Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

4.2) Capital, Parts I-II: Let me provide you with a brief guide in the form of my reactions on my last reading through Capital. And, truth by told, if I had made up the syllabus I would have assigned Parts VII and all but the last chapter of Part VIII, and dipped into Parts I-VI only for chapter 10, The Working Day, and a few selected passages. In place of the bulk of Parts I-VI, I would have substituted Marx’s 1847 essay Wage Labor and Capital; Marx and Engels’s 1848 The Communist Manifesto; Marx’s early 1850s study of French politics and political economy, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; and his late-in-life Critique of the Gotha Program.

So here I am going to rush through Parts I through VI of Capital. I do not have time now to do more. Plus, with the exception of Chapter 10, The Working Day, which is great and which is by itself worth the price of the book, these pieces of the book do not sing to me.

4.2.1) Part I: Commodities and Money: The start of the book is, at bottom, a Hegelian German-philosophical argument for the truth of something called the labor theory of value: that the value of a commodity is the human labor that it took, directly and indirectly, to produce it. If you were a Hegelian German philosopher you might well find that argument somewhat convincing. But you are not. And in fact there are no Hegelian German philosophers at all: the consensus of philosophers is that Hegel is an important figure in the history of philosophy, but that his concepts and frameworks have little worthwhile bite.

Moreover, the labor theory of value is wrong, or at least profoundly unhelpful for Marx.

It involved him in spending years of his life trying to resolve all kinds of problems—the reduction problem, the transformation problem, how to characterize the capital-intensity of the economy—that were at best time-wasting sinks of energy and at worst led to what were in retrospect obvious analytical errors.

I get little out of Part I. But maybe I have not remade myself into the right kind of reader?

4.2.2) Part II: Transformation of Money into Capital “Capital” as Not Things But a Process: As the book moves out of Marx’s Hegelian German-philosopher mode it becomes, I think, much more promising. People typically think of “capital” as stuff: machines, buildings, inventories, and so on. But, Marx argues—I think correctly—that capital is better thought of as a particular form of social power: wealth directing human activity by being itself directed toward acquiring more wealth. Capital is money that is in the business of making more money by being used to buy and thus be transformed into commodities, and then back into more money. And, Marx argues, the most important commodity that capital is transformed into in its every-amplifying circular flow is labor-power, because the only reason that the system can produce profits on average—that the amount of capital can grow in general—is that the value of labor-power is less than the value of the commodities that that labor-power the capitalist purchases then creates.

But it takes Marx three chapters to say that.

Antisemitism Again: There is one piece of Part II that I should not pass over. It is:

The capitalist knows that all commodities, however tattered they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, are by nature circumcised Jews, and, what is more, a wonderful means for making still more money out of money…

What are “the Jews" doing here? Yep. This is a leftover from 1842, from the days when Marx and his soon to be ex-friends Moses Hess and Heinrich Heine were attacking “Jewishness” as the source of evil—cf. Heinrich Heine’s denunciation of his own city of Hamburg a:

a city of hagglers populated entirely by Jews, some baptized (I call all Hamburg’s inhabitants Jews)…

It’s people who behave like how Heine has been taught to think Jews behave who are the subject of his ire. Still, not at all a good look.