In this Patron exclusive episode, we move to the third part of our mini-series “What is Dialectics?” and take on the works of Karl Marx. The WLOP crew investigates what Marx took and rejected from Hegelian dialectics while defending why Marx remains deeply relevant in our contemporary moment. We cover the role of mystification under capitalism, Marx’s moral and political critique of value, and the future of Marxism in the context of ecological crisis. There’s even a mention of spectres for you Derrida fans out there! It’s a can’t miss episode for sure.
Full episode available at patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
Follow us @leftofphil
References:
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 53-66.
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 67-77.
Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Preface of the 1859 Critique,” at Economic Manuscripts: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859 (marxists.org)
Karl Marx, “Appendix to the 1859 Critique,” at Economic Manuscripts: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859 (marxists.org)
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1982).
music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
In this Patron exclusive episode, we move to the third part of our mini-series “What is Dialectics?” and take on the works of Karl Marx. The WLOP crew investigates what Marx took and rejected from Hegelian dialectics while defending why Marx remains deeply relevant in our contemporary moment. We cover the role of mystification under capitalism, Marx’s moral and political critique of value, and the future of Marxism in the context of ecological crisis. There’s even a mention of spectres for you Derrida fans out there! It’s a can’t miss episode for sure.
Full episode available at patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
Follow us @leftofphil
References:
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 53-66.
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 67-77.
Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Preface of the 1859 Critique,” at Economic Manuscripts: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859 (marxists.org)
Karl Marx, “Appendix to the 1859 Critique,” at Economic Manuscripts: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859 (marxists.org)
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1982).
music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
It's hard to pinpoint, in some ways, where the significance of dialectics lies in Marx, because it appears in a lot of different ways, and some of them methodological, some of them seeming to have to do with the nature of capital itself, some of them having to do with the nature of history. One of the things that I find helpful is a lot of this book. A lot of the logic of this book is based on the idea of relations, a number of different levels, right, relations of production, relations that exist within something that seems simple, for example, like a commodity. It's actually a relationship between use value and exchange value, and he unpacks from out of a lot of what's the difference between use value and exchange value?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's the. In the opening chapter on commodities, marx starts with this seemingly simple starting point the commodity which surrounds us and seemed to be, he says, it's like a capitalism appears as if it were just a gigantic set of commodities. And so he breaks down this simple element into two constitutive elements of its value. And on the one hand you have use value, which has to do with its meeting of a certain need or desire. He doesn't distinguish really in any kind of important way between whether that need is an actual necessary subsistence need or some kind of want or desire that's his kind of. He describes it as its qualitative element. And on the other hand you have its exchange value, which has nothing to do, at least at first, right.
Speaker 2:It seemingly gets more complicated later, but at least at first it seems to have nothing to do with its usability, right, it has to do with what you can get for it on the market, so it has to do with its place in the market.
Speaker 2:And so, as soon as he takes what seems to be a simple unity right and here I do think the legacy of Hegel is present, and he shows that in actual fact there's a relation in this simple unity. It's not a simple unity, that the unities that we are dealing with whether it's the unities at a very kind of micro level of the commodity or the unity of the macro level of a mode of production like capitalism that what appears like a simple unity is actually in fact a complicated, mediated unity with elements, you know, constitutive elements in it, and in fact those constitutive elements are quite often contradictory. And so simple unities have contradictory elements in them and, yeah, there ends up being a contradiction, for example, between use value and exchange value, because the use value of something what I can use it to meet a certain, the way I can use it to meet a certain need that value is is eviscerated the minute I exchange it.
Speaker 1:You can't have your cake and eat it too with commodities, right as soon as you exchange it you can no longer use it Like literally if you give your cake away, you don't get to eat it. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, I just think that whenever he uses the word relation, he's never, I don't think, talking about a simple kind of indeterminate relation. I think when the word relation comes up as a concept, as a way, as an explanatory mechanism, I think that is always a good place to pause and say, like you know, to what extent is this a dialectical relation? Because I think that dialectics is the way that Marx thinks relations.
Speaker 1:Can I actually ask what might be a dumb question, though, even though it was, like you know, you just saying you can't have your cake and eat it too. But you know, based on the chapters we read in Capitalism we read things from his early and middle period as well, which we can jump around to if we so choose is the way that he describes the capitalist who gives money to buy labor power and what the labor produces the capitalist gets to also consume in order to get their money back at an increase. Thank you for watching to the end. Does the capitalist actually get to have their cake and eat it too, actually?
Speaker 1:So I'm caught on Lilian's question about why mystification is something specific to the social form of capitalism and even as I think, through these things and you know Marx provides this wealth of social science to it there is a coherence to capitalism. But there's also something deeply incoherent about, like things that shouldn't be possible are possible in capitalism. You know I was thinking about this today that you know well, there's a lot through my dynamics you can't create something from nothing, yet somehow in the system of capitalism you get to withdraw more than you put in. Like, how is that possible? Like I know it's not magic, but the way he approaches it, he says it sure kind of looks like magic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he used the word magic all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, break down into it. There's something spooky about this. I think he has, like you know, this reflection on, like the spectrality of capitalism. You know, I wonder if that's you getting us. You know, along the way, at least, what I find fascinating, the better awful about the social form capitalism is that the limits that should bind it don't end up really binding it. You know the common sense restraints on activity, on production, end up not being restraints but limits it overcomes.
Speaker 3:So I think that I waited to bring up the lot of value, because I think it's one of the most arcane and frustrating things about Marx scholarship. But I think the only way with Marx that you get the idea of a contradiction is through his understanding of what value you is and the and like. The reason capitalism mystifies its own social relations, unlike other social forms, is because it subordinates the various kinds of human value that exists in the world to the value form that capital takes so like. It's not a logical contradiction in the sense that it's impossible for these different things to be happening that you're mentioning. It's that they appear to us in one way, in this particular form, and actually our lived reality, like that, the real life that we live, is another way and so, but it's not like a. Yeah, it's a. I guess it is a dialectical contradiction, but I want. I want to say why I've.
Speaker 3:I think value is actually important, because when you say things like there's use value and surplus value or exchange value, that seems like a set of obvious things to say, like there's some things I use and other things I exchange. But the attachment of the word value to it creates a sense of like, as Owen was saying, social relativity. We're not talking about a calculation, we're literally talking about human values, the way things value to me, the way things value based on how we think we ought to use them together or like. Value is this it's not a tangible good, it's not a quantitative good, it's literally just human value. And I think that when I first read Capital when I was an undergrad, I didn't understand this. I thought we were talking about calculating shit. I thought it was like you put in a certain quantity and you get out a certain quantity. There's a sense in which you can calculate labor time that way.
Speaker 3:But you can also talk about capitalism without any theory of value, and in fact I was trained to think about it thusly like. You can do all of this without that. You can talk about coercion, surplus, appropriation, the relations between direct producers. You can. There's no reason you need the theory of value unless you're interested in simultaneously saying interested in making a moral and political critique on top of the social theory that you are developing, so like under capitalism. In order for things to be valuable in a universally recognizable way, they have to be exchangeable as commodities and they have to be subordinated to the imperatives of what capital sees as valuable, so we can have all the values we want. We're not determined by economics or economic structures. We can, like you know, not top to bottom, it's not commodities all the way down. You value this, I value this, I have this religion, you have this religion, but everything needs to be made compatible with the value form, and that's that's the. I think that's the moral critique and why it's contradictory to us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what you're you're describing, there is and I think you you came up to the border of sort of a disjunction between our lived experience, just spontaneous consciousness, and the sort of systemic reality of what's happening is, you know, an alienation that's at work constitutively in capitalism. You know that you can have whatever values you want. You know, nothing can stop you from making that personal choice perhaps, but the social form of capitalism is always going to move towards. For that value to do work for you, it's going to have to abide by whatever dictates this social system says is valuable. And so you know, what you have under capitalism is, you know, constitutionally, a system that is designed by people but increasingly separates people from their capacities, from their perhaps independently chosen wants. It creates a structure of your choosing but you don't really get to choose. And the mystification ups cover over that kind of fracture, that alienation on Mars, where talks on his earlier or middle period, that separation from ourselves. That isn't an accident, it's a necessary working way.
Speaker 4:Well, like, the basic thing with capital right is that it's he describes it as the self moving substance, right, value is the self moving substance and the sort of inherent dynamics of capital and the process of production under capital is to valorize itself, the the expansion of value for itself, like one of the things we said before, was that something like you know, where are the limits? Right, where are the limits for capitalism? And in certain places it seems like there aren't any at all. But Marx will also say things like capital is its own limit, right, like it's its own sort of self overcoming movement. And what this amounts to in practice, in in like reality, is the sort of continual and more or less automatic accumulation of capital for itself, which takes the form of like an increasingly abstract social power that dominates, and nothing thus far is yet to be able to escape that expansive logic, right, and so here we can, you know, talk about so called formal and real subsumption. But the basic point is that, you know, the, the limit to capital being itself means that it will never stop. Like.
Speaker 4:One of the things I'm always trying to emphasize with my students when I talk about Marx is, like, you know, we don't need to posit any greedy capitalists at all. We don't need it right. That's not part of the analysis. The analysis is what the inherent dynamics and logics of capital accumulation are right, and this is what I think Marx is best at doing right, showing that these things are unavoidable aspects of commodity production for the sake of surplus value generation and so like. Maybe we could start thinking then to a little bit about like, what kinds of political consequences there are from the analysis here. Like, what sort of like? What sort of what can we do?
Speaker 3:Only a half hour in. Why are you doing that to us?
Speaker 2:I mean. The way you framed that, though, reminded me of something we were talking about in that CLR James episode, where CLR James says that you know the problem we face and he was saying this in the 60s, and of course we think of things like climate change now but he says the problem is is that capital dictates everything to us. We're not allowed to value anything else. We're not allowed to. We are prohibited from not, of course, like legally or through some kind of formal mechanism, but we are concrete, concretely prohibited from valuing anything other than what the value form under capital dictates, like you know, basically anything any way other than commodities and commodity exchange right, like capitalists as much as workers, of course, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And so, like we, whatever your position within that mode of production is globally, we'd love to say that we're going to value the environment. Now, we should probably. This is a we, this is an important thing that we should actually value and do something about. And it's like, well, for as long as you can do, you can say that all you want, like you said, will right. Like you can, you're free, at a certain level of, like, individual imagination and individual valuing, to say that, oh no, I like, I really think that we should. I value the environment. I think we should all really value in the environment. Sorry, for as long as this is the economic system that we live under, there is not going to be valuing it of anything in any other way. You know it's not. We can as much, you know, maybe you can make small strides here and there, but you know it's not, it's not possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think here the language of capacity is really important, you know. So maybe people go too far to say something like you know, maybe this is like early Frankfurt School of Critical Theory where, like capitalism, even like, you'll get into your psyche so that you know, I think that's like the false consciousness of thesis. But you know, for Marx there is not necessarily a false consciousness problem. Like, sure, we might not grasp capitalism in all of its workings, but you can still have. You know, marx still creates a tiny space as latest capital for the imagination, for subjective desires, and all of that. The problem is that those get subsumed into the institutions or the social form that will allow you to do anything. And so sometimes I'll say to my students because all my students they're all anti-capitalists. Now there's nothing more widespread in the philosophy undergraduate academy I don't know what they're doing the other disciplines than being anti-capitalists. But I will say to you, there is nowhere you can run that capital will not follow. Not because it's like hunting you down, but I bet you need to eat right and you need to survive right. What are you going to do in order to do that? And so, if you want to live your values of value in the environment. Well, what is preventing us from having the capacity to realize that value? Well, the problem is that there is one dominant way that value is getting realized and that was not really chosen by the rest of us. That is the self-actualization or the mechanism process of a social form of capitalism.
Speaker 1:And so what I thought was really interesting in capillary, like that Gil said, it's not about the capitalist being greedy, it's about given their position. If they are going to survive against other firms that are also out there, this is what they will do, and so there's actually this tension. I wonder what you'll think about this. There is a moral political critique, but Marx and Capital, at least one reading. He's not giving a moral critique of capitalism, he is giving an empirical analysis and obviously he's expecting to read like so what do you think about this? But it's not like we should shame capitalist in order. We should shame capitalism sharing our values, because, at the end of the day, they're obeying pretty much one law, and that's for their own survival. And I don't know many capitalists who are going to abolish themselves to save the environment, because they'll probably make a type of argument Well, you'll need someone power like us to do the types of things you want to do.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's also another odd tension in the text and this is another thing that I constantly try to emphasize when I teach this stuff to my students that when he talks about the tendencies through basically the laws of competition. Like you said, capitalists got to compete with each other, so they're bound by these processes of accumulation and exploitation as much as anyone else. So one of the things that happens is, in order to be competitive, you want your rate of surplus value or exploitation to be as high as possible, because that's going to allow you to sell your commodities more cheaply than your competitors. And if you figure out ways of rationally improving the production process by increasing the productivity of labor through the development and implementation of new technologies or intensifying the division of labor, you're going to do that, and then everyone else is going to do that too as they try to catch up with you. The moment that I wanted to emphasize about that is, marx will say things like that is, objectively speaking, a more rational and scientific way of organizing production than there was previously, both in terms of the literal implementation of scientific knowledge and technology, but also in that centralization of production processes is just more efficient, productive and makes better sense than having disparate firms competing with each other to produce the same products.
Speaker 4:And so there's this odd tension, the sort of way in which I often think I'm reading Marx and he's looking at capitalism and being like, wow, this is kind of incredible, this is amazing. Think about the previous forms of social organization. It's just like what. There's, that famous line from the manifesto where it's like previous social forms could never have imagined, could never have imagined the level of productivity, the value generated by social labor, as capitalism's just unlocked in a couple of decades. And so one of the contradictions here if it's a real contradiction or not, I don't know is that we then get scarcity of its abundance, hunger of its plenty, right, like all of our problems are now materially solvable, I think, due to the development of productive forces that capitalism itself just inherently rationalizes and systematizes. And yet, right, just due to the logics of accumulation, what we see on the other side is not the satisfaction of human needs and desires, but a relative surplus population, increasing amissuration for more people and more people, on an ever-expanding scale. I think that's why, to my mind, accumulation is the name of the heart of the problem. I think that's the thing that really and it's a contradictory issue, precisely because it's the source of the solution for all of these problems and the reason why they never get solved and continue to expand or are continually engendered. It's a contradictory reality.
Speaker 4:Hey there, thanks so much for listening. This is just a small sample of the full episode. To listen to it and to access other premium content we're putting out, please subscribe to us on Patreon at patreoncom. Slash leftophilosophy. See you next time. New religion cautious on its way to money through its journey.