Notes on Nick Beams’ Two Hundred Years Since the Birth of Karl Marx

On Das Kapital: “A seminal work that analysed the laws of motion of capitalist economy, its writing was a feat never matched, rivalled, or even attempted since, by the bourgeois academy, for all its vast resources.”

Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, not to compete with the bourgeois academy, from which he obtained a doctorate, but to continue its work to its completion, to save humanity from ignorance and self-destruction. Marx’s grandsons also obtained advanced degrees. Women did not attend such institutions in those times, otherwise his daughters would similarly receive a university education. The system of higher education, which today educates around 200 million students annually, does base itself on many idealist notions, does find itself isolated at times by reaction from repressive authority, does ignore the active role of the people, in opposition to governments, as it relies to a large extent on state funding, and does reference itself while ignoring intellectual and artistic movements that stand in political opposition to their establishment views. Those 200 million students, however, will benefit from enhanced skills, training and preparation. Universities, especially the student body, have long had connections to revolutionary movements. Marx’s work, while not written in the university, benefited from his years of education and his doctorate.

He [Marx] withdrew from the public stage to undertake, at the age of just 25, a critical re-examination of the philosophy of Hegel, in order, as he put it later, to dispel the doubts assailing him, namely that the state was the embodiment of reason.

If the state is the embodiment of reason, then reason is the abstract essence of the state. This definition of the essence of the state could not satisfy Marx, because of his fundamental disagreement with the German state, but that did not mean that the state did not have some essence, some essential, non-physical aspect to its being which allowed it to be reproduced repeatedly and throughout the world. This essence, he would discover, along with other philosophers, is not reason but historical compromise between conflicting societies and groups or classes within society, what Jean-Jacque Rousseau described in his 1762 book, “The Social Contract.”

This leaves out the question of the embodiment of reason. The state may not be the embodiment of reason, but that does not prove that none exists. Marx argues that reason, order that proceeds from consciousness, prior to the enlightenment came from monks, but since then, reason has found its embodiment in the philosopher.

“The solution [to social environment vs. social consciousness] lay in the discovery of an objective social process, which did not depend on public opinion, but which determined both the social environment and social consciousness. The discovery of this social process lay at the heart of the development of the materialist conception of history.”

The social process formed the basis of the investigation into the German state and its essence, the German Ideology.

“What is being equated in the exchange relation where 20 yards of linen equals one coat? What is the common quality they have? It cannot have anything to do with their use values—because they are different things.”

This argument is missing something. The use values can have a common quality because they can be purchased and consumed by a single person. They must weigh the benefit they derive from having the one or the other, and they must decide when there is a balance, at 19 yards, at 21 yards, or at 20 yards when neither provides more use value than the other.

“The dual character of labour”

The use-value and the exchange-value:

The workers sell their labor power, not their labor. The capitalist pays them for their labor power, their ability to work for the day, while taking the entire product of their labor, regardless of the price.

“In the first case, the bushel of wheat is the product of the labour of a slave who is owned by his master. He has not produced a commodity, that is, a material thing destined for exchange. In the second case, the same thing has been produced, but that thing, that product of labour, is embedded in an entirely different set of social relations.”

This does not seem clear enough. The slave seems to have produced a commodity, which his master can then sell. This aspect seems no different from the case of the wage worker, who produces a bushel of wheat that he does not own, which the owner then sells. Beams is talking about the peasant farmer, who owns his land and sells the product of his work himself.

This does not illustrate the “simplest social form in which the product of labor in contemporary society manifests itself”, to which Marx referred, which is that of the product of the wage laborer, who accepts wages in exchange for labor, while the product of his labor remains entirely in the possession of the capitalist. The ownership of the commodity by the capitalist requires Marx’s analysis to demystify it, to make this relation to the commodity clear within the historical context of the emergence and decline of capitalism.

Otherwise, the bourgeois economists’ position stands, that the capitalist has only bought two or three commodities, one of which is labor, and combined them to form a new commodity.

[Minor edit added on Marx’s daughters.]

[Minor edit to correct typos.]