Referenties in Das Kapital van Marx
De verwijzingen naar andere denkers (of in het geval van de eerste mythische figuren) zijn hier in een kort overzicht opgenomen, als eerste kennismaking met het werk.
I - Faust.
(a) The Poverty of Philosophy. 'Where thoughts are absent, words are brought in as convenient replacements.' A slightly altered quotation from Goethe, Faust, Part I, Scene 4, Faust's Study, lines 1995-6.
(b) In their difficulties our commodity-owners think like Faust: 'In the beginning was the deed.'* They have therefore already acted before thinking. The natural laws of the commodity have manifested themselves in the natural instinct of the owners of commodities (*'Im Anfang war die Tat' (Goethe, Faust, Part I, Scene 3, Faust's Study, line 1237).)
(c) By turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated monster which begins to 'work', 'as if its body were by love possessed'. (*Goethe, Faust, Part I, Auerbach's Cellar in Leipzig, line 2141 ('als hiitt' es Lieb' im Leibe').)
(d) While the capitalist of the classical type brands individual consumption as a sin against his function, as 'abstinence' from accumulating, the modernized capitalist is capable of viewing accumulation as 'renunciation' of pleasure. 'Two souls, alas, do dwell within his breast; The one is ever parting from the other.' (•a. Goethe, Faust, Part I, Before the City Gate, lines 1112-13) ... Thus although the expenditure of the capitalist never possesses the bona fide character of the dashing feudal lord's prodigality, but, on the contrary, is always restrained by the sordid avarice and anxious calculation lurking in the background, this expenditure nevertheless grows with his accumulation, without the one necessarily restricting the other. At the same time, however, there develops in the breast of the capitalist a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment.
(e) . In fact, the misery of Ireland is once again a daily theme of discussion in England. At the end of 1866 and the beginning of 1867, one of the Irish land magnates, Lord Dufferin, set about solving the problem in The Times. 'Wie menschlich von so/ch' grossem Herrn!' ('What humanity from such a great lord!' The quotation comes, in altered form, from Goethe's Faust, where the words of Mephistopheles in the 'Prologue in Heaven' (lines 352-3) are 'Es ist gar hiibsch von einem grossen Herrn, So menschlich mit dem Teufel selbst zu sprechen' ('It is indeed civil on the part of a great lord, to speak so nicely to the devil himself').)
(f) Raw materials and the object of labour in general exist only to absorb the work of others,
and the instrument oflabour serves only as a conductor, an agency, for this process of absorption. By incorporating living labourpower into the material constituents of capital, the latter becomes
an animated monster and it starts to act' as if consumed by love'. (Goethe, Faust, Part I, Auerbach's Cellar, line 2141.)
II - Aristoteles.
(a) The two peculiarities of the equivalent form we have just developed will become still clearer if we go back to the great investigator who was the first to analyse the value-form, like so many other forms of thought, society and nature. I mean Aristotle. In the first place, he states quite clearly that the money-form of the commodity is only a more developed aspect of the simple form of value, i.e. of the expression of the value of a commodity in some other commodity chosen at random, for he says:
5 beds = 1 house (... Griekse tekst)
(b) 35. 'The economists have a singular way of proceeding. For them, there are only two kinds of institutions, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not heirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation of God ... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any' (Karl Marx, Misere de la philosophie. Reponse d la philosophie de la misere de M. Proudhon, 1847, p. 113).• Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by plunder alone. For if people live by plunder for centuries there must, after all, always be something there to plunder; in other words, the objects of plunder must be continually reproduced. It seems, therefore, that even the Greeks and the Romans had a process of production, hence an economy, which constituted the material basis
of their world as much as the bourgeois economy constitutes that of the present-day world. Or perhaps Bastiat means that a mode of production based on the labour of slaves is based on a system of plunder? In that case he is on dangerous ground. If a giant thinker like Aristotle could err in his evaluation
of slave-labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right in his evaluation of wage-labour? I seize this opportunity of briefly refuting an objection made by a German-American publication to my work Zur Kritik der Politischen Okonomie, 1859. My view is that each particular mode of production,
and the relations of production corresponding to it at each given moment, in short 'the economic structure of society', is 'the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness', and that 'the mode of production of material
life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life'.
(c) 6. Aristotle contrasts economics with 'chrematistics '. He starts with economics. So far as it is the art of acquisition, it is limited to procuring the articles necessary to existence and useful either to a household or the state. 'True wealth () consists ofsuch use-values; for the amount of property which is needed for a good life is not unlimited •.. There is, however, a second mode of acquiring things, to which we may by preference and with correctness give the name of chrematistics, and in this case there appear to be no limits to riches and property. Trade (Grieks) is literally retail trade, and Aristotle chooses this form because use-values predominate in it) does not in its nature belong to chrematistics, for here the exchange only has reference to what is necessary for (the buyer or the seller) themselves.' Therefore, as he goes on to show, the original form of trade was barter, but with the extension of the latter there arose the necessity for money. With the discovery of money, barter of necessity developed into (Grieks), into trading in commodities, and this again, in contradiction with its original tendency, grew into chrematistics, the art of making money. Now chrematistics can be distinguished from economics in that 'for chrematistics, circulation is the source of riches (Grieks). And it appears to revolve around money, for money is the beginning and the end of this kind of exchange (Grieks). Therefore also riches, such as chrematistics strives for, are unlimited. Just as every art which is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, has no limit to its aims, because it seeks constantly to approach nearer and nearer to that end, while those arts which pursue means to an end are not boundless, since the goal itself imposes a limit on them, so with chrematistics there are no bounds to its aims, these aims being absolute wealth. Economics, unlike chrematistics, has a limit ... for the object of the former is something different from money, of the latter the augmentation of money . , . By confusing these two forms, which overlap each other, some people have been led to look upon the preservation and increase of money ad infinitum as the final goal of economics' (Aristotle, De Republica, ed. Bekker, lib. I, c. 8, 9, passim).
(d) Hence Aristotle says: 'Since chrematistics is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economics, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual cheating), the usurer is most
rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented. For it originated for the exchange of commodities, but interest makes out of money, more money. Hence its name.' (r6xoi; interest and offspring.) 'For the offspring resembles the parent. But interest is money, so that of all modes of making a living, this is the most contrary to Nature.'
(e) This originates from the fact that man, if not as Aristotle thought a political animal, is at all events a social animal.
(f) Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modem in· dustry, that machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working day. Hence too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital's disposal for its own valorization. 'If', dreamed Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity,
'if every tool, when summoned, or even by intelligent anticipation, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Daedalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephaestus went of their
own accord to their sacred work, if the weavers' shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master craftsmen, or of slaves for the lords.'73 And Antipater, • a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, hailed the water·wheel for grinding com, that most basic form of all productive machinery, as the liberator of female slaves and the restorer of the golden age.
III - Charles Babbage
(a) Once the most fitting proportion has been established by experience for the number of specialized workers in the various groups producing on a given scale, that scale can be extended only by employing a multiple of each particular group. (14. 'When (from the peculiar nature of the produce of each manufactory) the number of processes into which it is most advantageous to divide it is scertained, as well as the number of individuals to be employed, then all other manufactories which do not employ a direct multiple of this number will produce the article at a greater cost ... Hence arises one of the causes of the great size of manufacturing establishments• (Charles. Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 1st edn, London, 1832, Ch. 21, pp. 172-3).)
(b) The collective worker now possesses all the qualities necessary for production in an equal degree of excellence, and expends them in the most economical way by exclusively employing all his organs, individualized in particular workers or groups of workers, in performing their special functions. ('The master manufacturer, by dividing the work to be executed into different processes, each requiring different degrees of skill or of force, can purchase exactly that precise quantity of both which is necessary for each process; whereas, if the whole work were executed by one workman, that
person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to execute the most laborious of the operations into which the art is divided' (C. Babbage, op. cit., Ch. 19) [pp. 175-6].)
(c) 10. The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial revolution, replaces the worker, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools and set in motion by a single motive power, whatever the form of that power. ('The union of all these simple instruments, set in motion by a single motor, constitutes a machine• (Babbage, op. cit., p. 136).)
(d) But with a spinning-wheel, assuming that the hand-spinner produces 13 ounces of yam in 60 hours,
the same weight of cotton would absorb 2, 700 working days of 10 hours each, or 27,000 hours oflabour. (cotton by the labour of spinning alone. At the same period (1832) the total value added to cotton by machinery and labour in the fine-spinning industry amounted to about 33 per cent of the initial value of the raw material (On the Economy of Machinery, pp. 165-6).)
(e) When machinery is first introduced into a particular branch of production, new methods of reproducing it more cheaply follow blow upon blow (65. 'It has been estimated, roughly, that the first individual of a newlyinvented machine will cost about five times as much as the construction of the
second' (Babbage, op. cit., pp. 211-12).)
IV - Spinoza
I criticized the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just when I was working at the first volume of Capital, the illhumoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel in the same way as the good Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza in Lessing's time, namely as a 'dead dog'. (Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) was a philosopher who popularized the ideas of the Enlightenment in Germany, and a friend of Lessing. Marx refers here to Mendelssohn's controversy with Jacobi over the alleged Spinozism of Lessing. In the pamphlet 'Moses Mendelssohn to the Friends of Lessing' (1786), he defends the latter against this accusation' and the related one of atheism)
...
We shall see later how the school of Ricardo came to grief on this stumbling-block. Vulgar economics,
which like the Bourbons 'has really learnt nothing', relies here as elsewhere on the mere semblance as opposed to the law which regulates and determines the phenomena. In antithesis to Spinoza, it believes that 'ignorance is a sufficient reason'. (Spinoza, in the appendix to Part I of his Ethics, rejects the teleological argument for the existence of God, stating that ignorance of other causes is ot a sufficient reason for the view that God created nature with some particular end in view.)
...
He who converts his revenue abstains from the enjoyment which its expenditure would afford him. It is
not the capital, but the use of the capital productively, which is the cause of profits' (John Cazenove, op. cit., p. 130, n.). John Stuart Mill, on the contrary, both copies Ricardo's theory of profit, and annexes to it Senior's 'remuneration of abstinence'. He is as much at home with absurd and flat contradictions as he is at sea with the Hegelian 'contradiction', which is the source of all dialectics. It has never occurred to the vulgar economist to make the simple reflection that every human action may be conceived as an 'abstinence' from its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking is abstinenee from standing still, working is abstinence from idling, idling is abstinence from working, etc. These gentlemen would do well to ponder occasionally over Spinoza's 'Determinatio est negatio'. (Spinoza made this statement in a letter of 2 June 1674 to J. Jelles. But it should be noted that it is quoted and commented on a number of times by Hegel. The formulation in the Logic is particularly appropriate here: 'The foundation of all determinateness is negation' (Logic, para. 91, Addition). In this case, eating is not-fasting, working is not-idling, etc.)
Andere referenties (in Engelse naamgeving):
- Frédéric Bastiat
- Jemery Bentham
- Edmund Burke
- Samuel Butler
- Thomas Carlyle
- Dante Alighieri
- Charles Darwin
- Daniel Defoe
- Pierre de la Court
- René Descartes
- Dupont de Nemours
- Friedrich Engels (die Zehnstudenbill)
- Charles Fourier
- Hegel
- Thomas Hobbes
- homer illias
- horacio
- david hume
- isocrates
- john law
- john locke
- malthus thomas robert
- bernard de Mandeville
- james mill
- montesqieu
- thomas more
- ovidius (ovid)
- plato
- plutarch
- richard price
- david ricardo
- Jean Jacques Rousseau,
- Jean Baptiste Say
- sextus empericus
- nikolia sieber
- sismondi
- adam smith
- sophocles
- thucydides (history of peloponesian war)
- jacques turgot
- virgil, aeneid
- Xenophon
-- 7 jan 2022
* - (Trouw): Het wordt beschouwd als een mijlpaal in de geschiedenis van de filosofie, maar toch verscheen het nog nooit in het Nederlands: Afsluitend onwetenschappelijk naschrift bij Filosofische kruimels van de grote Deense denker Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). (bron:Sofie Messeman7 januari 2022, Trouw, 7 jan 2022)
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