Marx's Basement Demo Tapes: On Monferrand's La Nature du Capital

 

Illustrated with a few pictures of enjoying the weather

As many readers of this blog probably know, there is a new translation of Capital coming out this month. I am sure that this new translation will have a great deal of new revelations drawn from the work of considering the text in light of its multiple variations and Marx's notes.  However, it seems to me that the book that we are in need of reconsidering is not so much Capital but the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. 

For a long time, as long as I could remember, a strange consensus hovered above that text, it was assumed to be the writing of a humanist Marx, influenced by Feuerbach. Some celebrated this humanist Marx, and there is a long history of trying to make alienation, species being, and praxis the center of Marx's thought, while others bemoaned it, seeing it as too humanist, too idealist, and too essentialist for an understanding of capital. A consensus of meaning made possible a dissensus of value. This consensus has begun to unravel bit by bit, there is, as I mentioned above, Franck Fischbach's book on Spinoza and Marx, which reads the 1844 Manuscripts along with Spinoza's Ethics to produce a different early Marx, one that is not predicated on some human essence but on humanity as part of nature. Fischbach's book also points to why such a rereading of Marx might be necessary now. The Anthropocene has pushed the question of the relationship of capitalism to nature to the forefront of thinking about the critique of capitalism. Perhaps species being is all the more relevant in our consideration of our place as a species on the planet. Although this would be a different species being than the one that saw humanity as uniquely related to its its universality and activity. It would be a species being in which no species is a kingdom in a kingdom but each is necessarily interrelated. 

Frédéric Monferrand's book La nature du capital: Politique et ontologie chez le jeune Marx is a book completely dedicated to rethinking the meaning and value of the 1844 Manuscripts. Monferrand argues that the first step in reading of these manuscripts is breaking out from the shadow of the humanist debate, only then can one appreciate the relationship between humanity, nature, and society. As Monferrand writes, "The young-Marxist equation "humanism is = to naturalism" says nothing more or nothing less. It indicates that our manner of being human are Terrans, which are inextricably part of a nature which the are related to under forms that are more or less alienating." 

Monferrand's books is in some sense structured around the question as to how to read these fragmentary and early texts, texts which come to us as already read, and already burdened by the debates that have come before. What needs to be rediscovered is the novelty of these notebooks, which are a break with the basic questions and perspectives of political economy. They are, as Monferrand argues, a counter-investigation, one that upends political economy by insisting on both the questions it does not ask, the relationship between alienation and property, and by the experience it cannot recognize, of alienation. This combination of structure, private property and alienation as a social relation, and experience, alienation as a particular experience of work, defines in part Marx's novel approach. It is not a matter of focusing on structure or experience, but of understanding experience as structured and structures having their effects as they are experienced or lived. 

Alienation then does not refer back to some supposed essence, some human nature that is denied or repressed, but can itself be understood as a structure defined by inversion, dispossession, and submission. On this point Monferrand makes a distinction between an essential naturalism, one which posits some fixed idea of what it means to be human, and what he refers to as historical naturalism, in which humanity exists as an ensemble of forces, that is always changed and being transformed in different historical moments. 

"In this perspective, "alienated labor" is activity that cannot be accomplished by virtue of an internal impulsion, but by an external constraint, whether it is that exercised by the employer, that which the machine system objectifies in its functioning,  or that which embodies the very necessity of having to obtain a salary in order to survive. It is an activity which responds to no other need than the "need for money." 

Humanity, the human essence, is not given any particular priority here, and what Marx posits in the 1844 Manuscripts is a position in which nature, social relations, and human capacities are all understood to intersect and transform each other. Capitalism has to be understood as not a separation of nature, but as an organization of nature and human existence. As Monferrand puts it,

"Marx comes to the position of conceiving of capitalism as a social totality, at the heart of which nature, human and non-human, is always more intensely put to work. Or, in order to think of an end or a possible escape from this alienation, it is necessary to envision another way of relating to nature inside of us and outside of us, which basically amounts to considering that capitalist alienation teaches us something essential about the social, namely that it consists of a changing and changeable process of collective appropriation of nature."

Monferrand balances the limitations of the Manuscripts with their strengths. As he argues, the manuscripts do not offer anything like a historical understanding of capitalism, an account of its emergence. However, this lack of any historical understanding is made up for by an early concept of its existence as a system, or totality. This can be found in Marx's assertion that private property and alienated labor necessarily presuppose each other, are part of the same system. If capitalism can be understood as a totality, as an organization of nature, society, and humanity, it is one in which the primary organization of that system is one of separation, a separation of society from nature, from natural limits and needs and humanity from social relations. 

Monferrand ties together three of the most ambitious aspects of the 1844 Manuscripts, passages which suggest that a transformation of capital will entail a new relation to nature, a new social relation, and a new subjectivity. Such a vision can be found in two of the more provocative formulations of the Manuscripts.

"When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means has become an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures."

In contrast to this capitalist society is an anti-society, in which social relations are neither the end nor the means of our different relations. In capitalist society sociality itself is a byproduct of the existence of profit. The more provocative statement from concerns not our relations with each other, but our own intimate relation with our own sense of the world, and the world around us. It is as follows:

"Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means o f life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labour and capitalization.

Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses - the sense of having. So that it might give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be reduced to this absolute poverty."

This statement seems on one level to be absurd. Of course an object is only ours when we have it. What other way of relating to the world is there other than that of private property? In capitalism, the objects we do not own, the commodities in shop windows, can only be objects of envy or desire. As much as equation of owning and having seems like basic common sense, it is one that obscures the way in which we constantly relate to objects that we do not possess. These are the so-called public goods, parks, beaches, and other elements of nature, but one could also add much of the social world that produces our joy and activity is not something that we own. We might own a house or an apartment in a desirable part of town, but everything that makes that part of the town desirable stems from the social relations, the people and activities that we do not possess. What shows up on balance sheets as externalities is most of what makes our life worth living. The various imperatives to "Keep [Blank] Weird" that one sees around Austin, both Portlands, and other desirable cities is often (a futile) attempt to sustain everything that makes the neighborhood cool (and does not make money).

Monferrand's understanding of alienation comes closest to a Spinozist sense of the term, not just in Fischbach's sense of separation from objectivity, alienation as a collapse into pure subjectivity, but in a sense one finds in Sévérac. Sévérac argues that Spinoza's concept of passive joys define not a "seperation from one one is capable of" as Deleuze claims, but rather an apparatus of capture, to use a Deleuzian term, that connects our capacities to feel joy to a determinate object. Frédéric Lordon has connected passive joys to life under capitalism, connecting Spinoza’s analysis of the affects to Marx’s critique of capitalism. As Lordon argues capitalism can be understood as a fixation of not only desire but the basic and fundamental striving that defines our existence, assigning it an object, money, which as Spinoza writes “occupies the mind of the multitude more than anything else,” and an activity, wage labor. Wage labor becomes the central activity, the only way to realize one’s desires, obscuring other possibilities and other activities. Moreover, consumer society can be understood as the reign of passive joys, the things that we desire and purchase are entirely produced outside of us, and their meaning and significance is determined and dictated by advertising and the opinions of others. As Lordon writes, “Alienation is fixation: indigent enticements of the body, narrow confines of the things one can desire, a severely restricted repertoire of joys, obsessions and possessions that tie one’s power to a single place and impede its expansion.” As Marx writes, "The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history." That history culminates into an fixation and reduction of all the possible ways of experiencing the world to owning, to having, and the only possible way of acting in the world to labor.

Monferrand finds in the broad range and often incomplete nature of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts a call for a revolutionary transformation that is not just a new organization of society, but a new relation to nature, and a new production of subjectivity.