Continental
Capitalism as a socio-economical form of organisation in the lens of study.
Full development after the French revolution and the abolishing the state of bondage: which produces the social conditions and legal conditions for a capitalist organisation of society.
What is characteristic of the french revolution is the two-fold freedom. Marx distinguishes a positive freedom from a negative freedom. Positive freedoms are entitlements, rights and liberty to do as you please, something guaranteed by law. We are free to sell our working force to whoever pays the highest price. You are free to find the job you like. At the time this was a huge freedom, as it came out of the serfdom/bondage state which existed before. One had to work at a slice of terrain and hand over percentage of what one produces to the landlord. One is not free to sell their working power to whoever buys it. Once you abolish this state, the workers become free to choose their own job and profession.
If this is coupled with negative freedom, suddenly it can become dangerous however.
Negative freedoms work rather on the idea of lack, one is ’free of’, and in this sense property. People who quit their state of bondage were free, but didn’t have anything from before. Rather they had to accept bad working conditions for their survival.
It is the onset of capitalism because of the two-fold freedom.
For capitalism however it is also necessary to understand the characteristic of private ownership of means of production: the means of production are posessed by private individuals. That means land, machines, manufactory and so on are owned by private actors.
One also has to consider the capitalistic market as something with a generalised competition, and in order to survive, the producer has to constantly reinject surplus money into the circle of production. This is crucially what distinguishes capitalism from previous forms of accumulation.
Before, the king would still have a lot of accumulated wealth, but this was never injected into a market, but was rather used for more or less what the landlord pleased. As such they were interested in taking as much from the people that belonged to them as possible, but without reinjecting that money into the sphere of production. He did not constantly try to continue his profits, but rather tried to maximise his ability to take from taxpayers.
As such, the rule of the survival of the factory owner is that they have to constantly update his earnings into production, because they will otherwise drown in not being up-to-date. By buying a new machine you usually produce better or quicker. If quicker, you can sell more products at cheaper price, and if it is better, you can have a qualitative advantage. This is a sort of unwritten law. All capitalists have to behave according to this law, it is a structural necessity. Capitalists are not bad in and of themselves, but they are forced to be bad because of the system. Otherwise they won’t survive. Any individual that you put into the place of the capitalist will do the exact same thing. It has nothing to do with character and personality.
The capitalist system, as a structure, is a structure wherein the position of the system determines the behaviour of the individuals.
Notion of capital comes from the latin caput meaning head, which appears in the 12:th century and refers to a certain amount of gained money used for the purpose of re-investment. It is overhead money.
In 19:th century: word ’capitalism’ is used in literature on political economy (ie. David Ricardo and Adam Smith.) There are a few attempts at political economy in Locke, but it does not go as far as Ricardo or Smith. As such, for Marx economies have inherently political consequences.
Fetishism:
Written of in ”The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof”.
Marx more or less lived in the library at the time of writing capital.
’fetishism’ comes latin facticious which artificial or man-made.
Is used in ethnology as a pejorative denomination for the use of objects in sorcery or religious animism (like Voodoo culture kind of). By the manipulation of Voodoo you can manipulate other individuals. This was described as being fetishist.
Was also used in psychopathology by Richard von Krafft-Ebbing. He talks about it as a kind of sexual devotion to a single bodily part. Attraction specifically to bodily parts that have no role in reproduction. DSMs now a days always have a chapter on fetishism.
For Marx it refers to the way in which people in capitalist societies consider their goods and commodities. All the objects we use to show our identity are fetishistic if they are commodities. They understood that the large scale of our things in a capitalist society are inherently fetishised. And because of this, we are entangled with quasi-metaphysical ideas that dominate our everyday life. We believe that the objects around us have a certain power, which has nothing to do with the material condition of the object itself.
Marx contrasts the value-in-use, which is entirely unmysterious. The use of the object explains its material constitution. It changes however when it becomes commodity, it becomes transcendent.
A commodity then is the typical form of wealth.
Everything that is produced is produced as a commodity. It is something that is and can be exchanged. In preceeding times, not everything was produced as a commodity. If you don’t want to anything back in exchange for an item, it is not a commodity. It changes its status. It is not anymore a product made for consumption, but rather which is made for exchange. Money itself is also a commodity of course, but it can be exchanged for everything.
”The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.”
In the feudal societies or the early middle ages, only a small proportion of the goods were exchanged: the rest was produced for immediate consumption.
The commodity then has an exchange-value on top of the use-value.
Use-value is a things usefullness. It is independent of whether the thing is exchanged or not. It is inherent in the natural form of the thing, it has to do with the material constitution of the thing. We know immediately what a thing ’is there’ for. We can explain the uses they have.
”Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange-value.”
Isolated acts of exchange occur in all forms of society. But in capitalist society, almost everything is exchanged, and as such produced for exchange, everything is a commodity.
Exchange-value is not a natural property of the thing, but is its social form. Things have individual exchange values in relationship to other things: 1 chair = two linen sheets = 100 egs. It is exterior to the thing, it lies in its exteriority in relation to other things. This is the transcendent character of the commodities, it is outside the thing itself.
Exchange-value does not come directly from utility. Water has a high utility, but not always a high exchange-value. A diamond has a high exchange value, but use-value remains questionable, though it necessarily is there.
Adam Smith: exchange value = amount of work needed to produce a thing (labor-time). Scarcity and demand also have an effect on the exchange value. If there is no working time involved, there is no value involved.
Marx does not agree enitrely with Smith:
Rather he says that value is not condition by individual labour-time, but only through the socially necessary labour time: ie ’abstract labour’. This is because it abstracts from the individual labour time, it does not consider it at all.
The transcendent character of the commodity lies in: the object of value (Wertgegenstand) of hte commodity cannot be grasped in terms of the commodity itself, but only in terms of another commodity, which is the direct embodiment of value.
When I put my commodities out into the market, can I know what the commodity is worth. With this calculus I calculate the production costs. This is part of the transcendent character of the commodity. It does not depend on the commodity’s use-value of how much it is worth.
The exchange value then in total actuallises as the price on the market, which is different from the abstract labor value as such. The abstract labor value is only the axis around which the price fluctuates along certain other parameters like supply and demand. The exchange value only equals the price when supply and demand equal each other.
Furthermore, by its value, a commodity is related to the social and economical totality of production and socio-historical conditions for production.
Once the commodity is on the market, it incarnates the whole social construction behind the production and all social relationships involved in its production: and the thing as such then becomes much more than itself: it represents the whole of society, which are indexed and presented in the commodity. As such the commodity becomes mysterious, because the social character comes to appear as an objective character. It presents the social character as if it would be a trait of its natural form. As if the social is something materially present in the obeject. This is the voodoo-puppet mechanism of a commodity. It is a material thing that has human traits. It represents the soul of a human being despite entirely not being so.
In our society, a society of capitalism and commodity, all relations can be broken down to goods that are exchanged between human beings. Friendship is very rare in capitalism. Most of our relationships to other people are dominated by the transfer of commodities, of money. Many social interactions we have throughout the day is about if we are paid or are paying something.
In each commodity there is a trait which represents the whole of social organisation, and it shows itself as if it were material.
Individual relatonships disappear behind objective relations between goods. And finally the distinguishing role of labour that has produced the goods disappears behind the social character of the product.
Producers do not directly relate to each other socially: but only in exchange ie. By means of their labour products.
As such, wealth constitutes social power. With wealth you seem to possess something of the structure of society, and as such goods become appealing.
In capitalism things seem to possess automatically exchange-value
Therefore people blindly subordinate themselves to the objective domination of goods.
We worship the goods because we think there is something mysterious in the goods themselves, and this mysterious aspect is nothing but the residuum of the whole of the social aspect of the goods produced, produced under the condition of abstract labour.
That things are traces of the whole of society is not illusory, but the illusory character is to see it as something transcendentally attached to goods naturally. Exchange value is regarded as a self-evident natural necessity. Objects are seen as the social agents of society in the market.
As such, in capitalism, social relations are relations between things.
Althusser:
Communist; killed his wife.
Important French intellectual, ENS-professor. Was preparing the students for the agregation, which is very important for the enlightenment frenchies. Had a big influence on these future intellectuals.
Implemented the seat of Marxism at the ENS and the seat of structuralism. The specificity of his reading is structuralist, where society is considered as a whole as as system wherein different topologies determine the work of an individual. He was the guy that invited Jacques Lacan after has expelled by the psychoanalytic association. Lacan got a new place to teach at because of Althusser and which contributed to his fame, and made him more philosophical.
He was never condemned for killing his wife, because he was considered mad, and was sent to psych ward. There was a huge scholarly background who defended him. Was also a war prisoner in Germany during WWII and was heavily depressed afterwards.
From the 60s onwards he started to collect a bunch of essays called pour Marx, in which he makes an anti-humanist interpretation of Marx. These had been made popular by previous marxist and catholic thinkers.
For Althusser, Marx’ science is incommensurable with non-marxian thinking: it is anti-humanist, and a structuralism avant la lettre.
No one except Althusser was so aggressively anti-humanist.
In 67 he publishes together with his students Lire le Capital.
Published an influential paper about Freud and lacan. Opening up Marxism to Freudism, breaking down the barriers imposed by Stalinism.
Althusser had a problematic relationship with the French Communist (stalinist) party. Often taking stances against it.
Him and Lacan joined in a struggle against humanism in the name of big S Science. They claim a retour a, ie. A return to the original holy scriptures.
Marx’ humanism: French post-war philosophy was an intrinsically humanist interpretation of Marx, such as the existentialists like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but also the catholic philosophers like Jean-Yves Calvez and Pierre Bigo.
According to this reading, Marxism is concerned with freeing men and women from the inhumane conditions of capitalism and bringing about a society for living genuinely human lives. In communism we can live more genuinely humane lives. These ideas can be seen in in the economic and philosophical manuscripts that were discovered and published for the first time in 1933. These had a huge impact at the time. Everyone was trying to read Marx through his early texts, thereby overstepping the discoveries of Capital. Khruschev began implementing this kind of idea, trying to make communism ’for the sake of man’.
They thought humans have an essence, which is having a productive and transformative ability and acitivity.
In capitalism, human labour is not a process in which men and women transform themselves and the natrual world through productive labour: one has only alienated labour = the produce of the worker’s labour confronts them as an alien object. As such, they thought that one needs to become fully human again by removing capitalism.