Abstract
In this book the author draws on over 30 years of scholarship, much of it devoted to deepening our understanding of Marx and sustaining the tradition of Marxist critique. In places Callinicos even refers to his 35-year-old doctoral thesis, which was an analysis of Marx’s Capital. Here, then, is the result of decades of work interrogating Marx, reflecting on the internal coherence of his thought and trying to clarify his significance for our times. In fact, Callinicos does less of the latter here and more of the detailed, meticulous study that characterized some of his fine early books on Marxism and Philosophy (1985) and the philosophy of history (e.g. Making History, 1987). The result is a text that is at times difficult and which makes few concessions to the generalist: this is Marx scholarship of a kind that has become rare in today’s academy.
Callinicos begins by acknowledging that there has been something of a revival of interest in Marx’s Capital since capitalism went into one of its periodic crises in 2008. He likens this to the return to Capital associated with one of his own early influences, Louis Althusser, and his project of a ‘strenuous’ re-reading of Marx’s text. For Althusser it was important to identify the break in Marx’s thought between his early humanism and his later scientific work. In Chapter 1 Callinicos presents a more plausible interpretation of Marx’s career, with three phases: a youthful humanist Marx who railed against capitalism and abstraction; a more mature Marx who has learned value theory and now focuses his critique of property more specifically on capitalist economic processes, and finally the mature Marx who is an ‘artificer of categories’ and the author of Capital itself.
According to Callinicos’s reading, the youthful Marx’s notion of human nature – his philosophical anthropology – is continuous throughout his thinking. What changes is that he complicates his understanding of historical development and offers a much more precise analysis of the capitalist moment in particular. Central to this evolution is the idea of abstraction. For the early Marx, abstraction is merely the sign of a partial comprehension, a distorted or stymied development to be overcome. As he matures, Marx understands the one-sidedness of abstraction as part of the necessary violence of the historical process. Capitalism may shatter human individuals and distort their nature but it sucks them dry in order to develop the productive power of the species to ever higher levels.
Marx’s analysis in Capital tells us how this works. In his account of Marx’s method, Callinicos describes in detail how Marx criticized and appropriated David Ricardo’s value theory, integrating the insight that economic value traces to labour power with a properly historical account of the different forms this relation can take. The account manages to avoid a discussion of the transformation problem (which Callinicos confesses he does out of a concern for his own sanity) while at the same time telling us that ‘the transformation of values into prices of production allows Marx to avoid Ricardo’s errors’ (p. 99). It does this by factoring in capitalist competition as a kind of universal shakedown of prices that maintains the general rate of profit while preserving the relation of values to socially necessary labour time.
What’s of most interest here is the emphasis Callinicos places on real contradiction, internal to the capitalist social order. Marx’s critical appropriation of Ricardo mirrors Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s pantheism, which preserves the idea of a single ‘world-spirit’ but explains its negation, which brings it into the finite realm of the empirical and knowable, and the negation of that negation that is the human subject and its comprehension of the infinite. Similarly, Marx’s reading of Ricardo takes the idea that labour determines value and makes sense of it by placing it in a dynamic conception of social relationships. Value is not a substance but the form of social life under capitalism, produced by that system’s contradictions. Just as the human subject is the negation of spirit’s negation in coming into empirical being, so the experience of labour under capitalism is the mediation of value as a social manifestation of production as such. The empirical world is diverse yet finite and in Hegel the human subject transcends it by the infinite differentiation of thought. In Marx the range of economic systems is also vast and each parses value in its own way, but human labour comprehends and surpasses them all.
The reason we need all this philosophical groundwork becomes clear later in the book, when Callinicos confronts rival interpretations of Marx and, in particular, identifies a widespread loss of focus on labour and the working class. These things, which are pivotal to the Marxist conception of history and social change, and absolutely central to Marx’s analysis in Capital, have become intellectually unfashionable. Callinicos’s reading shows that they are not contingent or secondary categories whose priority can be revised without detriment to the overall project of social transformation. The experience of labour and the activity of the working class are central to Marx’s whole conception of history and society. It is the presence of real contradictions here, associated with the distinctive impress of the value form on the experience of life under capitalism, that determines where the key fault lines will emerge within the political.
Having established this with such clarity I find it somewhat ironic that Callinicos’s reading abandons the centrality of the antagonism between capital and labour when it comes to the question of technical innovation. He argues instead that competition between capitalists plays the key role here. In seeking to ensure they get a larger slice of surplus value than their rivals capitalists try to obtain more efficient technical means of production. This means their products take less time and labour power to produce but can sell at the same price as competitors’ goods. This may seem like common sense but it is a controversial reading of Marx because he says in several places that, despite appearances, this is not the sequence of events. Capitalists, Marx says, employ new technologies because they perceive them as weapons in the ongoing drive to control and limit their reliance on labour.
Callinicos acknowledges that Marx says this, of course, and that competition features on the side of ‘appearances’ in capitalism, along with price and other surface mechanisms that play a role in the distribution of surplus value but not one in its creation. This is why Marx talks up competition in Capital, Volume III, while in Volume I, where he sets out the core, constitutive processes of capitalism, he says little about it and, on most readings, appears to assign it little explanatory role. Competition, Callinicos says, may be an appearance but it is one that quickly becomes a reality as people believe in it and it plays a concrete role in the constitution of the capitalist totality.
I find this argument inconsistent with what Marx says, including some of the passages Callinicos cites in support of his case. In Capital I, for example, Marx famously writes that ‘it would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against working class revolt’ (p. 563). Moreover, in Capital III where, as Callinicos says (p. 267), Marx has become less inhibited about assigning an explanatory role to competition, Marx writes: The competition between capitalists … consists here in their withdrawing capital bit by bit from those spheres where profit is below the average for a long period, and similarly injecting it bit by bit into spheres where profit is above this; or, alternatively, in their dividing additional capital between these spheres in varying proportions. (cited on p. 278)
Competition may explain capitalist behaviour here, but that behaviour is not the bold risk-taking of bourgeois mythology. There is no investment in expensive new technology designs, only a cautious shuffling of investments in a climate dominated by fear. This is an important point because it conditions our understanding of contemporary technical politics and the dynamics that obtain in real contests over technology design.
Notwithstanding my reservation on this point, readers will struggle to find a more trenchant and rigorous discussion of Marx’s book anywhere in the enormous literature – I haven’t read it all, of course, but this book is no less rigorous in its interrogation of Marx’s text than Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx and it does its work without importing alien interpretative standards and a largely destructive political agenda. The superiority of Callinicos’s interpretation of Capital to David Harvey’s recent work is nowhere more clear than when he calls Harvey out on his ‘astonishing misinterpretation’ (p. 201) of Marx’s theory of exploitation as a variety of primitive accumulation, something which must have shocked many readers of this journal.
Deciphering Capital is an important and timely intervention and we may hope that it will be part of a revival in serious Marx studies as against more popular studies like Harvey’s (which have their place). Callinicos’s emphasis on the reality of social contradiction is a thesis of urgent relevance to contemporary sociology, which has largely abandoned all discussion of social antagonisms, never mind taking up positions or contributing to the development of strategies and solutions. For me, this book stands out against that backdrop as a sign of what of worth may still be achieved by intellectual work.