value, but this disguises the inner meaning of value as a social relation to produce the fetishism of commodities, understood as material relations between persons and social relations between things. In the marketplace, people relate to one another not as people but as buyers and sellers of things. Here Marx assumes, as in liberal theory, private property rights, juridical individuals and perfectly functioning markets. Within that world, money, the representation of value, takes on two distinctive and potentially antagonistic roles, as the measure of value and as the means of circulation. But finally there is only one money, and the tension between the two roles is seemingly resolved by a new money relation, that between debtors and creditors. This shifts the focus from a C-M-C form of circulation to M-C-M, which is, of course, the prototype of the concept of capital defined not as a thing but as a form of circulation of value that produces a surplus-value (profit), M-C-M + ΔM. This poses a contradiction between the equivalence supposed in perfect market exchange and the non-equivalence required in the production of surplus-value. This contradiction is resolved by the existence of labor-power as a commodity that can be bought and sold on the market and then used to produce value and therefore surplus-value. And so we arrive, finally, at the grand conception of a class relation between capital and labor.
This is not, please note, a causal chain of argument. It does entail the gradual unfolding, the layering of different levels of complexity, as the argument expands from a simple opposition within the commodity into more and more insights into different aspects of how a capitalist mode of production works. This dialectical expansion continues throughout the book, for example, in the emergence of a class relation and of class struggle and in the dual concepts of absolute and relative surplus-value. And the expansion jumps scale into the macro-dichotomy between the whole of Volume I, which concentrates on the world of production of surplus-value, and Volume II, where the primary focus is on the circulation and realization of surplus-value. The tensions (contradictions) between production and realization underpin the theory of crisis in Volume III. But I go way ahead in the story.
This cognitive map helps us envision how Marx has “grown” his argument organically and by what dialectical leaps. But please remember that the chart is a mere skeletal form around which Marx arranges an analysis of the real flesh and blood of a dynamic, evolving and contradictory capitalist mode of production.
CHAPTER 7: THE LABOUR PROCESS AND THE VALORIZATION PROCESS
We now leave the “noisy” sphere of the market, the sphere of freedom, equality, property and Bentham, and go inside the labor process, where the sign says: “No Admittance Except on Business.” This chapter is, however, unusual in one respect. For the most part, Marx is emphatic that he is dealing only with the conceptual categories formulated within and appropriate to a capitalist mode of production. Value, for example, is not a universal category but something unique to capitalism arising out of the bourgeois era (Aristotle, as we have seen, could not have come up with it, given the conditions of slavery). But in this chapter, for the first ten pages or so, Marx launches into a discussion that is universal, applicable across all possible modes of production. We “have to consider the labour process,” he says, “independently of any specific social formation” (283), thus confirming a position he took earlier, that labor is “a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself” (133).
We should not interpret these statements, however, in familiar bourgeois terms that presuppose a clear separation between “man and nature,” culture and nature, natural and artificial, mental and physical, and in which history is viewed as a titanic struggle between two independent forces, humanity and nature. There is, in Marx’s view, no such clear separation in the labor process. That process is wholly natural and wholly human at the same time. It is construed dialectically as a moment of “metabolism” in which it is impossible to separate the natural from the human.
But within this unitary conception of the labor process, as happened in the case of the commodity, we immediately identify a duality. There is, says Marx, “a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” Human beings are active agents in relation to the world around them. So man
confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. (283)
This is where we most clearly encounter Marx’s dialectical formulation of the relation to nature. We cannot transform what’s going on around us without transforming ourselves. Conversely, we can’t transform ourselves without transforming everything going on around us. The unitary character of this dialectical relation, even though it entails an “externalization” of nature and an “internalization” of the social, can never be displaced. This dialectic, of perpetually transforming oneself by transforming the world and vice versa, is fundamental to understanding the evolution of human societies as well as the evolution of nature itself. But this process is not unique to human beings—ants do it, beavers do it, all kinds of organisms do it. The whole history of life on earth is rife with dialectical interactions of this kind. James Lovelock argues in his Gaia hypothesis, for example, that the atmosphere which supports us right now wasn’t always there but has been created by organisms that once lived off methane and produced oxygen. The dialectic of organic life and the evolution of the natural world has been central all along.
In his earlier works, Marx made much of the idea of a distinctively human “species being” (perhaps drawing on Kant’s anthropology as well as the later anthropological formulations of Feuerbach). This idea takes a backseat in the formulations of Capital, but it does occasionally exercise a shadowy influence, as in this instance. So what makes our labor exclusively human? “A spider,” he writes,
conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally [i.e., mentally].
This is an important statement. We have an idea, Marx says, and then make it real. There is, therefore, always an “ideal” (mental) moment, a utopian moment, entailed in human productive activity. Furthermore, this moment is not haphazard: “man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes … his own purpose in those materials.” The activity is purposive. “And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it. This subordination is no mere momentary act.” He needs—we need—to pay close attention, and
the less he is attracted by the nature of the work … and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is forced to be. (284)
There are a number of points to be made about these crucial passages—and they really are crucial. To begin with, there is no question that Marx is here contesting Fourier’s ideas about the labor process. Fourier thought laboring should be about joy, passionate and erotic engagement, if not pure play. Marx is saying it’s never like that. A lot of hard work and self-discipline are required if the imagined is to be made real on the ground, if a conscious purpose is to be realized. Second, Marx here accords a vital role to mental conceptions, to conscious and purposive action, and this contradicts one of those arguments so often attributed to him, namely that material circumstances determine consciousness, that how we think is dictated by the material circumstances in our life. Here he clearly says, no, there is a moment when the ideal (the mental) actually mediates what we do. The architect—and I think it is important to treat the architect here as a metaphor rather than as a profession—has the capacity to think the world and to remake the world in that image. Some analysts argue either that Marx simply forgot his own maxims in this passage or that he is in effect schizophrenic,