Kapitalism101

In the context of a very long critique of the Proudhonian idea that commodities should exchange for their exact labor content, Marx comes to this bit in which he contrasts the directly social labor of communal production with the indirectly social labor of commodity production.

“…The communal character of production would make the product into a communal, general product from the outset. The exchange which originally takes place in production — which would not be an exchange of exchange values but of activities, determined by communal needs and communal purposes — would from the outset include the participation of the individual in the communal world of products. On the basis of exchange values, labour is posited as general only through exchange. But on this foundation it would be posited as such before exchange; i.e. the exchange of products would in no way be the medium by which the participation of the individual in general production is mediated. Mediation must, of course, take place. In the first case, which proceeds from the independent production of individuals — no matter how much these independent productions determine and modify each other post festum through their interrelations — mediation takes place through the exchange of commodities, through exchange value and through money; all these are expressions of one and the same relation. In the second case, the presupposition is itself mediated; i.e. a communal production, communality, is presupposed as the basis of production. The labour of the individual is posited from the outset as social labour. Thus, whatever the particular material form of the product he creates or helps to create, what he has bought with his labour is not a specific and particular product, but rather a specific share of the communal production. He therefore has no particular product to exchange. His product is not an exchange value. The product does not first have to be transposed into a particular form in order to attain a general character for the individual. Instead of a division of labour, such as is necessarily created with the exchange of exchange values, there would take place an organization of labour whose consequence would be the participation of the individual in communal consumption. In the first case the social character of production is posited only post festum with the elevation of products to exchange values and the exchange of these exchange values. In the second case the social character of production is presupposed, and participation in the world of products, in consumption, is not mediated by the exchange of mutually independent labours or products of labour. It is mediated, rather, by the social conditions of production within which the individual is active. Those who want to make the labour of the individual directly into money (i.e. his product as well), into realized exchange value, want therefore to determine that labour directly as general labour, i.e. to negate precisely the conditions under which it must be made into money and exchange values, and under which it depends on private exchange. This demand can be satisfied only under conditions where it can no longer be raised. Labour on the basis of exchange values presupposes, precisely, that neither the labour of the individual nor his product are directly general; that the product attains this form only by passing through an objective mediation by means of a form of money distinct from itself.

“On the basis of communal production, the determination of time remains, of course, essential. The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on economization of time. Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs;just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus, economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production. It becomes law, there, to an even higher degree. However, this is essentially different from a measurement of exchange values (labour or products) by labour time. The labour of individuals in the same branch of work, and the various kinds of work, are different from one another not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. What does a solely quantitative difference between things presuppose ? The identity of their qualities. Hence, the quantitative measure of labours presupposes the equivalence, the identity of their quality.”
-Marx, Grundrisse 171-172

This passage is helpful in understanding the categories of directly and indirectly social labor. The labor of individuals engaged in communal production is directly social because the labor does not need to pass through a mediation in order to be part of the social labor of society. Commodity producing labor must produce a product that people want at the socially necessary labor time in order to be considered social labor. All other labor is wasted labor and is not social. The particular labor, represented by a particular commodity, is only social to the extent to which it measures up to the average labor of society. The particular commodity must show its equality to all other commodities through its relation to money, in order to be part of the social labor of society. Workers in a commodity producing society must purchase their stock of consumption goods with the money they get from selling their labor time. In communal production workers have no product to sell. They do not exchange one product for another. Instead they participate in social consumption to the extent in which they participate in production. Their product is immediately social from the outset because their labor does not have to measure up to the social average to be social. To say that a worker participates in social consumption to the extent to which they participate in production means that an hour of work earns one an hour of consumption goods, regardless of the efficiency at which one works. This same idea is repeated in the Critique of the Gotha Program and in the fetishism section of chapter one of Capital.

Another common theme between this passage and Capital, as well as the Critique of Political Economy, is the notion that a quantitative comparison between products implies a qualitative equality of labors. Though labors are heterogeneous, even within the same branch of production as Marx says here, they are considered qualitatively homogeneous from the standpoint of capital. This is because capitalism values all commodities at their socially necessary labor time, thus only counting labor as social to the extent to which it measures up to this average. Thus the equivalence between labors, their qualitative equality.

This passage is also helpful in demonstrating that a communist society which makes labor directly social by eliminating socially necessary labor time need not do away with labor-time accounting or with the goal of minimizing the time it takes society to do some tasks. There are certain aspects of social production which are a-historical, universal, aspects true in all modes of production.  There is only so much social labor to organize at any given time so there are always trade-offs. Increasing efficiency always makes room more labor to go into other areas of production. Society has to organize all of this social labor some way. A communal society needs to know how much labor time society requires to achieve certain tasks in order to plan production. Marx says here that the “economy of time” becomes “law” in communal production to an even higher degree than in capitalism. I assume that by this he means that because economy of time becomes a conscious aspect of planning by society, rather than a diffuse reaction of various firms to competition, that economy of time becomes “law” to a “higher degree”.

A few thoughts on the concept of Indirectly Social Labor in The Critique of Political Economy

As far as I know, Marx does not use the term “indirectly social labor” at all in the Critique of Political Economy. However much of the first chapter deals with the unique way in which private labor becomes social in a capitalist economy. In this post I hope to extract the key points from the first chapter in relation to this unique form of social labor.

In the first few pages Marx establishes that when commodities pass as equivalents (when A stands as the equivalent of B) that they therefore represent the same entity. This entity is materialized social labor. Since value is a homogenous substance differing only in number but never in quality so must the substance of value, labor be uniform and homogenous. Though the labor that creates use-values is heterogeneous, corresponding to the different type of work required to make different products, the labor that forms exchange-value is homogenous, resulting in a homogenous value substance.

What is this totally homogenous, divisible substance which labor has? It is time, labor-time. Time is the “natural” measure of labor. Labor-time is the “vital” substance of labor. Regardless of the concrete nature of work, all work can be measured in time.

Still the reader might object various things: Skilled labor produces more value in an hour than unskilled labor. Lazy workers don’t produce as much value in an hour as hard-working workers, etc. Marx addresses such concerns. He says that in order to understand how value (or “exchange value as he says here”) is determined by labor time we must understand three things:

1. The reduction of skilled labor to simple labor

2. The specific ways in which commodity producing labor becomes social labor

3. The difference between use-value producing labor and exchange-value producing labor.

Point 2 is what primarily concerns me in this post. However, much of the first point pertains directly to the second so I will start there.

The reduction of all labor to a uniform, homogenous quality seems an abstraction but it is “an abstraction which takes place daily in the social process of production.” Se we are not dealing with some philosophical ideal abstraction but with a real material process which treats all labor as uniform and homogenous. The result is a system in which “the various working individuals appear as mere organs of labor.” “Human labor in general” is what produces values. Marx doesn’t spell out for us, here, what the material process is that reduces all labor to human labor in general. But he does point out that this general human labor does exist, virtually, in the labor that an average individual can perform. This is unskilled labor.

This is important. The process by which private labor becomes social treats all labor as if it is this average labor. A few paragraphs later when Marx comes to the concept of socially necessary labor time, we see a more explicit demonstration of the material process by which all labor is treated as average labor.

It is in the next paragraph that Marx starts to talk about point 2, the “special sense” in which labor becomes social in capitalism. The private labor of individuals is only social, is only represented in exchange value, to the extent to which it is a “relation of equality with all other individuals”.  If the SNLT to produce a widget is 1 hour, and it takes me 2 hours to make a widget, only 1 of my hours of labor is counted as social. This is capitalist equality. It is equality via inequality.

SNLT tells us how our labor is counted as social. In the next paragraph Marx goes on to explain how this sociality is expressed. “Furthermore, in exchange-value the labour-time of a particular individual is directly represented as labour-time in general, and this general character of individual labour appears as the social character of this labour.” When a commodity exchanges for another commodity, or for money, the private labor that made the commodity is expressing itself in an equation with all other labor. It is expressing its value in relation to this general, average, universal labor time. By expression value in price, by private labor expressing itself as universal labor, labor manifests its social character.

I tend to use the phrase “labor becomes social” when talking about private labor realizing its social value in exchange. Here, Marx uses the term “manifest” rather than “become”. I like “manifest” better because it makes it clear that the social value of the labor existed before exchange, only manifesting its social worth in exchange. I wonder if Marx ever uses the phrase “become social”….

So private labor is expressed as universal labor. This is the unique way in which labor is social, or indirectly social, in a capitalist economy. The exchange value of a commodity represents the labor time that went into it but only in a way in which that labor time is indistinguishable from all other labor time. It is socially necessary labor time. This labor time is represented with the general equivalent, money, which stands for labor in general.

Marx then goes to contrast this unique sociality with other modes of production. The comparisons are quite similar to the comparisons he makes in the Fetishism section of Chapter One, Volume One of Capital. In the patriarchal family of the past labor is also social but it doesn’t need to take the form of universal homogenous abstract labor in order to be social. It is immediately social. The same is true for the middle ages where the particular forms of labor constitute the social ties between people, not some universal form. In communal labor there is no private product and therefore no private labor. Each person’s labor is immediately part of the social organ. It is only in commodity production where private labor must take the form of its opposite, universal labor, in order to manifest its sociality.

Indirectly Social Labor notes. Capital Fetishism section

In the Fetishism section of chapter one, volume one of Capital Marx makes a comparison of different modes of production, arguing that the fetishism of commodities only arises in the capitalist mode of production. I think that the same logic which Marx uses in these pages also applies to the concept of “indirectly social labor”. A comparison of different modes of production reveals how labor is only indirectly social in a capitalist society in which most production is commodity production. Though Marx is only explicitly dealing with fetishism in this passage I think it is quite reasonable to see his arguments applying equally to indirectly social labor, so that when he says, “The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production….” the same logic holds for indirectly social labor.

The reason the two categories map onto each other is that it is only in a society of indirectly social labor that the social relations between producers are mysterious and not immediately apparent. It is only because private labor must take the form of commodity value in order to be social that we have commodity fetishism. “Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.”

Thus, Marx’s comparison of modes of production allow us some insights into how we can better understand the concepts of direct and indirectly social labor.

Commodity fetishism and indirectly social labor vanish in non-capitalist social formations. Marx moves through several examples of directly social labor, an isolated Crusoe, medieval production, the patriarchal peasant family, and a communist society of free individuals. One point he makes is that in each mode of production labor time is still used as a measure of one’s input into the total social labor. Each mode of production uses some form of what might be called “labor-time accounting”. Yet this alone does not make labor indirectly social.

The Robinson Crusoe example, in addition to serving as a parody of bourgeois writers, shows that Crusoe’s activity contains all of the determinants of value yet there is no value creation, all of his labor is directly part of the total product, and there is no fetishism of commodities. Crusoe plans:  “His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him.” There is labor-time accounting and this planning happens through a consideration of average labor times, yet there is no value creation and thus no indirectly social labor. Why is this the case? The reader might at first assume that this is because Marx is dealing with an economy of one person and thus his labor is automatically directly “social”, or directly counted as part of the total product, because he does not exchange his labor with a larger society.

But in the examples that follow Marx shows that this is not the reason. In the relations of personal dependence that characterizes the European middle ages labors are just as well measured by time. Yet these labors do not take the form of objectified value in the form of commodities. “Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour.” By this Marx means that each individual’s labor, just like each of Crusoe’s different forms of labor, immediately counts as part of the social product without needing to take the form of money, the general abstract social form of value, in order to be validated as social labor. If a peasant works 5 days on the landlords land, and 2 on his own, those five days of work are directly part of the landlord’s wealth. The peasant’s labor does not have to be related to a socially necessary labor time and then take the money-form of value in order to be social. It is immediately social in its concrete, particular form.

The interior relations of the peasant family also serve as a social unit, the individual labors of which are all directly social, not needing to be mediated through socially necessary labor time and money in order to be socially valid. That means that if Peasant A produces corn less efficiently than Peasant B this doesn’t mean that Peasant A’s labor is wasted, or that some of his/her labor does not count as social. Everything that Peasant A creates is part of the total product consumed by the family. “The labour power of each individual, by its very nature, operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour power of the family, and therefore, the measure of the expenditure of individual labour power by its duration, appears here by its very nature as a social character of their labour.”

The labor of the members of the communist society in Marx’s last example is directly social for the same reason: Each person’s labor is immediately counted as a portion of the total social labor rather than the averaging that is required for private labor to become social in a capitalist society. “All the characteristics of Robinson‘s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual.”

To further clarify Marx points out that labor-time accounting could take two roles in a communist society in both planning of production and serving as a way of distributing consumption goods. Though distribution could be handled different ways Marx shows an example in which an hour of work entitles one to an hour of consumption goods: ” On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption.”  Of course, in a capitalist society an hour of work does not directly entitle us to a proportionate share of the social product. Rather, on a socially average hour of work does so. Marx makes this clear earlier in the chapter in his discussion of the English hand loom weavers.

This last examples is very much in the same spirit as Marx’s discussion of the lower phase of communist in the Critique of the Gotha Program. There he says:

“Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society — after the deductions have been made — exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another….”  “Hence, equal right here is still in principle — bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.”

Just as Crusoe uses average labor times as a basis for planning his work so too a communist society with directly social labor would use averages to plan production. But this averaging is not the same as the averaging that happens with socially necessary labor time in a capitalist society. In the latter case sub-average labor does not count as fully social. If the SNLT is 1 hour and it takes me 3 hours then only one of my hours counts as social. In the directly social labor of a communist society all 3 my hours would be social because I have the right to an hour of consumption goods for every hour that I work. My labor time has cost society more because all of my labor is social.

This also means that labor in a communist society is not abstract but rather only concrete. An hour of one person’s labor is not the same, is not interchangeable with another’s, in the way it is in capitalism.

In an interesting passage from the Poverty of Philosophy Marx discusses the reduction of compound labor to simple labor as well as the transformation of all labor into a similar quality so that value is measured solely by labor time rather than having anything to do with the concrete nature of work. The passage is interesting, to me, for several reasons. It deals with several intertwined issues that Marx revisits in the Grundrisse, the Critique of Political Economy and Capital, yet in the Poverty of Philosophy Marx has not yet discovered the concept of “abstract labor”. However, when in the passage he says, “If the mere quantity of labor functions as a measure of value regardless of quality…” it is clear that he is dealing with the same issue that he deals with in Capital when he derives the concept of abstract labor: if value is determined by labor time, and not effected by the specific concrete qualities of labor, then there must be social forces which create a specific type of capitalist labor process where work is reduced to a mere physical exertion of energy, an abstraction in which concrete labors are interchangeable and meaningless and only labor time is important for the creation of value.

That abstract labor, or at least a nascent concept of abstract labor, is related to the real effect of capitalism on the labor process is relevant to contemporary debates between “value-form” theorists who claim that it is market exchange which retroactively makes labor abstract and their “physiological” opponents who claim that labor is abstract in production as Marx argues in Capital.

In the passage in question however Marx seems to conflate two different processes, the reduction of compound labor to simple labor and the reduction of concrete labor to abstract labor. It is a pardonable error since the two processes are similar in some ways and easily conflated. Indeed, in some criticisms that I have encountered in my advocacy of a physiological theory of abstract labor I have been accused of conflating abstract labor with simple labor.

The passage in question reads as follows:

“Is your hour’s labour worth mine? That is a question which is decided by competition.
“Competition, according to an American economist, determines how many days of simple labour are contained in one day’s compound labour. Does not this reduction of days of compound labour to days of simple labour suppose that simple labour is itself taken as a measure of value? If the mere quantity of labour functions as a measure of value regardless of quality, it presupposes that simple labour has become the pivot of industry. It presupposes that labour has been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or by the extreme division of labour; that men are effaced by their labour; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day; but this equalising of labour is not by any means the work of M. Proudhon’s eternal justice; it is purely and simply a fact of modern industry.”
-Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, .126-7 (MECW vol. 6)

The passage occurs in the midst of a critique of Proudhon’s claim that, given that labor time determines value, the fact that two commodities exchange for one another means that they represent, always, equal quantities of labor. Marx counters by pointing out that compound labor (skilled labor) creates more value in an hour than simple labor even though both produce commodities whose values are determined by labor time.
“Thus values can be measured by labour time, in spite of the inequality of value of different working days; but to apply such a measure we must have a comparative scale of the different working days: it is competition that sets up this scale.” (ibid 126)
Similarly, in Capital Marx refers to a process which goes on “behind the backs of the producers” to determine how much simple labor is worth an hour of compound labor. The difference is that in Capital simple labor is not the “measure of value”. Rather, abstract labor is the substance that comprises value. Simple and compound labor are two types of abstract labor. The reason we can compare heterogeneous labors to each other is that all capitalist labor is both abstract and concrete on a practical level. Because both simple and compound labor are abstract we can reduce compound labor to multiples of simple labor. If they were not abstract there would be no way to say that a tailor’s labor was a multiple of an hour of simple labor.
[Also missing from the passage in question is the concept of labor as the substance of value. Instead Marx talks about simple labor being the “measure of value”.]
Without these distinctions the passage from Poverty of Philosophy seems to ask simple labor take on the explanatory job of abstract labor. On the other hand this passage does a great job of illuminating the actual material processes which underlie both the simplification of labor and the abstraction of labor. The quest to lower socially necessary labor time sets in motion forces which degrade the worker, taking skill and autonomy out of work, reducing the worker to an appendage to a machine, to a larger labor process out of the control or understanding of the individual worker. Thus each worker’s labor is of the same quality as any other worker. In the Critique of Political Economy Marx states that the “greater part of the labor performed in bourgeoise society is simple labor, as statistics show.” (CPE p.8 MIA edition) This is so because this process of deskilling and dominating the laborer is a central aspect of the capital-labor relation and of SNLT.
Despite the greater theoretical clarity of later passages on the subject of abstract labor and simple labor, this passage from Poverty of Philosophy is quite clear in the way it illuminates capital’s brutal degradation of labor. It also helps us to recognize the continuity in Marx’s thought, from Poverty to Capital, in the way he continued to identify the heterogeneity of value-creating labor with the changes to the material labor process under capital. This calls in to question value-form interpretations of Marx that identify Abstract labor with exchange rather than with the nature of work in a capitalist society.

In the context of a very long critique of the Proudhonian idea that commodities should exchange for their exact labor content, Marx comes to this bit in which he contrasts the directly social labor of communal production with the indirectly social labor of commodity production.

“…The communal character of production would make the product into a communal, general product from the outset. The exchange which originally takes place in production — which would not be an exchange of exchange values but of activities, determined by communal needs and communal purposes — would from the outset include the participation of the individual in the communal world of products. On the basis of exchange values, labour is posited as general only through exchange. But on this foundation it would be posited as such before exchange; i.e. the exchange of products would in no way be the medium by which the participation of the individual in general production is mediated. Mediation must, of course, take place. In the first case, which proceeds from the independent production of individuals — no matter how much these independent productions determine and modify each other post festum through their interrelations — mediation takes place through the exchange of commodities, through exchange value and through money; all these are expressions of one and the same relation. In the second case, the presupposition is itself mediated; i.e. a communal production, communality, is presupposed as the basis of production. The labour of the individual is posited from the outset as social labour. Thus, whatever the particular material form of the product he creates or helps to create, what he has bought with his labour is not a specific and particular product, but rather a specific share of the communal production. He therefore has no particular product to exchange. His product is not an exchange value. The product does not first have to be transposed into a particular form in order to attain a general character for the individual. Instead of a division of labour, such as is necessarily created with the exchange of exchange values, there would take place an organization of labour whose consequence would be the participation of the individual in communal consumption. In the first case the social character of production is posited only post festum with the elevation of products to exchange values and the exchange of these exchange values. In the second case the social character of production is presupposed, and participation in the world of products, in consumption, is not mediated by the exchange of mutually independent labours or products of labour. It is mediated, rather, by the social conditions of production within which the individual is active. Those who want to make the labour of the individual directly into money (i.e. his product as well), into realized exchange value, want therefore to determine that labour directly as general labour, i.e. to negate precisely the conditions under which it must be made into money and exchange values, and under which it depends on private exchange. This demand can be satisfied only under conditions where it can no longer be raised. Labour on the basis of exchange values presupposes, precisely, that neither the labour of the individual nor his product are directly general; that the product attains this form only by passing through an objective mediation by means of a form of money distinct from itself.

“On the basis of communal production, the determination of time remains, of course, essential. The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on economization of time. Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs;just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus, economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production. It becomes law, there, to an even higher degree. However, this is essentially different from a measurement of exchange values (labour or products) by labour time. The labour of individuals in the same branch of work, and the various kinds of work, are different from one another not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. What does a solely quantitative difference between things presuppose ? The identity of their qualities. Hence, the quantitative measure of labours presupposes the equivalence, the identity of their quality.”
-Marx, Grundrisse 171-172 (Penguin Edition)

This passage is helpful in understanding the categories of directly and indirectly social labor. The labor of individuals engaged in communal production is directly social because the labor does not need to pass through a mediation in order to be part of the social labor of society. Commodity producing labor must produce a product that people want at the socially necessary labor time in order to be considered social labor. All other labor is wasted labor and is not social. Workers in a commodity producing society much purchase their stock of consumption goods with the money they get from selling their labor time. In communal production workers have no product to sell. They do not exchange one product for another. Instead they participate in social consumption to the extent in which they participate in production. Their product is immediately social from the outset because their labor is not only social to the extent in which it measures up to the social average. To say that a worker participates in social consumption to the extent to which they participate in production means that an hour of work earns one an hour of consumption goods, regardless of the efficiency at which one works. This same idea is repeated in the Critique of the Gotha Program and in the fetishism section of chapter one of Capital.

Reading Capital Closely

Livestream Course on Volume 1

During the 2015–16 school year, Marxist-Humanist Initiative (MHI) will sponsor a course on the first volume of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. The course will be taught by Andrew Kliman, author of Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital” and The Failure of Capitalist Production. If there is sufficient interest, subsequent volumes may be taught in the future.

Marx regarded Capital as a theoretical blow to the bourgeoisie from which it would never recover. We will read Capital in that spirit–that is, not only as a work that can help us understand our world, but as a theoretical critique of the political-economic thought of the bourgeoisie and of other Left tendencies (such as Proudhonism). Attention will be given to uncovering the uniqueness and specificity of Marx’s ideas and analyses––things he has to say that are not found elsewhere, and that are largely absent from discussions on the Left today––and to the critical and revolutionary character of Capital.

Against the grain of contemporary academic and popular discourse, the course will emphasize understanding the text rather than “applying” or “using” it. Careful attention will be paid to the specific question Marx poses at a particular point and the argument(s) he offers to answer it, and to the book’s overall argumentative strategy. Secondary literature will be greatly de-emphasized. The book is certainly difficult, but you can understand it, not just understand what others have said about it. What is needed is hard work, perseverance, and attention to detail. Study questions and reading suggestions will be made available ahead of time; you will be expected to have done the week’s reading prior to the class session.

Class sessions will be held weekly between September and early May, with breaks for holidays, etc., from 1 to 3 p.m. on Sundays (Eastern time in U.S.) Class members who are unable to participate at that time, or who must miss a particular session, will be able to view the Livestream video––which will not be available to the general public––and will be expected to do so prior to the next session.

Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and make comments both during the class session and on a “bulletin board” afterward; the latter questions will be addressed at the start of the next session.

We don’t want money to be an obstacle to participation. The fee for the course will be low––just enough to cover expenses (professional recording, uploading, etc.).

Applying for the course

The Livestream videos will not be released, during the course or in the future, to the general public. Class participants must agree in writing to refrain from (1) transferring or reproducing the recordings; (2) making their own recordings; and (3) communicating to non-participants what others (including the instructor) have said or written during the class sessions or on the “bulletin board,” unless permission is granted ahead of time. Knowledge of Capital is a powerful weapon in the struggle for a new, human society, and it is important that powerful weapons be in proper hands and used responsibly.

The course is open to trustworthy people who will behave in a solidaristic manner and adhere to standard norms of scholarly dialogue (argument rooted in evidence and reasoning), and whose interest in learning Capital isn’t limited to personal edification. Given that the course will be provided at cost, we ask that applicants think of non-monetary ways they can help MHI. (Monetary donations also help MHI, of course.)

To apply for the course, please address the above concerns and write to mhi@marxisthumanistinitiative.org by July 15.