Jim.+279-297+&+Stuart+Hall

May 10, 2011

Stuart Hall, 2003. Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction’

This is a “reading” of the 1857 introduction, which means he goes through Marx’s text from beginning to end, interpreting and commenting. This is different from Lallier’s “annotated summary”, which is much thinner and reductive.

Looking back at my notes on the preface and the introduction, I did get much of this before reading Hall.

This text is a key writing of Marx on his method

On the historic specificity of concepts like labor. Ricardo et al start with the isolated individual in a sate of nature. Marx writes:

115: “It is not until labor has been freed of the dependent forms of feudal society, and subject to the revolutionary development it undergoes under early capitalism that the modern concept of ‘the individual’ could appear at all.”

method: phenomenal (surface) forms (ideology), critique, unmasking, real (essential) relations. Example: “commodity fetishism” in Capital v.1

The construction of categories, abstraction: Marx vs. political economy

The Marxian dialectic: the relation between concepts

Political economy: mere juxtapostion immediate identity

121: “There are many ways in which Marx may be said to have remained Hegelian; but the use of Hegelian triads (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) and syllogisms (general, particular, singular) is //not// one of them.”

negation = alienation? negation of negation = end of alienation?

On base-superstructure between the workings of the economy and the way it is represented:

122: “It is because, in the ‘real relations’ of capitalist production, the different parts of the process appear, simply, as independent, autonomous ‘neighbors’ that they appear, in the textbooks, as linked by an accidental connection; not visa versa.”

But political economy only represents the form of appearance.

The discussion of the relations between production, distribution, consumption and exchange give insight into Marx’s dialectic.

Three kinds of relations:

1. immediate identity: production is consumption because abilities and raw materials are consumed in production. Consumption inside production. Also production inside consumption: consumption of food is the reproduction of labor power.


 * 1)  mediation: mutual dependence: “each cannot exist, complete its passage and achieve its result, without the other. Each is the other’s completion (122).” Consumption produces production: The product of production is only realized when it is consumed; consumption creates the need for new production. Production produces consumption: production provides object of consumption, production specifies mode of consumption, production creates needs. “...needs are the product of an objective historical development (123).” But in 2 production and consumption are distinct.


 * 1)  internal connection: “each creates the other in completing itself and creates itself as the other (124)”. Each are moments in the process of capital accumulation, but production initiates the process. “In this third relation, production and consumption are no longer external to each other; nor do they ‘immediately’ merge. Rather, they are linked by an ‘inner connection’ (124).”

Distribution: vulgar economists argue that capital, land and labor are all compensated based on their contributions. Marx argues that there is a prior distribution: the distribution of the means of production. Here he argues that this distribution is an outcome of production, but maybe it’s an outcome of history and class struggle.

Exchange is also an aspect of production

differentiated unities

concrete abstractions: the product of thought applied to bourgeois political economy and real empirical history; uncovering the true relations, the categories that matter

theory -- history dialectic

theoretical and historical categories: labor, production

thought -- historical object dialectic

132: thought produces knowledge which “remains speculative, merely theoretical... so long as practice does not, dialectically, realize it, make it true.”

interesting use of “realization” here. Consumption realizes production. Practice realizes thought/knowledge/theory.

historical epistemology

modes of production, social formations, epochs, historical periods in Marx breaks in historical evolution 134: “History moves -- but only as a delayed and displaced trajectory, through a series of social formations or ensembles.” ensemble of relations of production

modes of production or social formations (used as synonyms?) can be developed/simple or dominant/subordinate

older modes of production survive within capitalism

stable functionalism vs revolutionary change

real relations -- phenomenal forms (ahistoric, equilibrium, equal exchange) dialectic 140: “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things direclty coincided.” discover real relations through a critique of political economy

141: “To present Marx as if he is the theorist, solely, of the operation of ‘a structure and its variations’, and not, also and simultaneously, the theorist of its limit, interruption and transcendence is to transpose a dialectical analysis into a structural-functionalist one, in the interest of an altogether abstract scientism.”

theory - practice dialectic

productive forces -- relations of production dialectic Greek art is incompatible with spindles, railways, locomotives. 144: “the historical compatibility between artistic and material forms.” But ancient Greek drama is still appreciated

145: “...bourgeois relations nmust be overthrown in practice before they can be wholly superceded in theory...”

Marx hasn’t quite broken with political economy or with Hegel

146: “//Capital// remains ‘A Critique of Political Economy’; not ‘Communism: An alternative to Capitalism’.”

**   Grundrisse, Chapter on Capital, pp 279-297

//The Market//: this is basically a list, but you can see Marx’s categories of markets, which mirror his discussion in Capital of different kids of commodities.

Money markets: discount market, loan market, interest-bearing bills, shares divided into foreign and domestic; world market There is a reference to cities and industrial location, makes me think of Sassen’s global city:

280: The concentration of the money market in a chief location within a country, while the other markets are more distributed according to the division of labor; although here, too, great concentration in the capital city, if the latter is at the same time a port of export.”

markets for products, raw materials, raw materials which at the same time instruments of production

//Exchange between capital and labor, etc//

This is familiar from capital: labor theory of value

equal (apparently) exchange between capitalist and laborer: money for disposition of Labor power labor time vs piece work, comes out the same

Worker seems equal to capitalist in exchange, but “This semblance exists, nevertheless, as an illusion on his part and to a certain degree on the other side...(284).”

Labor power is paid at it’s value, like any other commodity, the amount of labor time that goes into producing (and reproducing) it. Wages paid in money: for most workers this is a subsistence wage so the money is simply a means of circulation so that he can buy wage goods. Money mediates between the use value he sells, his labor power, and the use values he buys, wage goods. But since money is a share of social value it is potentially wealth. Laborers could save and turn that money into capital. But only individuals could do this, not the class. They would be the exception and those workers would become capitalists. If the class in general could save, wages would have to be reduced because the system depends on a certain kind of wage labor.

Capitalists tell workers to save. Most can’t do it. But it is in the interest of capital to a point, because those savings can get workers over hard times or function as a pension, so that the state (and therefore capital) won’t have to provide. On the other hand capitalists want workers to consume.

The Irish live at a minimal standard, the baseline for human existence.

Missing page in the notebook!

polemical language: “belletristic phrases”, “liquorice-sweet filth”, “whitewshing sycophants”, “the circumference of his moneybag”

free labor vs. slavery: temporary vs permanent transfer of disposition to labor; slave contains value, worker sells use value; Marx borrows from Hegel for this distinction

Laborors capacity to labor is used up over his working life

294: “The struggle for the ten hours’ bill etc. proves that the capitalist likes nothing better than for him to squander his dosages of vital force as much as possible, without interruption.”

In capital he expands this into a whole chapter.

//The exchange between capital and labor belongs within simple circulation...//

C-M-M-C worker’s perspective M-C-C-M capital’s perspective

separation of property from labor as precondition labor’s “absolute poverty” because of “total exclusion of objective wealth” 296: “Labor not as an object, but as activity; not as itself value, but as the living source of value.” /contradiction: poverty and wealth coincide in worker.

**Labor** under fully development capitalism is abstract labor, abstract because it is deskilled to the point where the worker doesn’t care what work he does, and the capitalist doesn’t care what commodities he produces. **Concrete abstraction**: labor power becomes abstract as a concept at the same time as it becomes abstract in reality.