Karl Marx

by Francis Wheen

  What Marx did predict was that under capitalism there would be a relative – not an absolute – decline in wages. This is self-evidently true: few if any firms which enjoy a twenty per cent increase in surplus value will instantly hand over the loot to their workforce in the form of a twenty per cent pay rise. So labour lags further and further behind capital, however many microwave ovens the workers can afford. ‘It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.’ (My italics.)

  Marx’s definition of poverty, like Christ’s, was as much spiritual as economic. What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or, as Marx wrote in Capital, the means by which capitalism raises productivity

  distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital … Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole.

  That last sentence, taken alone, could be adduced as another prediction of absolute financial impoverishment for the workers, but only a halfwit – or an economics lecturer – could maintain this interpretation after reading the thunderous indictment that precedes it.

  ‘It must be borne in mind,’ admits Leszek Kolakowski, one of the most influential modern obituarists of Marxism, ‘that material pauperisation was not a necessary premiss either of Marx’s analysis of the dehumanisation caused by wage labour, or of his prediction of the inescapable ruin of capitalism.’ Quite so. Yet Kolakowski then ignores his own advice by placing another lump of hard cheese in Karl Popper’s old mousetrap. ‘As an interpretation of economic phenomena,’ he warns, ‘Marx’s theory of value does not meet the normal requirements of a scientific hypothesis, especially that of falsifiability.’ Well, of course it doesn’t: no litmus paper or electron microscope or computer program can discern the presence of such intangibles as ‘alienation’ and ‘moral degradation’.

  Capital is not really a scientific hypothesis, nor even an economic treatise, though zealots on both sides of the argument have persisted in regarding it thus. The author himself was quite clear about his intentions. ‘Now, regarding my work, I will tell you the plain truth about it,’ Marx wrote to Engels on 31 July 1865. ‘There are three more chapters to be written to complete the theoretical part … But I cannot bring myself to send anything off until I have the whole thing in front of me. Whatever shortcomings they may have, the advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole …’ Another letter, a week later, refers to the book as a ‘work of art’ and cites ‘artistic considerations’ as a reason for his delay in submitting the manuscript.

  Had Marx wished to produce a straightforward text of classical economics, rather than a work of art, he could have done so. In fact he did: two lectures delivered in June 1865, later published as Value, Price and Profit, give a concise and lucid précis of his conclusions:

  As the exchangeable values of commodities are only social functions of those things, and have nothing at all to do with their natural qualities, we must first ask: what is the common social substance of all commodities? It is labour. To produce a commodity a certain amount of labour must be bestowed upon it, or worked up in it. And I say not only labour, but social labour. A man who produces an article for his own immediate use, to consume it himself, creates a product but not a commodity … A commodity has a value, because it is a crystallisation of social labour … Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value … What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist … Now suppose that the average amount of the daily necessaries of a labouring man require six hours of average labour for their production. Suppose, moreover, six hours of average labour to be also realised in a quantity of gold equal to three shillings. Then three shillings would be the price, or the monetary expression of the daily value of that man’s labouring power … But by paying the daily or weekly value of the spinner’s labouring power, the capitalist has acquired the right of using that labouring power during the whole day or week. He will, therefore, make him work daily, say, twelve hours … By advancing three shillings, the capitalist will, therefore, realise a value of six shillings, because, advancing a value in which six hours of labour are crystallised, he will receive in return a value in which twelve hours of labour are crystallised. By repeating this same process daily, the capitalist will daily advance three shillings and daily pocket six shillings, one half of which will go to pay wages anew, and the other half of which will form surplus value, for which the capitalist pays no equivalent. It is this sort of exchange between capital and labour upon which capitalistic production, or the wages system, is founded, and which must constantly result in reproducing the working man as a working man, and the capitalist as a capitalist.

  Whatever its merits as an economic analysis, this can be understood by any intelligent child: no elaborate metaphors or metaphysics, no confusing digressions or philosophical orotundities, no literary flourishes. Why then is Capital, which covers exactly the same ground, so utterly different in style? Did Marx suddenly lose the gift of plain speaking? Manifestly not: at the time he gave these lectures he was also completing the first volume of Capital. A clue can be found in one of the very few analogies he permitted himself in Value, Price and Profit, when explaining his belief that profits arise from selling commodities at their ‘real’ value, and not – as one might assume – from adding a surcharge. ‘This seems paradox and contrary to everyday observation,’ he wrote. ‘It is also paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things.’

  This sounds like an invitation to judge his master-work by scientific standards. But listen more closely: he is taking on ‘the delusive nature of things’, a subject which cannot be confined within an existing genre such as political economy, anthropological science or history. As Marx points out, ‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ He admired the objective, unsentimental methodology of Ricardo and Adam Smith: indeed, the aspects of Capital that are most often ridiculed today – such as the labour theory of value – derived from these classical economists and were the prevailing orthodoxy of the time. Nevertheless, he felt that for all its achievements ‘the bourgeois science of economics had reached the limits beyond which it could not pass’. Empirical measurements could never quantify the human cost of exploitation and estrangement.

  In the British Museum, Marx had discovered a reservoir of data about capitalist practice – government Blue Books, statistical tables, reports from factory inspectors and public health officers – which he used to the same drenching effect as Engels had in The Condition of the Working Class in England. But his other main source, less often noticed, is literary fiction. Discussing the effects of machinery on labour power, he uses the 1861 census figures to show that the number of workers employed in mechanised industries such as textile factories and metalworks is lower than the number of domestic servants. (‘What a splendid result of the capitalist exploitation of machinery!’) How can capitalists shrug off their responsibility for the human casualties of technological progress? Putting as
ide his census figures, Marx turns to a speech from the dock by Bill Sykes in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. ‘Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveller has been cut,’ Sykes explained. ‘But that is not my fault, it is the fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? … If you abolish the knife – you hurl us back into the depths of barbarism.’

  More use-value and indeed profit can thus be derived from Capital if it is read as a work of the imagination: a Victorian melodrama, or a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created (‘Capital which comes into the world soiled with mire from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore’); or perhaps a satirical utopia like Swift’s land of the Houyhnhnms, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile. In Marx’s vision of capitalist society, as in Swift’s equine pseudo-paradise, the false Eden is created by reducing ordinary humans to the status of impotent, exiled Yahoos. All that is solid melts into air, he wrote in the Communist Manifesto; now, in Capital, all that is truly human becomes congealed or crystallised into an impersonal material force, while dead objects acquire menacing life and vigour. Money, once no more than an expression of value – a kind of lingua franca in which commodity could speak unto commodity – becomes value itself.

  In the simplest of all worlds, exchange-value hardly exists: people produce to satisfy their needs – a leg of lamb, a loaf of bread, a candle – and barter these goods only if there is a surplus to their own requirements. But then along come the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker, rogues all three. To buy their alluring products we must become paid labourers; instead of living for our work, we work for our living. Gradually but unstoppably, we are dragged into the social nexus of commodities and wages, prices and profits, a fantasy land where nothing is what it seems. Look at the very first sentence of the very first chapter of Capital: ’The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of commodities”; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.’ What ought to strike the alert reader at once is the choice of verb, repeated for emphasis – ‘appears as …’ Though less dramatic than the opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto, it has a similar purpose: we are entering a world of spectres and apparitions, as he reminds us regularly throughout the next 1,000 pages.

  Exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative … Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity … This led to the rise of a restored mercantile system which sees in value nothing but a social form, or rather the unsubstantial ghost of that form … The distinction between higher and simple labour, ‘skilled labour’ and ‘unskilled labour’, rests in part on pure illusion … Instead of revealing the capital-relation, they [political economists] show us the false semblance of a relation … [My italics.]

  To expose the difference between heroic appearance and inglorious reality – stripping off the gallant knight’s disguise to reveal a tubby little man in his underpants – is, of course, one of the classic methods of comedy.

  The absurdities to be found in Capital, which have been seized on so readily by those who wish to expose Marx as a crackpot, reflect the madness of the subject, not of the author. This is obvious almost from the outset, when he plunges into a wild and increasingly surreal meditation on the relative values of a coat and twenty yards of linen.

  Now it is true that the tailoring which makes the coat is concrete labour of a different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating tailoring with weaving reduces the former in fact to what is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to the characteristic they have in common of being human labour … Yet the coat itself, the physical aspect of the coat-commodity, is purely a use-value. A coat as such no more expresses value than does the first piece of linen we come across. This proves only that, within its value relation to the linen, the coat signifies more than it does outside it, just as some men count for more when inside a gold-braided uniform than they do otherwise.

  The ludicrous simile ought to forewarn us that we are in fact reading a shaggy-dog story. This becomes more and more evident as Marx goes on:

  Despite its buttoned-up appearance, the linen recognises in it [the coat] a splendid kindred soul, the soul of value. Nevertheless, the coat cannot represent value towards the linen unless value, for the latter, simultaneously assumes the form of a coat. An individual, A, for instance, cannot be ‘your majesty’ to another individual, B, unless majesty in B’s eyes assumes the physical shape of A, and, moreover, changes facial features, hair and many other things, with every new ‘father of his people’ … As a use-value, the linen is something palpably different from the coat; as value, it is identical with the coat, and therefore looks like the coat.

  Then, just as the reader’s head is beginning to spin uncontrollably, Marx delivers the punch-line:

  Thus the linen acquires a value-form different from its natural form. Its existence as value is manifested in its equality with the coat, just as the sheep-like nature of the Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.

  Short of printing the page upside-down in green ink, Marx could hardly give a clearer signal that we have embarked on a picaresque odyssey through the realms of higher nonsense. One is reminded of the last lines from his beloved Tristram Shandy:

  —L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about?

  —A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick;—and one of the best of its kind I ever heard.

  In his first youthful infatuation with Laurence Sterne, Marx tried writing a comic shaggy-dog novel of his own. Nearly thirty years on, he at last found a subject and a style. Sterne, according to his biographer Thomas Yoseloff, ‘broke with the tradition of contemporary writing: his novel was no more a novel than it was an essay, or a book of philosophy, or a memoir, or a local satire after the manner of the pamphleteers. He wrote as he talked as he thought; his book was loose and disjointed in structure, full of curious and difficult oddities …’ Much the same could be said of Marx and his epic. Like Tristram Shandy, Capital is full of systems and syllogisms, paradoxes and metaphysics, theories and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and whimsical tomfoolery. One of the running gags concerns a slightly dim embryonic capitalist, Mr Moneybags. ‘In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend Moneybags must be so lucky as to find, within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value … and consequently a creation of value.’ Lucky old Moneybags finds just such a commodity in labour power, which has the unique ability to multiply its own value.

  To do justice to the deranged logic of capitalism, Marx’s text is saturated, sometimes even waterlogged, with irony – an irony which has yet escaped almost every reader for more than a century. One of the very few exceptions is the American literary critic Edmund Wilson, who hailed Marx as ‘certainly the greatest ironist since Swift’. This is such an extravagant tribute that supporting evidence may be required; so let us quote a passage from Theories of Surplus Value, the so-called fourth volume of Capital:

  DIGRESSION: ON PRODUCTIVE LABOUR

  A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crime but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures on to the general market as ‘commodities’ … The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice, constables, judges, hangmen, juries, etc; and all these different lines of business, which form just as many categories of the social di
vision of labour, develop different capacities of the human mind, create new needs and new ways of satisfying them. Torture alone has given rise to the most ingenious mechnical inventions, and employed many honourable craftsmen in the production of its instruments. The criminal produces an impression, partly moral and partly tragic, as the case may be, and in this way renders a ‘service’ by arousing the moral and aesthetic feelings of the public. He produces not only compendia on Criminal Law, not only penal codes and along with them legislators in this field, but also art, belles-lettres, novels, and even tragedies, as not only Müllner’s Schuld and Schiller’s Räuber show, but Oedipus and Richard the Third … The effects of the criminal on the development of productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks ever have reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves? Would the making of banknotes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers? … And if one leaves the sphere of private crime, would the world market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would even the nations have arisen? And has not the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?