As I read through Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. I a second time, I noted a number of general ideas that stood out more clearly than they had the first time through. These included Marx’s clear use of terminology to support his observations, the concepts revolving around the definition of “the Working Day,” the discussion of growing worker dependence upon machinery, and interpretations of the struggle for better wages. Capital also has come to seem to have a kind of double quality.
Marx was writing about his own time as if he were a journalist, but at the same time, so many of Marx’s ideas and complaints are relevant to debates about business and labor in our own time. Clearly Marx’s definition of capital is far deeper and broader than I had ever imagined, and so much a part of my own understanding, not only of economics, but of social and political realities in my own world, that I have come to see this book as marking what Michel Foucault has called an “epistemic shift”: a change in the general understanding of how society functions that is so great that those who live within it cannot imagine how earlier worldviews might have functioned. I got the sense that Marx and I were talking about the same reality, and that it was a reality neither of us would share with someone from the century before Marx.
In the second reading, not looking for the Marx of the Communist Manifesto, I was able to read Marx as a social critic, an academic, and a journalist examining important events in his own time. This lack of expectation of the political allowed me to see the analysis taking place in the text, and I found myself trying harder to understand the terminology that Marx presented. His writing is really quite easy to read, and he presents terms which he defines clearly in order to create a clear foundation for the observations he makes about society. His specific definitions, for example, of the terms “means of production,” “implements of production,” “labour,” and “capital” make his work very accessible. I had never understood to the degree I do now how all of this fits together. With a clear understanding of these terms, I am both more able to criticize Marx, and to read critically those who have used or referred to Marx in their own later work. The second reading was useful for this purpose alone.[1]
In another example of Marx’s clear use of technology, but with even greater implications, I was very interested to learn Marx’s definition of “raw materials” not as the most basic materials removed from nature for manufacturing, but as the means of production which have already been changed through the process of labor. In other words, every manufacturing system creates new value out of “use-values” that themselves were products of the labor process. This helped me to better understand the idea that once a product is finished, the labor and means of production that went into it are eradicated, and only the value of the manufactured item remains, to be used again in the next process of creating surplus value. This is a complex set of ideas, but ultimately, it means that the process of production is always removed from nature by at least one degree, and usually more. This seems to be another kind of alienation – if one of the characteristics of capitalism is the alienation of the worker from the product, another is the alienation of the product from nature.[2]
The section concerning “The Working Day” had presented a number of problems for me the first time around. The concept of surplus value as a function of surplus labor was extremely difficult to comprehend. I came to understand this as including what we today call ‘productivity’ after the second reading. I understood the historical context of the issue by reading the evidence Marx presents, and came to recognize that the wage structure differed from the hourly wages of factory workers today. This means that Marx’s discussion of the way in which factories extended the time that workers labored in the factories on a daily basis has to be translated into our own productivity conceptions. To do this is very difficult because the daily wage structure Marx was confronting was far simpler, and perhaps easier to subvert, than our own structures today. It was the examples that Marx gave to support his ideas, and the evidence he provided, that helped me begin to see the process of working toward hourly wages, and made me wonder where I might find further information on the goals of labor reform in order to discover if the hourly wage came to be in response to the abuses of other wage structures by factory owners. The effect of this was to make me see the vast spaces open for analysis of wage and management structures in terms of the way they exploit labor and force increases in productivity – I was able to understand the appeal and analytical power of Marx’s ideas, and why they might have such impact on the field of historical analysis. I also developed a great interest in labor history here.[3]
Marx’s discussion in Capital of the nature of the wage struggles of his own time clearly shows the roots of later analysis of labor and business. Marx says that these wage struggles are a part of the manufacturing system as it has come to exist, and not in opposition to it.[4] This reads as a kind of foreshadowing of the 20th century argument about the admissibility and efficacy of labor unions in the economies of the belligerents in World War I, and the post- World War II economies of Europe, Japan, and the United States, in which labor unions are defined as ways to work for equity within the existing manufacturing system, rather than attempts to destroy it.[5]
Marx was already interested in this question when he published vol. I of Capital in 1867. I find this fascinating in the sense that it seems that Marx is talking about an economy and a society that I can understand and relate to in the United States of the twenty-first century. While the size, organizational structure, level of automation, and degree of capitalization has changed dramatically, the economy Marx is discussing, almost journalistically as existing in his own time is very much like the economy of our time. In a sense, we share a reality with Marx that I don’t think we share with people of the 16th century, for example. Mill, Smith, and Ricardo were also talking about ideas and realities that, while different, are recognizable and understandable to people living in today’s economy. It therefore occurred to me as I read that Capital is one marker that an epistemic shift – a change in understanding that removes clear access to earlier ways of understanding the world – had occurred by the mid 19th century in industrial societies.
There are many other examples of ways in which Capital seems to mark an epistemic shift. The way in which Marx foreshadows the ideas that eventually became “scientific management” in twentieth-century America is uncanny. For example, he wrote that “[the] technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instrument of labour…gives rise to a barrack-like discipline…thereby dividing the workers into manual laborers and overseers, into the private soldiers and N.C.O.s of an industrial army,” and that while an individual craftsman makes use of tools, “in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”[6] Both of these passages make it clear that Marx was looking at the way that the process of manufacturing on a large scale is driven more by the needs of the machines than by the workers who operate them. This has overtones of the redesigned Ford Motor Co. factories in the second decade of the twentieth century, where worker action and machine needs were integrated in such a way as to make the workers a part of the machinery, and to create an atmosphere in which human working patterns were subordinated to the working patterns of the machines.
In all a second reading of Capital was rewarding. I know that I understand Marx better now than I ever have, and look forward to reading further.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin ed. 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1867, 1976. Reprint, 1976.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Penguin ed., 3 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Books, 1867, 1976; reprint, 1976), 284-7.
[2] Ibid., 284-5.
[3] Ibid., 340-411. For example, I have been using the work of Pierre Bourdieu to analyze the field of music production in early 20th century Japan. Borudieu’s ideas about the so-called “field of production” seem to be related to Marx’s “field of employment” discussed on page 287.
[4] Ibid., 555.
[5] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 330-31. Zinn discusses the revolutionary ideas of Samuel Gompers at the founding of the IWW in 1905, but Gompers is clear that he is not looking to end the system of manufacturing, but to take control of it – Marx seems to already have this figured out in 1867.
[6] Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 548-9.