From whence come the industrious people?
Why spend months reading Marx’s so-called ‘notebooks’ in Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1 (TSVI) when you could skip to where those notes find coherence in the polished manuscript of Capital, Volume 1 (hereafter KI)?
KI, Marx admits, is already a fatiguing climb up steep paths toward luminous summits, never mind the unforgiving terrain of KII and KIII. And it is not as though TSVI has the panache of the Manifesto or the gothic narrative enthralling readers through KI. No, TSVI grumbles along recursively, replete with repeated circumlocutions gyrating around points that appear fragmented, if not concentrically hollow. ‘Quranic rhythm’ opined one fellow alpinist. Others offered harsher appraisals.
The following ‘comments, thoughts, reflections,’ to crib the group’s longstanding prolegomenon, draws out key topics of contention from no less than 15 weeks of robust dialogue on what some might consider an obscure, if not trivial, contribution to the Marx and Engels canon. But again, aside from bookish Marxology, why bother?
KI offers one incentive with the assurance that ‘In Book IV, which treats of the history of the theory, it will be more clearly seen, that the production of surplus-value has at all times been made, by classical political economists, the distinguishing characteristic of the productive labourer.’
Moreover, and perhaps especially so today, the hard graft of immanent critique, of exposing those who would ‘square the circle’ in service of capital, is a necessary privation for would-be sextons of capitalism. Particularly for wage-slaves chained to ivory towers co-opted by shyster consultancies selling snake oil conjured by large language models to inept managerial flunkies. Slop-ful indolence shall continue to prevail lest more of us heed Engels and Marx’s call to edifying ascension through (un)productive(?) laborious toil.
Phýsis kràtos
Base camp departs from Sir James Steuart, who gave profit upon alienation its scientific form, before moving on to the Physiocrats. In Marx’s estimation: ‘The analysis of capital, within the bourgeois horizon, is essentially the work of the Physiocrats. It is this service that makes them the true fathers of modern political economy’.
They moved the search for surplus-value out of the sphere of circulation and into production because it appeared that land alone could generate more than the sum of its constituent parts.
Our thoughts turned quickly to the origins of capitalism and the Brenner-Wood debates. Marx announces the Physiocrats’ contradiction with characteristic subtlety: ‘While feudalism is thus made bourgeois, bourgeois society is given a feudal semblance.’ One comrade observed that the National Party still hails extractive agrarian capital as the only genuine source of wealth, so it seems Physiocrats enjoy a longer afterlife in Canberra than their reputation in the seminar room might suggest. Calls for agrarian autarkic monoculture from marionettes suspended by billionaire purse strings amplify the tragic farce of Physiocracy redux.
Hanging in mid air
We initially encountered TSVI as Marx working out in exhaustive, if not occasionally tedious, detail what would eventually become KI. But Marx stopping Smith (or ‘Adam’, when Karl was feeling personable) mid-sentence over the use of the phrase ‘industrious people’ reminds us why journeys make destinations worthwhile:
In the first place, whence come the “industrious people” who possess neither means of subsistence nor materials of labour – people who are hanging in mid air? If we strip Smith’s statement of its naïve phrasing, it means nothing more than: capitalist production begins from the moment when the conditions of labour belong to one class, and another class has at its disposal only labour-power. This separation of labour from the conditions of labour is the precondition of capitalist production.
Lest this seem a gratuitous quarrel with long-dead Scottish philosophers, consider this year’s faux Nobel prize in economics, awarded to Robert Hall and Michael Woodford for the New Keynesian framework that the Nobel Committee calls ‘the main tool for policymakers today’. The Committee’s deliberations on the scientific merit of the model opens with ‘a representative household that chooses stochastic sequences for consumption, hours worked, and saving in bonds.’ Unemployment then dissolves into the output gap, defined as ‘lower hours worked relative to their “natural” level.’ The Committee’s scare quotes guard Woodford’s technical definition of natural output as what ‘would have arisen in the absence of price stickiness.’ Yet the technicality gives the game away. The frictionless state of nature, against which every disturbance is measured, is a household weighing leisure against the sale of its hours at a wage, with productivity the sole other input. Smith’s industrious people may have acquired a utility function and a share portfolio, but they still levitate. Whence they came, and why they have nothing to sell but their capacity to labour, lies beneath the ‘deep parameters’ of the model.
Capitalists and their apologists still fail to grasp, some wittingly but most not, how workers’ capacity for industry emerged in the first instance, i.e., violent dispossession of land, deprivation through enclosure, the extirpation of indigenous peoples, and the real subsumption of our species’ capacity for sensuous human activity to the insatiable needs of capital accumulation.
Smith’s ardent position, one fellow traveller suggested, admits a rising tide, the claim that capitalism lifts society as a whole, and that makes a harder opponent than any tally of individual exploitation. Our homework after this session linked TSVI to KIII, a riddle that would take two months to resolve: ‘How should they buy a value of four with a value of three?’
Schrödinger’s labour
The chapter on productive and unproductive labour kept us occupied for six weeks. Friendships and patience were tested alongside commitment to attending sessions of reading groups. Marx’s criterion is plain enough in principle. An actor or a clown in the service of a capitalist is a productive labourer, ‘while a jobbing tailor who comes to the capitalist’s house and patches his trousers for him, producing a mere use-value for him, is an unproductive labourer. The former’s labour is exchanged with capital, the latter’s with revenue.’ Mowing a neighbour’s lawn for $20 is unproductive, while the same work performed by an employee of a gardening franchise is productive. Child-rearing amid social reproduction was christened as ‘Schrödinger’s labour,’ wherein the productive status of labour hangs undetermined until the commodity is sold and the surplus-value realised, which sent us scrambling ahead to KII, where capital ‘can be understood only as a motion, not as a thing at rest.’ Although we must recall the ‘mass-iness of capital’ wherein the phrase ‘static thing’ (‘thing at rest’ in the Moscow edition) reminds us ‘that it is things that are in motion so that capital can expand’ and that ‘their movement does not require their de-materialisation.’
By the eighth meeting patience with the text had worn thin, with ‘turgid’ entering the lexicon of appraisal. The teacher, productive in a private school and unproductive in a state school for identical work, became the test of the definition. KI renders the point acutely, with the schoolmaster who ‘works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor’, having ‘laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory’, before closing with a line that drew rueful laughter: ‘To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.’
Some persisted in their demands for stricter definition, if only to keep KPMG consultants and police out of the working class. By the tenth meeting a rough consensus held that unproductive status left the public school teacher or the housebound reproductive labourer within the working class, since class follows the sale (or not) of labour-power. Is productive labour a category of capital rather than a badge of class status derived through revenue?
One question outlived the consensus. Marx treats commercial capital as unproductive and the private schoolmaster as productive. Are the two positions commensurable or does trying to do so collapse levels of abstraction between capital and its revenue forms?
The same chapter drew the state apparatus into view, and with it a second question that remains unresolved. Why does capital consent to the state taking a share of surplus-value as revenue? Answers ranged from the state as collective capitalist through to a reading of Pashukanis, for whom state and law reproduce the system irrespective of the will of the masses.
In this heat
Discussion on Quesnay begins on email, with one comrade confessing to having ‘personally got very lost in Marx’s 306 usages of “milliard” in the Quesnay chapter, only for Marx to spring into excitement at the end about Quesnay’s significance’. Hunting for a foothold, she turned up Marx’s letter to Engels of 6 July 1863 and circulated it. Marx asks Engels, ‘If at all possible in this heat,’ to inspect the table he is ‘substituting for Quesnay’s table.’ He then dispatches the Smithian dogma in a sentence: were price wholly resolved into revenue, ‘a society would have to start each year de novo, without capital.’ The accompanying diagram shows constant capital reproduced in kind without ever confronting revenue. The four-for-three riddle was solved!
Marx also shuts the door on circulation, since the reflux of money cannot explain how ‘the capitalist draws more money out of circulation than he threw into it.’ The answer lies in production.
Linguet, who follows, provoked the sharpest exchange of the whole ascent. A reactionary partisan of Asiatic despotism, he nonetheless holds that ‘Society is born of violence, and property of usurpation’, and that wage labour is slavery under a sweeter name: ‘He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune.’ His targets were the Physiocrats and the Enlightenment’s champions of free labour, and Marx savours every blow. We were less enamoured. Formal freedom alters the terrain of class struggle, creating new faultlines through which the working class can organise and mobilise. The passage from feudal to capitalist exploitation as ‘a change of form of this servitude’ described in KI sharpens this line of inquiry.
Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre
The Addenda delivered in spades. Reiterating the capital/revenue distinction with clarity was hailed as a revelation. One comrade offered the pandemic’s ghost flights, empty planes kept flying through the lockdowns, as an example of value preserved outside the circuit of revenue. KII explains the trick: ‘fixed capital spoils, if it is not employed in the labour-process.’ Yet the flights sold no change of location, so fuel and wages were burnt to keep fleets airworthy and, above all, to hold airport slots, a monopoly title to runway time priced much like land. An economy read through revenue alone, as the national accounts and their diviners would have it, sees the ghost flight but is blind to the fixed capital it keeps aloft, and to the rent it preserves.
Petty’s treatment of rent proved the richest seam of the Addenda. Marx credits him with seeing that ‘the value of land is nothing but capitalised rent’, so that ‘rent has become completely unrecognisable and appears as interest on capital.’ KIII draws the political conclusion. The apologia that the buyer of land pays an equivalent for it ‘would also serve to justify slavery, since the returns from the labour of the slave, whom the slave-holder has bought, merely represent the interest on the capital invested in this purchase.’ Linguet would have approved. So, perhaps, would anyone servicing a mortgage on unceded lands of the Eora peoples, paying interest on rent capitalised in advance.
Why bother?
KIII credits classical political economy with dispelling ‘an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things…Nevertheless even the best spokesmen of classical economy remain more or less in the grip of the world of illusion which their criticism had dissolved.’ TSVI is the logbook of Marx cutting his way out of that grip one mighty thinker at a time, and following him over the scree brings the luminous summits of Capital into view. As Marx put it, ‘Productive labour is only a concise term for the whole relationship and the form and manner in which labour-power figures in the capitalist production process.’ Fifteen weeks unpacked that concise term, slowly and in excellent company.
A parting reflection on the criminal. In his satire of the apologists, Marx has the criminal producing crimes and then criminal law, ‘and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market.’ Our first meeting on Smith opened with a lament over a $6,000 fee to publish an academic journal article. Marx would have recognised the business model, though he might have hesitated over who to call a criminal.
So, why bother reading TSVI? The source of surplus-value is perhaps the most important question in the ongoing history of thought in action. As the poor Physiocrats discovered, sterile classes have no place in society when the oppressed seize power. No wonder the 1% fantasise about leaving earth when a seething mass of 8 billion owners of the source of surplus-value might demand what is their creation.
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