David Graeber
c/david-graeber
Lectures, interviews, and talks by David Graeber — anthropologist, anarchist, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Bullshit Jobs, and The Dawn of Everything.
c/david-graeber
Lectures, interviews, and talks by David Graeber — anthropologist, anarchist, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Bullshit Jobs, and The Dawn of Everything.
…eight-hour day, for example. And ironically, it tended to be the anarchist constituency, if you look at the famous debate between Marx and Bakunin, right, who was gonna be the revolutionary, who was going to actually make the revolution. Marx thought it was…
…between Marx and Bakunin, right, who was gonna be the revolutionary, who was going to actually make the revolution. Marx thought it was going to be Germany and England, the advanced proletariat. Bakunin said Spain, Russia, recently proletarianized peasants…
…the left, in general, this tends to have been rendered rather peripheral from our thinking. I guess one of the legacies of Marx and Marxism is to start to think about The proletariat is the major agency of change, major agent of historical transformation.…
…problems are we missing? Well, one way to think of it is that both neoclassical economics and Marxist economics are... Remember, Marx was not actually writing a theory of political economy. He was writing a critique of political economy. He was saying, I'm…
…I'll still show you that the whole thing is fucked up. And a lot of Marxists tend to forget that. You know, they say, well, Marx said it. It must be true. And a lot of his things, he's just playing devil's advocate. But even if you ignore that, you…
…in the third world i think you know i'm kind of developing the theory it's rather crude form of marxism but that Marx was right, that mechanizing production will eventually destroy the basis of the profit system. A declining rate of profit is directly…
…also reproduced bits of it, yes. Where does this come about from? I mean, is it... You know, in terms of Hegel, Marx, history and ideas, what's preceding what here? Is it ideas preceding actual practice and sort of observable reality or were there…
…a lot of it, I think that the thing that the standard Marxist accounts tend to leave out, and it's partly because Marx wasn't particularly interested in this aspect, is the role of war and the commercialization of war debt. Because from very early times,…
…families. Exactly, yeah. Which is the complete opposite of what we think it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, in a way, like, even Marx has read backwards, it's not a labor theory of value, it's a value theory of labor. You know, the purpose of value is…
…own life somewhere else. So we want more hours. I always thought the irony of the 20th century, there's a famous Bakunin Marx argument about where the revolution would happen, who was the real evolutionary classes. And Bakunin argued that it would be Spain…
…the sort of recently proletarianized peasants and artisans rather than the sort of advanced industrial proletariat of Germany. and England, as Marx predicted. Of course, Bakunin was right. But one of the great ironies of the 20th century is that it was…
…actions, moments of political frustration when you feel stymied in some way that are really creative of new radical intellectual ideas. Marx wrote Capital after the failure of the one round of revolutions. That pattern seems to repeat over and over again. I…
…ontologies of the imagination because if, and this goes back to the real origins of what we call the left because whether you have Marx and the idea of production and of course Marx starts as a sort of romantic poet actually or you have this sort of…
…to the real origins of what we call the left because whether you have Marx and the idea of production and of course Marx starts as a sort of romantic poet actually or you have this sort of more romantic imaginative conception, the idea of the hidden…
…a priority? Is there sort of a resistance? Well, that's an interesting inversion of the traditional Marxist line, you know, because even Marx says, at some point, that women were the first forms of private property, and it's what it is in the paper, our…
…position to do that. So I want to do anything to work to a future where everybody is in a position to do that. Marx talked about it and he talked about a time of superabundance when people measured their achievement not by the amount of time they…
…this point. In that, basic income is there. I think in the 19th century, This actually relates to the idea of genius. Marx has always attributed ideas of communism, labor theory, of value, according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. In…
…pleasure out of teaching this course this way, is that many people have taken courses where they've done a little bit of Marx, a little bit of Weber, Durkheim, this kind of stuff. They've read excerpts from Marx or something like that, but they've never…
…where they've done a little bit of Marx, a little bit of Weber, Durkheim, this kind of stuff. They've read excerpts from Marx or something like that, but they've never actually read it as a book. And it is a fantastic literary construction. So one…
…have to struggle always with understanding something, and in struggling with it yourself, you can come to your own understanding of what Marx stands for and what it means to you. So it's an engagement between you and this book, you and this text, that…
…ask you at the beginning is to try to lay aside a lot of those preconceptions, a lot of those things you think you know about Marx, and just try to read the text to find out what it really was he was trying to say. And that of course is not easy…
…disciplinary concerns. And so the tendency is to sort of read it from your disciplinary standpoint. Well, one of the great things about Marx is he would never have got tenure in any discipline. And if you want to read him right, then you've got to…
…it, have a good time. But they can't do that because they live in a world in which they're disciplined by what Marx calls the coercive laws of competition. And if they don't reinvest in new technologies, new products, they soon won't be a capitalist…
…We have an extremely special guest today, Professor David Harvey. who will be speaking on the subject of anti-value in Marx. David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of CUNY at the City University of…
…as you can. One of the things I've been doing over the last 10 or 15 years is I guess in retrospect I call it the Marx Project. And I say in retrospect because I had no idea I was getting into it when I started it, but it seems to have taken…
…into it. And the project was founded on the fact that I was getting more and more impatient with a lot of misrepresentations of Marx. and I felt that something had to be done about that. I was also getting impatient with some of the work being done by…
…about that. I was also getting impatient with some of the work being done by Marxists, which seemed to be dedicated to making Marx even more complicated than he already is, and that therefore there was a niche to be filled, which was to try to find…
…and that therefore there was a niche to be filled, which was to try to find ways of representing what it was that Marx had to say, that were simple enough without being simplistic, which were relevant to understanding everyday life and to try to find…
…of course, in the full understanding that volumes two and three were never completed and are only sketches in some, some way, but Marx at various times in his lifetime was often invoking the idea of a totality and therefore it seemed important to me to…
…in very much the same way. But it is not the circulation of capital, however, that we're looking at, but the circulation of what Marx called value. and I don't have really a great deal of time to sort of talk about exactly what's meant by value, but…
…moves. And the best way to do it is to start in the little black box at the bottom that says Money Capital, because Marx in Volume 1 talks about the conversion of money into capital. Not all money is capital. Capital is money used in a certain way.…
…labor power and means of production. Then labor power and means of production are brought together in a production process. And as Marx points out, this is a movement from the money form of value to the commodity form of value, which then goes into…
…form of activity of value. But the production is of two sorts. And this is, I think, crucial to always to understand when Marx uses the word production. First, it's the production of a tangible commodity, a use value of a certain kind, which will then…
…claims about BS jobs mean Keynes was right-we could all be working fifteen-hour weeks. Were that to happen, Graeber, like Marx and early Communists, imagines that then everyone will spend his days creating art and philosophy, and thereby obtain agency and…
…of central banks has been always closely related to the waging of war. This is something that an aspect of capitalism that Marx did not really discuss. fell outside of his purview. But as a result, radical theorists attended to neglect that key relation.…
…is for it to become humane instead of brutal. And, and I think the path to that is not to use any language from Marx or any language from anybody, but just talk about it in terms of everyday things that aren't right. And, and encourage people to think…
…this. it pretty much comes out. You need to go back to the original definition, which goes back first in writing, not by Marx, actually, but by Louis Blanc. Communism is the principle of from their abilities to each according to their needs. And he said,…
…the left, in general, this tends to have been rendered rather peripheral for my thinking. I guess one of the legacies of Marx and Marxism is to start to think about The proletariat is the major agency of change, major agent of historical transformation.…
…produced, it's maintained, it's changed, it's transformed. The paradigms for labor that we use are very much built on examples that Marx used, not because he thought that factory labor was the major form of labor, but because he was taking certain political…
…everybody who produces the city and reproduces the city, One of the things was, if you want to be theoretical about it, Marx said anybody who transports anything is productive and valuable. So all of those vans that are going around New York City…
…you come up with this cascade of new intellectual ideas. things, too, of early Marxism. I mean, half those ideas we attributed to Marx didn't come from Marx. They're just the sort of things that people were brooding about in cafes at the time. You know,…
…this cascade of new intellectual ideas. things, too, of early Marxism. I mean, half those ideas we attributed to Marx didn't come from Marx. They're just the sort of things that people were brooding about in cafes at the time. You know, we tend to attach…
…between the left and the right, is that when left people are saying, let's be realistic, what are they talking about? Like Marx, it's all about production. You know, somebody's making this stuff. We don't talk about that. We don't think about where this…
…So the reality is creation, not destruction, not violence. So you can have the romantic versions, it's all about creativity, and Marx does start as romantic. You can have the productive version. But it's always a hidden reality that we're not supposed to…
…production. What really runs society is our creativity. We're creating each other, creating people, creating the imagination, ultimately. And for Marx, that's what makes humans different than animals. You imagine things first, and then you make them. In a way,…
…envisioned in a certain way in political economy as I think like production, the image you have of it in Adam Smith and Ricardo Marx for that matter, kind of sitting in the back of their head is almost this sort of male fantasy of birth. factories are…
…phenomena is to see how it ties into a specific totality, which can then be typologized in some way. This is why Marx famously was unwilling to theorize what communism might be like, since we can't really think outside the particular totality that we're…
…of kind of left-wing theory, Marxist theory in particular, that category of alienation, which is obviously kind of important in Marx and then picked up throughout the 20th century, you know, philosophically as well, developed, and then kind of sort of…
…There are various structural reasons why one would believe that not to be the case. And even if you go back to Marx in Capital, the talk about the different motivations that bring people to be capitalists or that motivate capitalists, one of the great…
…the talk about the different motivations that bring people to be capitalists or that motivate capitalists, one of the great points that Marx made in Capital is, and I think one of the things that stands up about the book, is that the motivations of…
…for the most part from students is that... Who taught last term? Was it Catherine? Harry. It was Harry. That's just like the Marx, Durkheim, Faber. Right. I always wanted to teach that, but they never wanted me. You wanted to teach that one. Well, I…
…grandparents' bedpans. In fact, there never was a time most workers worked in factories. Even in the days of Marx or Dickens, working class neighborhoods housed far more maids, boot blacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies, school teachers, prostitutes,…
…as marking the beginning of a reformulation of the very idea of what a working class actually is, and always has been. As Marx himself pointed out in Volume 3 of Capital, which no one reads. Actually, this is in The Foreman. I have another one from…
…social value or lack of it in their own labor. If teased out and developed in the same way that theorists like Marx teased out and developed the full implications of the productivist version of the labor theory of value embraced by working class people…
…I always noticed that they didn't really have any books in the house of critiquing capitalism. I think they had one volume of Marx, kind of felt they had to. But they didn't need anybody to tell them why capitalism was horrible. They worked nine to…
…well, when I was writing about the production of People, and I was kind of coming out of a feminist reading of Marx. I was inspired by feminist readings of Marx. You could say that The essence of Marx's critique of capitalism, which most Marxists…
…of People, and I was kind of coming out of a feminist reading of Marx. I was inspired by feminist readings of Marx. You could say that The essence of Marx's critique of capitalism, which most Marxists often forget, is precisely that, that it inverts…
…precisely that, that it inverts our understanding of the importance of the production of people and the production of things. At one point, Marx actually pointed this out. He said that if you look at the ancient world, No one ever wrote a book about what…
…it were a sort of biblical scripture, they tend to forget that this is an as if. And they actually take those, since Marx said it, it has to be true, and completely warp their perspectives. He didn't actually think that these things were true. And he…
…we talk about value as economic value. Value is what happens in the economy when you're making things to get money. And Marx talks about this predominantly. He says money has this bizarre double role because On the one hand, money represents the value of…
…They seemed to be very scared by the robot factory stuff. And I think... One argument you could make, somewhat surprisingly, Marx has this elaborate argument that since value can only be extracted from human labor, the change in the organic composition of…
…going to create a declining rate of profit. I assume you all know the drill. It seems to me that it's quite possible that Marx was right about this. What he was wrong about was that capitalists would do it anyway and continue to mechanize. A case could…
…owing to mechanization or whether it's some other reason, is an interesting question. I was throwing out the possibility that Marx was right just because what he predicted sort of happened, except for the part about capitalists all competing anyway and…
…nature of history, or the idea that self-consciousness is embodied in actual control over the conditions of your existence, and Marx and other socialist thinkers. So it's actually a very interesting notion, because You have people, for example, arguing that…
…I always stress this, is we like to think of capitalism as this total system. You know, we live under capitalism. I mean, Marx didn't even use the word capitalist, you know, so as to avoid that impression of capital's mode of production. We live in a…
…Greeks, to Balzac, references to all of the political economists and philosophers, to anthropologists and all the rest of it. In other words, Marx draws upon an immense array of sources. And as he does so, it might be really exciting for you to kind of…
…reading this, I had not read many of Balzac's novels. And I'm reading Balzac's novels, and I say to myself, oh, that's where Marx got it from. And then you kind of suddenly see all the ways in which he's drawing upon a whole experiential world, full…
…book. And here of course we come across another set of preconceptions, because many of you will have encountered some of Marx in your reading. Maybe you read the Communist Manifesto in high school, maybe you went through one of those wonderful courses…
…maybe you went through one of those wonderful courses which is called Introduction to Social Theory, where you spent two weeks on Marx, two weeks on Weber, a few weeks on Durkheim and all the other kind of characters. And maybe you read some excerpts…
…of this is some sense of what that grander narrative is, and what that grander conception is, because that is, if you like, how Marx, I think, would want to be read. He would hate it if somebody said, hey, you've got to excerpt this chapter, or you've…
…hate it if somebody said, hey, you've got to excerpt this chapter, or you've got to do this chapter, and you can understand Marx that way. And he would certainly hate it if he knew he was being given three weeks and an introduction to social theory…
…and an introduction to social theory class. And I think you should hate that too, because you get a certain conception of Marx from that, which is radically different from the kind of conception you get from reading a book like Marx's Capital. Now the…
…bothered to follow the economic argument, I'm just going to follow the philosophical argument. And actually it's very interesting reading Marx from that perspective. I've taught this course now every year since 1971, except one. Some years I've taught it…
…all the time on chapter one, but this is the kind of thing that different disciplinary perspectives can open up. because Marx actually wrote this text from those many different standpoints that I've indicated, and I think that we have to recognize how…
…with it, and so when we're going through I'll give you quite a bit of materials coming out of that in terms of where Marx is getting his inspiration from, because he doesn't always cite it in Capital. an idea comes up which is clearly taken from one…
…doesn't always cite it in Capital. an idea comes up which is clearly taken from one place and is very significant, but Marx doesn't always cite it. There are of course also some other theorists, even in the United States, but primarily French. So there…
…even in the United States, but primarily French. So there was a French tradition of political economy too, rather different, so Marx makes reference to that. But that is one of the big areas of his discussion. The second area, is German classical…
…one of the big areas of his discussion. The second area, is German classical critical philosophy, which stretches back to the Greeks. Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus, so he was very very familiar with Greek thought, and of course the way in which…
…with a group of philosophers who were steeped in Hegel and all that kind of stuff, so I got a very Hegelian kind of view of how Marx is proceeding. I know some of it but I'm not so strong on it as I would want to be. And I have to say, early on…
…probably shouldn't say it and I'll upset all the Hegelians around, actually one of the best things about reading Hegel before you read Marx is it makes reading Marx pretty easy. So, get yourself a dose of Hegel before you do Marx and then everything will…
…I'll upset all the Hegelians around, actually one of the best things about reading Hegel before you read Marx is it makes reading Marx pretty easy. So, get yourself a dose of Hegel before you do Marx and then everything will be okay. The third tradition…
…reading Hegel before you read Marx is it makes reading Marx pretty easy. So, get yourself a dose of Hegel before you do Marx and then everything will be okay. The third tradition that he uses and appeals to a lot is the utopian socialist tradition. Now…
…Cabey who created a group called the Icarians that came here and settled in the United States after 1848, Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Fourier. Marx is very very familiar, he spent some time in Paris, very familiar with their works, and if you read the Communist…
…the utopians are actually configuring some ideal society over there without any idea of how to get from here to there. For Marx, what he wants to do is to try to convert the socialist project from a utopian socialist project into a scientific socialist…
…I've read a lot of those people like Fourier, Saint-Simon and Proudhon in particular, and I think actually what happens is that Marx often draws from them more than he wants to acknowledge, since he'd kind of wanted to distance himself from that overt…
…I suggested, however, that we should be reading it in Marx's own terms, but that also poses a whole set of difficulties. Marx himself was aware of this. He interestingly commented in one of his prefaces, particularly the preface to the French edition, when…
…things as feuilletons, a paper comes out and it's the first two chapters, then the next week a serialized publication. And what Marx writes, this is in 1872, he says, I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of Capital as a serial. In this…
…production, is now reflected back in the ideas, then it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction." What Marx is talking about here is his method of inquiry is different from his method of presentation. His method of inquiry starts with…
…that behind the world of appearance that you started out with, there is another way to interpret what's going on. In effect, Marx is a pioneer in a method which, if you're familiar with psychoanalysis, you would also, I think, understand. That you start…
…you can explain, ah, that person is acting that way and it looks like this, but in fact it's a representation of that. Marx is doing the same sort of thing. In fact, Marx is pioneering this method in social science. Start with the surface appearance,…
…and it looks like this, but in fact it's a representation of that. Marx is doing the same sort of thing. In fact, Marx is pioneering this method in social science. Start with the surface appearance, find the deep concepts. In capital, he's going to start…
…get the concept straight and then you go on to the next one. It's like you build brick by brick by brick by brick. Marx is more like dissecting an onion. I use this metaphor, it's an unfortunate one, because as somebody pointed out, when you dissect an…
…working. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, that by the time you start to actually derive some of the consequences that Marx lays out, then of course you get somewhere. And included in this is his choice of starting point. As you will see, he…
…standpoint from the concept of the commodity. Now this is a very strange starting point. Most of you, when you think of Marx, will think of phrases like, all history is the history of class struggle. So you think, capital should start with class struggle.…
…And so you're going to have to recognize that what you're going to get out of this course is an analysis by Marx of a capitalist mode of production from the perspective of production. Volume 2 does the perspective of exchange, Volume 3 does materials…
…his preface, is that in dialectics we find a completely different concept of analysis. You'll find hardly any causal language in Marx. Marx doesn't say this causes that. He nearly always says this is dialectically related to that. And a dialectical relation…
…preface, is that in dialectics we find a completely different concept of analysis. You'll find hardly any causal language in Marx. Marx doesn't say this causes that. He nearly always says this is dialectically related to that. And a dialectical relation is…
…but exactly opposite to it. There are ways in which I think we're going to find that's not exactly true. In fact, Marx revolutionized the dialectical method, he didn't simply invert it, as he sometimes said. He then goes on to say this, I criticized…
…said. He then goes on to say this, I criticized the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago. What Marx is referring to here is his tract called A Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,…
…Hegel's Philosophy of Right, whichever the title is. And I think that that critique played a very foundational moment in which Marx defined his relationship to the Hegelian dialectic. So he goes on talking about this mystificatory aspect, and the way in…
…relations between elements within his system. But he's going to do it in such a way as to capture fluidity and motion. Marx above all is incredibly, incredibly impressed with the fluidity and the dynamics of capitalism. Now this is very weird because Marx…
…motion. Marx above all is incredibly, incredibly impressed with the fluidity and the dynamics of capitalism. Now this is very weird because Marx is often talked about as if he is a static structural analyst. The weird thing is when you read Capital you…
…talking about that movement, and that movement is a dialectical movement. So one of the ways in which also you have to read Marx in Marx's own terms is to try to grapple with what he means by dialectics. Because the problem is, he never wrote a…
…good dialecticians almost from day two. But in fact dialectical method is intuitively very, very powerful. And in a sense what Marx is doing is recovering that incredibly intuitive dialectical method, and putting it to work both in terms of an analytic…
…capitalism is, as Jack Kerouac would say, perpetually on the road. and if it's not always on the road then it's nothing. So Marx is incredibly appreciative of that, and it's very strange to find him so often depicted as this static figure who's got it…
…figure who's got it all worked out. No, it's in motion, it's changing, it's perpetually in motion. So here I think too, what Marx is trying to do is to find a conceptual apparatus that would help you understand that motion. And so some of his concepts…
…instantiated within a capitalist mode of production. So, one of the ways in which I think you have to try to understand Marx is by appreciating his dialectical method. Now there are a lot of people, including many Marxists, who really don't like his…
…something that's very dialectical and turn it into a causative structure. And in fact there's a whole positivist version of what Marx says, that is, strip away the dialectics, Now, this may be perfectly correct. I'm not making an argument saying the…
…Marx's texts in Marx's terms, is you're going to have to grapple with the dialectic. And it's fine afterwards if you want to say Marx is wrong, the dialectic is wrong, I don't like it, it doesn't work and this kind of thing, that's fine. But before you…
…what it is and how it's working. So part then of what we want to do is to spend some time recognizing that dialectical aspect of Marx and seeing how it works. This is the final point before we get to a break. I've asked you to try to read Marx in…
…aspect of Marx and seeing how it works. This is the final point before we get to a break. I've asked you to try to read Marx in Marx's own terms, but obviously I'm your guide, and so you're going to read it with my help, and my terms are going to…
…that is history and geography change. And so there are certain things which arise and I kind of come back and I look at Marx and say, well, does he have anything to say about this? And sometimes you find something really acute which he has to say…
…have cropped up which didn't exist before, therefore you read it in a different way. Interesting point. In one of the prefaces Marx talks about that process, about how bourgeois theory understood the world in a certain way and then history moved on to…
…and have a good time talking to the text, and letting the text talk to you. and appreciating the way in which Marx tries to understand the world. Because above all, I think this text is a wonderful, wonderful exercise in seeking to understand what…
…is the a priori beginning point which we've already mentioned. But notice something about the language. Appears. Always watch out when Marx uses the word appear. Appears is not is. Appears means there's something else going on and you better watch out and…
…other natural properties of commodities, he says further down the page. Now, we're hearing something here which is rather significant. Marx is often depicted as a grubby materialist, everything has to be material. But here, what we're seeing immediately, he's…
…look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case, but the same phantom-like objectivity. Marx loves all this stuff about phantoms and werewolves and all that kind of stuff, so you're going to get a lot of that.…
…anybody will quickly tell you, the difference between the representation and what actually something is, there can be quite a gap. And Marx is going to spend quite a bit of time talking about the nature of that gap between value and its representation. So…
…A process, in fact, a labour process becomes objectified in a thing. It's an idea that's going to become very important in Marx. You have a thing, And then there's a labour process. What's the relationship then between the process and the thing? This is…
…in terms of that process by the things they make. essays, papers, multiple choice questions, all the rest of it. So what Marx is doing here is to say, well the representation, i.e. the exchange value, is something which you really see, but it's…
…it's fantastic, but when you try to objectify it on paper, you say, good God, what nonsense this is. So Marx is talking about that relationship. But that's implied immediately in this notion of objectification. Human labour is objectified, materialized in…
…in which the capitalist mode of production sets up a certain notion of temporality, time. How does capitalist mode of production structure time? Marx is going to make an argument and say you've got to understand a lot of it has to do with the fact that…
…this point. Actually, there's a brilliant description of globalization, if you want to call it that, in the Communist Manifesto. where Marx talks about the impulsions of the bourgeoisie to create the world market and the consequences of making that, in which…
…and the consequences of making that, in which old industries get destroyed, new ones get created, there's tremendous kind of fluidity. Marx is writing this in a context where the world was opening very fast, through the steamship and through the railways…
…This is his first cut definition of value. Value is socially necessary labour time. Now, one of the reasons I think Marx thought he could get away with this very cryptic presentation of use-value, exchange-value and value, was because anybody who read…
…Ricardo. And it is pure Ricardo with, however, one exceptional insertion. Ricardo used the concept of labour-time as value. Marx uses the concept of socially necessary labour-time. And you should immediately ask yourself the question, what is socially…
…only begin to get the sense of the answer to that when you're way on the way through capital. In other words, what Marx has done here is simply set up the Ricardian conceptual apparatus, repeat it, and in a sense say Ricardo missed something out. It…
…like to think we have our own values and all this kind of stuff, and everybody likes to go on talking about values, But Marx is kind of saying, look, there's a value which is being determined by a process that we do not understand. And it's not our…
…of who determines the value structure and how is it determined by these processes, then you've got to be kidding yourself. So what Marx in effect is saying, you've got to understand what social necessity is. We've got to spend a lot of time looking at…
…your definition. The individual commodity counts here only as an average sample of its kind. Then he reiterates, and you often find Marx doing this by the way, he repeats himself. He figures that you didn't get the hand loom, power loom example, so he's…
…amongst other things, by the worker's average degree of skill, the level of development of science and its technological application, Marx is very hot on the significance of technology and science to capitalism, the social organization of the process of…
…go down. If the supply is too little, the value will go up. So there is an element here of supply and demand involved. Marx is not actually terribly interested in that. As he will say at various points as he goes on, what I'm interested in is what…
…I give up the exchange-value money for this or do I not? Do I hang on to the money or what do I do? So Marx has set up something which is explaining something already. And even as he explains it, however, he's not saying this caused that. So it's…
…and exchange value. So this is a way of situating what people do on a daily basis. And you can see that this apparatus, although Marx doesn't take it in the way that I'm taking it, but if you think about it, you see immediately what this can help you…
…me? Is it telling me anything? and initially it'll be very hard to see what it might tell you. As you go on, Marx will start to tell stories coming out of these relationships, and he'll spin outwards from this to a far, far greater understanding of…
…yeah, that reminds me of when I was working for AT&T, this happened, and this happened, and this happened, and it's exactly what Marx is talking about. In other words, there are constant ways in which this refers to experience. I don't mind some of that,…
…don't mean very much unless you can transform the real value system which is governing our daily lives, which is this one. So Marx is not against necessarily thinking about alternative values, and in fact I think one of the big issues which we face right…
…People want to talk about environmental values which should be a part of this, and I think the answer again, as I suggested, is Marx would say that's fine, Well, he might not say that's fine, he has a particular kind of aim of where he wants to go…
…taking Marx's labour theory of value almost as a normative device to think about how socialism should work. But this is not what Marx is saying. He's saying value is inherent within a capitalist mode of production. And we have to come to terms with what…
…a dynamic here, so the thing and the qualities of the thing are not fixed. In fact, again, there's a lot of dynamism, but Marx by and large is not going to be concerned about that in capital, he's going to sort of say, okay, I'm going to assume…
…over time and according to place. So, you know, there are all those elements within it. vision of the capitalist world that Marx deals with diverge, I mean, obviously diverges somewhat from ours in modern day, but specifically with the way the laws and,…
…which is determining it? To what degree is there colonial enslavement which is determining it? In other words, those are open questions. Marx is very much open to discussing those sorts of questions in principle, but again what we're going to look at is…
…perfectly functioning markets and the state power is going to be out of the way and there's going to be no monopoly. So Marx tends to say, let's assume that the classical political economists are correct and that's how the world is. We will see examples…
…in 1850? It's very different. I would want you to think about this as having a flexible reading of this, but realize that Marx is using it in a very specific way, in a very specific situation, for very specific purposes. Does socially necessary imply the…
…to integrate that into socially necessary has been a contentious issue amongst Marxists. And what you have to remember by the way is that Marx was a little skeptical of this term Marxist. He once said, I am not a Marxist. And what he meant by that was…
…a social feminist project, or whatever, how we should expand it, again, is something very much up to us. And I don't think Marx would want to be read as somehow or other providing a gospel within which you can find yourself. It's not about a confining…
…surplus value. So there's a double operation there, and I think this is terribly important always to remember that when Marx talks about production, he doesn't necessarily mean production of commodities. He often means production of value and surplus value,…
…something moved from, say, a gaseous state into crystals and the like. So it's a transformation of form, a metamorphosis, as Marx liked to call it, and a metamorphosis which has important implications. So the moment of realization is significant, but to be…
…commodities which reproduce labor power. Then you get bourgeois consumption but you also get state expenditures which are terribly important and which Marx does not spend very much time talking about and I'll again come back to that. in a little bit. So it…
…to impel this system onwards and what is that source of energy doing? Now the classic way to look at that is the way that Marx does of course in volume one of Capital in particular to say that nobody in their right mind would start the day with a…
…demand, or demand for productive consumption? What would happen to this circulation process? Because it becomes very clear from Marx that continuity in the circulation process is foundational and fundamental. and that if therefore this system gets jammed up…
…based, in fact, on growth. So instead of it being a cycle, it becomes a spiral. And if you go to the Grundrisse, Marx talks in a number of places about the transformation from simple reproduction, which is circular, to spiral form. And if you notice the…
…Okay. So it's just that side. When it gets to the point of realization, what does it say? In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx says, I assume everything exchanges at its value. That is, there is no problem of realization. And furthermore, he says, I assume the…
…kinds of conclusions. But they're contingent conclusions on the assumptions. Now most people, of course, read Volume 1 when they read Marx and they read it very carefully, but they get the idea sometimes that that's the whole of the story about capital.…
…volume does in relationship to this whole system, you see it is not the whole story of capital at all. In fact, what Marx says in the Grundrisse is that capital, in order to understand it, you have to look at the contradictory unity between production…
…of what the whole thing looks like. But basically volume two is really about some of the questions of realization. But Marx approaches the questions of realization in a very curious way. He assumes there is no problem of realization. Now, that's sort…
…equilibrium position, even though you've assumed that's where you want to be. And one of the big things that goes on there is Marx starts to talk about the turnover time. And that becomes very significant in the whole of this thing because we also have…
…how fast are we moving around? How quickly do we move around? And again, one of the things that comes up is that Marx in volume two also assumes the technological change is zero. This is again a very strange assumption. So with all commodities sold at…
…And one of the things I want to emphasize in reading Capital is always be aware, always be aware of the assumptions that Marx is using in any particular part of the text. Because on the basis of those assumptions, he will say this and this happens.…
…again, rather an element to be looked at. And of course, Given what I've just said about the importance of the credit system, Marx is in a situation where he's going to have to look at each one of these distributive categories and ask why is it…
…to this diagram. One is on the left-hand side doing that. One's on the top about realization. Another is about distribution. And Marx had the idea, which is developed very much in the Grundrisse, that he really wanted to look at capital as a totality.…
…look at capital as a totality. One of the arguments I want to make is that if we were projecting forward as to where Marx was going to go with these incomplete volumes of volume two and volume three and where would he have gone after he had completed…
…interesting immediately comes out, which is this, that at the very first chapter, the very first section of volume one of Capital, Marx is talking about the value theory, so it's value in motion. And he's talking about the labor theory of value, and I…
…so it's value in motion. And he's talking about the labor theory of value, and I don't have time to elaborate about how Marx is developing that labor theory of value here. But he's talking about that, and I'm talking about its motion. But he says…
…is the creation of new wants, needs, and desires. And value is contingent on that. Most people concentrate when they're reading about Marx on production. He's on about that all the time in volume one. That's his topic in volume one. But that's not the…
…a terribly important part of value theory, or should be a part of value theory. It can't, you cannot avoid it. But Marx avoids it entirely in volume one of Capital, and interestingly in volume two of Capital, by assuming that all commodities always…
…Now, what this says is that actually Capital can produce not value, not value. And this suddenly, when you go back and you read Marx, you find that actually this notion of not value is coming in all over the place. Because he says a commodity loses its…
…physics understand the world? It understands it as a relation between matter and anti-matter. Everything is set up that way. And Marx is thinking about capital that way. And I like to talk to these economists who have physics envy by saying, actually,…
…And Marx is thinking about capital that way. And I like to talk to these economists who have physics envy by saying, actually, Marx got to this way of thinking before the physicists did. If they'd read Marx and then started doing their physics the way…
…economists who have physics envy by saying, actually, Marx got to this way of thinking before the physicists did. If they'd read Marx and then started doing their physics the way Marx sets this up, they would have had matter and antimatter in their heads…
…Marx got to this way of thinking before the physicists did. If they'd read Marx and then started doing their physics the way Marx sets this up, they would have had matter and antimatter in their heads way at the very, very beginning, you know? Because…
…sets this up, they would have had matter and antimatter in their heads way at the very, very beginning, you know? Because Marx had value and anti-value in his head all the way through this, all the way through this. Anti-value is a complicated question,…
…the system in such a way as to exercise control over the totality of it. And I think it is important to think totality. Marx didn't finish this. And I think we should be working on how to finish this. And there are lots of kind of complications in…
…know, where it's coming from. So this system depends more and more on what's going on in the center of distribution. Now Marx, quite understandably, in volume one, emphasized the moment of production and did an extremely good job, I think, of talking about…
…in the hard sciences as well. In the case of Marxist political economy, this is particularly complex because disputes will involve what Marx said, what Marx should have said, what Marx would have said if he had completed his work, how and to what extent…
…sciences as well. In the case of Marxist political economy, this is particularly complex because disputes will involve what Marx said, what Marx should have said, what Marx would have said if he had completed his work, how and to what extent Marx's work…
…case of Marxist political economy, this is particularly complex because disputes will involve what Marx said, what Marx should have said, what Marx would have said if he had completed his work, how and to what extent Marx's work applies today and how can…
…the beginning. It is to capture everyday life. That is the point of the whole figure. It is the point of the work of Marx. How can we understand the world in which we live? And of course, for this, the circuit is extremely useful. Now, my questions…
…much what I was mentioning, alluding to at the end, when I want to talk about the space and time of this. I mean, Marx, when he just published the first volume of Capital, wrote a letter to Kugelmann kind of saying, you know, the real science begins…
…My question is about something you said on the global level of value production, circulation and distribution. Do you think Marx already envisioned this global aspect of capital Or is this something more recent we have to theorize about? Because throughout…
…I'll answer all those questions like that. My God, where did we go? Oh, let's start with the global thing. Yeah. Marx... Something interesting about the structure of the three volumes of Capital is that the description of globalization in the Communist…
…always found that rather surprising, but I can give you an explanation why. At the end of volume one of Capital, Marx dealt with the theory of colonization, which actually was proposed by Hegel, which suggested that you could resolve the inner…
…that, actually, Hegel's solution, which would solve the internal contradictions of capital by some external adjustment, as far as Marx was concerned, it simply takes those internal contradictions and projects them onto a higher, a bigger stage, i.e. the…
…simply takes those internal contradictions and projects them onto a higher, a bigger stage, i.e. the world stage. As far as Marx was concerned, he actually confines himself in the three volumes of Capital for the most part looking at the internal…
…class interest. I haven't mapped that in here, and this applies also to the hydrological thing. To me, the value theory of Marx is very much about alienation. and therefore the whole kind of question of alienation from nature, which is why I'm talking a…
…is emerging over the realization question. And that brings me to the accumulation by dispossession. There's a politics of production. Marx talks a lot about that. There's a long history in Marxism talking about the politics of production. There's also a…
…it's not class struggle in the sense it is at the production. In production, there's a relationship between capital and labor, but as Marx points out, at the point of realization, the laborer is a consumer. So the big fight that goes on in realization is…
…minutes for that. Let me talk a little bit about the whole question of relation to nature and human nature and the like. Marx at various times did talk about the free gifts of nature and the significance of those free gifts for any economic activity. He…
…that capital is developing. And I think it's important always to understand, in my understanding of the theory of value, that Marx is describing capital's theory of value. It's not his theory of value, it's capital's theory of value. And people kind of…
…of stuff. Capital doesn't care what it produces. Capital doesn't care what use values it sets up or destroys. So actually what Marx is reflecting is a theory of value which is inherent in the way in which capital works. which leads into an interesting…
…kind of political question, because value has such a positive connotation, I think a lot of people want to be included in it. But Marx is very clear that to be a value producer under capitalism is a misfortune. And why on earth would you want to put…
…appropriate? Why are we not actually saying there are different value regimes? And actually, there's a very good reason why Marx said there's only one. It's because he assumed a perfectly competitive capitalist society. What happens if you have monopoly power…
…have monopoly power in any form? And by the way, all spatial competition is monopolistic competition. Therefore, the conditions under which Marx derived his initial theory of value do not hold. Therefore, we have to have an alternative notion of value. And…
…of this, Suddenly this thing is no longer a map of this kind. It's something very radically different. It is what Marx describes and begins to describe in the Communist Manifesto when he starts talking about globalization or in those fantastic passages in…
…in the creation of the relationship between the bondholders, and the different value regimes. For instance, just take this on money. When Marx talks about money, he kind of says, you know, there are lots of local monies and there are lots of currencies…
…has to be applied to this kind of thing. So you just don't say, this is all there is. This is the beginning point. Marx is very clear about that. This is the sort of beginning point. And once you've got the beginning point, you can then start to…
…human labor, that is the socially necessary labor time. But that commodity is then taken to market and it is sold, or as Marx says, the value is realized through the conversion of the commodity into the money form. And the act of realization takes place…
…workers in the form of wages. Some of it is taken away in the form of taxes. Now, I've added taxes in here because Marx very rarely dealt with taxes throughout capital. But it seemed to me very important to put that in because this is a very important…
…a thriving wage labor structure. And that means that wage labor has to be reproduced somehow. So there is social reproduction. Now, Marx looks at this and says, well, yeah, this is important and clearly the capitalist has to provide enough value to the…
…really care about social reproduction. It actually says, basically, here's the money. You get on with it, and you do it. And so Marx kind of says, this is how I'm going to treat it. Social reproduction is a very important and key aspect of this. It's…
…talking about household labor, household structures, and things of that kind, all of which is, I think, very important to add into what Marx has to say. But Marx takes the view that this is not productive of value. This is doing a service, creating a…
…structures, and things of that kind, all of which is, I think, very important to add into what Marx has to say. But Marx takes the view that this is not productive of value. This is doing a service, creating a context within which value can circulate.…
…powers and the history of productivity of labor and how that history has been worked out. And it's long, long history. And so Marx refers again to this, but says, well, you know, this is an important aspect of the dynamics of this system, but I'm going…
…of the like. And that, again, is a very important context in which the circulation and accumulation of capital occurs. But again, Marx says I'm not going to consider it in great detail here, except with a number of very specific kind of questions. For…
…process depends very much upon the wants, needs, and desires of a population. And in Volume 1 of Capital, in the third chapter, Marx talks about the fact that wants, needs, and desires have to be created. and he makes very clear if wants, needs and…
…therefore we cannot ignore the question of wants, needs, and desires. And this whole kind of thing then becomes very significant, as Marx points out in his little chapter, He says, you know, commodities are in love with money, but, you know, and this is…
…capital to try to create new wants, needs, and desires. And that is actually a terribly important part of Capital's history. But Marx talks about this in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. He talks about it at some length in the Grundrisse. But then…
…the production of nature and the destruction of nature. So that these questions, therefore, are part and parcel of the totality. Marx talks about the metabolic relation to nature. Several points, he kind of says, capital tends to destroy it. But he doesn't…
…of course, and household labor and all of those things. These are all part and parcel of the totality, but they are things that Marx does not pay very close attention to. What he does pay close attention to, however, is the way in which this, if you…
…with money capital and it goes through the production process and it takes you up to the point of realization and then Marx makes the assumption. He says, I assume all commodities exchange at their value, therefore I don't have to go into the question…
…you'll find very little about about merchant capital if I'm very little about the the theory of distribution in general and So that Marx in volume one then creates an isolated sliver of the totality and analyzes it as if all the rest of it is working…
…of the totality and analyzes it as if all the rest of it is working in a perfect kind of way. Now, you can criticize Marx for doing that. My view is you don't criticize him for doing it. What you do is to say we often have to make assumptions…
…suddenly you get a volume one reading of Marx's totality, which is only that sliver under these assumptions. Now in volume two, what Marx does is actually to look at the second red box, the realization process. But he does it in a very peculiar way. And…
…So his tactic in Volume II is very strange. And it bothered me for a while to think about why is it that Marx assumes that all commodities exchange at their value. You're not going to actually get into the question of where's the effective demand come…
…tend to sort of lay those to one side. And the answer, I think, lies in this. That in volume three of Capital, Marx shows that commodities can never exchange at their value. In fact, they exchange at their prices of production, what he calls their…
…surplus value and then relative surplus value. So this is what is going on in volume one of Capital and the result comes when Marx talks about the The consequence of all of this is that there is an immense concentration of wealth at the top of the…
…the rich are going to get richer and the poor are going to get poorer. This was a very, very important finding for Marx because it actually refuted, of course, the Adam Smith notion that give us a free market economy and then that will redound to…
…refuted, of course, the Adam Smith notion that give us a free market economy and then that will redound to the benefit of all. Marx kind of says, you take a free market economy and what it's going to do left to itself is it's going to make the…
…worker, and actually, we have two cars in the driveway, and we have a suburban house, and all the rest of it. This story Marx tells is a pure fiction. So you then found yourself saying things like, well, go off to Bangladesh or Shenzhen and look at…
…found yourself saying things like, well, go off to Bangladesh or Shenzhen and look at what's going on there, and you'll see that Marx is kind of, there's a certain truth to Marx's story, but you've then got the problem of what to do about the affluent…
…explained to you at all in Volume 1, but in Volume 2 they are. Because by the time you get to the end of Volume 2, Marx is kind of saying, you know, if you drive the wage rate down and reduce the share of wages in national income more and more and…
…surplus value and undermine the capacity to realize the value. So in volume two, you get a completely different story. In volume two, Marx starts saying, you know, look, there are all sorts of reasons why you get crises. One of them is the tendency of…
…and the like. So what we have to do is to match and say, well, these two stories don't fit each other. Is Marx contradicting himself, or is he talking about a contradiction of capital? And my answer to that is, oh, he's talking about a contradiction…
…the American dream is located. So we have all of that going on and that's kind of volume two sort of story. And Marx talks at the end very briefly of volume two about the notion of rational consumption. Rational consumption, that is, from the standpoint…
…and down and down. And then that's created certain problems in the market. And here's something interesting, because in volume two, Marx again and again and again comes across certain problems which can't be resolved without resort to the credit system. And…
…of things of this sort which are very significant in Volume 1 about the nature of the struggle. But the trouble is when Marx said okay, I'm going to assume everything exchanges its value and I therefore don't have to talk about realization, is that he…
…suggested. There are struggles over wants, needs and desires. But there are struggles also that go on around realization. But when Marx did talk about those struggles, and he talked about them about three times, once in the Communist Manifesto and twice in…
…And it's questions of housing, for example, realization of housing. So I think there's a problem with the fact that Marx actually excluded the whole kind of detailed discussion of realization, even though, like some of the other points about metabolic…
…That is, there's a redistribution of value that goes on through the market. And that redistribution of value has the form, Marx jokingly kind of says, this is the form of capitalist communism. It's from each capitalist according to the labor they employ…
…each other, then what happens is you get a transfer of value from the labor-intensive economies to the capital-intensive economies. But Marx says something very interesting about that transfer of value. He says it doesn't go to the whole country. It goes to…
…commodity, which was in the background always, and increasingly in the background of the 1920s and 1930s to international trade. And Marx had always made the argument that value is only recognized on the world market, and the world market only works when…
…the world market, and the world market only works when there's world money, and there is only one form of world money for Marx, and that was gold. So, we went off the gold standard. Then what happened was there was no disciplining of the money supply.…
…lot about volume two, people look at you and say, oh, you're a Keynesian. You kind of go, no, actually, Keynes came after Marx. And I think took quite a lot from this, particularly the reproduction schemas. But the third volume, The driving force is the…
…actually, you know, the physicists, when they talk about the world, they can only talk about matter and anti-matter. And actually Marx was talking about value and anti-value all the way through. And debt becomes the real major form because it's reducing…
…of debts. This system, and this is why it's so different from the hydrological cycle, is not a cycle. It is, as Marx says, a spiral. It's a spiral. And we have a very interesting English expression, things spiral out of control. Actually, capital is…
…of technological utopianism from the 1960s and 1970s and so on, and we're in another one now with artificial intelligence. The fact is, Marx actually has a very good thing to say about this, about John Stuart Mill, he says, you know, John Stuart Mill, he…
…that should lighten the load of labor seemed to make the lot of the laborer worse. And he was perplexed by this. And Marx, well, you know, that's because he doesn't understand that the role of machinery is to extract surplus value from workers, not... to…
…to be an inevitable conflict between the United States and China to fix these issues. And I'm wondering if you believe, as Marx did, that an incredible violent conflict is is necessary to fixing these things or if there's some sort of alternative to…