Two Ways of Approaching Marx's Capital
Today's Marx's birthday! And next Sunday, I'm starting a new weekly Zoom class on Capital. So this seemed like a good week for an essay on how to (and how not to!) read that book.
In his 1886 preface to the English edition of Capital, Marx’s longtime collaborator Friedrich Engels says that the book was already becoming known as “the Bible of the working class.” Sadly, he may have been more right about that than he realized.
In the thirteen decades since he wrote that line, a great many socialists and communists have treated Capital more or less exactly the way the most fervent believers treat the Old and New Testaments—which an adamant atheist like Engels should know is the last way a book full of valuable insights should be treated.
Like the Bible, Capital sits unopened on a vast number of bookshelves. Both are treated with great reverence by people who’ve never read past, in one case, the interminable lists of “begats” in the Book of Genesis or, in the other, Marx’s examples about the exchange value of yards of linen in Ch. 1. Just as Exodus is a better read than Genesis, Capital really starts to hum around the beginning of Ch. 4. But many people who enroll in study groups with the best of intentions lose interest too early to find out.
Part of the problem is that too many of these readers don’t read Capital for the arguments, but to hear conclusions announced to them as if the gods of dialectical materialism had delivered them to Marx at the top of Mount Sinai. When you read him, instead, for what he was—a brilliant but fallible historical thinker who got a lot of important things right—you tend to start talking back to the text. No differently than when you’re reading Aristotle or Kant or, I don’t know, Max Weber, you start to ask yourself questions while you read, like:
What’s the argument in this part? What are the premises (explicit or otherwise) and the conclusion?
…and:How sure are we that these premises are true? If the answer in some important cases is “not very,” can we reconstruct a version of the argument that does without some of them but still gets us to the conclusion?
Capital resembles the Bible in that some readers are weird fundamentalists who think nothing needs to be updated, but also in that it’s often subjected to the kind of extremely close reading that quickly starts to reap diminishing returns. The Kabbalists read profound meaning into not only the sentences of the Torah but the misspellings and the ways the spaces between the words were arranged on the scrolls. I get an uncomfortable echo of that sometimes in the way a certain kind of Marxist will endlessly parse every sentence of the early chapters of Capital—the ones where Marx is exploring the general nature of money, commodities, and “value.”
As far as I can tell, this subset of Capital readers is divided more or less evenly between two groups. First, there are diehard defenders of whatever they take the Labor Theory of Value to be. (Interpretations, to put it mildly, differ.) The second will very confidently insist that Marx actually rejects the LTV and the passages where he seems to put it forward are best read as part of an “immanent critique” of the views of bourgeois economists like Ricardo.
But what work does the discussion of “value” in those early chapters even do in the larger arguments built over the course of the book?
Marx sometimes writes about surplus “value” being extracted from workers. This is the formulation of his view about exploitation that people who haven’t actually read the book are most likely to have heard of—and it’s certainly there.
But the concept Marx puts the most emphasis on in his discussion of exploitation in Capital is not surplus value but surplus working hours. Here’s his point:
Under feudalism, peasants were allowed to spend most of their time working their own little plots of land, but were legally required to devote a certain number of days or weeks a year working their corvée on the lord’s land without compensation. Capitalism doesn’t seem to be like that. Employment relations are voluntary, and workers are compensated for every hour of their labor.
Right?
Marx thinks these appearances are misleading. Some of what workers produce is the equivalent of what they get back (and/or had advanced to them) in wages. Another part, though, becomes the capitalists’ profits. And Marx famously argues that the “mute compulsion” of material conditions leaves most people with no realistic choice in practice except to accept employment contracts in which they “voluntarily” surrender part of the product of their labor to the capitalist employing them. This is what Marx means, in another of the most famous phrases from Capital, when he calls proletarians “doubly free”—legally free, unlike serfs, to move around and sign employment contracts with any capitalist who will have them, but also “free” from any other means of supporting themselves.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx has some great prose poetry about the transition from feudalism to capitalism:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
At first glance, this points in the opposite direction from what he says in Capital. In Capital, exploitation is right out in the open—guys with swords will pay you a visit if you don’t show up for your corvée labor—while it’s disguised under capitalism by the surface appearance of equals meeting in market relations. In the Manifesto, exploitation is “veiled by religious and political illusions” under feudalism but capitalism tears away the veil.
So which is it? It could be, of course, that Marx simply changed his mind. He often did—and nineteen years separate the publication of the two books.
But in this case, I think the most plausible explanation is offered by G.A. Cohen, who points out that Marx is talking about very different aspects of exploitation being “veiled” or “out in the open” in the apparently contradictory claims from Capital and the Manifesto. Under feudalism, the involuntariness of the extraction of those working hours is out in the open. Under capitalism, exploitation is “naked” in the sense that the feudal pretense of a divinely instituted family-like relationship of mutual obligations, under which the lord is the serf’s benevolent protector, has been stripped away for the naked “nexus” of “cash payment.”
If you’re as old as I am and you remember Michael Moore’s first and best documentary Roger & Me, you’ll remember scenes of befuddled General Motors executives expressing confusion about why Moore found it objectionable that GM so thoroughly destroyed his hometown by shutting down its plants there to reopen them in lower-wage countries. Look—they kept trying to explain to him, as if to a very simple child—companies don’t exist to serve communities. They exist to make money.
In Appendix 1 to his excellent book Karl Marx’s Theory of History (“Karl Marx and the Withering Away of Social Science”), G.A. Cohen provides a handy table illustrating his set of distinctions1:
When I first started writing and podcasting about this stuff five years ago, I would sometimes say that “exploitation” is more of a “normative” concept than an empirical one. I now think that was wrong.
Certainly, no halfway plausible reading of Capital can avoid the conclusion that Marx thinks exploitation is deeply objectionable. Some Marxists insist otherwise but it seem pretty obvious that he wouldn’t call it “exploitation” if he didn’t feel some normative feelings about it! Even so, I think the concept itself is a historical/sociological one. To call a system exploitative is to say that it systematically forces the direct producers into hours of unpaid labor for a ruling class in addition to the hours they spend working to “reproduce” their own labor—i.e. to sustain their own existence at a given, historically-determined standard of living. Hume’s guillotine separating facts from values is useful here. We could imagine, for example, someone with a demented Nietzschean worldview agreeing with the empirical claim that workers are forced to labor for bosses by the structures of capitalism but also insisting as a normative matter this is as it should be—that it’s all the common herd is good for anyway.
Marx’s view is importantly also not that workers should get 100% of the product of their labor returned to them for their personal consumption. In fact, he goes out of his way to deny this—most famously in his Critique of the Gotha Program but also in passing in Capital itself—and he’s pretty clearly right to deny it. To start with, some people are too young or too old to be reasonably expected to work, some people are disabled, some people are on parental leave, and so on. None of the people in these categories, which at any given time make up the majority of the human population, should be forced to subsist on an individual charity. While the phrase “welfare state” obviously postdates Marx’s death in 1883, a fair paraphrase of one of his points in the Critique of the Gotha Program is that in any form of socialism worth wanting, the welfare state would be much larger than it is under capitalism, not smaller. The problem with the extraction of the workers product by capitalists is that it emerges not from any sort of process of democratic deliberation where the workers have a meaningful say and they have to be given good reasons to support this or that allocation of the collective product. Capitalists, by virtue of their structural position, can simply take what they want.
Beyond that, as Marx is at pains to emphasize, no economy—capitalist, socialist, or otherwise—will last for long if some of the resources produced today aren’t directed back into the production process tomorrow. Again, it’s a question of who decides future production priorities and how these are balanced against consumption.
Many barstool libertarian types think Marx’s claim that workers are systematically exploited under capitalism can be refuted by refuting the LTV and that the LTV can be refuted with sneering observations about how products aren’t more valuable because they were made by lazier or less efficient workers who took more time producing them, but there are two problems with this chain of argumentation. The first is that, however you read the relationship Marx is postulating between “value” and labor time in Ch. 1, he’s crystal clear in those early pages that the relevant concept isn’t “labor time” simpliciter but the average amount of labor time that’s necessary to do the task given prevailing conditions in a particular society at a particular time.
The second and more important problem is one that I’m deriving in large part from, once again, G.A. Cohen—in this case his essay The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation—although my formulation here is a bit different than his there. This is that, even if we assume—as Cohen does—that Marx is a proponent of the LTV, it doesn’t actually seem to be an essential premise in his larger argument that workers are exploited (i.e. forced to spend part of the working day doing unpaid labor) under capitalism. In some of his formulations, Marx routes this argument through a version of a theory of value common among nineteenth-century economists—at least on the standard reading where he endorses the LTV!—but it survives just fine when that assumption is withdrawn.
That’s very good news, since a lot has changed about academic economics in the hundred and forty-seven. years since Capital Vol. 1 was published in 1867. Even many economists who are politically sympathetic to Marxism are skeptical of the LTV due to the impact of more recent trends in the discipline. My own position is rock-hard unwavering agnosticism. I just don’t feel confident enough about my command of that particular academic debate to have a position. But I am sure that, whoever’s right about all of that, it doesn’t matter in this context.
To see why not, remember that Marx’s favorite way of explaining capitalist exploitation centers on an analogy to feudalism. Well, no one thinks that you need the LTV to understand feudal exploitation. To see that workers’ labor is the source of capitalists’ profits, you don’t need the LTV—a highly technical and controversial economic claim—but just the extremely intuitive and straightforward observation that capitalists’ profits are based on the sale of products and services that workers produce (a sort of “labor theory of stuff that has value”). And the claim that the hours of each day in which workers are producing the capitalists’ profits rather than filling up what Marx calls in Ch. 23 the “variable capital fund” (i.e. the part of a firm’s revenues that become workers’ wages) is extracted from them involuntarily hinges not on the LTV but Marx’s perceptive analysis of the “mute compulsion” imposed by the way property is divided in capitalist societies, which leaves most of us without the resources necessary to start our own businesses and thus with no choice but to submit to the miniature dictatorships that are capitalist workplaces.
And, of course, as Marx is also quite aware, this “mute compulsion” arises from a property vision ultimately backed up by the very noisy compulsion of state power. Johnny Cash’s song “One Piece at a Time” is a useful point of reference here. It tells the story of an auto worker very slowly sneaking car parts home with him until he had enough to assemble into “a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56,'57, '58' 59' automobile…a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67 '68, '69, '70 automobile.” It’s a fun song. But any worker who tried it would rapidly find themselves face to face with raw coercive force like a peasant who refused to do his weeks working the lord’s land.
In the case of the argument we’ve been looking at, reading Capital not like a fundamentalist who only wants to understand every piece of what Marx says so they can dutifully repeat it all but like a critical and engaged reader who’s thinking about how the pieces fit together logically, and is willing to yank out a premise here and there to see if everything works without it, should actually make us more confident about one of Marx’s key conclusions.
I said earlier that the book “starts to hum” in Ch. 4. The first three chapters are rich and interesting and shouldn’t be skipped, but as Marx himself admits in his preface to the first edition, what he’s up to in those chapters is far less transparent than the primary element he lays out in the remaining thirty. You’re already on more solid ground in Ch. 4. And this passage at the end of Ch. 6 is where Capital starts to sing. That’s where Marx gets to the sale of the workers’ labor time to the capitalist, thereby leaving the “sphere” of general observations about “the exchange of commodities.” He notes that, at this point in his story, “a certain change takes place” in “the physiognomy of our dramatis personae.”
He who was previously a money-owner strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back — like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing to expect but — a tanning.2
In the early chapters he writes about the interconnected concepts of exchange value, use value, commodities, and money. In the next few chapters he builds upon those concepts to discuss the specific way that markets work under capitalism. In the passage about hide-tanning at the end of Ch. 6, the analysis of markets becomes an analysis of class. And that’s the thread Marx follows until the end of Vol. 1.
I cannot emphasize enough that Capital is not primarily a treatise on the metaphysics of value. It’s primarily a book about capitalism as a class structure—one of several class structures that have existed throughout history, and, Marx emphasizes over and over again, one that doesn’t have to last forever.
Another way of saying all this is:
Capital shouldn’t be read like the Bible. It should be read like what it is. It’s a brilliant work of class analysis. It’s not flawless but its core insights, I’d argue, do very much stand the test of time. Approach it that way, and you’ll learn more, you’ll be armed with a much better understanding of the world around you, and you’ll have a hell of a lot more fun reading it.
Shameless plug: If this essay has piqued your interest in reading Capital, why not sign up for my upcoming class? It’s going to start with the prefaces + Ch. 1 of Vol. 1 for next Sunday—we’ll be meeting every Sunday from 1-3 PM EST—and the plan is to keep going until we finish Vol. 3. I explain what I’ll be doing there here. The actual Patreon signup link is here.
Second Edition, p. 403
Penguin Edition, p. 280
Despite what the barstool libertarian thinks about laziness, we’ve all seen the neoliberal era productivity vs. wage graphs—the exploitation is undeniable.
Yeah, since first delving into those early chapters years ago, I don’t find myself thinking much about the LTV, and to your point, I think it’s because it’s not really the central concern for Marx—rather, the focus is exploitation and the factors shaping it (# of hours worked, intensity of work, productivity rates, displacement).
I am, though, on the side of taking LTV as true, that Marx took it as true, and that it remains a factor, but that it’s sort of buried among or complicated by other factors effecting s-v, namely the incorporation of science on the side of capital, which Marx gets into more in Vol 3 but briefly describes in Vol. 1, how large-scale industry “makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital.”
Thanks Ben!