David
Harvey has done me a great honor by reviewing my book, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, for Jacobin. To have the first review of my
first book penned by the most famous living teacher of Capital is a boon. Professor Harvey’s wide-ranging response
highlights a number of disagreements of broad significance, not only for academic
Marxologists, but for the political Left. He claims that my book will be “a first
salvo in what promises to be a grand battle to redefine Marx’s legacy, both
intellectual and political.” I certainly hope that he is right. At present, the
Left is weak but energized. Young people are widely disenchanted with capitalism
and the post-Cold War global order, and are open-minded about socialism. At the
same time, the political and economic organizations of the Left are in
shambles, and there is no theoretical or tactical center of gravity. I think
this is precisely the moment to reread the history of Left theory, to return to
and to rework first principles.
No one is more important, in this respect, than Marx. The
question is, which Marx? My book defends the dignity of the first volume of Capital, and argues that it contains the
Marx we need to recover today. Harvey disagrees, arguing that “taking Volume 1
as a standalone treatise is deeply problematic.” This disagreement, which he
calls his “most serious objection” to my book, reflects three deeper but less
apparent divisions. One concerns the sort of theory Marx provides. The second
concerns the actual content of Marx’s arguments in Volume One. The third
concerns what is needed now, in our present. Each of these deep disagreements should
be brought into the open, for wide-ranging debate on these matters is of the
utmost importance.
1. Part 1: What sort of book is Capital?
The
research question that my book poses and tries to answer is the old question of
Marx’s “method of presentation” in Capital.
Why does Volume One take the form it does? Because Marx himself addresses this
question – howsoever elliptically – in the course of rebutting the claim that
he is applying a Hegelian method to the study of political economy, the scholarship
on this question is dominated by efforts to find a Hegelian or quasi-Hegelian method
of presentation in Volume One. This has had mixed results. Everyone
acknowledges that parts of the text look
rather Hegelian. On the other hand, major chunks of the book don’t look
Hegelian at all: much of Parts Three, Four, and Eight, together adding up to about
40% of the book. These are the “historical” parts. Hegelian Marxists tend to be
embarrassed by these parts, since they don’t add to much to the development of
the concepts. Social historians, like Gareth Stedman Jones, think they are the
only valuable part of Capital. The
two halves are never knit together, though.
My
idiosyncratic answer to this problem is that Marx’s structured Volume One on
the model of Dante’s Inferno. This is
not so weird as it might sound. Metaphorical descents into Hell were widespread
in the socialist literature of the nineteenth century. Marx’s bête noir,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, did the most with the trope. Moreover, the moral
categories that structure Dante’s Hell – incontinence, force, fraud, and treachery
– were pervasive in the moral economy of early socialism, for the simple reason
that the Christian-Aristotelian heritage permeated popular morality. Marx, I
argue, wrote Capital as a descent
into the social Hell of modern capitalism. He wanted to acquaint his readers
with the inner workings of the capitalist mode of production, while displacing
the categories of socialist moral judgment onto “the ensemble of social
relations.” As my book shows, reading Volume One in this way allows us to make
sense of its arguments in a connected and holistic way, and as a carefully
constructed intervention into the socialist movement of Marx’s day, without
excising half the book as “digressions” or “illustrations” or “beside the point.”
David
Harvey objects, however, that this “builds a singular and exclusive account
that pushes other readings to one side,” and that it rests “on the shallow but
convenient grounds” that only Volume One was seen through to publication by
Marx. According to Harvey, “if we only read Volume 1 of Capital, … we will also
misunderstand the point of Volume 1.” We will do so because “the assumption
throughout Volume 1 is that all commodities exchange at their value.” This
allows Marx to construct “a model of capitalist activity that reflects ‘the
hell’ of the laborer,” but it does not allow him to consider the “alienation” of “the ‘affluent worker’ who is protected by
a trade union, lives in a suburban house, has a car in the driveway, a TV in
the living room, and a laptop in the kitchen, and vacations in Spain or the
Caribbean.” Nor does it allow him to explain how “capital accumulation … rests
on [the] ‘rational consumption’” of the working class, which must be enabled by
the capitalist class. Harvey claims that these issues can come to the fore and
receive their proper explanation only once Marx’s drops the assumption that
prices equal values, which he does in Volumes Two and Three. Hence, Volume One,
on its own, gives us a partial, and hence false, picture of capitalism. My
book, by arguing that Volume One can stand on its own, does Marx and my readers
a disservice.
The basic presupposition of Harvey’s interpretation is that, when Marx wrote and published Volume One, he was “presenting his findings,” and that, in the service of presenting them in a “persuasive” and “palatable” way to a readership of “self-educated artisans and laborers,” he “simplified” those findings, “even to the point of falsification.” If this is true, then only his unpublished works – the Grundrisse, Volumes Two and Three, the various preparatory drafts – can give us a true picture of Marx’s “findings.” In short, Harvey’s Marx is an explainer. He has a grand, unified theory, but knows that it is too difficult to communicate to “self-educated artisans and laborers,” so he simplifies it, and dresses it up with “literary and cultural references,” so as “to make sure his audience would get what he was talking about.”
My Marx, by
contrast, is an arguer. He doesn’t
have a fully-worked out theory in his back pocket. Instead, he is oriented by a
set of disagreements with the classical political economists, and with his
fellow socialists, and is working out, in Capital,
as full-fledged a response to those disagreements as he can. The literary form
of his intervention is not a costume he dresses his theory up in; it is the
form of the theory itself. His audience knows very well what he is talking
about, because he is not descending upon them from the mountaintop, but
responding to on-going arguments and controversies within the socialist and workers’
movements. The metaphorics of Marx’s text – the vampires and werewolves, Lazarus
and Moses and the prophets, machine-gods and automata – are commonplaces. They show up again and
again in socialist tracts from both sides of the Channel. What is unique to
Marx is the use to which these commonplaces are put, and the elaborate
interconnections among them.
