Introduction to Marx’s Capital

Lecture 2: The method of Marx’s critique of political economy

Marx’s great contribution in applying historical materialism to the capitalist mode of production was to show the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat – the inevitability that capitalism will be replaced by socialism – a higher social system. Hence the importance of the collapse of the socialist bloc as a significant problem facing communists, an issue to which we will eventually have to return.

What Marx showed was that:

1. Socialism was possible – preconditions for socialism were present.
2. Socialism was necessary – the working class and other op­pressed masses faced with a threat to its fundamental interests with the growing crisis of the capitalist system would be forced to overthrow it.

Rosa Luxemburg wrote:

‘If the capitalist mode of production can ensure boundless expansion of the productive forces, of economic progress, it is invincible indeed. The most objective argument in support of socialist theory breaks down; socialist political action and the ideologi­cal import of the proletarian class struggle cease to reflect economic events, and socialism no longer appears an historical necessity.’ (The Accumulation of Capital p325)

The significance of Hobsbawn’s statement cited earlier should now be clear:

• If possible and necessary – why has the socialist revolution not occurred in one of the most developed capitalist nations? In any of the major imperialist nations which existed in Lenin’s time? This is the context in which Lenin’s Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism is crucial. The split in the working class and the rise of opportunism. Or is our concept of the epoch incorrect? Has capitalism not outlived its historical mission? Questions which we need to address.

So let us move on to examine Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperial­ism and how their writers actually saw their contributions serv­ing the working class movement.

Both Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperialism are critiques of political economy in two senses of the word.

First Marx’s Capital:

1. A critique of political economy as the theoretical understand­ing which bourgeois society in its period of rise has of itself and found its most adequate political expression.

Adam Smith and unproductive labour – nb Thatcher and the tradi­tions of dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Ricardo and the Corn Laws and landlord class. Malthus and unproductive consumers – profits arise from selling commodities above their value.

– but most importantly the petty bourgeois criticism of capital­ism – Proudhon with his schemes for abolishing money. Capital was a political intervention to arm the working class against oppor­tunist currents of this kind.

2. Critical representation of the capitalist mode of production – a criticism of the real, economic conditions as they necessarily arise from capitalist forms of production and distribution.

– the inherent contradictions within the system

– the inevitability of crises etc…

Second Lenin’s Imperialism:

1. Imperialism is capitalism in decay. Lenin’s critique is against those who see imperialism not as the inevitable decline of a system but as a wrong, misguided policy of a section of the ruling class – military cliques etc criticism of the liberal Hobson and the renegade Kautsky.

2. Lenin shows how imperialism leads to a division of the world between oppressed and oppressor nations and how the battle to redivide the world and control weaker capitalist nations inevita­bly leads to war…

– how imperialism divides the working class and necessarily provides apologists for imperialism in the working class move­ment.

Both Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s Imperialism are attempts to defend the scientific proletarian standpoint against bourgeois and petty bourgeois critiques of capitalism and imperialism.

– to establish the materialist foundation of the revolutionary working class standpoint.

Our task in the longer term sense is to do the same in the con­text of today’s serious defeats for proletarian socialism. To do this we must first understand the nature of the capitalist system, its laws of motion and development. That is why we need to restudy the basic principles of Marx’s Capital.

In the preface to the first German edition of Capital, Marx tells us that every beginning is difficult and that holds in all sciences. ‘To understand the first chapter, especially the sec­tion that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore, present the greatest difficulty.’ (p7 Capital Vol 1 Moscow 1961). This is indeed the case. Many have failed to understand the theory of value in Marx’s Capital and most of the critics of Marx have never really made the effort. This is not surprising.

In 1915 Lenin wrote:

‘It is impossible to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and under­stood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx.’ (Philosophical Notebooks CW Vol 38 p180)

Today this is almost certainly not necessary, and with the publi­cation of the Grundrisse and the writings of Rosdolsky, Ruben and others many of the errors of earlier commentators on Capital, can be avoided. Nevertheless some understanding of Marx’s dialectical method is necessary.

In a letter to Engels (14 January 1858) talking about the progress of his work on political economy Marx wrote: ‘In the method of treatment the fact that by mere accident I again glanced through Hegel’s Logic has been of great service to me.’ Further in the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, while saying that his dialectic method ‘is not only different from Hegelian but its direct opposite’ (p19), Marx openly avowed himself ‘the pupil of that mighty thinker’ (p20). And as if to prove the point he admits in the chapter on value, here and there, to coquetting with the modes of expression peculiar to Hegel.’ The dialectic suffers from mystification in Hegel’s hands; ‘with him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.’

In fact many of the decisive categories in Capital arise directly out of Hegel’s Logic – essence and appearance, quantity and quality, mediated and immediate etc.

Note: for Hegel the real world is only the external phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’ – the process of thinking which Hegel transforms into an independent subject. For Marx, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.

In these lectures I intend to show what Marx’s dialectical method consists of through an exposition of Capital. But a few general points are in order.

First the method of inquiry and that of presentation are very different. Inquiry follows the actual course of bourgeois history. Presentation takes a quite different process of development. Marx begins Capital with an analysis of the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in capitalist society, the commodity. He proceeds from ‘immediate being’ (commodities or more precisely the exchange of commodities) moves to mediating ‘essence’ (value – expenditure of human labour) to the forms of value, exchange value, money, capital etc. That is we move from the abstract to the concrete. We start from simple (abstract) conceptions such as labour, need, value, exchange-value and end with the state, international exchange and the world market etc.

‘The concrete is concrete, because it is a combination of many determinations and therefore a unity of diverse elements, in our thought, it therefore appears as a process of synthesis, as a result, and not as the starting point, although it is the real starting point and, therefore, also the starting point of observation and conception…the abstract definitions lead to the concrete subject in the course of reasoning…While the method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete is but the way of thinking by which the concrete is grasped and reproduced in our mind as concrete…’ (A Contribution to the Critique of Politi­cal Economy Chicago 1904, Introduction p294 and Grundrisse Penguin 1973 p101)

This method is essential if we are to not, like vulgar economy, to remain trapped in what Marx called the ‘estranged outward appearance of things’. If essence and outward appearance of things coincided there would be no need for science.

There are two senses in which the word ‘appearance’ can be used:

1. those appearances and forms of manifestation in which social relations present themselves and which are not mystificatory or false as such, in as much as they do correspond to an objective reality. These become mystified only when regarded as a product of nature or of the subjective intentions of human beings.
2. those appearances, of forms of manifestation which are simply false, corresponding to no objective reality. (Most of vulgar economy would come into this category while the difficulties and failure of Classical Political Economy would, in general, be due to the difficulties involved with the former.)

In this context it is important to understand the levels of abstraction in the different volumes of Capital. In Volume I we are dealing with the immediate process of production as such – the production of value and surplus value and the accumulation of capital in this context. Volume II moves on to the circulation of total capital – capital’s existence as fixed and circulating capital. In both Volume I and II we are dealing with ‘capital in general’. It is only in Volume III that Marx begins to examine the concrete forms which grow out of the movements of capital as a whole… in competition and in the consciousness of the agents of production themselves. The first paragraph of Volume III makes this clear:

‘In the first volume we analysed the phenomena presented by the process of capitalist production, considered by itself as a mere productive process without regard to any secondary influences of conditions outside it. But this process of production, in the strict meaning of the term, does not exhaust the life circle of capital. It is supplemented in the actual world by the process of circulation, which was the object of our analysis in the second volume. We found in the course of this last-named analysis, especially in part III, in which we studied the intervention of the process of circulation in the process of social reproduction, that the capitalist process of social reproduction, considered as a whole, is a combination of the processes of production and circulation. It cannot be the object of this third volume to indulge in general reflections relative to this combination. We are rather interest­ed in locating the concrete forms growing out of the movements of capitalist production as a whole and setting them forth. In actual reality the capitals move and meet in such concrete forms that the form of the capital in the process of production and that of capital in the process of circulation impress one only as special forms of those concrete forms. The conformations of the capitals evolved in this third volume approach step by step that form which they assume on the surface of society, in their mutual interactions, in competition, and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves.’ (Charles H Kerr ed 1909 Capital Volume III p37-8 and Moscow 1962 Capital Volume III p25 – from both translations)

We can now move on to deal with Volume I of Capital.