Reading Capital (notes #1-Beginning with the commodity)

The opening line of Capital begins like an axiomatic that will subsequently orientate the work, stating the relationship between wealth in capitalist societies and the role of the commodity.  Wealth appears in the form of the commodity within capitalism, more specifically with the ‘collection of commodities’.  From this starting point the individual commodity is taken to be the basic ‘elementary form’ that will be the starting point for Marx’s investigation into capitalism.  The first thing to note is the choice of elementary form.  Marx does not begin with money, or labour, or scarcity – this last one being the most common starting point for economists.  Instead we begin with Marx with the commodity.  Whilst this might seem rather mundane the implications are touched on immediately when the commodity is understood by Marx to be the means by which human needs are satisfied.  Talk of ‘needs’ however, might seem to suggest something of the ‘scarcity’ emphasis, it might suggest that they are natural or set in stone for example.  If human needs were some basic fact of our existence then the satisfaction of those needs by something we call a commodity wouldn’t really be much to worry about.  The problem is that the needs that the commodity can satisfy are unbounded.

In the second paragraph (C:125) Marx refers to ‘needs of whatever kind’ and goes on to say that ‘the nature of these needs, whether they arise … from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference’ (emphasis added).  In this simple moment the imagination is brought into the system of capitalism, with all its wildness and desire.  If we speculate here then it might be possible to push this idea into some curious territory.  The commodity satisfies needs, any need of the imagination.  Why not say, to put it another way, anything you can imagine is capable of being satisfied within capitalism through the commodity?  If that were the case then to imagine a needed future is to follow a logic where this imagination can be satisfied with a commodity.  Imagine an needed alternative, a needed transgression, a needed rebellion – to the extent there is a need attached to the imagined thing, then capitalism will have the potential to satisfy that need with a simple, elementary commodity or collection of commodities.  This strikes me as close to the concept of recuperation that the situationists develop, in which rebellion itself becomes transformed from an act of resistance to one of consumption – people ‘need’ to resist, to embody their imagined utopian world, so they ‘buy’ the commodity of rebellion, be it in the form of Che Guevara t-shirts and posters or left groups and programmes.  Recuperation is the process of normalisation, a process of regaining normality that occurs when faced with an illness, or a rebellion.  It’s fine to rebel, totally cool to revolt, more than chic to protest.  Indeed the almost classic moment of recuperation occurs in 2003 when George W.Bush applauds the anti-war protestors for their democractic expression of their views; the protests are recuperated, revolution is televised, revolt is normalised.  The dynamic of the commodity is universalistic, it tries to swallow up every bitter pill that arises.

Putting aside the problem of recuperation, the satisfaction of imaginary needs by the commodity, the next move in Marx’s analysis is to address the way in which the commodity satisfies needs through having a use.  The property of a thing that satisfies a need is a use-value.  The use-value is a way of referring to the ‘usefulness’ of a thing.  A pint of water has a degree of usefulness, as does ‘iron, corn, a diamond’.  This usefulness is ‘conditioned by the physical’. So for the diamond to have the usefulness of cutting glass it needs to have the specific physical properties of highly organised carbon that it has.  Of course we don;t know what use-values something has until it is used and what something is or can be used for changes and is partially ‘natural’ or basic and partially constructed historically and socially.  Sand, for example, has a usefulness in glass-making only once the properties of glass have been discovered and a method of production invented. Marx then says that use-values ‘constitute the material form of wealth, whatever its social form may be’ (C: 126).  Here some curious facts might emerge.  Wealth in a digital age (social form) still needs some material form, in this case the various networks and machines which record and account the figures.  If you wanted to disrupt the capitalist mode of production by directly attacking the wealth it holds then attack the material form in which the social form is constituted.  Switch off the electricity.    Capitalism, at least the big guns of finance capitalism, is susceptible to EMP bombs.  That seems to be a rational conclusion if Marx is right on this point about the material form.

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C = Capital Vol 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin 1979