This Fall, Dukes’ Book Club @ DCLI continues with Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Knopf, NY: 2023).
It builds on the success of Dukes’ Book Club with Steve Luxenberg’s Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson (Fall 2021- Spring 2022).
Before joining the Dukes, Dana worked at Barnard College and Columbia Law School. There she had two book clubs (see below: Richard Lazarus, The Rule of Five (2019) and Karl Marx, The Capital (vol. 1) (1867)). She brought her reading habit along, and the DCLI Book Club has its own blog — https://duqlawblogs.org/duqlawbookclub/
Barnard Book Club – Spring &Summer 2021 (Open to CU, UB, and any interested student of Marx)
Environmental Science Department
Book Club – Marx, Capital . Vol. 1
| Chpt | Dana’s questions | Participants’ Questions |
| 1 | Ch1. Sect.1. Can wealth be described in any other way than accumulation of commodities?Do you think we can have wants satisfied otherwise than as means of subsistence or means of production?Let’s talk about use-value and exchange value.Does use-value become a reality only by use or consumption? “use -values become a reality only by use or consumption:they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth.”Commodities are the “material depositories of exchange-value” as a quantitative relation.Let’s consider exchange value as human labor in the abstract; as use-values commodities are different qualities; as exchange-value merely different in quantity; not an atom of use-value;Exchange value=Congelation of human labor measured by duration;Problematic or not?: the value of a commodity remains constant if the amount of congealed work is the same;Nothing can have value without being an object of utility (for others)Ch.1Sect.2Is division of labor still necessary for the production of commodities (different labor; different use-value; coat; linen; you can’t exchange coat for a coat)Use-values cannot be exchanged unless they contain different useful labor embodied in them. Is that true? Two coats looking identical but with different labels have different use-value and exchange value;Let’s consider product activity as the expenditure of human laborThe value of labor; skilled and simple labor – problematic – there is no connection anymore – therefore the reward of CEOs and manual workers is out of sink;“Since the magnitude of the value of a commodity represents only the quantity of labor embodied in it, it follows that all commodities, when taken in certain propositions, must be equal in value.Worth thinking about : “an increase in the quantity of use-values is an increase of material wealth. With 2 coats 2 men can be clothed, with 1 coat one man. Nevertheless, an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value.” How can you prevent the fall in value while increasing the material wealth (or the production of coats)?Sect.3Commodities have utility and exchange value.Exchange value is relational to something else; another exchange value (qualitatively different or money)Human labor creates value but it is not a value; only when it becomes congealed in use-value items, it has value.The relational value needs a constant = moneyNonsense or deep observation? It is not the exchange of commodities that regulates their magnitude of their value but it is the magnitude of their value that controls their exchangeMoney – utility universal value equivalent; exchangeable in itself for itselfNOTHING yet on how the exchange is established – 1 coat for $Sect. 4P. 59. Interesting nature of comedies; they develop a relationship with each other although they are human products. TRUE or FALSE for fashion ?Bourgeois economy- commodity economyFallacy – ignore the time Robinson Crusoe spent praying because it was recreational – can people create value while enjoying their recreational work? Personal dependance characterizes the social relations of production in feudalismThe social relations between individuals in the performance of their labor appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations and are not disguised as social relations between products of labor |
| Ch 25 | ContentsSection 1 – The Increased Demand for labour power that Accompanies Accumulation, the Composition of Capital Remaining the sameMarx examines the extra demand for labour caused by accumulation of capital, and this is related to changes in the composition of capital (Marx 1990: 762).Marx now defines two concepts as follows:(1) the value composition of capital which is the ratio of the constant to variable capital c/v expressed in values , and(2) the technical composition of capital Marx describes the distinction between these two concepts as follows:“The composition of capital is to be understood in a twofold sense. On the side of value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital or value of the means of production, and variable capital or value of labour-power, the sum total of wages. On the side of material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power. This latter composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed, on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other. I call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical composition of capital. Between the two there is a strict correlation. To express this, I call the value-composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes of the latter, the organic composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of capital, without further qualification, its organic composition is always understood.The many individual capitals invested in a particular branch of production have, one with another, more or less different compositions. The average of their individual compositions gives us the composition of the total capital in this branch of production. Lastly, the average of these averages, in all branches of production, gives us the composition of the total social capital of a country, and with this alone are we, in the last resort, concerned in the following investigation.” (Marx 1906: 671–672).We cannot, however, measure the technical composition of capital in homogenous quantitative units because the means of production and labour are heterogeneous elements.For Marx the organic composition of capital is the value composition of capital “in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes of the latter” (Marx 1906: 671). So the organic composition of capital is the value composition but considered only when v and c change owing to physical productivity changes (Harvey 2010: 264).So the simple value composition of capital can change owing to factors other physical changes in productivity (Harvey 2010: 264).The average composition of capital is the average throughout the whole economy or total social capital of a country.When accumulation of capital occurs with added demand for labour-power given a constant composition of capital, real wages can rise.Marx concludes the section by making clear that the very “law of capitalist production” is to set limits to the rising real wage since capitalism requires unpaid labour time:“The law of capitalist production, that is at the bottom of the pretended ‘natural law of population,’ reduces itself simply to this: The correlation between accumulation of capital and rate of wages is nothing else than the correlation between the unpaid labour transformed into capital, and the additional paid labour necessary for the setting in motion of this additional capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two magnitudes, independent one of the other: on the one hand, the magnitude of the capital; on the other, the number of the labouring population; it is rather, at bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of the same labouring population. If the quantity of unpaid labour supplied by the working-class, and accumulated by the capitalist class, increases so rapidly that its conversion into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labour, then wages rise, and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labour diminishes in proportion. But as soon as this diminution touches the point at which the surplus-labour that nourishes capital is no longer supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue is capitalised, accumulation lags, and the movement of rise in wages receives a check. The rise of wages therefore is confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalistic system, but also secure its reproduction on a progressive scale. The law of capitalistic accumulation, metamorphosed by economists into a pretended law of nature, in reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction; on an ever enlarging scale, of the capitalistic relation.” (Marx 1906: 680).Fundamentally, all Marx’s remarks here on rising wages must be qualified by the understanding that he is talking about conditions in which there is a given a constant composition of capital. Marx now turns to conditions where productivity increases and there is a changing organic composition of capital.Section 2 – Relative Diminution of the Variable Part of Capital Simultaneously with the Progress of Accumulation and of the capitalism also involves centralization:“Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means of production, with a corresponding command over a larger or smaller labour-army. Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation. With the increasing mass of wealth which functions as capital, accumulation increases the concentration of that wealth in the hands of individual capitalists, and thereby widens the basis of production on a large scale and of the specific methods of capitalist production. The growth of social capital is effected by the growth of many individual capitals. All other circumstances remaining the same, individual capitals, and with them the concentration of the means of production, increases in such proportion as they form aliquot parts of the total social capital. At the same time portions of the original capitals disengage themselves and function as new independent capitals. Besides other causes, the division of property, within capitalist families, plays a great part in this. With the accumulation of capital, therefore, the number of capitalists grows to a greater or less extent. Two points characterise this kind of concentration which grows directly out of, or rather is identical with, accumulation. First: The increasing concentration of the social means of production in the hands of individual capitalists is, other things remaining equal, limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Second: The part of social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production is divided among many capitalists who face one another as independent commodity-producers competing with each other. Accumulation and the concentration accompanying it are, therefore, not only scattered over many points, but the increase of each functioning capital is thwarted by the formation of new and the subdivision of old capitals. Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as increasing concentration of the means of production, and of the command over labour; on the other, as repulsion of many individual capitals one from another.This splitting-up of the total social capital into many individual capitals or the repulsion of its fractions one from another, is counteracted by their attraction. This last does not mean that simple concentration of the means of production and of the command over labour, which is identical with accumulation. It is concentration of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals. This process differs from the former in this, that it only presupposes a change in the distribution of capital already to hand, and functioning; its field of action is therefore not limited by the absolute growth of social wealth, by the absolute limits of accumulation. Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand, because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centraliszation proper, as distinct from accumulation and concentration.” (Marx 1906: 685–686).There is a three-fold process at work in capitalism: (1) accumulation, (2) concentration (accumulation over time) and (3) centralization of capital.Marx notes that a major effect of competition is the falling prices of commodities:“The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hand of their conquerors, partly vanish.” (Marx 1906: 686–687).Marx is essentially referring here to what we would now call increasing returns to scale and falling average unit costs of large enterprises designed to have excess capacity utilisation.But there is an important related point which Marx neglects: as the prices of commodities fall, so too would the prices of means of production (constant capital, whether fixed or circulating capital).Section 3 – Progressive Production of a Relative surplus population or Industrial Reserve ArmyAccumulation and concentration of capital induce more use of constant capital and reduce variable capital:“The accumulation of capital, though originally appearing as its quantitative extension only, is effected, as we have seen, under a progressive qualitative change in its composition, under a constant increase of its constant, at the expense of its variable constituent.The specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the productive power of labour corresponding to it, and the change thence resulting in the organic composition of capital, do not merely keep pace with the advance of accumulation, or with the growth of social wealth. They develop at a much quicker rate, because mere accumulation, the absolute increase of the total social capital, is accompanied by the centralization of the individual capitals of which that total is made up; and because the change in the technological composition of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change in the technological composition of the original capital. With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. …Since the demand for labour is determined not by the amount of capital as a whole, but by its variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the increase of the total capital, instead of, as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. It falls relatively to the magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases. With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or the labour incorporated in it, also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion. The intermediate pauses are shortened, in which accumulation works as simple extension of production, on a given technical basis. It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of labourers, or even, on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already functioning. In its turn, this increasing accumulation and centralisation becomes a source of new changes in the composition of capital, of a more accelerated diminution of its variable, as compared with its constant constituent. This accelerated relative diminution of the variable constituent, that goes along with the accelerated increase of the total capital, and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase of the labouring population, an increase always moving more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of employment. But in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population.” The industrial reserve army is a necessary consequence and necessary condition of capitalism:“But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation. With accumulation, and the development of the productiveness of labour that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows also; it grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already functioning increases, not merely because the absolute wealth of society expands, of which capital only forms an elastic part, not merely because credit, under every special stimulus, at once places an unusual part of this wealth at the disposal of production in the form of additional capital; it grows, also, because the technical .conditions of the process of production themselves—machinery, means of transport, &c.—now admit of the rapidest transformation of masses of surplus product into additional means of production. The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c, the need for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. Over-population supplies these masses.In a crucial passage, Marx now states that the industrial reserve army is what governs the movement of wages:“Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and these again correspond to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. They are, therefore, not determined by the variations of the absolute number of the working population, but by the varying proportions in which the working class is divided into active and reserve army, by the increase of diminution in the relative amount of the surplus-population, by the extent to which it is now absorbed, now set free. FSection 4 – Different Forms of the Relative surplus population. The General Law of Capitalistic AccumulationIn this section, Marx distinguishes four subdivisions in the industrial reserve army as follows:(1) the urban floating surplus-population;(2) the latent surplus-population (rural reserve army);(3) the stagnant reserve army, and(4) paupers living in poverty.Marx sees an absolute general law of capitalist accumulation:“The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve-army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develops also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve-army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve-army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazurus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve-army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.” (Marx 1906: 707).So for Marx the more productive and wealthy a capitalist society is, the “greater is the industrial reserve-army.” This is another dogmatic communist myth that has been disproven by the history of the past 150 years, for there is considerable evidence that unemployment on average was much higher in the 19th century than in more developed and wealthier 20th century capitalist economies.Section 5 – Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist AccumulationA. England from 1846-1866B. The Badly Paid Strata of the British Industrial ClassC. The Nomad PopulationD. Effect of Crises on the Best Paid Part of the working classE. The British Agricultural ProletariatF. Ireland |
| Part VII- ch 26 | We have seen how money is changed into capital; how through capital surplus-value is made, and from surplus-value more capital. But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of labour power in the hands of producers of commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith) preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point.This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology.In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. With this polarization of the market for commodities, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are given. The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it.CommentaryWhat makes capitalism a new kind of society has been the creation of two new classes: a capitalist one made up of those who seek to organize most people’s lives around the work of producing commodities and another, a class of workers, made up of those whose lives are subordinated to that organization. The secret of this creation—hidden by pro-capitalist political apologists in the telling of history—is that the emerging class of capitalists imposed this social order with brutality and violence, forcibly serparating people from their means of livelihood and destroying their ways of life. Those means included: privately owned tools, formal and informal land tenure and commons, such as pastures, fishing waters, forests and often language and culture to which everyone in a community had acess. Although this forcible separation created a situation where the reality (and threat) of destitution and starvation would largely replace the lash as a coercive instrument of control, violence continued to provide capitalists with a supplementary weapon for keeping people subordinated, right down to the present. This is true whether the violence has been wielded by corporate goons, paramilitary thugs or by government police and military.Marx both critiques political economy by showing it to be at once apologetic and false and gives an overview of the actual processes through which capitalism emerged as a new kind of social order—an outline of the history he examines more thoroughly in the subsequent chapters.(3)His analysis temporarily ignores the central subjects of political economy —the interactions of “money and commodities”—to focus on the social social conflicts that shaped the new world in which those things came to figure so centrally. The violence that capitalists required to impose their order reveals the depth of resistance. The agents of this new order, the “knights of industry”, exploited every opportunity to achieve power, to subordinate the exploited classes of the old order in a new way and to usurp the power of the feudal lords, the “knights of the sword.” Here the nascent capitalist class is portrayed as using “base” means, of “making use of events in which they played no part whatsoever” and of using various “revolutions”as “levers.”The Myths of Political EconomyMyths about the class structure of capitalism have served to justify its historical origins and on-going class disparities. The central myth, still promulgated today, is a morality tale that portrays capitalists as obtaining their wealth by frugally saving and investing. It suggests that everyone has always been able to become a capitalist by the same means, and those who do not, have no one to blame but themselves.In 19th Century English literature, this myth was already the object of ridicule far more ascerbic than that of Marx’s. For example, in Charles Dickens’s (1812–70) 1854 novel Hard Times, which narrates the lives and tragedies of several people in a fictional Manchester-style, manufacturing city called Coketown, we find many passages where various persons are repeating this myth. Examples include the self-praising speeches of Mr. Josiah Bounderby—the novel’s central capitalist—constantly bragging (falsely it turns out) about how he raised himself out of the mud to his present august position as mill owner and banker. (4) More concise, however, is a pretty exchange between Bounderby’s ex-housekeeper Mrs. Sparsit and Bitzer, his light porter, general spy and informer at the bank, in which the repetition of the myth reveals both a distain for those irrational creatures (the workers) who put human relationships before personal profit and a self-delusion about the origins of wealth. Both, of course, are merely repeating the self-justifying truisms of Bounderby in an almost ritual, and mutually reinforcing, manner. (5) The effect is both comic and appalling.Extensions: Capitalism Can Not Eliminate the AlternativesAs he argues here, and again in Chapter 25 on accumulation, capitalist development never means giving everyone a living wage in exchange for work. On the contrary, many, perhaps most (on a world scale) of those whose previous ways of life are progressively destroyed are doomed to remain unwaged and poor.This is one reason why so many people have resisted and fought to preserve their independence as communities and their uniqueness as cultures. In the United States, as in other so-called developed capitalist countries, most people have lost that struggle and been swept into the world of factories, offices, ghettos and suburbs. Some have preserved unique cultural attributes by forming rural or urban communities. We have the Amish in the countryside, Native Americans on reservations, and ethnic communities in cities. Others, from time to time, have broken away to form intentional communities that escape, to some degree, subordination to wage labor. But most people have been integrated into the waged/unwaged hierarchies of capitalist society. In the Global South, where factories have been fewer and capitalist development has concentrated its poverty, a higher percentage of people have had better luck in preserving some land, some control over their means of production and more of their traditional culture. They are not outside of capitalism, they too are exploited, as we will see, in a variety of ways, yet they still have some space that supports their ongoing struggle for autonomy. In Capital, Marx does not talk much about these situations because his historical examples are mostly drawn from the British Isles where very little of pre-capitalist social forms and culture survived.(13)One place where access to land and community cohesion have made possible resistance to total subsumption to capitalism and a certain degree of autonomy is Mexico. In the early 1990s, in the run-up to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Mexican government pushed through a consitutional amendment aimed at undercutting one of the few fruits of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) won by peasants and the indigenous: the collective ownership of land in the form of ejidos where the land belonged to communities and not to individuals and could not be bought and sold. While not organized like the Russian mir, the ejidos nevertheless provided the material foundations for peasant, especially indigneous, communities to survive and preserve elements of their languages, music, dress and self-organization quite different from the institutions of the centralized Mexican state. Thus, they have formed unwanted rigidities to Mexican and American business with an interest in expanding their investments and tapping more people as cheap labor.While the amendment of the Mexican constitution pleased business, indigenous communities saw it as a death knell foretelling widespread ethnic genocide. As a result in the southern state of Chiapas the indigenous members of many communities united to form, equip and launch a rebellion against such a destiny. These are the Zapatistas, self-named after one of the heroes of the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919), a peasant from the state of Morelos who became leader of the Liberation Army of the South.On January 1, 1994, the same day NAFTA went into effect, fighters of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, or Zapatista Army of National Liberation) poured out of the jungles and forests and seized six cities in Chiapas. As they did so they explained their rebellion as a last ditch defense against their extermination as peoples and demanded official recognition of their rights to preserve and evolve, in their own ways, their traditional forms of social organization. The Mexican government counterattacked with troops but was soon forced into negotiations by widespread protests all over Mexico and around the world. Those protests were sparked by the ability of the Zapatistas, especially their main early spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos, to clearly articulate not only NAFTA’s threat to their communities and their demands for autonomy, but also a more general critique of neoliberalism that resonated around the world so much so as even to inspire foreign musicians, such as the band Rage Against the Machine to celebrate their rebellion in the song “People of the Sun.” (14) Outflanked and defeated repeatedly in the subsequent political struggle, the state attacked again in early 1995 and was again forced to back off.Over the last two decades, the conflict has continued and so far, despite the consitutional amendment permitting communities to be privatized, broken up, sold off and dispersed, the indigneous of the Zapatista movement have been successful in resisting such pressures. Indeed, they have continued to reorganize themselves in more and more explicitly anti-capitalist ways and carried those efforts to the rest of grassroots Mexico seeking ways of building a nationwide, anti-capitalist movement. (15) They continue to resist the final enclosure of the Mexican countryside and the completion of the kinds of processes described by Marx in these chapters.Because many pre-capitalist forms in Britain were also exploitative, such as the rural world of tenants dominated by a landed aristocracy, Marx had no nostalgia for them. In many areas of the rest of the world, however, those cultures which predated capitalism were either not exploitative, or the people had spheres of autonomy filled with their own traditions, skills and rituals, as in Mexico where strong elements of precolumbian, mesoamerican culture have survived and evolved. (16) Where capitalism has succeeded in destroying such cultures the world has suffered an absolute loss of cultural diversity and human meaning with little to take their place other than the alienated world of capitalist poverty. Where capitalism has failed to impose its own rules of the game because of peoples’ resistance, the conflict continues.Late in his life, Marx not only studied the peasant mir in Russia but also delved into anthropological works on so-called primitive cultures, looking, his notebooks suggest, for further possibilities of avoiding the evils of capitalism through the further development of autonomous cultural practices. (17)Today, we can look around the world, to some degree here in the U.S. and in the other “developed” capitalist countries, but to a larger degree in the Global South and see the wide variety of distinct ways of life which have been preserved (with change of course), or invented, that still offer a diverse array of alternatives to the dominant culture of capitalism. Whether these alternatives are judged satisfying or seen as points of departure, they show something extremely important: capital has never been able to shape the world entirely according to its own rules.Beyond the survival of pre-capitalist cultural practices, people have also repeatedly created new kinds of social relationships that are incompatible with the capitalist rules of the game and in the process, have posed new alternatives to it. In his theoretical chapters, Marx shows capitalism really has no creativity at all, but lives by absorbing and harnessing the creativity of those it dominates. The realization of this constant failure of capital to bend all people during all their lives to its demands alerts us to the essential source of potential change: those alternatives preserved and created through struggle.With these notes of warning about too simplistic an adoption of Marx’s analysis as being universally valid in its details, and even more so as being a prescription for a painful but necessary historical passage, we can proceed to examine the elements of this original accumulation which Marx selected for detailed treatment |
| Ch 27-30 | Ch. 27: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the LandEngland: serfdom disappeared by last part of 14th Century- mostly independent peasants in 15th Century – part time laborers – right to common land for grazing, timber, etc. – small peasant propertiesPrelude to Revolution: last 1/3 of 15th Century to first 1/3 of 16th Century- dissolution of bands of feudal retainers – partly by royal power reducing wealth of aristocracy – partly by feudal lords – driving peasants from land for sheep walks (fx increased wool price) – usurping commons – destruction of houses – futile legislation for 150 years after Henry VII (1489) to stem this trend, i.e., to 1630.16th Century: Reformation- colossal spoliation of catholic church property – ex-feudal proprietor of land – dissolution of monasteries – estates given to royal favorites, drove out hereditary sub-tenants – estates sold at nominal price17th Century: “Glorious Revolution” of William of Orange- theft of state lands, seized and given away or sold at low prices18th Century: Law becomes tool of land theft-“Bills for the Enclosure of Commons” by Parliament dominated by “landed and capitalist profit grubbers.”19th Century: “the clearing of the estates”- clearing of cottages and people – particularly dramatic in Scotland, e.g. by the Duchess of Sutherland: – 15,000 people pushed out by British soldiers in appropriation of 794,000 acres of land, – pushed to seashore, later driven awary again when sea-shore let to London fishmongers. – conversion of sheep-walks to “deer-forests” for sport (led to famine)Results:1. destruction of yeomanry (independent peasants) by 1750- replaced by tenants at will, small farmers on yearly leases, a servile rabble, – and sheep/deer, agricultural labor2. destruction of a whole system of private property and its replacement by another 3. driving of people into the manufacturing towns:- creation of the human material to be shaped into an industrial working class, – “driven from the land and forbidden to emigrate” Commentary This historical analysis of the first step in the creation of the working class centers on the forcible expropriation of the means of livelihood of peasants and craftspeople. In England some 6,000,000 acres or 1/4 of the cultivated acreage was enclosed by direct act of parliament. Another 4-7 million acres are estimated to have been enclosed privately. (1) The second step—forcing them into the factories—comes in the next chapter. This expropriation of the land was a long process, 300 to 400 years, and only through considerable violence were these changes accomplished. Vast numbers resisted and had to be forcibly dispossessed, a violence that forced them to seek refuge in woodland or cities or even flee abroad. One area of dispossession, which Marx highlights, is the highlands in Scotland where the Dutchess of Sutherland and others drove their clansmen from the land. Such enclosures and the human misery produced were fought by those directly victimized and protested by sympathizers.Ch. 28: Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing down of Wages by Acts of ParliamentThe conversion of peasants and artisans into waged and potentially waged workers involved a long and brutal campaign by capital to drive the “freed” population into the labor market—a campaign whose difficulty was due to resistance, documented in centuries of “bloody legislation” aimed at its suppression.In part, resistance was a refusal of the factory and the refusal to be reduced to a machine among machines in that factory. The following statement by one American manager reveals how capitalists saw workers: “I regard my work-people just as I regard my machinery. . . . They must look out for themselves as I do for myself. When my machines get old and useless, I reject them and get new, and these people are part of my machinery.”(1) No residue here of the paternalism of feudal times, much less the closeness and mutual support of so-called primitive cultures, only the most violent redefinition of human beings as animate tools, an attitude echoed in more recent times by economists who consider workers “human capital.”(2)As early as 1857, Marx observed in his Grundrisse notebooks, “They must be forced to work within the conditions posited by capital”.(3) They do not go willingly from the fields, forests and villages to the “satanic mills” of early capitalist factories and into the dank tenements available to such mill workers. Force must be used because they resist. Marx cites begging, vagabondage and robbing as forms taken by the resistance to entering factories and he describes the bloody legislation passed to repress them. However, he does not analyse these activities in any detail; we get no texture of this resistance, only of punishment by whip and branding iron. When he analyses the factory in Chapters 13, 14, and 15 on cooperation, the division of labor and machinery and modern industry, he does show how the struggle continued inside the factories through machine breaking, strikes and so on.[Charlie Chaplin’s classic film Modern Times (1936) presents an eloquent visual representation of workers as part of the machinery, paced by machinery, eaten up by machinery and driven crazy by the factory. Although it concerns the assembly line of Fordism in the 20th Century its basic vision is every bit as valid for earlier periods.]Ch. 29: Genesis of the Capitalist FarmerThe expropriation of the agricultural population only created “great landed proprietors. Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer: “was a slow process” evolving through many centuries. For England:1) First form: the baileff, himself a serf, like the Roman villicus. 2) Second form: emerging in second half of the 14th Century was the farmer provided by the landlord with seed, cattle and farm implements, exploits more wage labor. 3) Third form: metayer or sharecropper who advances part of inputs, rest advanced by landowner and they divide the output. 4) Fourth form: 15th Century on, capitalist farmer proper who has his own capital for investment, employs wage labor and pays rent. This emerging class gets boost in 15th/16th Century from:1) “Usurpation of the common lands” which allows expansion in cattle and manure. 2) Fall in value of gold and money causing a rise in the prices (e.g., agricultural output) which undermining real wages and rents, raising surplus value/profits. So, by the end of the 16th Century, England had a “class of capitalist farmers.”CommentaryAnalyzing the emergence of the capitalist class, Marx begins in the countryside, where he began his discussion of the genesis of the working class. The expropriation of the rural population made it possible for the landed proprietors to reorganize the countryside, directly or through intermediaries. In some cases, landlords took over supervision of waged workers on their enlarged domains. In most, they hired others to reorganize agricultural production increasing its commercialization, demanding only their share of the surplus-value as rent. The examples Marx gives shows the decreasing control of landlords, per se, and the increasing control of the emerging class of capitalist farmers. Like the capitalist class more generally, in order to emerge as a dominant class, agrarian capitalists had to first gain control over production, independent of the landlords, and second, employ a reorganized labor force to produce a marketable surplus.As the point of departure of this process in Europe varied enormously, so too did the paths along which the new class emerged. They varied from region to region and country to country. The history in the United States was just as varied, starting from family farming, waged labor and plantation slavery. After slavery was ended by revolt and civil war, small farmers, whether independent or sharecroppers, were slowly squeezed off the land in an ongoing process of enclosure by large-scale capitalist agribusiness, with considerable help from the US government.The Resistance to Market Forces in American FarmingIn the United States, the westward movement of people seeking alternatives to the emerging factories (in Europe and on the East Coast of North America) created a class of independent family farmers linked together in many kinds of community. These farmers were akin to the independent yeoman farmers Marx saw being wiped out in England. Obtaining land by displacing Native Americans, their labor could only be harnessed/exploited by the emerging capitalist system through the market (the manipulation of domestic terms of trade and high interest rates). Such exploitation culminated in the Populist Revolt in the late 19th Century, when millions of American farmers joined together to protest, among other things, the falling ratio of the prices they received for their crops to the prices they paid for their tools, seeds, etc. They also protested the limitation of the money supply to gold—that kept supplies of money limited, prices down and interest rates up—and demanded the monetization of silver.(1)Ch. 30: Reaction of the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. Creation of the Home-Market for Industrial Capitallargely self-sufficient peasantry, which worked the land, produced raw materials, and processed them into final consumption goods, e.g., raised sheep, worked wool into thread and hence into cloth and clothes. Expropriation of the land had three results:1. Peasants became workers and landlords either became or hired agrarian capitalists. 2. Produced raw materials, along with the land became the property of the agrarian capitalists. 3. The destruction of independent artisanal and handicraft production so that all consumer goodshad to be purchased.Destruction of Artisanal Production– begins with expropriation of the land which often involved the destruction of villages and means of artisanal production such as looms – is temporarily limited by the rise of cottage industry which is subordinated to merchant capital. – this begins the period of manufacturing controlled by merchants, in isolated workshops, with the aim of profits – is completed with the rise of industrial factories in which production and workers are concentrated in “labor barracks” – creates the home market which replaces what were once home made or artisan goods produced to meet local needsHome market = demand for food + clothes + housing, etc., from people who had previously provided their own but are now working for wages and buying what they need on the market.CommentaryThe expropriation of land and the bloody legislation against the expropriated produced not only a proletariat available for work in capitalist industry, but also a market for the goods being produced by that industry. Previously, that market was quite limited because most people produced what they needed. It was restricted to the wealthy with money to spend or to local exchange, often under conditions of barter or reciprocity within a community. Marx points out that the rise of a waged working class also meant the rise of a class of consumers who increasingly bought everything they needed in the market. |
Barnard Book Club -Fall 2020
Environmental Science Department
The Rule of Five – Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and on Clio.columbia.edu
| Week | Chapter/pages | Proposed Questions |
| 10/28 | 1-2; Ch. 1: 3-15; Ch. 2:16-25 | What makes Joe Mendelson memorable as a lawyer? How did the presidential aspirations of Vice-President Al Gore influence the Clinton Administration’s environmental policies?Explain the role of Carole Browner, the EPA Secretary regarding the EPA rulemaking role (ability to regulate pollution).What is your understanding about how Congressional hearings work?What was the goal of Medelson’s petition to the EPA?What were the three legal arguments Mendelson made in his petition to the EPA requiring it to regulate carbon dioxide emissions in specific instances?Which one was the strongest in your view?Which one was the weakest in your view?Is the right to petition a first amendment right? Based on what?Once filed with the EPA, it took seven (7) years to Mendelson’s petition to reach the United States Supreme court. Briefly describe what happened to his petition before it reached EPA’s Office of General Counsel. |
| 11/4 | Ch3: 26-35; Ch.4 36-53; Ch. 5 54-64 | On the campaign trail, what did candidate G.W. Bush promise regarding environmentalism?Once electected, President Bush continued his policies, and her nomination at the helm of the EPA proved it.What does Lazarus mean when he refers to the fact that Vice-President Cheney kneecapped Secretary Whitman?How do you view the letter that VP Cheney had drafted for Congress, describing the rulemaking powers of the EPA?Lazarus refers to the letter drafting in the following terms: “Presidents have wide-ranging policy discretion in deciding whether, when, and how to exercise the authority conferred on them by the Constitution and by act of Congress. But as the US Supreme Court made clear in no less than its landmark 1803 ruling in Marbury v. Madison almost 2 centuries before, ‘It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is’.” How do you judge the White House decision to dictate its federal agency to abdicate its rulemaking power (stating that it has no power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions?)At page 44 (Ch. 4), Lazarus explains the concerted efforts of the major environmental NGO on Mendelson to do nothing, one year after his petition was filed with the EPA. How do you explain that approach?What is your understanding about the folks working for the EPA? How can they be described? Politicians? Technocrats? How would you like the EPA to be staffed?Chapter 5, “the carbon dioxide warriors” , introduces four other lawyers who championed litigation upon the EPA’s denial of Mendelson’s petition. Can you briefly describe their background? |
| 11/11 | Ch. 6: 65-78; Ch.7:79-87 | How are lawsuits against the EPA’s denial under the Clean Air Act, litigated differently than any other administrative lawsuits?https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/05-1120P.ZS |
| 11/18 | Ch.8: 88-96; Ch. 9:97-106; Ch.10: 107-121 | Name of Judge Tatel https://youtu.be/D9v3FM0YFS0 |
| 11/25 | Ch.11:122-33 ; Ch.12:134-52; | |
| 12/2 | Ch. 13:153-67 Ch.14:168-84; | Your view on the amount of preparation Milkey put into it; LH’s participation in the Moots; |
| 12/9 | Ch.15:185-203 Ch.16:204-18; Ch. 17:219-38 | |
| 12/16 | Ch.18: 239-54; Ch.19:255-70; | |
| 12/23 | Ch.20:271-84; Epilogue 285-94 | |