between existence and ideas played no role for this shift. But, as the long note we recently examined shows, they are still important for the author of Capital. There is an excess of examples of how he made use of religious allusions and metaphors; they are not just ornamentation but serve to emphasize how the capitalist mode of production itself promotes certain kinds of ideas. Even more explicit is the analysis of how ideas about freedom, equality, and property arise out of the relationship between capitalist and free worker. The general conception of history is important here.
The next question is inevitably how central this analysis is for an understanding of Marx, and the answer may be twofold: for the specific theory of Capital it plays no role, but it is important for Marx’s assessment of the totality of the time and society he lived in. It is especially of crucial significance for his political analysis.
There is one inflammatory subject that still remains to be taken up regarding the development of capitalism. As we have seen, certain interpreters such as Wolfgang Fritz Haug claim that Marx also captures the development of capitalism – that is, its various stages – as a result of his theory. Many others who are part of the traditions from Marx discern a particular, contemporary phase they call late capitalism. This is a term that is more than a hundred years old, and it was given the meaning of ‘the last stage of capitalism’ (before its ruin) sometime in the 1930s. From the 1950s onwards, on the other hand, it became more the designation of development after the Second World War with a strongly developed welfare state. The word was used in this way by the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel and by the representatives of critical theory, for example Habermas. After the tide turned around 1980 and classical capitalism quickly gained ground, the term again became less common, and many who wanted to give the period that began thereafter a particular name have, like Haug, preferred to talk about ‘high-tech capitalism’ or something similar.
An even more popular term for the new epoch is postmodernism. The word is ambiguous, to say the least, as it can stand in opposition to both aesthetic modernism (Baudelaire, Picasso, Schönberg, and so on) and to modernity in the sense of the entire enormous process of transformation the world has undergone over the last few centuries in which capitalism – cast with the expansion of trade, industrialization, urbanization, and much else – constitutes the very centre. It is chiefly in the latter sense that the word has direct bearing on the debate having to do with the inheritance from Marx. A key role is played here by the American literary scholar Fredric Jameson who, in the title of his 1992 book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, directly attempts to revive the term ‘late capitalism’. He sees no break in the development of capitalism itself, but places the new in the sphere of culture. However influential Jameson’s book may have been, it has not meant that the idea of late capitalism as an unbroken development – at least after the Second World War – has been vitalized. Today, a good bit into the twenty-first century, the epochal designation ‘postmodernism’ also obviously finds itself on the wane.92
It is naturally uncontroversial to state that society has undergone a tremendous change since Marx wrote Capital. Rather, the debate concerns whether the fundamental theoretical assumptions Marx made must be changed in any radical way in order to be able to cast light on a later phase in his development. Have electronics and biotechnology meant that the theory of capital must be recast in some way?
In one sense, the answer must be no: over the last few decades, we have only witnessed yet another great step in the development of productive forces. Money has become even more abstract thanks to computers, but its role is in principle the same. Marx himself discerned a stage of manufacture in capitalism, with its beginnings back in the mid-sixteenth century. The craftsmen soon lost their former specialities, just as they did their own tools. So developed the system whose essential elements were not changed through the mechanization of industry.
Stages in the development of capitalism that Marx never got to experience have not changed the exact relationships that represent the elementary building blocks in his theory of capital. It is another thing if Capital is seen – as Heinrich does – as an unfinished project that it is now important to bring forward into our own time. But Heinrich gives us no detailed information about what this means.
Back in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels pointed out that the general guidelines they provided for how society was to be studied could not be used as a timetable according to which history could be put in order. What is actually occurring emerges out of a swarm of details. Only when this swarm has been overcome can the real description of history begin. A pattern emerges, and the more this pattern is concretized, the more complete the picture becomes.
It is naturally this concretization that Marx was striving for in his project on Capital. What he said about the place of religion, the origin of liberal ideals, and much more has a place in this concretization, even if these phenomena have not been defined; nor can they certainly be defined as well as the concept of productive forces or the relationship between abstract labour and value.
Humanity and Classes
Labour is primarily a process between humanity and nature, Marx says. To describe how intimate the relationship is, he used a term he drew from contemporary physiology and organic chemistry: through labour, humanity ‘arranges, regulates, and controls’ its metabolism (Stoffwechsel) with nature.93 This metaphor could possibly be seen as an example of how Marx can sometimes naturalize humanity’s reality – that is, express himself as if the boundary between humanity and (the rest of) nature had been erased.94 In the French translation, Marx inserted a note: not about the word ‘metabolism’ – which disappeared without further ado from his French text – but about the ‘process’ in the compound term ‘labour process’ (procès de travail). By that, he said, he meant ‘a development regarded in the totality of its real conditions’, pointing out that the meaning, separate from the one found in jurisprudence (‘lawsuit’ or ‘trial’), had in French become common in physics, chemistry, and even metaphysics. It would gradually become completely natural, he assured the reader.95
Marx meant what he said literally: in relation to nature, humanity is one natural force among others. With its ‘arms and legs, head[s] and hands’, it shapes nature according to its needs and thereby also changes itself. We are again reminded of the sharp boundary Marx drew between labour as a force of nature (the sphere of use values, of concrete labour) and work as a social phenomenon (the sphere of exchange values, of abstract labour).
Immediately afterwards, he was ready to demonstrate the crucial difference between humans’ and animals’ ways of working upon nature. His example is rightly famous. A bee, he said, can build the most perfectly shaped cells that an architect could never even come close to. But even the most wretched architect differs from the cleverest bee in that they build a house in their thoughts before they build it in stone. Construction work is a conscious activity in which each stage is anticipated in thought.
François Mitterrand published a book in 1978 – a few years before being elected president of France – called L’abeille et l’architecte (The Bee and the Architect).96 At that time, it was still important for a socialist to show they knew their Marx, and Mitterrand not only succeeded at that but also extracted an elegant piece of rhetoric about his own audacious political programme from the parable. (By the time he became president, he had shed his skin and become less a social architect than a building contractor for state monuments.)
The similarities between the bee and the architect say something essential about Marx’s image of humanity. Consciousness may always be marked by the society in which a person lives. It is through constantly setting goals and plans tha
t they differ from other living beings. In their work, they are a force of nature – but a force of nature that in contrast to all other forces of nature knows what they are aiming for.
A question nevertheless presents itself. Did Marx see labour only as a transaction between humanity and nature? How did he view the activities of lawyers, doctors, researchers, or teachers? Of course, he viewed such occupations as labour. In his letters, he often described how hard he was working, or complained about illnesses and other concerns putting obstacles in the way of his work. Only two examples among many possible ones: I ‘am working like mad all night’, he wrote in a letter to Engels in 1857.97 More than eight years later, he wrote to him again that a new outbreak of carbuncles involved an ‘interruption in my work’.98
Marx lived in a time when the word ‘labour’ itself had been given an expanded meaning, from having signified only physical work to also encompass intellectual and artistic activities. Hegel was among those who enthusiastically adopted this meaning; as we will remember, Marx asserted back in the Manuscripts that Hegel’s commentary on labour were the most praiseworthy things in his philosophy (see above, p. 157).
But in the theory that Marx developed in Capital, it is only labour that has to do directly with material production that is up for discussion. At the same time, he emphasized the significance of science and technology for the development of the productive forces. In this context, this activity does not itself appear as work, but only an activity that makes labour power cheaper.
Marx happens to approach the question of what research is in this context. This becomes clearest in a commentary in Theories of Surplus Value. Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, is up for discussion, and Marx comments that according to Hobbes ‘science, not performative labour, is the mother of the arts’. The word ‘arts’ here has its classical meaning of handicrafts, but Marx certainly meant physical work in general.99
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