play of ideas and mental activities, and one the deterministic Marx, who indeed holds that our consciousness, as well as what we think and do, is determined by our material circumstances. I think neither view is plausible. It is unlikely that in Capital, of all places, in a central chapter of a work that was revised carefully for publication (and later modified in response to criticism), Marx would take a position that was not deeply consistent with the way in which he understood the world. If these passages were in one of his notebooks, or even in the Grundrisse, that would be one thing. But this is a central transitional moment in Capital’s argument. It deserves, therefore, a serious reading and a careful interpretation.
Marx’s dialectical understanding of the labor process as a metabolic moment immediately implies that ideas cannot possibly come out of nowhere. Ideas are in some sense wholly natural (this is a position fundamentally at odds with Hegelian idealism). So there is nothing strange about saying ideas arise from within the metabolic relation to material nature and always bear the mark of that origin. Our mental conceptions of the world are not divorced from our material experiences, our central engagements with the world, and therefore, they are not independent of those engagements. But there is (and the parallel with the case of money and the commodity is here instructive), an inevitable externalization of an internal relation, and in the same way that the world of money (particularly when it assumes symbolic forms) can both appear to be and “really is” (see the fetishism argument) in opposition to the world of commodities and their use-values, so our mental conceptions move into an external relation to the material world we seek to reshape. There is, therefore, a dialectical movement, when the imagination soars free, when it can and does say I am going to build this rather than that, reshaping material elements using natural forces (including human muscle) in such a way as to produce something new and different (e.g., the potter at the wheel). There is a certain openness to ideas and mental conceptions that is captured here in Marx’s formulation. And in exactly the same way that the monetary system can get out of hand and generate financial crises, so our mental conceptions (our ideological fixations) can get out of hand and generate crises. Indeed, this is exactly the position that Marx takes with respect to the whole bourgeois vision of the world, with its Robinson Crusoe fantasies and its celebration of a fictional possessive individualism and perfectly functioning markets. In the same way that the monetary system is forced at some point to return to its senses in relation to the material world of socially necessary labor, so the bourgeois conception of the world, which is still so very much with us, has to give way to a more appropriate configuration of mental conceptions if we are to address the spiraling social and environmental problems of contemporary capitalism. In this, the struggle over appropriate mental conceptions (usually cast as “merely” superstructural, though note that Marx did specify that this is the realm in which we “become conscious” of issues and “fight them out”) has a significant role to play. Why else would Marx struggle so mightily to write Capital? This moment, when Marx positions mental conceptions, consciousness, purposiveness and commitment, is therefore in no way aberrant in relation to the dynamics of social evolution and the transformation of nature, and human nature, through laboring. It is, instead, fundamental.
Marx is also saying that projects (like building a house) take hard work to complete and that once we have embarked on a project we all too often become imprisoned within its confines. We have to submit to its demands, subject ourselves and our passions to its purposive intensity, if we are to complete it. Every time I write a book, for instance, I start with an idea that sounds brilliant and exciting, but by the time I’m done, it feels like getting out of prison! But there is a far broader meaning here. At the heart of Marx’s critical sensibility lies the idea that human beings can all too easily fall prisoner to their own products and projects, to say nothing of their false mental conceptions of the world. This critical sensibility can be applied just as ruthlessly to communism, socialism and ancient Rome as to capitalism, where Marx will most powerfully and persuasively deploy it.
There is something else about these passages that makes them interesting. Marx, it seems to me, attaches a sense not only of creativity but also of nobility to the labor process. I find the argument deeply Romantic. Marx was undoubtedly influenced by early-nineteenth-century Romanticism. His early writings are infused with Romantic sentiments and meanings. And while this sensibility is subdued in his later writings, it is not hard to detect its presence (even as concepts of alienation move from deeply agonistic in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to more technical meanings in Capital). But here he says directly that human beings can transform the world in radical ways, according to their imagination and with an idea of a purpose, and be conscious about what they are doing. And in so doing, they have the power to transform themselves. We must therefore think about our purposes, become conscious of how and when we intervene in the world, transforming ourselves. We can and must seize hold of that dialectical possibility creatively. There is, therefore, no neutral transformation of an externalized nature in relationship to us. What we do “out there” is very much about us “in here.” Marx makes us think about exactly what this dialectic means for us, as well as for nature, of which we are but one part: hence the universalistic approach to understanding the labor process. This implies that human nature is not a given but perpetually evolving.
Marx’s positioning here is controversial (as is, perhaps, my own reading of it). There are abundant opportunities to dispute it. You can take Fourier’s position, for example, or some version of the Marxist autonomistic positions of Tony Negri, John Holloway and Harry Cleaver, whose Reading Capital Politically1 offers an intensive inquiry into the matters now before us. But you have to come to terms here with some understanding of what Marx is saying, see that this is how he is positioning himself, that this is his vision of what the potentiality for creative labor and changing the world is really all about.
So how then can the labor process, as a universal condition of possibility of human existence, be characterized? Marx distinguishes three distinctive elements: “purposeful activity, that is work itself … the object on which that work is performed, and … the instruments of that work” (284). Initially, the object on which work is performed is given in the concept of land, raw nature. But he quickly moves away from this to distinguish raw nature from raw materials, which are aspects of the world that have already been partially transformed, created or extracted by human labor. A similar distinction arises in the case of the instruments of labor. These can be given directly—sticks, stones, etc., that we can use. But then there are the consciously made instruments of labor such as knives and axes. So while the earth may be our “original larder” and “our original tool house,” human beings have long succeeded in transforming both the land and the instruments of labor according to conscious design. “Man,” Marx says, quoting Ben Franklin with some modicum of approval, can be defined “as a tool-making animal.” “The use and construction of instruments of labour, although present in germ among certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labour process” (285–6). Marx then offers a side observation on which he will elaborate in detail later:
It is not what is made but how [it is made], and by what instruments of labour, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which men work. (286)
The implication is that transformation in our instruments of labor has consequences for our social relations and vice versa; that as our social relations change, so our technology must change, and as our technology changes, so our social relations change. So he here sets up the idea of a dialectic between technologies and social relations which will be significant later on. This is, as we have seen, a typical Marx strategy—to insert a comment of this sort as a precursor to what comes later.
But we are not only concerned with tools in the conventional sense. Physical infrastructural conditions, also produced by human labor, are not directly involved in the immediate labor process but are necessary to its performance. “Instruments of this kind, which have already been mediated through past labour, include workshops, canals, roads, etc.” (287). The labor process depends not only on the extraction of materials from raw nature but also on a built environment of fields, roads and urban infrastructure (sometimes referred to as “second nature”).
So