There is a way in which intellectual formations and disciplinary standpoints not only matter but also provide helpful perspectives on Capital. I am, of course, against the sort of exclusionary readings around which students almost invariably organize their understandings, but I have learned over the years that disciplinary perspectives can be instructive. I have taught Capital nearly every year since 1971, sometimes twice or even three times in a single year, to groups of all kinds. One year it was with the whole philosophy department—somewhat Hegelian—of what was then called Morgan State College in Baltimore; another year it was all the graduate students in the English program at Johns Hopkins; another year it was mainly economists who showed up. What came to fascinate me was that each group saw different things in Capital. I found myself learning more and more about the text from working through it with people from different disciplines.
But sometimes I found that learning experience irritating, even painful, because a particular group would not see it my way or would insist on going off onto topics I thought irrelevant. One year I tried to read Capital with a group from the Romance-languages program at Johns Hopkins. To my intense frustration, we spent almost the whole semester on chapter 1. I’d keep saying, “Look, we have to move on and get at least as far as the politics of the working day,” and they’d say, “No, no, no, we’ve got to get this right. What is value? What does he mean by money as commodity? What is fetish about?” and so on. They even brought the German edition along just to check the translations. It turned out they were all working in the tradition of somebody I had never heard of, somebody who I thought must be a political if not intellectual idiot for sparking this kind of approach. That person was Jacques Derrida, who spent time at Hopkins during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Reflecting on this experience afterward, I realized this group had taught me the vital importance of paying careful attention to Marx’s language—what he says, how he says it and what, also, he takes for granted—just from going through chapter 1 with a fine-toothed comb.
But don’t worry: I don’t intend to do that in these readings because not only do I want to cover Marx’s discussion of the working day, I am determined to see you through to the end of the volume. My point is simply that different disciplinary perspectives can usefully open up the multiple dimensions of Marx’s thought, precisely because he wrote this text out of such an incredibly diverse and rich tradition of critical thinking. I am indebted to the many individuals and groups with whom I have read this book over these many years, precisely because they have taught me so much about aspects of Marx’s work that I would never have recognized on my own. For me, that education is never-ending.
Now, there are three major intellectual and political traditions that inspire the analysis laid out in Capital, and they are all propelled by Marx’s deep commitment to critical theory, to a critical analysis. When he was relatively young, he wrote a little piece to one of his editorial colleagues, the title of which was “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything That Exists.” Clearly, he was being modest—and I do suggest that you actually go read it, because it is fascinating. He doesn’t say, “Everybody is stupid and I, the great Marx, am going to criticize everybody out of existence.” Instead, he argues that there have been a lot of serious people who have thought about the world hard, and they have seen certain things about the world that have to be respected, no matter how one-sided or warped. The critical method takes what others have said and seen and works on it so as to transform thought—and the world it describes—into something new. For Marx, new knowledge arises out of taking radically different conceptual blocs, rubbing them together and making revolutionary fire. This is in effect what he does in Capital: he brings together divergent intellectual traditions to create a completely new and revolutionary framework for knowledge.
The three grand conceptual frameworks that converge in Capital are these: first, classical political economy—seventeenth- to mid-nineteenth-century political economy. This is mainly British, though not solely so, and it runs from William Petty, Locke, Hobbes and Hume to the grand trio of Adam Smith, Malthus and Ricardo, as well as to a host of others, like James Steuart. There was also a French tradition of political economy (Physiocrats like Quesnay and Turgot and later on Sismondi and Say) as well as individual Italians and Americans (like Carey) who provide Marx with additional critical materials. Marx subjected all these people to a deep criticism in the three volumes of notes now called Theories of Surplus Value. He didn’t have a photocopying machine and he didn’t have the Web, so he laboriously copied out long passages from Smith and then wrote a commentary on them, long passages from Steuart and a commentary on them, and so on. In effect he was practicing what we now call deconstruction, and I learned from Marx how to deconstruct arguments in this way. When he takes on Adam Smith, for example, Marx accepts much of what Smith says but then searches for the gaps or contradictions which, when rectified, radically transform the argument. This kind of argumentation appears throughout Capital because, as its subtitle indicates, it is shaped around “a critique of political economy.”
The second conceptual building block in Marx’s theorizing is philosophical reflection and inquiry, which for Marx originates with the Greeks. Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus, and he was familiar with Greek thought. Aristotle, as you will see, provides a frequent anchor for his arguments. Marx was also thoroughly trained in the way in which Greek thought came into the mainly German philosophical critical tradition—Spinoza, Leibniz and, of course, Hegel, as well as Kant and many others. Marx puts this mainly German critical philosophical tradition into a relationship with the British and French political-economic tradition, though, again, it would be wrong simply to see this in terms of national traditions (Hume was, after all, as much a philosopher—albeit an empiricist—as he was a political economist, and Descartes’ and Rousseau’s influence on Marx was also substantial). But the mainly German critical philosophical tradition weighed heavily on Marx because that was his initial training. And the critical climate generated by what later came to be known as the “young Hegelians” in the 1830s and 1840s influenced him greatly.
The third tradition to which Marx appeals is that of utopian socialism. In Marx’s time, this was primarily French, although it was an Englishman, Thomas More, who is generally credited with originating the modern tradition—though it, too, goes back to the Greeks—and another Englishman, Robert Owen, who not only wrote copious utopian tracts but actually sought to put many of his ideas into practice in Marx’s lifetime. But in France there was a tremendous burst of utopian thinking in the 1830s and 1840s, inspired largely by the earlier writings of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Babeuf. There were, for example, people like Etienne Cabet, who created a group called the Icarians, which settled in the United States after 1848; Proudhon and the Proudhonists; August Blanqui (who coined the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat”) and many like him who adhered to a Jacobin tradition (such as that