Marx, Capital Intro. and Ch. 1, Sections 1 and 2

 Discussion Questions

1. What is the power of abstraction? What work is Marx's 'cell-form' metaphor doing?

2. Why begin with the commodity as the matter of concern?

3. Breakdown of Marx's critique of Hegel's dialectical method? (M/E, pp. 301-302)

4. What is the relationship between scarcity and labor time? E.g., the diamond example (C1, p. 130)

5. What is the relationship between utility, value, and labor? (C1, p. 131)

6. Does Marx distinguish between use-values and usefulness (useful things)? (C1, p. 126)

(Concerning #1) Well, this metaphor is helpful for thinking about what he means by 'laws.' He uses a lot of organic metaphors: society as an organism. Perhaps his conception of economic laws (i.e., laws of capitalist production) are akin to biological laws. The commodity is a cell, not an atom. 

Marx's seems to also rely on an appearance/reality distinction. We need to uncover or disclose something and not limit ourselves to the analysis of surface practices and institutions. 

What is the cell relative to the body? What is this metaphor tracking? Well, atomistic metaphor implies something like bundles, whereas organic biological metaphors elicit a sense of systematicity, circularity, etc. More plasticity. 

Marx also uses physical metaphors to talk about constructing an ideal model of capitalist laws. England as the model of capitalism which other countries are approaching. 

(Concerning #2) I was thinking of Foucault's archaeological method of stripping away everything we hold constant in history. So, for Marx, why does he start with the commodity? If we follow the phenomenological reading, the commodity is the first 'appearance' of capitalism. But this seems analogous to Heidegger's starting point of Being/beings?

Well, the commodity seems like the universal category of the capitalist mode of production; it's present in any capitalist society. Well, I took the commodity as criterial for capitalism, so it's not so much a 'starting point,' and more as an analytic observation. Not just the commodity, but the 'immense' collection of commodities is criterial. 

What does Marx mean by 'appearance' for Marx mean? Kantian? Hegelian? Proto-Heideggerian?

(Concerning #5). Use-values are a necessary condition for the commodities. What does Marx mean by use-values presuppose 'definite quantities.' Maybe in the sense of the amount of useful things you want or possess?

It's interesting that Marx treats use-value as both a potentiality and an actuality. Use-values are, in some sense, transhistorical because as humans we always appropriate nature for our own uses. For Marx, labor in the abstract sense is a nature-imposed necessity, independent of all social forms (see p. 133). Marx has two senses of labor: abstract labor (capitalism) vs. concrete labor (human nature). 

Exchange-value is the commensurable value between two use-values. Two exchange-values are made equal by virtue of a 'third thing'? The socially average necessary labor-time it takes to produce a commodity assuming all things hold equal. 

(Concerning #4). Something that is useless cannot be commodity, but we can derive usefulness from things that are not commodity. Scarcity would be factored in the sense that it typically takes more socially average labor time to extract rare minerals like diamonds, whereas the same amount of time can extract more common minerals, like coal. 

Selections from Marx's Gründrisse

 Questions

1. What is the difference between fixed and circulating capital? (280). Can we provide an example of what is new (or is being introduced) by fixed capital?

2. Can we unpack the following claim: "In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital" (Marx-Engels Reader, 279).

3. "The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite" (279). Does this entail technological determinism? Is there any autonomy or agency left for the worker?

4. Can we discuss the distinction between machine/machinery and instrument? (279)

5. "In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself" (280) & "Thus the quantitative extent and the effectiveness (intensity) to which capital is developed as fixed capital indicate the general degree to which capital is developed as capital, as power over living labour, and to which it has conquered the production process as such" (281). What is the power-relation of machine and labor? In Foucauldian terms is this a sovereign, a disciplinary, or other modality of power relation? Does this imply a zero-sum struggle?

6. "While machinery is the most appropriate form of the use value of fixed capital, it does not at all follow that therefore subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of machinery" (281). What does this mean? Does this open the door to techno-communism? What valence does this have: pessimism, optimism? Is it deterministic?

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4/22/ 2026 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Questions:

1. Vagabond/Peasant → What is the relation between the two

2. (614): “But the parody of imperialism was necessary” –What is the historiagraphical status of the appeals to necessity? Not just here, but throughout

3. (615): What does Marx mean by cause and effect in the context of Napoleon protecting material power?

4. (606): “But the revolution is thorough-going…” What does Marx mean by purgatory here, and what kind of method does Marx understand revolution to be?

5. Is “The Eighteenth Brumaire” historical materialism? How, why?

6. (597): “Society now seems to have fallen back behind its point of departure…” Again, how do passages like this instantiate a historical materialist method?

7. What relationship should the social revolutionary have to the past (597)?

Discussion:

On the social revolution drawing from the future question, maybe Marx is building on his initial reference to Hegel. The “phrase” and “content” meaning can be made visible in the Napoleanism of the past revolution, also maybe “form” distinction. 

• The proletarian revolution, as Marx envisages it, is perhaps more about the content of the revolution, rather than the form?

• So, is Marx, in saying that the content goes beyond the phrase, that there isn’t self-consciousness?

• The first french revolution conceived of itself as a Republican revolution, and thus was not aware of itself as a class revolution. For Marx, the form of this initial revolution in late 1700s was a class revolution, a revolution championed by the bourgeoisie as political dominance. 

• But, is Marx attributing full self-consciousness to the current (1848) revolutions? 

• (601) First full paragraph, seems that Marx is saying that class consciousness is stirring, but it is appropriated by bourgeois, leading to ever decreasing significance of results.

• “Bonapartism” = ideals or an ideology promulgated by the first Bonaparte (The Uncle) to exploit land.

On revolution:

• This text is interesting for many reasons, one being that revolutions cannot be “willed” or “forced” if certain conditions are not available. Revolution needs “real” ground, so this is against a “hyper-revolutionary” will to arms. Reality will impose itself, which isn’t just a question of consciousness.

• Emphasis on material conditions for revolution to take hold, otherwise there are so many partial or continuous revolutions that snowball. 

• C.P. the context of Russia that couldn’t bring about socialism in the same way that the material conditions prevented the realization of socialist possibilities 

• Okay, so what is the “scope” of “revolution,” for Marx?

• Is he just talking about the “flow of history,” or Proletarian revolution here?

• It seems that Marx is describing an “accelerationist point,” in reading the revolutions that proceed in the nineteenth century

• In another text by Marx, he describes the bourgeois dictatorship showing its ugly face in the sense of an executive power that mobilizes resistance.

• So, the preparatory work isn’t being done necessarily by a proletarian class, but instead by a determinism? (page 606) 

• Related to this historiographic question, what is the perspective of the social critic here? When Marx suggests that the content goes beyond the phrase, then how does one recognize or see it as such? 

• Marx is arguing that past revolutions understood themselves this way (as republican, etc), and there wasn’t a self-awareness of class struggle, but isn’t he just saying that the working class needs to detach from an antiquated Republic form and seize the means of production.

• But how does all that content emerge without being “phrased?”

• Now that there are social revolutions that go beyond the phrasing of political revolutions, where does the “social content come from? Is the content even articulable? It seems that Marx is setting up a temporal challenge: that this content is an epistemological problem. How do we articulate what we are trying to bring about if it has not already been brought about?

• Something cannot be so ontologically new that it cannot be seen as such, as what is being asked about. 

Status of the Peasantry:

• Not a class, not able to represent themselves, but in need of representation

• In need of authority 

• On the peasant/vagabond connection, seems to be a pretty sharp distinction from Foucault here on punitive society

• Nothing really changed after bourgeois revolution, but for Foucault there was massive change at the level of the microphysics of power through the figuration of the vagabond

• On Foucault’s account, the disciplinization of the vagabond IS a social revolution, so it’s telling that Marx accounts for the peasantry and lumpenproletariat in an entirely historically impotent way

• Normative versus descriptive stakes of situating the peasantry for Marxist’s account

On the Method:

• So what is the motor of this historical account? Doesn’e seem to be the will or consciousness of individual actors?

• “Men make their own history” shows that there is a sense of agency, but that historical conditions create concrete action. The problem seems to be in the crux between the two?

• (595): Marx as doing a critique and a warning, “and just when they seem engaged…” Marx is giving an account of fragments at play that would be overlooked in a history? –Possible view

• If Marx is arguing that agency is deterministically structured, then the futural conclusion can’t just help itself to an agency that doesn’t exist or has been possible in the past.

• Marx does seem to indicate a revolutionary point of departure, but we aren’t clear on what this means.

Marx, "Wage Labour and Capital"

 Questions

1. What processes are entailed by/within "the cost of reproduction"? (p. 206)

2. The universal accessibility of new means of production (p. 213): is this "universality" partial in the context of copyright laws?

3. What is included in "greater division of labor"? (pp. 212-213). What does it entail? What is its relationship to machinery/technology?

4. What does Marx mean by "totality"? (p. 207)

5. How are the laboring class and capitalist class defined? 

6. Compared to "Estranged Labor," in which Marx offers an argument about alienation, on what basis is Marx arguing here? Immiseration? 

Marx seems to anticipate Arendt's work/labor distinction on pp. 204-205: "But the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker's own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life ..."

What does Marx mean by labor-time? Labor time is the expression of labor's exchange value, but the reality is the labor power.

Reproduction is unpaid. The worker must buy food to reproduce "him"self but, he is not necessarily the one cooking. 

The value of labor-power is the socially average cost of subsistence/reproduction it takes to (re)produce a worker.

Why is this work italicized so much.

Is "totality" an ontological or methodological claim? Mode of production = means of production + relations of production. The latter changes based on transformations in the former. 

Are the "laws" of capitalism mechanistic? sociological? economic? 

Why does Marx's explanans here shift from his earlier works? How does this better illuminate the explanandums of immiseration.

Laboring class = those who sell their labor-power in return for wages. Capital as accumulated labor? Capital as the means to exchange for labor power? 

Capital is determined in the process of production. The brute fact of having a steam engine, for example, does not make it capital until employed as such.

Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts – "Estranged Labor"

 Questions

1. What is dialectical relation between property as the product of alienation and the means by which labor alienates itself?

2. What is the relation of labor to/as life activity with Arendt's distinction of labor and work (77)?

3. Animals reproductive labor seems to be immediate. Does this mean that there is a distortion of human temporality in/through alienated labor?

4. What is species-being? How is it related to the universal?

5. What is a contradiction for Marx (79; 81)?

6. What is man's "essential nature" for Marx and what does he mean by the "objective world"?

Spring Term Readings Marx

 

WEEK	TEXT(S)	PAGES
2	“Estranged Labour” from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844  **Optional: “Wages of Labour” from the EPM	pp. 69-84 (optional: pp. 19-34)
3	“Wage Labour and Capital” (1847) in The Marx and Engels Reader	pp. 203-217
4	“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), in The Marx-Engels Reader	pp. 594-617
5	Selections from the Grundrisse (1857-1858) on the labor process and the famous “Fragments on Machines” in The Marx and Engels Reader	pp. 278-285
6	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), Preface to the First Edition & ch. 1, “The Commodity,” secs. 1-2	pp. 89-93, 125-137
7	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 6, “The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power”	pp. 270-280
8	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 7, “The Labour Process and the Valorization Process”	pp. 283-306
9	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 10, “The Working Day,” secs. 1-4	pp. 340-366
10	Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 10, “The Working Day,” secs. 5-6 **Optional: sec. 7	pp. 367-410 (optional: pp. 411-416)
11	TBD	TBD

Arendt, The Human Condition, sec. 42-45

5 March 2026

Questions:

1. Life/happiness—is Arendt ambivalent about these? What’s the positive account of each?
2. Is Arendt theorizing biopower? [Biopolitics (labor?) vs. anatomopolitics (work?)] If so, how might we mark/note the difference from other views of biopolitical resistance?
3. Homo faber vis-a-vis Bergson?
4. How do we respond? Art (pg. 323)? Science (pg. 324)?
5. Relations between thought vs. contemplation vs. ideas?
6. Questions of method—what’s Arendt’s methodology? How do we characterize this as history? “Not a history of ideas” (313). How does it contrast with genealogy?
7. Life vs. action: increasing concern with life as constitutive of the social corresponds to decreasing possibilities for action for Arendt.

Discussion:

• General conclusions about how Arendt ends things
• Ought we interpret Arendt in line with a quasi-Heideggerian soft determinism? Or is she more Hegelian (i.e., determinations only clear and appear necessary in retrospect)? Vita activa as Heideggerian calculative thinking vs. vita contemplativa as Heideggerian meditative thinking. Is Arendt giving an account of the emergence of these Heideggerian categories?
• The methodological question: why did upsweep in labor have to correspond to decrease in work and action? What needs to be the case in Arendt’s account, in her methodology, for these conclusions to follow?
• Who is able to choose to perform labor/work/action vs. who is consigned to them?
• What’s the motor driving the historical processes she’s tracing? Not contradiction (as in Hegel), but what is it?
• What’s the relationship between the behavior of the strands (labor, work, action)? What holds them in balance? When their balance is interrupted, in what way is this interruption a result of facts about how the behavior of each relates to that of the others?
• If this isn’t a history of ideas (pg. 313), then what is it? A history of concepts? [Concepts as indexes of forms of life, not a thin sense of “concept” here.]
• Challenge for pragmatism—how to respond? Pragmatist instrumental reasoning emerging as a result of the historical processes inhering between labor/work/action.
• We can imagine Arendt asking: can pragmatism think a conception of action that's irreducible to work?
• How central is instrumental reasoning to the critique Arendt is making? Is her primary concern the subsumption of reason into instrumental reasoning at the expense of other non-means-ends forms of rationality?

• How might constructing phenomenological examples of each (labor, work, action) help clarify in what ways they can be analytically separated?
• Action as parasitic on work and labor
• Are labor, work, and action points of view? Orientations one can or may take up? Or are some deeds just action, some deeds just work, etc.?
• What would it look like to practice action in a way that’s irreducible to an instrumentalized, "work" sense of action?