*This is a wonderful description of Capital.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1814909,00.html
The poet of dialectics*
Karl Marx's Das Kapital is a ground-breaking work of economic analysis.
But, argues Francis Wheen, it is also an unfinished literary masterpiece
which, with its multi-layered structure, can be read as a Gothic novel,
a Victorian melodrama, a Greek tragedy or a Swiftian satire
*Saturday July 8, 2006
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>*
In February 1867, shortly before delivering the first volume of Das
Kapital to the printers, Karl Marx urged Friedrich Engels to read The
Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac. The story was itself a little
masterpiece, he said, "full of the most delightful irony". We don't know
whether Engels heeded the advice. If he did, he would certainly have
spotted the irony but might have been surprised that his old friend
could take any delight in it. The Unknown Masterpiece is the tale of
Frenhofer, a great painter who spends 10 years working and reworking a
portrait which will revolutionise art by providing "the most complete
representation of reality". When at last his fellow artists Poussin and
Porbus are allowed to inspect the finished canvas, they are horrified to
see a blizzard of random forms and colours piled one upon another in
confusion. "Ah!" Frenhofer cries, misinterpreting their wide-eyed
amazement. "You did not anticipate such perfection!" But then he
overhears Poussin telling Porbus that eventually Frenhofer must discover
the truth - the portrait has been overpainted so many times that nothing
remains.
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"Nothing on my canvas!" exclaimed Frenhofer, glancing alternately at the
two painters and his picture.
"What have you done?" said Porbus in an undertone to Poussin.
The old man seized the young man's arm roughly, and said to him: "You
see nothing there, clown! varlet! miscreant! hound! Why, what brought
you here, then? - My good Porbus," he continued, turning to the older
painter, "can it be that you, you too, are mocking at me? Answer me! I
am your friend; tell me, have I spoiled my picture?"
Porbus hesitated, he dared not speak; but the anxiety depicted on the
old man's white face was so heart-rending that he pointed to the canvas
saying: "Look!"
Frenhofer gazed at his picture for a moment and staggered.
"Nothing! Nothing! And I have worked ten years!"
He fell upon a chair and wept.
After banishing the two men from his studio, Frenhofer burns all his
paintings and kills himself.
According to Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, Balzac's tale "made a
great impression on him because it was in part a description of his own
feelings". Marx had toiled for many years on his own unseen masterpiece,
and throughout this long gestation his customary reply to those who
asked for a glimpse of the work-in-progress was identical to that of
Frenhofer: "No, no! I have still to put some finishing touches to it.
Yesterday, towards evening, I thought that it was done . . . This
morning, by daylight, I realised my error."
As early as 1846, when the book was already overdue, Marx wrote to his
German publisher: "I shall not have it published without revising it yet
again, both as regards matter and style. It goes without saying that a
writer who works continuously cannot, at the end of six months, publish
word for word what he wrote six months earlier." Twelve years later,
still no nearer completion, he explained that "the thing is proceeding
very slowly because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of
subjects to which one has devoted years of study than they start
revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further". An
obsessive perfectionist, he was forever seeking out new hues for his
palette - studying mathematics, learning about the movement of celestial
spheres, teaching himself Russian so he could read books on the
country's land system.
Or, to quote Frenhofer again: "Alas! I thought for a moment that my work
was finished; but I have certainly gone wrong in some details, and my
mind will not be at rest until I have cleared away my doubts. I have
decided to travel, and visit Turkey, Greece and Asia in search of
models, in order to compare my picture with Nature in different forms."
Why did Marx recall Balzac's tale at the very moment when he was
preparing to unveil his greatest work to public scrutiny? Did he fear
that he too might have laboured in vain, that his "complete
representation of reality" would prove unintelligible? He certainly had
some such apprehensions - Marx's character was a curious hybrid of
ferocious self-confidence and anguished self-doubt - and he tried to
forestall criticism by warning in the preface that "I assume, of course,
a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think
for himself." But what ought to strike us most forcibly about his
identification with the creator of the unknown masterpiece is that
Frenhofer is an artist - not a political economist, nor yet a
philosopher or historian or polemicist.
The most "delightful irony" of all in The Unknown Masterpiece, noted by
the American writer Marshall Berman, is that Balzac's account of the
picture is a perfect description of a 20th-century abstract painting -
and the fact that he couldn't have known this deepens the resonance.
"The point is that where one age sees only chaos and incoherence, a
later or more modern age may discover meaning and beauty," Berman wrote.
"Thus the very open-endedness of Marx's later work can make contact with
our time in ways that more 'finished' 19th-century work cannot: Das
Kapital reaches beyond the well-made works of Marx's century into the
discontinuous modernism of our own."
Like Frenhofer, Marx was a modernist avant la lettre. His famous account
of dislocation in the Communist Manifesto - "all that is solid melts
into air" - prefigures the hollow men and the unreal city depicted by TS
Eliot, or Yeats's "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". By the
time he wrote Das Kapital, he was pushing out beyond conventional prose
into radical literary collage - juxtaposing voices and quotations from
mythology and literature, from factory inspectors' reports and fairy
tales, in the manner of Ezra Pound's Cantos or Eliot's The Waste Land.
Das Kapital is as discordant as Schoenberg, as nightmarish as Kafka.
Marx saw himself as a creative artist, a poet of dialectic. "Now,
regarding my work, I will tell you the plain truth about it," he wrote
to Engels in July 1865. "Whatever shortcomings they may have, the
advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole." It was to
poets and novelists, far more than to philosophers or political
essayists, that he looked for insights into people's material motives
and interests: in a letter of December 1868 he copied out a passage from
another work by Balzac, The Village Priest, and asked if Engels could
confirm the picture from his own knowledge of practical economics. Had
he wished to write a conventional economic treatise he would have done
so, but his ambition was far more audacious. Berman describes the author
of Das Kapital as "one of the great tormented giants of the 19th century
- alongside Beethoven, Goya, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Van
Gogh - who drive us crazy, as they drove themselves, but whose agony
generated so much of the spiritual capital on which we still live".
Yet how many people would think of including Marx in a list of great
writers and artists? Even in our postmodern era, the fractured narrative
and radical discontinuity of Das Kapital are mistaken by many readers
for formlessness and incomprehensibility. Anyone willing to grapple with
Beethoven, Goya or Tolstoy should be able to "learn something new" from
a reading of Das Kapital - not least because its subject still governs
our lives. As Berman asks: how can Das Kapital end while capital lives
on? It is fitting that Marx never finished his masterpiece. The first
volume was the only one to appear in his lifetime, and the subsequent
volumes were assembled by others after his death, based on notes and
drafts found in his study. Marx's work is as open-ended - and thus as
resilient - as the capitalist system itself.
Although Das Kapital is usually categorised as a work of economics, Marx
turned to the study of political economy only after many years of
spadework in philosophy and literature. It is these intellectual
foundations that underpin the project, and it is his personal experience
of alienation that gives such intensity to the analysis of an economic
system which estranges people from one another and from the world they
inhabit - a world in which humans are enslaved by the monstrous power of
capital and commodities.
Marx was an outsider from the moment of his birth, on May 5 1818 - a
Jewish boy in a predominantly Catholic city, Trier, within a Prussian
state whose official religion was evangelical Protestantism. Although
the Rhineland had been annexed by France during the Napoleonic wars,
three years before his birth it was reincorporated into Imperial Prussia
and the Jews of Trier became subject to an edict banning them from
practising in the professions: Karl's father, Heinrich Marx, had to
convert to Lutheranism in order to work as an attorney. His father
encouraged Karl to read voraciously. The boy's other intellectual mentor
was Heinrich's friend Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a cultured and
liberal government official who introduced Karl to poetry and music (and
to his daughter Jenny, the future Mrs Karl Marx). On long walks together
the Baron would recite passages from Homer and Shakespeare, which his
young companion learned by heart - and later used as the essential
seasonings in his own writings.
In adult life Marx re-enacted those happy hikes with von Westphalen by
declaiming scenes from Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe while leading his
own family up to Hampstead Heath for Sunday picnics. There was a
quotation for every occasion: to flatten a political enemy, enliven a
dry text, heighten a joke, authenticate an emotion - or breathe life
into an inanimate abstraction, as when capital itself speaks in the
voice of Shylock (in volume one of Das Kapital) to justify the
exploitation of child labour in factories:
Workmen and factory inspectors protested on hygienic and moral grounds,
but Capital answered:
My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,
The penalty and forfeit of my bond.
To prove that money is a radical leveller, Marx quotes a speech from
Timon of Athens on money as the "common whore of mankind", followed by
another from Sophocles's Antigone ("Money! Money's the curse of man,
none greater! / That's what wrecks cities, banishes men from home, /
Tempts and deludes the most well-meaning soul, / Pointing out the way to
infamy and shame . . ."). Economists with anachronistic models and
categories are likened to Don Quixote, who "paid the penalty for wrongly
imagining that knight-errantry was equally compatible with all economic
forms of society".
Marx's earliest ambitions were literary. As a law student at the
University of Berlin he wrote a book of poetry, a verse drama and even a
novel, Scorpion and Felix, influenced by Laurence Sterne's wildly
digressive novel Tristram Shandy. After these experiments, he admitted
defeat:
Suddenly, as if by a magic touch - oh, the touch was at first a
shattering blow - I caught sight of the distant realm of true poetry
like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing
. . . A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new
gods had to be installed.
Suffering some kind of breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to
retreat to the countryside for a long rest - whereupon he at last
succumbed to the siren voice of GWF Hegel, the recently deceased
professor of philosophy at Berlin, whose legacy was the subject of
intense dispute among fellow students and lecturers. At university, Marx
"adopted the habit of making extracts from all the books I read" - a
habit he never lost. A reading list from this period shows the
precocious scope of his intellectual explorations. While writing a paper
on the philosophy of law he made a detailed study of Winckelmann's
History of Art, started to teach himself English and Italian, translated
Tacitus's Germania and Aristotle's Rhetoric, read Francis Bacon and
"spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic
instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight". This is the same
eclectic, omnivorous and often tangential style of research which gave
Das Kapital its extraordinary breadth of reference.
As a student Marx was infatuated by Tristram Shandy, and 30 years later
he found a subject which allowed him to mimic the loose and disjointed
style pioneered by Sterne. Like Tristram Shandy, Das Kapital is full of
paradoxes and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and whimsical
tomfoolery, fractured narratives and curious oddities. How else could he
do justice to the mysterious and often topsy-turvy logic of capitalism?
"What does it matter to you what people whisper here?' Virgil asks Dante
in Canto 5 of the Purgatorio. "Follow me and let the people talk."
Lacking a Virgil to guide him, Marx amends the line in his preface for
the first volume of Das Kapital to warn that he will make no concession
to the prejudices of others: "Now, as ever, my maxim is that of the
great Florentine: Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti [Go your own
way, and let the people talk]." From the outset, then, the book is
conceived as a descent towards the nether regions, and even in the midst
of complex theoretical abstractions he conveys a vivid sense of place
and motion:
Let us, therefore, leave this noisy region of the market, where all that
goes on is done in full view of everyone's eyes, where everything seems
open and above board. We will follow the owner of the money and the
owner of labour-power into the hidden foci of production, crossing the
threshold of the portal above which is written, "No admittance except on
business". Here we shall discover, not only how capital produces, but
also how it is itself produced. We shall at last discover the secret of
making surplus value.
The literary antecedents for such a journey are often recalled as he
proceeds on his way. Describing English match factories, where half the
workers are juveniles (some as young as six) and conditions are so
appalling that "only the most miserable part of the working class,
half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it", he
writes:
With a working day ranging from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night labour,
irregular meal-times, and meals mostly taken in the workrooms
themselves, pestilent with phosphorus, Dante would have found the worst
horrors in his Inferno surpassed in this industry.
Other imagined hells provide further embellishment for his picture of
empirical reality:
From the motley crowd of workers of all callings, ages and sexes, who
throng around us more urgently than did the souls of the slain around
Ulysses, on whom we see at a glance the signs of overwork, without
referring to the Blue Books under their arms, let us select two more
figures, whose striking contrast proves that all men are alike in the
face of capital - a milliner and a blacksmith.
This is the cue for a story about Mary Anne Walkley, a 20-year-old who
died "from simple overwork" after labouring for more than 26 hours
making millinery for the guests at a ball given by the Princess of Wales
in 1863. Her employer ("a lady with the pleasant name of Elise", as Marx
notes caustically) was dismayed to find that she had died without
finishing the bit of finery she was stitching. There is a Dickensian
texture to much of Das Kapital, and Marx gives the occasional explicit
nod to an author he loved. Here, for example, is how he swats bourgeois
apologists who claim that his criticisms of particular applications of
technology reveal him as an enemy of social progress who doesn't want
machinery to be used at all:
This is exactly the reasoning of Bill Sikes, the celebrated cutthroat.
"Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveller
has been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the fault of the knife.
Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish the use of the
knife? Only consider! Where would agriculture and trade be without the
knife? Is it not as salutary in surgery as it is skilled in anatomy? And
a willing assistant at the festive table? If you abolish the knife - you
hurl us back into the depths of barbarism."
Bill Sikes makes no such speech in Oliver Twist: this is Marx's
satirical extrapolation. "They are my slaves," he would sometimes say,
gesturing at the books on his shelves, "and they must serve me as I
will." The task of this unpaid workforce was to provide raw materials
which could be shaped for his own purposes. "His conversation does not
run in one groove, but is as varied as are the volumes upon his library
shelves," wrote an interviewer from the Chicago Tribune who visited Marx
in 1878. In 1976 SS Prawer wrote a 450-page book devoted to Marx's
literary references. The first volume of Das Kapital yielded quotations
from the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Homer, Balzac,
Dante, Schiller, Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Defoe,
Cervantes, Dryden, Heine, Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, Thomas More, Samuel
Butler - as well as allusions to horror tales, English romantic novels,
popular ballads, songs and jingles, melodrama and farce, myths and proverbs.
What of Das Kapital's own literary status? Marx knew it could not be won
second-hand, by the mere display of other men's flowers. In volume one
he scorns those economists who "conceal under a parade of
literary-historical erudition, or by an admixture of extraneous
material, their feeling of scientific impotence and the eerie
consciousness of having to teach others what they themselves felt to be
a truly strange subject". A fear that he could himself have committed
this offence may explain the anguished admission, in the afterword to
its second edition, that "no one can feel the literary shortcomings of
Das Kapital more strongly than I". Even so, it is surprising that so few
people have even considered the book as literature. Das Kapital has
spawned countless texts analysing Marx's labour theory of value or his
law of the declining rate of profit, but only a handful of critics have
given serious attention to Marx's own declared ambition - in several
letters to Engels - to produce a work of art.
One deterrent, perhaps, is that the multilayered structure of Das
Kapital evades easy categorisation. The book can be read as a vast
Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they
created ("Capital which comes into the world soiled with gore from top
to toe and oozing blood from every pore"); or as a Victorian melodrama;
or as a black farce (in debunking the "phantom-like objectivity" of the
commodity to expose the difference between heroic appearance and
inglorious reality, Marx is using one of the classic methods of comedy,
stripping off the gallant knight's armour to reveal a tubby little man
in his underpants); or as a Greek tragedy ("Like Oedipus, the actors in
Marx's recounting of human history are in the grip of an inexorable
necessity which unfolds itself no matter what they do," C. Frankel
writes in Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought). Or perhaps it is a
satirical utopia like the land of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels,
where every prospect pleases and only man is vile: in Marx's version of
capitalist society, as in Jonathan Swift's equine pseudo-paradise, the
false Eden is created by reducing ordinary humans to the status of
impotent, alienated Yahoos.
To do justice to the deranged logic of capitalism, Marx's text is
saturated with irony - an irony which has yet escaped most scholars for
the past 140 years. One exception is the American critic Edmund Wilson,
who argued in To The Finland Station: a study in the writing and acting
of history (1940) that the value of Marx's abstractions - the dance of
commodities, the zany cross-stitch of value - is primarily an ironic
one, juxtaposed as they are with grim, well-documented scenes of the
misery and filth which capitalist laws create in practice. Wilson
regarded Das Kapital as a parody of classical economics. No one, he
thought, had ever had so deadly a psychological insight into the
infinite capacity of human nature for remaining oblivious or indifferent
to the pains we inflict on others when we have a chance to get something
out of them for ourselves. "In dealing with this theme, Karl Marx became
one of the great masters of satire. Marx is certainly the greatest
ironist since Swift, and has a good deal in common with him."
What, then, is the connection between Marx's ironic literary discourse
and his "metaphysical" account of bourgeois society? Had he wished to
produce a straightforward text of classical economics he could have done
so - and in fact he did. Two lectures delivered in June 1865, later
published as Value, Price and Profit, give a concise and lucid précis of
his theories about commodities and labour:
A man who produces an article for his own immediate use, to consume it
himself, creates a product but not a commodity . . . A commodity has a
value, because it is a crystallization of social labour . . . Price,
taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value . . .
What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring
power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist . . .
And so on.
Whatever its merits as an economic analysis, this can be understood by
any intelligent child: no elaborate metaphors or metaphysics, no
puzzling digressions or philosophical excursions, no literary
flourishes. So why is Das Kapital, which covers the same ground, so
utterly different in style? Did Marx suddenly lose the gift of plain
speaking? Manifestly not: at the time he gave these lectures he was also
completing the first volume of Das Kapital. A clue can be found in one
of the very few analogies he permitted himself in Value, Price and
Profit, when explaining his belief that profits arise from selling
commodities at their "real" value and not, as one might suppose, from
adding a surcharge. "This seems paradox and contrary to everyday
observation," he writes. "It is also paradox that the earth moves round
the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases.
Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience,
which catches only the delusive nature of things."
The function of metaphor is to make us look at something anew by
transferring its qualities to something else, turning the familiar into
the alien or vice versa. Ludovico Silva, a Mexican critic of Marx, has
drawn on the etymological meaning of "metaphor" as a transfer to argue
that capitalism itself is a metaphor, an alienating process which
displaces life from subject to object, from use-value to exchange-value,
from the human to the monstrous. In this reading, the literary style
Marx adopted in Das Kapital is not a colourful veneer applied to an
otherwise forbidding slab of economic exposition, like jam on thick
toast; it is the only appropriate language in which to express "the
delusive nature of things", an ontological enterprise which cannot be
confined within the borders and conventions of an existing genre such as
political economy, anthropological science or history. In short, Das
Kapital is entirely sui generis. There has been nothing remotely like it
before or since - which is probably why it has been so consistently
neglected or misconstrued. Marx was indeed one of the great tormented
giants.
*·*This an edited extract from Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography, part of
a series, Books that Shook the World, published this month by Atlantic
and to be serialised in Review in coming weeks.
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901
