Nicole Pepperill has been at work for some on a close reading of Marx, and especially of Capital, showing the ways in which Marx’s style and complex but precisely-thought organization must be taken into account in ways they have not been in readings which have historically been wooden and overly literal. What follows is an excellent example, and statement, of this approach.
Her aim is to show that Marx’s immanent critique of capitalist production is multi-dimensional in ways that introduces greater contingency into both the historical development of capitalism and, more importantly, the complex of emancipatory possibilities which it generates.
The following is the text of a talk given by Pepperill in New York last February, and represents a slightly earlier version of what is now published in Communization ans its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles, ed. Benjamin Noyes, where it has the title I’ve given above.
The Higher Realms of Nonsense: Relections on Capital‘s ‘Greatest Difficulty’
N. Pepperill
Marx aims to present an immanent critique of the reproduction of capital. He aims, in other words, to show how the process by which capital is reproduced necessarily also reproduces the potential for the emancipatory transformation of capitalist society. In the Grundrisse, Marx uses the metaphor of mines that are ready to explode capitalist production from within, suggesting that emancipatory social movements mobilize an arsenal that has been inadvertently built by the very social practices they seek to transform:
[W]ithin bourgeois society, the society that rests on exchange value, there arise relations of circulation as well as of production which are so many mines to explode it. (A mass of antithetical forms of the social unity, whose antithetical character can never be abolished through quiet metamorphosis. On the other hand, if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.)[1]
But how does Marx understand the generation of such explosive possibilities? By what means does the reproduction of capital necessarily reproduce the potential for alternative forms of collective life?