Some contributions towards a better reading of Marx

Towards the beginning of the end of his work Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty writes: “The Marxist does not live with his eyes fixed on a transcendent future, forgiving deplorable tactics in the name of ultimate ends and absolving himself on account of his good intentions; he is the only one who denies himself such recourse.[1]” In my view, we should take this idea to be axiomatic when reading Marx, and especially so when reading the Marx of Capital, at the price that if we don’t do this, we become liable to deliver ourselves up accordingly to a damaging, and indeed dangerous, fundamental mis-take of his thought.

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In the preface to the first German edition of Capital Marx writes: “In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas. If however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural laborers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him, “De te fabula narratur![2]”

From this passage, two things can be drawn. First of all, the nature of the connection established here between theory and rhetoric: as Marx understands it, the former finds development in the latter, and furthermore, incorporated within this latter is thought to be the empirical world as such – it is in these terms that the given condition of “England” is mobilized - as an illustrative example of a theoretical undertaking thought as separate to it.

How can this methodology be thought to be legitimate? The picture that Marx paints of it in this passage seems to describe a procedure wholly self-confirming. Method as machine. Thought as proof cunningly produced – philosophy twitching like a phantom limb. And hence become moved to dismiss Marx himself - as effectively a zombie-signifier for a zombie system: rhetorically rubber stamping with selective facts a set of already established and invincible presuppositions. Either this, or else the opposite weighting – and canonize the name of Marx along the lines of some kind of a secular prophet preaching the gospel of a new religion – with Revolution as Messiah, and Communism as the Kingdom.

No doubt, Marx has been read in such manners before – whether more or less covertly - and by both his eternally sworn enemies, and his self-declared inheritors alike. In my view such interpretations are heretical, but it is not my intention to start naming names and taking numbers here – each must known their own. In any case - the key point here is in reality a simple one –there is a dimension which eludes these readings. And specifically, what this dimension amounts to is that one of the letter insofar it relates to fiction.

“De te fabula narratur!” – “This story is about you!” And in this statement, a confession. A direct avowal, an explicit declaration - this story is about you, this story is a story – and no doubt, at the same time, one imagines, a schematic, sure - but one so designated that it is marked indelibly by an aspect of the fabulous. In my view, we need to take Marx at his word here, and accept the consequences which follow come what may.

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I have just been speaking in relation to the question of presuppositions, and it is useful on this score to draw attention to that specific one which Marx directly states. He writes: “I presuppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.[3]” At the risk of theorizing a truism: this statement is significant: the conceptualization of the process of reading which emerges out of it is a crucial element towards the understanding of the importance and the novelty of Capital in the work of Marx.

This proposition can be most formulated as follows: the precise theoretical cause which Marx understood himself to following in Capital was the elucidation of the “natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves,” Marx writes, “of these tendencies working with iron necessity toward inevitable results.[4]”

Following from this, and the basic ground of the relation between Capital and its reader can start to be sketched out in terms of a relation between on the one hand, a treatise on law, and on the other, somebody able to learn and to think for themselves.

How can this sketch be fleshed-out? Marx writes: “To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.[5]”

He goes on: “The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence, or wherever possible he makes experiments that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality.[6]”

These statements invite pause. The notions of “typical form,” “free from disturbing influence,” “experiments that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality,” - at first glance these formulation seem almost more idealist than properly materialist. But Marx explicitly denies this. He writes: “With me…the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.[7]”

And this statement too demands some close attention. What exactly is being said here, what precise process is Marx here describing? The question to inquired after here is this: what exactly is Marx taking here for the operation of the human mind? That which at once reflects the material world, and also furthermore translates into forms of thought – but how are these notions of reflection and translation being here understood? And how precisely can they be thought to relate to the microscopic forms of Capital – forms that on the one hand are fantastic, and on the other serve as scientific laws?

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“De te fabula narratur!” – there is a yet further aspect to this phrase. Namely, that one contained within the pronoun “you” - in this, an imperative. Namely, this one: no beyond, no outside, no elsewhere - and indeed, no transcendent authority such that could be so established as such, and no acceptance for ressentimental projections - into, for instance, the picture postcards of the third, or fifth, fifteenth worlds. Rather: the state of things is here, now in this situation, this relation, this condition. Whatever this may be, and wherever it may lie: hence Marx here uses the example of the German reader, for the reason that Marx is here directly addressing that same reader. And so we are given to understand that in some sense present, in any instant whatsoever, is a connection to capitalist production – that mode of production which Marx is here specifically undertaking to critique – and that the problem of revolution simply is that one of some kind of an encounter or discovery.

To paraphrase Proust - what is being said here amounts effectively to the following: one does not want the landscape. Rather, one wants a something wrapped up in the landscape – with this something so defined in terms of an essentially fabulous universal situation, conceptualized along the lines of a certain set of laws, that at least theoretically could be potentially abstracted from the vanishing point of any point at all – any point at all - by means of a process akin to some kind of a translation.

Further: the authority of this process so defined is designated along the lines of an immanent property, inherent to the process itself - the analogy of translation is quite an apt one in this sense. And hence accordingly, the legitimacy of determinist deployments undertaken in the name of either/or the dumb and mute is denied before the fact.

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Where does this leave us? Effectively here – we are speaking now of a situation – to be precise: in the terms of a relation to a situation – so defined and designated on the fine red line of a means without ends, and a meaning without certain function. What is the structure of this line? From point to point - in short, the flight, the nudge, the wink: it is the subject – so conceived in terms of the product of this situation, as opposed to the producer of it: an agens, not an agent – a subject that so long as it is rigidly defined is both radically decentered and divided, and thus for this very reason so empowered consequently - in the face, and the fact, of its own very negativity - to be produced out of a process that “includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.[8]”

What is this subject? Marx calls it by the following name: the proletariat – but it has other names as well. Perhaps an infinity of them – or perhaps a hundred – ninety nine declared, and one kept under wraps. But in any case: it first emerged in the work of Marx in the 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – where it found a romantic definition as “the heart” of the revolutionary movement[9] - but was subjected to a continual redevelopment and revision throughout the entire trajectory of Marx’s work – such that the case could plausibly made that it ultimately makes-up his most subtle and complex idea of all.

How, then, does it find expression in Capital? Three distinctly different forms can usefully identified. First, in terms of a social symptom – and interestingly, always also a displaced one. For instance: “The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil…could not possibly be absorbed…[and]…were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds…from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working-class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as “voluntary” criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.[10]” In other words, then, effectively, the form of the abject persecuted “economic” proletariat of the (critique of) the Ricardian labour theory of value, still pregnant with the notion of an incarnated innate worth.

Second: in terms of an inevitable and ultimately unstoppable historical force – the proletariat as avenging angel. In theoretical terms this is actually ultimately the same proletariat as that of the above, only merely dialecticised from an industrial reserve army into an incipiently revolutionary one, and thus presented as a consequence with a greater rhetorical flourish. And thus Marx ends Capital Volume One by footnoting a quote from the Communist Manifesto. “The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable....Of all the classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes perish and disappear in the face of Modern Industry, the proletariat is its special and essential product.[11]”

Finally – and most tightly - in terms of an integral subject-object that functions in some sense as the unnamed and indeed, unnamable, ground of the capitalist mode of production as such. This is the inexistent “scientific” form of the proletariat, which first begins to be developed in Capital itself, and which is related neither primarily to an authorizing symbolic block like philosophy - and nor to something like a value so considered in the terms of an internal and intrinsic property of itself. Rather, this proletariat is that one related to the immanent process of valuation itself – so conceived in the terms of a ceaseless and never-ending critique of value – the critique which after Capital Marx would strive to refine and to refine again - generating smaller and smaller quanta as he went – in manner analogous to a figure like Heisenberg. So that in the end, then, performativity comes into play and the final phase of the critique of value thus reveals and reveils itself as follows: if you know what I mean, then you do not know what I mean.

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[1] Merleau-Ponty, M. Humanism and Terror: An essay on the Communist problem, trans. O’Neil, J. [Boston: Beacon Press (1969)] p.128

[2] Marx, K. “Capital Volume One” in the Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker [New York, London: Norton (1978)] p.296

[3] ibid. p.295

[4] ibid. p.296

[5] ibid, p..295

[6] ibid. p. 295

[7] ibid. p.301

[8] ibid. p.302

[9] Marx, K. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” in ibid. p.65

[10] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm

[11] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm (It is worth noting - this figuration has historically been prone to the most pernicious (mis)interpretations, and continues to be prone to them today. The specific problem with it is that it is so overtly valorizes the figure of the proletariat along the lines of a violent underdog that it tends towards the support of a cartoon so-called “Marxism” that in reality is simply adolescence masquerading by another name – a fact which renders it extremely powerful and compelling to certain people. Several recent unhappy conversations with associates have convinced me that this is a significant problem in its own right which demands an urgent refutation. See here and then here.