Karl Marx (38 page)

Now it is true that the tailoring
which makes the coat is concrete labour of a different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating tailoring with weaving reduces the former in fact to what is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to the characteristic they have in common of being human labour … Yet the coat itself, the physical aspect of the coat-commodity, is purely a use-value. A coat as such no more expresses value than does the first piece of linen we come across. This proves only that, within its value relation to the linen, the coat signifies more than it does outside it, just as some men count for more when inside a gold-braided uniform than they do otherwise.

The ludicrous simile ought to forewarn us that we are in fact reading a shaggy-dog story. This becomes more and more evident as Marx goes on:

Despite its buttoned-up appearance, the linen recognises in it [the coat] a splendid kindred soul, the soul of value. Nevertheless, the coat cannot represent value towards the linen unless value, for the latter, simultaneously assumes the form of a coat. An individual, A, for instance, cannot be ‘your majesty’ to another individual, B, unless majesty in B’s eyes assumes the physical shape of A, and, moreover, changes facial features, hair and many other things, with every new ‘father of his people’ … As a use-value, the linen is something palpably different from the coat; as value, it is identical with the coat, and therefore looks like the coat.

Then, just as the reader’s head is beginning to spin uncontrollably, Marx delivers the punch-line:

Thus the linen acquires a value-form different from its natural form. Its existence as value is manifested in its equality with the coat, just as the sheep-like nature of the Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.

Short of printing the page upside-down in green ink, Marx could hardly give a clearer signal that we have embarked on a picaresque odyssey through the realms of higher nonsense. One is reminded of the last lines from his beloved
Tristram Shandy
:

—
L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about?

—A
Cock
and a
Bull
, said Yorick;—and one of the best of its kind I ever heard.

In his first youthful infatuation with Laurence Sterne, Marx tried writing a comic shaggy-dog novel of his own. Nearly thirty years
on, he at last found a subject and a style. Sterne, according to his biographer Thomas Yoseloff, ‘
broke with the tradition of contemporary writing
: his novel was no more a novel than it was an essay, or a book of philosophy, or a memoir, or a local satire after the manner of the pamphleteers. He wrote as he talked as he thought; his book was loose and disjointed in structure, full of curious and difficult oddities …’ Much the same could be said of Marx and his epic. Like
Tristram Shandy, Capital
is full of systems and syllogisms, paradoxes and metaphysics, theories and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and whimsical tomfoolery. One of the running gags concerns a slightly dim embryonic capitalist, Mr Moneybags. ‘In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend Moneybags must be so lucky as to find, within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value … and consequently a creation of value.’ Lucky old Moneybags finds just such a commodity in labour power, which has the unique ability to multiply its own value.

To do justice to the deranged logic of capitalism, Marx’s text is saturated, sometimes even waterlogged, with irony – an irony which has yet escaped almost every reader for more than a century. One of the very few exceptions is the American literary critic Edmund Wilson, who hailed Marx as ‘certainly the greatest ironist since Swift’. This is such an extravagant tribute that supporting evidence may be required; so let us quote a passage from
Theories of Surplus Value
, the so-called fourth volume of
Capital
:

A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems
, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only
crime but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures on to the general market as ‘commodities’ … The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice, constables, judges, hangmen, juries, etc; and all these different lines of business, which form just as many categories of the social division of labour, develop different capacities of the human mind, create new needs and new ways of satisfying them. Torture alone has given rise to the most ingenious mechnical inventions, and employed many honourable craftsmen in the production of its instruments. The criminal produces an impression, partly moral and partly tragic, as the case may be, and in this way renders a ‘service’ by arousing the moral and aesthetic feelings of the public. He produces not only compendia on Criminal Law, not only penal codes and along with them legislators in this field, but also art, belles-lettres, novels, and even tragedies, as not only Müllner’s
Schuld
and Schiller’s
Räuber
show, but
Oedipus
and
Richard the Third
… The effects of the criminal on the development of productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks ever have reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves? Would the making of banknotes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers? … And if one leaves the sphere of private crime, would the world market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would even the nations have arisen? And has not the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?

This stands comparison with Swift’s modest proposal for curing the misery of Ireland by persuading the starving poor to eat their surplus babies. (It may be worth recording, parenthetically, that in 1870 Marx bought a fourteen-volume edition of Swift’s collected works for the bargain price of four shillings and sixpence.) As
Wilson rightly observes, the purpose of Marx’s theoretical abstractions – the dance of commodities, the zany cross-stitch of logic – is primarily an ironic one, juxtaposed as they are with grim, well-documented portraits of the misery and filth which capitalist laws create in practice. ‘
The meaning of the impersonal-looking formulas
which Marx produces with so scientific an air is, he reminds us from time to time as if casually, pennies withheld from the worker’s pocket, sweat squeezed out of his body, and natural enjoyments denied his soul,’ Wilson continues. ‘In competing with the pundits of economics, Marx has written something of a parody …’

Ultimately, however, even Edmund Wilson loses the plot: only a few pages after elevating Marx to the pantheon of satirical genius alongside Swift, he protests at ‘the crudity of the psychological motivation which underlies the world view of Marx’ and complains that the theory propounded in
Capital
is ‘simply, like the dialectic, a creation of the metaphysician who never abdicated before the economist in Marx’. This gripe doesn’t even have the merit of originality. Some German reviewers of the first edition accused Marx of ‘Hegelian sophistry’, a charge to which he happily pleaded guilty. As he reminded them in an afterword to the second German edition, published in 1873, he had criticised the ‘mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic’ nearly thirty years earlier, when it was still the fashion. ‘But just when I was working at the first volume of
Capital
, the ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel … as a “dead dog”. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him.’

These dialectical flirtations which so offended Edmund Wilson are all of a piece with the irony he praised so highly: both techniques up-end apparent reality to expose the hidden truth. ‘The mealy-mouthed babblers of German vulgar economics grumbled about the style of my book,’ Marx wrote in 1873. ‘No
one can feel the literary shortcomings of
Capital
more strongly than I myself.’ But critics elsewhere, even when hostile to the theories, acknowledged its stylistic merits. The
Saturday Review
, a London magazine, commented that ‘
the author’s views may be as pernicious as we conceive them to be,
but there can be no question as to the plausibility of his logic, the vigour of his rhetoric, and the charm with which he invests the driest problems of political economy’. The
Contemporary Review
, while patriotically scornful of German economics (‘
we do not suspect that Karl Marx has much to teach us
’), complimented the author on not forgetting ‘the human interest – the “hunger and thirst interest” which underlies the science’. Marx was particularly gratified by a notice in the
St Petersburg Journal
which praised the ‘unusual liveliness’ of his prose. ‘In this respect,’ it added, ‘the author in no way resembles … the majority of German scholars, who … write their books in a language so dry and obscure that the heads of ordinary mortals are cracked by it.’

In spite of its lively charms the first volume of
Capital
was still too forbidding for the heads of many ordinary mortals, whose task was made all the harder by Marx’s decision to place the most impenetrable chapters at the front of the book. ‘Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences,’ he explained in the preface. ‘The understanding of the first chapter, especially the section that contains the analysis of commodities, will therefore present the greatest difficulty. I have popularised the passages concerning the substance of value and the magnitude of value as much as possible.’ The value-form, he reassured readers, was really simplicity itself: ‘Nevertheless, the human mind has laboured for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom of it … With the exception of the section on the form of value, therefore, this volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. I assume, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.’

A rather ambitious assumption, as it turned out. While the book was being typeset Engels had advised him that it was ‘a
serious mistake’ not to clarify the abstract arguments by splitting them up into shorter sections with their own headings. ‘
The thing would have looked somewhat like a school textbook
, but a very large class of readers would have found it considerably easier to understand. The
populus
, even the scholars, just are no longer at all accustomed to this way of thinking, and one has to make it as easy for them as one possibly can.’ Marx made a few changes on his proof-sheets, but they were mere tinkerings at the margin. ‘
How could you leave the
outward
structure
of the book in its present form!’ Engels asked in some exasperation after inspecting the final set of proofs. ‘The fourth chapter is almost 200 pages long and only has four sub-sections … Furthermore, the train of thought is constantly interrupted by illustrations, and the point to be illustrated is
never
summarised after the illustration, so that one is forever plunging straight from the illustration of
one
point into the exposition of another point. It is dreadfully tiring, and confusing, too.’ However, he added lamely, ‘all that is of no import’.

Even some of Marx’s most adoring disciples found their eyes glazing over as they tried to make sense of the obscure early chapters. ‘
Please be so good as to tell your good wife
,’ he wrote to Ludwig Kugelmann, ‘that the chapters on “The Working Day”, “Co-operation, Division of Labour and Machinery” and finally on “Primitive Accumulation” are the most immediately readable. You will have to explain any incomprehensible terminology to her. If there are any other doubtful points, I shall be glad to help.’ When the great English socialist William Morris read
Capital
, years later, he ‘suffered agonies of confusion of the brain … Anyhow, I read what I could, and will hope that some information stuck to me from my reading.’ Sheer incomprehension, rather than political prejudice, may explain the muted reaction to
Capital
when it was published. ‘The silence about my book makes me fidgety,’ Marx wrote to Engels in October, revealing that insomnia had begun to persecute him again. ‘
My sickness always originates in the mind.
’ Engels did his best to stir up a commotion by
submitting hostile pseudonymous reviews to the bourgeois press in Germany, and urged Marx’s other friends to do likewise. ‘
The main thing is that the book should be discussed
over and over again, in any way whatsoever,’ he told Kugelmann. ‘And as Marx is not a free agent in the matter, and is furthermore as bashful as a young girl, it is up to the rest of us to see to it … In the words of our old friend Jesus Christ, we must be as innocent as doves and wise as serpents.’ Dr Kugelmann did his eager best, placing articles in one or two of the Hanover newspapers, but they were of little assistance since he barely understood the book himself. ‘Kugelmann becomes more simple-minded every day,’ Engels complained. Jenny Marx was rather more gracious: the Hanoverian acolyte might be a clodhopping dunce but at least he meant well. Depressed by the universal indifference to her husband’s
magnum opus
, and alarmed by his worsening health, she was grateful for any gesture of support. ‘
There can be few books that have been written in more difficult circumstances
,’ she said, ‘and I am sure I could write a secret history of it which would tell of many, extremely many unspoken troubles and anxieties and torments. If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes, to be completed they would perhaps show a little more interest.’