It is tempting to draw the conclusion from Marx’s statement that research, in his opinion, is non-performative labour. Research, Marx implies, is an activity that is similar to work but does not result in any products of labour to be offered on the market. This line of thought is easiest to follow in the field of technology. The person with the research task of improving or renovating the technology used, for example in industry, recreates the labour processes – not in order to produce commodities, but to arrive at how production itself can be improved. Research in the natural sciences that is less oriented on production can also be of significance for future technological breakthroughs, and even a medical student who sets themselves the goal of improving people’s health contributes to the development of productive forces. If looked at carefully, every scientific activity can have this effect.
But, Marx said, where scientific reorganization, like all non-manual labour (geistige Arbeit), is concerned, the costs of reproduction are not at all as high as for their production. He takes Newton’s binomial theorem as an example. It cost great effort to develop it, but today a student at school can learn it in an hour, Marx said.
The interesting thing, of course, is that Marx in general talked about ‘geistige Arbeit’ which can also include artistic activity. In his analysis of labour in Capital, it is only labour that is of use in material production that Marx is interested in. At least in English industry – the one he actually investigated – academically trained engineers still had no role. It was in Germanic culture, including German-speaking Switzerland, that this sort of engineer first turned up.100 What would Marx have said about their significance for material culture? Did they also have productive work in the sense of Capital? Did they sell their labour power, like the workers?
These were questions Marx was not confronted with, and we can only speculate about his answers. As we have just seen, when clarifying how human activity differs from that of animals, he mentioned the architect (der Baumeister, which can also be translated as ‘master builder’; the distinction was fluid in Marx’s time). In all likelihood, he must have had human labour in quite general terms in mind, and not the labour he would later talk about in the chapter on labour time – that is, what the capitalist buys against time for a certain amount of compensation.
Marx was not talking only about humanity in general terms. We have already encountered his concept of the character mask several times. In our time, this would be seen as a concept in social psychology. It describes how inhabiting a certain role in society leaves its mark on a person. They become only a living representative of certain economic relations. The capitalist gets a ‘soul of capital’. What they are like in private life, or more precisely when they are not buying labour power or selling commodities, is of no significance. Marx dramatizes the text; he puts himself in the worker’s place and says to the capitalist: ‘You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast.’101
What Marx said here is a powerful argument against everyone who claims that capitalists are particularly greedy people. The personal qualities of the capitalists have no significance for how they act in their role as capitalists. They may be greedy or generous, but they will not survive as capitalists if they do not minimize their costs and maximize their profits.
Marx said nothing more detailed about how the worker is marked by their role, but we know this from much of what he wrote in other quarters, from the Manuscripts to his later statements on political questions. Workers differ among themselves, but are similar in that they must give up their formal freedom and sell their labour power for as high a price as possible. Their subordinate position leaves its mark as soon as they are compelled to take on the role of workers.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx (and Engels) held out the prospect of development towards a society of two classes in which there would be workers and capitalists, and beyond that only small remnants of other occupational groups. In Capital, he provides another, richer image of the time he lived in and the future that awaited. The concept of reserve army is now central.102 With the development of productive forces, fewer workers can perform more and more work, while others are sent off to unemployment or forced into other occupations. Most often this concerns unproductive activities such as maids, servants, or footmen for the aristocracy and the middle class. Marx reproduces figures from the 1861 census carried out in Great Britain. Out of somewhat more than 20 million inhabitants, just over 1 million were agricultural workers, and approximately 642,000 worked in the cotton and wool industry as against 565,000 in the mines. The metal industry employed close to 400,000, while ‘the servant class’ – working in the homes of the finer folk – encompassed no less than 1,208,648 persons. It is clear that Marx was arguing that many of them had been forced out of an industry that no longer needed them.
He also pointed out that technological developments created entirely new categories of labour. Telegraphy, photography, railroads and gas works occupied a large number of people. The population also contained other groups: apart from children and housewives there was also what Marx called ‘the ‘ideological’ classes’ – that is, those tasked with upholding and protecting certain ideas about people, society, and the world: the government, priests, lawyers and members of the armed forces.
It was the number of ‘domestic slaves’ that above all surprised Marx. They were more than the industrial workers, and he sighed: ‘What a splendid result of the capitalist exploitation of machinery!’103 On the other hand, he did not talk about the character masks these people wore in their work. There is no reason to suppose that on this point he would deviate from what he was saying about the capitalist. In their work, a person’s personality bears the mark of the requirements the activity places (we should recall that the word ‘person’ originally meant ‘mask’).
The few pages on the various population groups of Great Britain indicate that Marx’s concept of class had become significantly more complex than it had been in the time of the Manifesto. We have already observed that he never got to the subject of classes, even in the third volume (the one that remained a manuscript from the 1864–65 working period that Engels later tried to complete). He wrote barely a page but then immediately concluded his project. There could naturally be external reasons for the interruption, but there were probably also objective reasons for the text not being longer. When this was written, Marx – to all appearances – was already familiar with the British population statistics from 1861. In the text, he nevertheless began by establishing the thesis he had found in Ricardo, namely that there were three main classes in capitalism: free workers, capitalists, and landowners. But not even in England, the most modern of societies, did these classes appear in pure form; there were various grey areas between them. He defiantly continued, saying that this played no role here; there was an obvious tendency towards converting more and more work into wage labour and more and more means of production into capital. Moreover, landed property was separating more and more from both capital and labour.
But, he asked in the next breath, what constitutes a class? We see that the members of a class each have their definite source of income: wages, profit, or interest. This, however, is not enough. In that case, doctors and civil servants – for example – would also constitute classes. In addition, workers, capitalists, and landowners could also be split up into different interest groups through the division of labour.
Just when he had piled up a number of difficulties, he left off. It is an educated guess that he was not sure how he would go further. After 902 pages, he put the enormous manuscript aside and never seriously took it up again.104
The concept of class is not given the space in the Capital project that should reasonably be its due. On the other hand, Marx devotes proper attention to it in his political activities, as we shall see.
Marx ascribe
d no prominent role to the issues of schooling and education in Capital. In the chapter on the development of machinery, he provided shocking examples of how labour in industries, mines, and agriculture undermine the workers’ health and make even the most elementary schooling impossible. He noted with a certain degree of satisfaction that factory legislation at least made certain demands – though modest ones – as regards hygiene, safety, and the acquisition of knowledge. Children who worked would be allowed to acquire certain fundamental insights and skills at the workplace itself.105
It may seem surprising that Marx did not in principle have anything against a system that involved children over a certain age combining schooling and work. He quoted with a certain amount of approval a statement by Nassau W. Senior, whom he otherwise mocked and dismissed as a vulgar economist. The children of the middle and upper classes spent an unreasonable amount of time at their desks, Senior said. Much of their time, health, and energy was thereby wasted. Better with a more even division between work and education! Marx calls attention above all to Robert Owen, the founder of New Lanark outside Glasgow and – according to the vocabulary of the Manifesto – one of the utopian socialists. According to Marx, Owen had observed that the factory system had laid ‘the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings’.
A few pages later on in the text, Marx spoke of a future – whether it was near at hand or far off, he left unsaid – in which the working class had seized power and saw to it that theoretical and practical vocational training characterized the schools. He thereby professed himself an adherent of the polytechnic idea that had had a prominent place among radicals of various kinds, from liberals to communists, since at least the French Revolution. He shares the opinion also that became prevalent during a large part of the twentieth century that school was an institution that over the long term could transform society and reduce or eliminate class differences.106
He said nothing about his own very thorough theoretical education. He was certainly of the opinion that substantial parts of it could also be incorporated into the schooling of the future. But we do not know how he imagined the matter in more detail.
The Unknown Masterpiece
In February 1867, it was clear that Marx would finally be finished with the first volume of Capital, and he had good hopes that the second would soon follow. On 25 February, he wrote a letter to Engels. It had to be short, he explained. The landlord was visiting, and before him Marx had to play the role of the ruined businessman Mercadet in Balzac’s comedy – a man who was always trying to convince his creditors that he would pay his debts as soon as the mysterious Monsieur Godeau finally turned up.
‘À propos Balzac,’ Marx continued, there were two of his stories Engels had to read: Le Chef-d’æuvre inconnu and Melmoth réconcilié. They were two masterpieces, ‘full of the most delightful irony’ (voller köstlicher Ironien), Marx assured his friend.107
We do not know if Engels followed the suggestion. He was no lover of Balzac, and in general not a great reader of literature like his friend. Many who later wrote about Marx, on the other hand, have noticed these short lines, and we will not deviate from this tradition here. Attention is usually paid exclusively to Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), while the other story, Melmoth réconcilé (Melmoth Reconciled) is left aside. But this one also deserves a moment’s reflection, even if its contents do not open themselves to equally exciting interpretations as ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’.
‘Melmoth Reconciled’ can be seen as a parody of that type of fantastic story that was popular during the Romantic period. It deals with a materialistic time: the period after 1815 when the ‘principle of honour’ was replaced by the ‘principle of money’. The main character is named Castanier, and he has followed this exact development in his life. But he has spent all his money on a prostitute and has ended up insolvent. A strange Englishman turns up to his rescue: Melmoth, who is the Devil himself (‘the bearer of light’ – that is, Lucifer). Castanier sells him his soul, but soon discovers that the limitless ability to enrich himself that he has thereby acquired drives him to the ‘horrible melancholy of the almighty’ that only God and the Devil can endure. Full of gloom he sets off for the Stock Exchange, the holy site of the money men, and there he succeeds in selling his curse off to another man weighed down with debts, who soon experiences the same melancholy and passes the diabolical baton on. Finally, it ends up with a priest.
Marx’s fascination with this story is easy to understand. Balzac was painting a picture of capitalism. The capitalists live their lives at the Stock Exchange in a pact with the Devil, equipped with petrified character masks.
Forming associations between Goethe’s Faust, another of Marx’s literary favourites, and Balzac’s story is reasonable. Faust also sells his soul to the Devil, and also becomes a hard-boiled exploiter by the end of the second act. But he does not let his curse pass further on to others; he dies with it. He is saved from the torments of Hell at the moment of his death simply for the sake of his constant striving.
‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ has an entirely different resonance for Marx. At its centre stands a purely invented character, the great painter Frenhofer. Around him, Balzac grouped a few well-known persons from the history of art – among them Nicolas Poussin, who here appears as a young man eager to learn the secrets of the profession. Frenhofer is the great master, ruthless in his criticism of others but above all of his own work. For ten years, he has been working on his great masterpiece without letting anyone else see it. The solution comes when he is permitted to use Poussin’s wonderfully beautiful fiancée as a nude model. It is a great sacrifice both for her and for Poussin. Their love feels tarnished, and comes to an end.
But the painting is finished. Now, Frenhofer can proudly show the results to his friends. It is a shock for them. They see a jumble of colours. It is possible only to clearly discern a foot. Faced with their reaction, Frenhofer breaks down. That night, he dies.
His goal had been to present movement in a picture. Even the best works of art were unable to do so, but he wanted to be the first to succeed. His friends and admirers believed that he had failed.108
Many commentators have noted that Balzac, with his imagination, anticipated modernist art, in which movement in a two-dimensional image had been an important goal for many leading artists. One only need think of Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 work Nude Descending a Staircase, or works by Umberto Boccioni, in which the rapid tempo of modernity is captured in a way that cartoonists later took over.
Marx’s enthusiasm for the story had to do with his own attempts through Capital to develop a theory that captures the movement in capitalist development. It is an ambition that separates him from most other economists, who instead worked with various types of equilibrium theories. But now, with the first complete results of his many years of toil, he was seized by doubt. Had he, like Frenhofer, only succeeded in achieving a confusion of colours? Would his closest critics also turn their gaze away from his work in consternation?
According to his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, Marx willingly compared himself to Frenhofer. The reference in the quick lines to Engels was thus not just a moment’s inspiration. In the literature on Marx, his fascination for ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ has often been pointed out. Opinion is undivided that in Frenhofer, Marx saw an image of his own struggle to create a theory that captures the dynamic in the development of capitalism. There is something gripping in the worry he expressed in and through the comparison. He knew he was creating a masterpiece. But would the world realize this, and admit it?109
There is an important difference between the works of Frenhofer and Marx. Frenhofer was finished with his work before he died. Marx was not. He was not satisfied even with the first volu
me – the one he still saw as finished in 1867 – but was constantly prepared to make revisions; he was planning the last one during his final years.
What is there to say, then, about his unfinished masterpiece?
His anxiety is understandable. Engels and other friends had let him know that his earlier texts on value and money were difficult to understand, bordering on incomprehensible. Capital is no easier, and moreover a bulkier volume.
But he also harboured another worry that lay deeper. Had he really succeeded in capturing the movement, the violent force in capitalist society? Had he convincingly demonstrated how the interaction between capital and free labour inexorably led to greater efficiency and increased production – and crises? Was it clear how the formal freedom of the worker to sell their labour power bears its own inner compulsion? Were his theses on commodity fetishism and character masks convincing? Had he succeeded in clarifying how the bourgeois ideas on freedom, equality, and justice grew out of the labour market’s own dynamic?
In the first tremendous pages of the Manifesto, he had succeeded in describing how capitalism destroyed and renewed everything. But there, it was still a matter of just a description. With Capital, he would lay bare in a scientifically convincing manner how this process of destruction and renewal came to be, and how it constantly had to be driven further until the day – when was left unsaid – when capitalism’s most important product, the workers, would have enough of their lack of freedom and cast off the yoke.
He expressed his worry in comparing himself with Frenhofer, the old master who year after year struggled with his masterpiece but ultimately lived to see that not even his greatest admirers saw anything but a jumble in his painting. Balzac’s character says a great deal about form and movement that Marx could very well have agreed with. But he was probably most deeply struck by the following words from the old master: ‘After all, in fact, entirely too much knowledge, like entirely too great ignorance, results in a negation. I have no faith in my work!’ That is: an overabundance of knowledge can, like the absence of every insight, place obstacles in the way of a convincing presentation.
A World to Win Page 55