Capital is a social relation, not a static thing

This is intended as an introduction to the philosophy of internal relations as developed by Bertell Ollman, 1935 -

Capital is not just a thing but a dynamic, living social relationship. My essay on Social Forms is deficient in this respect. It does identify Capital etc. as arising from social relations but it still, implicitly, treats Capital as a passive thing, not a dynamic living thing which depends on its ongoing social relationships for its existence and nature.

Ricardo made a similar mistake. He regarded Capital as “accumulated labour”, as something purely material, a mere element in the labour process. (Marx, Theory of Surplus Value). Ricardo was defining Capital in a narrow, clear cut sense and then linking it externally to other elements such as labour.

Marx, by contrast, describes Capital as an extensive network of internal relations. It is “that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except on condition of getting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation.”(The Communist Manifesto, Ch 2). The relation between capital and labour is treated as a function of capital itself, and part of the meaning of “capital”. Marx goes onto refer to the worker as “variable capital” (Capital vol 1). In other places Marx refers to money and commodities as capital. In Marx's view Capital is not a clearly defined thing but a dynamic, living, evolving, changing thing.

When social relations become subject matter then we have to think differently. What we normally regard as nouns (Capital, wage labour, Value) are transforming into verbs. But our ingrained habit is to think of nouns as static and verbs as active. This is one reason why Marx's Capital is hard to understand.

This relationship view of concepts, staying with Marx's examples of Capital, labour, Value, the commodity for now, views each of these concepts as an internally linked network.

Contrast this with our traditional conventional “scientific” or common sense view that each concept can be defined independently of the other concepts and then linked externally to the other concepts.

In the common sense view Capital is “accumulated labour” which can then be invested in a new project which requires wage labour to succeed. But in Marx's view if wage labour disappeared then there would no longer be any Capital (Communist Manifesto). Max Hirsch (Democracy versus Socialism, 1901) criticised Marx for the alleged imprecision of tying capital to exploitation of the labourer. This meant that a machine used by a farmer who owned it would not be capital, but it would be capital if he hired a man to operate it. The machine in itself is not Capital but when it is connected to wage labour it becomes Capital. However, rather than a valid criticism, this shifting sand arises from the view that Capital is not a clearly definable thing but a social relation in motion.

If we accept Ollman's interpretation of Marx, that social relations become subject matter, that things we regard as clearly defined nouns like Capital are in reality more like verbs, continually in motion, then this in turn impacts on our conception of causation. Once the extensive internal relations of a concept are used to identify it then change becomes more a matter of a shift in those internal relations rather than a traditional scientific cause and effect model.

eg. some have read Marx as an economic determinist because his major work has the words “political economy” in the subtitle. But since the concepts of Marx, such as Capital, have extensive internal relations to wage labour, work, commodity fetishism, estrangement etc. then his analysis is intended as an extensive social critique of the capitalist system as a whole, rather than a narrow economic only critique.

The social system of capitalism is conceived as a living, organic body with extensive, ever changing inner connections. In such a model causes and conditions tend to merge together, unlike a tradition scientific cause and effect model.

At some stage some particular inner connections may become more significant than others and so they might appear to be a major cause of change. But it is more helpful to see this as a principal contradiction (to use Mao's terminology in On Contradiction) determining change than some sort of linear cause and effect model.

Reference:
Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971), pp. 14-17

Capital chapter one (Laurence Miall's blog)

Capital by Karl Marx, Chapter 1 - blog by Laurence Miall

Laurence writes in an entertaining (and self deprecating, not claiming to be a Marx guru) manner replacing Marx's commodities of linen and coat with the more modern examples of gasoline, iPads and cat kibbles.

I think his summary of the most difficult chapter of Marx could be improved by a deeper analysis of the value form. I cite some references below which I found particular helpful in coming to grips with this. Here are some extracts from Laurence's article with comments:

para 10: “David Harvey really saved my pea brain from total meltdown here. It turns out that value is socially necessary labour time. This is to say that what gives a commodity value is the labour that went into it”

This is true but incomplete in that it is limited to the magnitude and substance of value. Value also has a social form  (the capacity to be exchanged as an equal with another commodity) as well as a substance (embedded abstract labour) and magnitude (socially necessary labour time).

para 11: “And lastly, what gives my cat kibbles their exchangeability is the fact that they hold value: their value is that they provide a use-value for somebody else (in this case, for James, because he can feed my yummy cat kibbles to his own cats)”

This mixes up value and use value in a way which muddies the concept that value is a historically contingent social form, a social construct which eventually took on the form of money. In another type of society (pre or post capitalist) the cat kibbles would not have value at all. Imagine a society where your neighbor James just took the cat kibbles (no exchange) and that wasn’t regarded as theft. There is enough cat kibbles for everyone, no scarcity. Without exchange there is no value.

para 22: “Furthermore, the quantities are pretty arbitrary too. What makes 20 pounds of linen the basis of comparison? Why not 50 pounds? Or one pound?”

Those quantities in the general value form are not arbitrary. They are equivalents of socially necessary labour time required to produce those various commodities.

para 28 David Harvey quote: “People under capitalism do not relate to each other directly as human beings; they relate to each other through the myriad products which they encounter in the market.”

An issue which I found difficult to understand in Marx – in the same sense that Laurence qualifies Harvey’s quote - was Marx’s use of the word social in phrases like “socially necessary labour time” and in the commodity fetishism section, particularly the phrase “… material relations between persons and social relations between things”. My understanding now is that the use of the word social here relies on:

• a restricted sense of social to mean exchangeable on the market – not social in the more general sense of human social interaction
• the historical transformation of things into social forms, eg. products of labour become commodities, which as well as having use values are exchangeable (and hence social in that restricted sense)

So, appreciating value as a historically contingent social form I think adds a deeper dimension to Marx's analysis as well as helping to fathom out some of the ways in which he expresses himself.

Reference:
Marx, Karl: The Value-Form: Appendix to the 1st German edition of Capital, Volume 1, 1867 (link)
Rubin, Isaak Illich: Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, esp Ch 12: Content and Form of Value (link)