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David Harvey has done me a great honor by reviewing my book, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital . Harvey’s wide-ranging response highlights a number of disagreements of broad significance, not only for academic Marxologists, but for the political left. He claims that my book will be “a first salvo in what promises to be a grand battle to redefine Marx’s legacy, both intellectual and political.” I certainly hope that he is right. At present, the Left is energized but weak. Young people are widely disenchanted with capitalism and the post–Cold War global order, and are open-minded about socialism. At the same time, the political and economic organizations of the Left are in shambles, and there is no theoretical or tactical center of gravity. I think this is precisely the moment to reread the history of socialist theory, to return to and rework first principles. No one is more important, in this respect, than Marx. The question is, which Marx? My book defends the dignity of the first volume of Capital and argues that it contains a Marx we need to recover today. Harvey disagrees, arguing that “taking Volume 1 as a standalone treatise is deeply problematic.” This disagreement, his “most serious objection” to my book, is refracted through three substantive differences between our approaches to Marx. One concerns the sort of theory Capital provides. The second concerns the content of Marx’s arguments in Volume 1. The third concerns Marx’s relationship to socialism, then and now. I want to bring each of these deeper disagreements into the open, for wide-ranging debate on these matters is of the utmost importance.

What Sort of Book Is Capital ? The research question that my book poses and tries to answer is the old question of Marx’s “method of presentation” in Capital . Why does Volume 1 take the form it does? Because Marx himself addresses this question — however elliptically — in the course of rebutting the claim that he is applying a Hegelian method to the study of political economy, the scholarship on this question is dominated by efforts to find a Hegelian or quasi-Hegelian method of presentation in Volume 1. This has had mixed results. Everyone acknowledges that parts of the text look rather Hegelian. On the other hand, major chunks of the book don’t look Hegelian at all: much of Parts 3, 4, and 8, together adding up to about 40 percent of the book. These are the “historical” parts. Hegelian Marxists tend to be embarrassed by these parts, since they don’t add much to the development of the concepts. Social historians like Gareth Stedman Jones think they are the only valuable part of Capital . The two halves are never knit together, though. My idiosyncratic answer to this problem is that Marx structured Volume 1 on the model of Dante’s Inferno . This is not as weird as it might sound. Metaphorical descents into hell were widespread in the socialist literature of the nineteenth century. Marx’s bête noir, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, did the most with the trope. Moreover, the moral categories that structure Dante’s Hell — incontinence, force, fraud, and treachery — were pervasive in the moral economy of early socialism, for the simple reason that the Christian-Aristotelian heritage permeated popular morality. Marx, I argue, wrote Capital as a descent into the social hell of modern capitalism. He wanted to acquaint his readers with the inner workings of the capitalist mode of production, while displacing the categories of socialist moral judgment onto “the ensemble of social relations.” As my book shows, reading Volume 1 in this way allows us to make sense of its arguments in a connected and holistic way, and as a carefully constructed intervention into the socialist movement of Marx’s day, without excising large swaths of the book, either as “digressions” or “illustrations” or as wrong-headed metaphysical encumbrances. David Harvey objects, however, that this “builds a singular and exclusive account that pushes other readings to one side,” and that it rests “on the shallow but convenient grounds” that only Volume 1 was seen through to publication by Marx. According to Harvey, “if we only read Volume 1 of Capital, . . . we will also misunderstand the point of Volume 1.” We will do so because “the assumption throughout Volume 1 is that all commodities exchange at their value.” This allows Marx to construct “a model of capitalist activity that reflects ‘the hell’ of the laborer,” but it does not allow him to consider the “alienation” of “the ‘affluent worker’ who is protected by a trade union, lives in a suburban house, has a car in the driveway, a TV in the living room, and a laptop in the kitchen, and vacations in Spain or the Caribbean.” Nor does it allow Marx to explain how “capital accumulation . . . rests on [the] ‘rational consumption’” of the working class, which must be enabled by the capitalist class. Harvey claims that these issues can come to the fore and receive their proper explanation only once Marx drops the assumption that prices equal values, which he does in Volumes 2 and 3. Hence, Volume 1, on its own, gives us a partial, and hence false, picture of capitalism. My book, by arguing that Volume 1 can stand on its own, does Marx and my readers a disservice. The basic presupposition of Harvey’s interpretation is that, when Marx wrote and published Volume 1, he was “presenting his findings,” and that, in the service of presenting them in a “persuasive” and “palatable” way to a readership of “self-educated artisans and laborers,” he “simplified” those findings, “even to the point of falsification.” Hence, only Marx’s unpublished works — the Grundrisse , Volumes 2 and 3, the various preparatory drafts — can give us a true picture of his “findings.” In short, Harvey’s Marx is an explainer . He has a grand, unified theory, but knows that it is too difficult to communicate to “self-educated artisans and laborers,” so he simplifies it, and dresses it up with “literary and cultural references,” so as “to make sure his audience would get what he was talking about.” My Marx, by contrast, is an arguer. He doesn’t have a fully worked-out theory in his back pocket. Instead, he is oriented by a set of disagreements with the classical political economists, and with his fellow socialists, and is working out, in Capital , as full-fledged a response to those disagreements as he can. The literary form of his intervention is not a costume he dresses his theory up in; it is the form of the theory itself. His audience knows very well what he is talking about, because he is not descending upon them from the mountaintop, but responding to ongoing arguments and controversies within the socialist and workers’ movements. I think my picture of Marx, and of Capital , is more accurate that Harvey’s. After all, it is strange to say that you miss the point of Volume 1 if you read it on its own. After all, Marx published Volume 1 on its own. In fact, he did so three times — twice in German and once in French. He was preparing to publish it again — on its own — when he died. And he approved a Russian translation — on its own — in 1872. Whatever aspiration he had for Volumes 2 and 3, he clearly thought that Volume 1 could be read and understood on its own. Unfortunately, we seem to be more comfortable with Marx if we picture him as a scholar unable to communicate the complexity of his truth in a mere nine hundred pages, instead of as an engaged political thinker, working out his ideas in the scrum of debate. This proclivity for Marx the explainer over Marx the arguer is symptomatic of an anti-political tendency on the Left. Secure in the knowledge of its correct ideas, and bemoaning the need to dumb things down for the sake of persuasion, the anti-political left is saved the trouble of reconstituting its theory on the basis of political engagement.

What Is Marx’s Theory in Capital ? But, you might say, I am just talking past Harvey’s real concern. While I am arguing that Volume 1 of Capital can be read and understood on its own, isn’t Harvey arguing that capitalism cannot be understood on the basis of Volume 1 alone? I suspect this is right, and I agree with Harvey about this. Volumes 2 and 3 may well deepen our understanding of how, according to Marx, capitalism works. However, Harvey’s review does not differentiate between understanding Capital and understanding capitalism. It simply proceeds as if the inability to understand Fordism or consumer society on the basis of Volume 1 invalidates my claim that Volume 1 can be read and understood on its own. I am confident that we have to read much that Marx never wrote in order to understand the vagaries and varieties of twentieth-century and contemporary capitalism. However, I also think that Marx, in Volume 1, does a better job than those who came before or after at getting at what is wrong with capitalism. First, he has a better grasp of the fundamental dynamics of the market, the workplace, the pattern of capitalist development, and the role of the capitalist state than his competitors. But he also shows how all of these offend against the all-too-human desire for freedom from dominating power. Marx’s innovation is that he married this concern for freedom to a systematic dissection of capital. Capital shows how and why the market dominates the producers, the capitalist and the factory dominate the wage-laborer, and capital comes to dominate the state. Capital , therefore, doesn’t merely show us how capitalist production works; it shows us why we would, for the sake of freedom, want to get out from under the regime of capitalist production. This prompts Harvey to claim that, while I have rightly drawn attention “to the political in Marx,” I have gone too far in the direction of “dismissing the economic.” I disagree. What I have tried to do, on the contrary, is to show that Marx had a better understanding of economics than Proudhon, the Owenites, or the Saint-Simonians, precisely because he saw what was political in the economy, and in arguments about the economy. Take, for example, Harvey’s claim that, in Volume 1, Marx assumed, contrary to his considered position, that commodities exchange at their values, or that price equals value. According to Harvey, Marx did so “in order to make the value theory more palatable to his audience.” This badly misrepresents the political intention and stakes of Marx’s argument. The default position among socialists in Marx’s day was that the suffering and exploitation of workers was attributable to the fact that their labor and their goods were unable to command their fair value on the market. Marx’s insistence on treating prices as if they reflected value would have made his value theory more controversial, not more palatable. Marx was cutting against the grain here, picking a fight. Why? The prevailing diagnosis, by harping on the divergence between price and value, missed both the dynamics of the market (by which prices converge on value) and the distinctiveness of capital, which can accumulate without extracting rents, as a form of economic power. Far from soft-pedaling the complexities of his theory, Marx is concerned to confront head on the weak points of existing socialist theory. To take another example, Harvey claims that, by assuming that all commodities exchange at their values, Marx is able to “avoid” the problem of effective demand, and thereby — “on the basis of these assumptions” — to construct “a model of capitalist activity that reflects ‘the hell’ of the laborer.” But, as I argue in Marx’s Inferno , Marx does not “avoid” this problem at all in Volume 1. Rather than assuming away the issue, Marx builds it into his accounts of the commodity, of exchange, and of money. That “the course of true love never did run smooth” is crucial for Marx’s argument that using the market to mediate the social division of labor produces anxiety, uncertainty, and slavish watchfulness among those dependent upon the market for their livelihoods. If it were otherwise, every commodity could become ready money, and Proudhon’s scheme to “republicanize” money would be realized. For a final example, there is the matter of primitive accumulation, which Harvey ties into the same claim about Marx’s simplifying assumptions. According to Harvey, there is a “dramatic shift of assumptions” at the beginning of Part 8, and “the figures of the usurer, the banker, the merchant, the landlord, the state (and its debt) flood back into the narrative, as does the power of effective demand in the market.” I agree that the landlords and the state are centrally important to Marx’s account of primitive accumulation, and say so in Chapter 6 of my book. Our real disagreement regards the importance of usurers’ and merchants’ capital. According to Harvey, it is the autonomous spread of these “antediluvian” forms of capital — “the spread of commodification and monetization” — that drives primitive accumulation. There are at least two problems here. First, Harvey cannot point to anywhere in Part 8 where Marx actually stresses the role of merchants or usurers. He cites the Manifesto , Volume 3, the Grundrisse , and complains that I “ignore all of these,” but he fails to show how Marx’s argument in Volume 1 depends upon or reproduces Marx’s claims in these other places. In fact, there are only two places in Part 8 where the antediluvian forms of capital play a role in Marx’s presentation. First, in Chapter 26, Marx says that the demand for wool in Flanders motivated lords to clear their estates and turn them into sheep pastures. This episode is integral to my own account, so I can’t see what Harvey’s complaint is on this score. Second, in Chapter 31, Marx claims that “The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented from turning into industrial capital, in the country by the feudal constitution, in the towns by the guild organization. These fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the country population.” In other words, primitive accumulation empowers money capital to begin functioning as industrial capital. Money capital does not, by its own action, dissolve the feudal constitution of society. Marx’s claim here is the very opposite of Harvey’s. If we are talking about what Marx says in Volume 1, then I don’t see any justice in Harvey’s criticisms. More importantly, I think Harvey’s reading of primitive accumulation erases one of the most important political points of Marx’s argument: the sharp, epochal break between the feudal constitution and the capitalist mode of production. Commodification and monetization are not, according to Marx, autonomous processes. They do not spread by contagion. A revolution in the relations of production is necessary. Yes, Marx does claim that “the circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital.” But, as I argue, he also begins each major section of Volume 1 with a new origin story for capital: in the circulation of commodities, in the exploitation of labor, in large-scale production, and in the primitive accumulation of the factors of production. Harvey’s reading, by stressing only the first origin, risks making the market into the root of all evil, and Marx into another socialist moralizer, inveighing against money and commodities, merchants and usurers, cheating and gouging. I happily admit that my reading of Marx’s economic arguments in Volume 1 is not the standard reading. Neither is it sui generis, however: it accords with some of the theses advanced by value-form theorists, like Michael Heinrich, for one. My borrowings from this approach to Marx situate him as a proto-Austrian rather than a post-Ricardian (yes, I know that will be a controversial claim!), and transform the reading of both Marx’s value theory and his account of exploitation. These are fundamental economic matters. What my book brings to the table that is novel is the claim that the political context and intent of Marx’s argument is crucial for understanding the true content of Marx’s position. When you appreciate Marx’s opposition to all the labor-money schemes, and you see what was motivating those schemes to begin with, you are better positioned to understand Marx’s arguments in Part 1. When you recognize the contrast between Marx’s approach to exploitation and all of the Saint-Simonian-inspired accounts of exploitation-as-extortion, you can appreciate the force of Marx’s argument in Part 3. When you understand the anti-political separatism rampant in the socialist camp in the 1800s, the argument of Part 8 comes into focus. That is my gamble, at least: Marx’s opposition to other socialist positions, both theoretical and political, animates his economic arguments in Volume 1.