Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography

Reviewed by Ben Trott

Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography
Francis Wheen (read by Simon Vance)
CD (Audio Book)
Tantor Media

Somewhere along the line, any self-respecting review of an introduction to Marx’s Capital needs to say that there is no replacement for reading the original, in all three volumes. And it is true.

What Marx produced with Capital was a revolutionary critique of classical political economy, or what today is simply called ‘economics’. Marx’s targets were the bourgeois theorists of his day whose project was to mask the historically specific nature of ‘the capitalist mode of production’ (Marx almost never used the term ‘capitalism’). He argued that they naturalised a social set up which was anything but natural, presenting relationships of exploitation as relations amongst equals.

But why read Capital today? Despite its difficulty, its sheer size, the fact that it is 140 years old (there have been one or two developments since!), and the fact that it would appear some of that which Marx foretold – like capitalism’s impending collapse – never seemed to manifest itself, there is still no other single work which has been able to better expose the means by which exploitation takes place within capitalism. And understanding the nature of our own exploitation is a powerful tool in its overcoming.

For those without the time to slog their way through all three volumes, or wanting to find ‘a way in’ before trying to doing so, Francis Wheen’s biography of Das Kapital is a great place to start.

A few years back, Wheen wrote a very well received biography of Karl Marx. In his ‘Forward’ to a recently published collection of Marx’s correspondence for the New York Tribune, he claims that one of the criticisms his book received within academia was its journalistic style. ‘I had no defence against the charge’, he explained, ‘I am a journalist’ (as, incidentally, was Marx for large chunks of his life). It is his training as such which makes both his biography of Marx, as well as that of Das Kapital so readable. He adopts a language and pitches at a level which neither assumes specialist knowledge, nor a lack of hunger to get to grips with some difficult concepts.

In a concise and accessible manner, Wheen explains Capital’s central theoretical innovations, and Marx’s ‘labour theory of value’ in particular. The theory had already been under development by classical political economists like David Ricardo, who had located human labour as the source of all wealth. Marx’s advance, however, was to distinguish between ‘concrete labour’ (which produces ‘use-values’, i.e. products made for their direct usefulness), and ‘abstract labour’ (which is invested in the production of commodities for exchange). The concept of ‘abstract labour’ (which Marx calls ‘a real abstraction’) allowed him to show how the value of a commodity is determined by the labour-time involved in its production – with labour-time measured in homogenous units. So, the fact that a particular tailor may spend a long time making a waste coat, perhaps out of sheer laziness, does not effect its value. Value, rather, is based on the average time involved in production, measured right across society.

Having gone to pains to explain all this, it is somewhat surprising then that a couple of pages later Wheen should point to an alleged weakness in Marx’s argument. He claims that if labour-time is the only determinate of value, it should not follow then that a lock of Elvis’ hair or a Picasso napkin doodle fetch such high prices. Here, Wheen is confusing value and price. Knowing the value of a lock of hair, or a napkin doodle (i.e. the time it takes – on average – to produce it), is precisely what allows us to say whether it’s price is high or low.

Perhaps one of the greatest strengths of Wheen’s book, though, is his ability to show how Marx can be read to make sense of contemporary phenomena. In the late 1970s, for example, he explains, there were many discussions about an imminent ‘leisure society’, with innovation leading to the automation of many jobs traditionally performed by human labour running the risk of leaving us all idle. Many have expressed surprise that there has been no actual decrease in the number of hours we work (in fact, the opposite is true). Marx, Wheen explains, would not have been surprised. Innovation under capitalism does not aim towards reducing the total number of hours we work, but ‘socially necessary labour time’. In other words, the proportion of the day taken up producing the value necessary to cover the worker’s wage, with the rest of the time then left available for producing ‘surplus value’ appropriated by capital.

The final section of Wheen’s book goes on to explain both the influence that Marx’s thought has had on history, and the workers’ movement in particular; as well as the extent to which Marxism has distorted much of our perception of that which Marx himself had argued. Famously, commenting on French socialists in the 1870s, Marx said: if they are Marxists, ‘all I know is that I am not’. Everything indicates that, had he been around, he would have certainly said the same about the Soviet Union, China and North Korea. In fact, Wheen argues, ‘the most truly Marxist achievement of the Soviet Union was its collapse’.

With enough distance from this collapse now to realise that with it history has anything but ‘ended’, many of those frustrated with the current state of things are gradually starting to gravitate back towards a serious engagement with Marx’s own texts. ‘Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, Marx may only now be emerging in his true significance. He could yet become the most influential thinker of the twenty-first century.’

God is not great

How lucky are our American counterparts. The audiobook version of God Is Not Great will be out in time for Christmas on the other side of the Atlantic, whereas Brit audiences must wait until February

Slipped on to the iPod, Christopher Hitchens’ plummy Oxbridge tones iconoclastically sermonising on the myriad evils of religion would have made the perfect substitute for, and antidote to, the annual borefest of midnight mass or the Queen’s Speech.

It could probably have been written by nobody else alive today, despite the fact that, of the entire ‘New Atheist’ crowd, Hitchens may appear to be the least qualified. AC Grayling (Against All Gods) and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell) are both philosophers; Sam Harris (The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation) has studied neuroscience, and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) is a feted biologist. Christopher Hitchens is an author and journalist, and rather an opinionated one at that.

But Hitchens acknowledges within his text that he’s been writing God Is Not Great his whole life – and it’s because his experiences as a journalist have allowed him to see first hand the things he’s writing about.

When he describes North Korea as being the nearest thing on earth to a pure form of theocracy, it’s because he’s been there and seen the servility of the people, and their blind worship towards the personality cult of Kim Il-Sung – still legally the President despite having been dead since 1994.

And when asked by religious broadcaster Dennis Prager whether, if approached by a large group of men in a strange city, he would feel safer or less safe, Hitchens can tell him how he actually did feel in precisely those circumstances. ‘Just to stay within the letter “B”, I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad,’ he responds. ‘In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.’

There’s a personal account such as this every few pages – though it’s not to everyone’s taste. Ross Douthat of The Atlantic magazine wrote on catholiceducation.org that, ‘Hitchens’s argument proceeds principally by anecdote, and at his best he is as convincing as that particular style allows, which is to say not terribly.’ In this he is, therefore, equally convincing as many of his opponents, who also tend to argue from personal experience.

To take just one example, a friend and I once found ourselves in a late-night discussion with one of the aforementioned street-preacher types. He ‘knew’ there was a God because the Almighty had spoken to him many years ago. (The fact that he was self-confessedly off his face on class-A at the time, and had just witnessed a woman being hit by a train, apparently didn’t colour his recollection of the moment.)

Anecdotes, textual criticism, and especially satire – as per Douglas Adams’ 1998 speech Is there an artificial God? – can be the best arguments to use, if for no other reason than that they’re more difficult to wilfully misunderstand, whereas the scientific arguments can be and frequently are misconstrued.

Richard Dawkins’ popular biology books contain the clearest, most beautiful explanations of Darwinian natural selection we’re ever likely to see, and the latest in his canon, The God Delusion, features some substantial, science-based refutations of ‘the God hypothesis’. But even those few willing to read, or listen to, Professor Dawkins’ work will often contrive to misunderstand it.

Much the same is true of physical explanations of the origin of the Universe, on which this writer, as an astrophysics graduate, is more qualified to comment. The best/worst instance of these is probably Moses Didn’t Write About Creation!, a self-published tome in which Herman Cummings, who claims he is the only man on Earth who ‘really’ understands Genesis (the Biblical opening book, not Phil Collins’ band; though that might make more sense), unintentionally shows the extent of some creationists’ failure to grasp even high-school physics.

The average debate on religion hasn’t time to fit in three years’ tuition in biology and another four in physics. It’s far simpler and more useful to have a debate based on anecdote and about ‘morality’. Hitchens dismisses all the good done by religiously minded people as also being possible by atheists.

‘We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion,’ he writes. ‘And we know for certain that the corollary holds true – that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.’ The fact that Judaism features specific commandments against bowing down on smooth stone but none against rape strongly suggests either that the religion is man-made (man as opposed to human) or God has his priorities entirely wrong.

Stealing Hitchens’ arguments outright would be largely pointless, of course: it would be contrary to the principle of free-thinking that he’s trying to promote; effectively replacing one Bible with another. The important thing is to have the debates at all, and as Hitchens says of those such as Hawking and Darwin, ‘men are more enlightening when they are wrong.’ God Is Not Great doesn’t have all the answers – or even many – but as a pillar to build on, there’s none better.