Marx’s Das Kapital

CHAPTER 2

Birth

‘Beginnings are always difficult in all sciences,’ Marx warned in Das Kapital’s preface. But not half as difficult as endings, he might have added: the first volume was the only one he completed before his death. The years of toil and struggle had left him physically and mentally exhausted.

‘You must not wait for the second volume,’ he wrote to his Russian translator in October 1868, ‘the publication of which will be delayed by perhaps another six months. I cannot finish it until certain official inquiries, instituted during the last year (and 1866) in France, the United States and England, have been completed and published.’ By 1870 he had a new excuse for delay: ‘I was not only held up by my illness throughout the winter, I found it necessary to mug up on my Russian, because, in dealing with the land question, it has become essential to study Russian land-owning relationships from primary sources.’ Over the next few years he accumulated a mountainous archive of Russian books and statistics – much to the irritation of Engels, who said he would have liked to burn the lot. He suspected Marx of using them as a barricade behind which he could hide from the exasperated appeals of his friends and publishers.

The suspicion was fully justified. When Engels began to assemble the next volume from the paper mountain left after Marx’s death in 1883, he described the scale of his task in a letter to the German socialist August Bebel:

Alongside parts that have been completely finished are others that are merely sketched out, the whole being a draft with the exception of perhaps two chapters. Quotations from sources in no kind of order, piles of them jumbled together, collected simply with a view to future selection. Besides that there is the handwriting which certainly cannot be deciphered by anyone except me, and then only with difficulty. You ask why I of all people should not have known how far the thing had got. It is quite simple: had I known, I should have pestered him night and day until it was all finished and printed. And Marx knew that better than anyone else.

The second volume appeared in 1885, followed by a third (also compiled by Engels) in 1894. What is often called the ‘fourth volume’, Theories of Surplus Value (1905), was edited by Karl Kautsky from the notes made by Marx in the mid-1860s on the history of economics, largely composed of extracts from previous theorists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

In short, Das Kapital is an incomplete, fragmentary work: Marx’s original plan, it will be recalled, envisaged six volumes. In the words of the Marxian scholar Maximilien Rubel, ‘we do not have before us a Marxist bible of eternally codified canons’. One has to emphasize this because many Communists came to treat it as holy writ, maintaining that whatever Marx said was true and whatever he didn’t say was not true. Both contentions are insupportable: there are silences and omissions which might have been filled had he energy enough and time; and there are errors and misconceptions, seized upon triumphantly by his critics, which should also be acknowledged by those who admire Das Kapital. ‘The fact that Marx brilliantly discovered a new continent,’ the economist Michael Lebowitz points out, ‘does not mean that he correctly mapped it all.’

The terra incognita which he set out to explore was the new world of industrial capitalism – a landscape unknown to Adam Smith – and from the outset Marx warned readers that they were entering a fantasy land where nothing is as it seems. Look at his choice of verbs in the very first sentence of Das Kapital: ‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of commodities”; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form.’ (My emphasis.) Though less dramatic than the famous opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto (‘A spectre is haunting Europe…’), it makes a similar point: we are entering a world of spectres and apparitions. The pages of Das Kapital are peppered with phrases such as ‘phantom-like objectivity’, ‘unsubstantial ghost’, ‘pure illusion’ and ‘false semblance’. Only by penetrating the veils of illusion can he reveal the exploitation by which capitalism lives.

The commodity, Marx argues, has two properties: use-value and exchange-value. The usefulness of an object is obvious enough: a coat keeps us warm and dry, a loaf of bread feeds us. If exchange-value were a measure of usefulness, the loaf of bread would command a far higher price than, say, a brightly patterned silk waistcoat, which is clearly not the case. How, then, is exchange-value established?

Let us now take two commodities, for example corn and iron. Whatever their exchange relation may be, it can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron, for instance 1 quarter of corn = x cwt of iron. What does this equation signify? It signifies that a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things, in 1 quarter of corn and similarly in x cwt of iron. Both are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third thing.

The one common element shared by commodities is that they are the products of labour. Therefore the value of an object must reflect the amount of labour ‘congealed’ in it – the labour directly involved in making the object, as well as the labour which produced the machines used in manufacture and the labour expended on acquiring the raw materials. (Marx is quick to add that he means ‘socially necessary labour-time’ – that is, the hours it would take an average worker to complete the job. Otherwise one might infer that a commodity made by clumsy or lazy workers would be more valuable, since they would take longer to produce it.)

So far, so conventional: similar ‘labour theories of value’ had been proposed by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and many other classical economists. Smith began his Wealth of Nations with this assertion: ‘The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life…’ But Marx goes further. Just as commodities have a dual character, possessing both use-value and exchange-value, so labour itself has a twofold nature. Use-value is created by ‘concrete’ or ‘useful’ labour, defined by Marx as ‘productive activity of a definite kind, carried on with a definite aim’, whereas exchange-value derives from ‘abstract’ or ‘undifferentiated’ labour, which is measured purely in terms of its duration – and there is an inherent tension between the two. A tailor, for instance, may strive to make the hardest-wearing coat of which he or she is capable. If it is too hard-wearing, however, the purchaser need never return to buy a replacement, so jeopardizing the tailor’s business. The same applies to the weaver who created the cloth from which the coat was sewn. The need to create use-value thus finds itself in conflict with the need to continue creating exchange-value.

To illustrate the two aspects of labour, Marx plunges into a lengthy and increasingly surreal meditation on the relative values of a coat and twenty yards of linen. ‘Within its value relation to the linen,’ he writes, ‘the coat signifies more than it does outside it, just as some men count for more when inside a gold-braided uniform than they do otherwise.’ As a use-value, the linen is something palpably different from the coat; as value, however, it is effectively the same thing, an expression of abstract labour. ‘Thus the linen acquires a value-form different from its natural form. Its existence as value is manifested in its equality with the coat, just as the sheep-like nature of the Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.’

This ludicrous simile ought to forewarn us that we are in fact reading a shaggy-dog story, a picaresque journey through the realms of higher nonsense. As a student Marx had been infatuated by Laurence Sterne’s wildly digressive novel Tristram Shandy, and thirty years later he found a subject which allowed him to mimic the loose and disjointed style pioneered by Sterne. Like Tristram Shandy, Das Kapital is full of paradoxes and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and whimsical tomfoolery, fractured narratives and curious oddities. How else could he do justice to the mysterious and often topsy-turvy logic of capitalism? As Marx observes, at the end of his exhausting riff about linen and coats: ‘A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’

When wood is made into a table, it remains wood for all that – an ordinary, sensuous thing. But when it becomes a commodity it changes into something that transcends sensuousness. ‘It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.’ Since different commodities reflect the labour of their producers, the social relationship between human beings ‘assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things’. The only analogy Marx can find for this bizarre transformation is in the misty realm of religion: ‘There the products of the human brain [i.e. Gods] appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities…’

In the religious sense, fetishes are objects venerated for their allegedly supernatural powers, such as the relics of saints in medieval Europe. (As early as 1842, the twenty-four-year-old Marx had ridiculed a German author who claimed that this form of fetishism ‘raises man above his sensuous desires’ and thus saves him from being a mere animal. Far from raising man above his sensuous desires, Marx riposted, fetishism is the religion of sensuous desire: ‘Fantasy arising from desire deceives the fetish-worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will give up its natural character in order to comply with his desires.’) In a capitalist economy, fetishism is the belief that commodities have some mystical intrinsic value. As with the bones of saints, it is a delusion. ‘So far,’ Marx writes, ‘no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.’

This is a curious example to choose, since it exposes a limitation in Marx’s own theory. If, as he implies, the exchange-value of pearls and diamonds derives solely from the labour-time spent on retrieving and transforming them, why do people sometimes pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for a single diamond ring or pearl necklace? Mightn’t these extraordinary prices also owe something to scarcity value, or to perceptions of beauty, or even to simple one-upmanship? If labour-time alone were the determinant factor, a doodle on a restaurant napkin by Picasso or a hat once worn by John Lennon would be worth no more than a few pounds – and the ‘value’ of a bottle of claret from a great vintage would be identical to that of an inferior vintage, if both embody the same quantity of labour.

Marx’s more reverential disciples deal with these problems by dismissing them as freakish and irrelevant exceptions to the rule. Besides, didn’t Marx himself point out that commodities had ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’? The labour theory of value may be of little assistance in understanding why a few of Elvis Presley’s hair-clippings, collected by his barber, sold for $115,000 at auction in 2002; but perhaps the notion of commodity fetishism – ‘the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour’ – offers at least a partial explanation. In its broadest sense, according to Marx, commodity fetishism represents ‘the rule of the object over the human, of dead labour over living, of the product over the producer’. (Here again we see the slow blossoming of an image sown many years earlier. One of his first articles for the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842 concerned a new law banning peasants from gathering dead wood in private forests, a right they had enjoyed since medieval times. ‘There is the possibility that some young trees may be damaged,’ he reported, ‘and it needs hardly be said that the wooden idols triumph and human beings are sacrificed!’ The idea resurfaced in a speech of 1856 to an audience of Chartists: ‘In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary… All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.’) All that is solid melts into air, he wrote in the Communist Manifesto; now, in Das Kapital, all that is truly human melts into inanimate objects which acquire astounding life and vigour.

Another difficulty then arises, and Marx is willing to tackle this one head-on: why are workers tyrannized by and estranged from the objects they create? If value in a commodity is created by labourers, why do they not obtain that full value? In an undeveloped economy, he replies, they often do. ‘In that original state of things,’ Adam Smith had written in The Wealth of Nations, ‘which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer. He has neither master nor landlord to share with him.’ If a carpenter sells a table and uses the money to buy a sack of wheat, the transactions can be described by the formula C–M–C – commodities (C) are transformed into money (M), which is then reconverted into other commodities. But there is another form of commodity circulation, increasingly prevalent under industrial capitalism, which can be written as M–C–M. The capitalist uses money to buy various commodities – labour-power, raw materials, machinery – that produce a new commodity, which is then sold.

Both these circuits can be divided into the same antithetical phases – C–M (sale) and M–C (purchase). What distinguishes them is the order of succession: in one case the starting point and finishing point of the movement are commodities, in the other they are money.

In the circulation C–M–C, the money is in the end converted into a commodity which serves as a use-value; it has therefore been spent once and for all. In the inverted form M–C–M, on the contrary, the buyer lays out money in order that, as a seller, he may recover money… He releases the money, but only with the cunning intention of getting it back again. The money therefore is not spent, it is merely advanced.

Whereas in the ‘simple circulation of commodities’ represented by C–M–C the twofold displacement of the same piece of money effects its definitive transfer from one hand into another, in M–C–M the twofold displacement of the same commodity causes the money to flow back to its point of departure.

There would be no sense in going through this elaborate rigmarole if the initial investment came back unchanged. So Marx rewrites the formula as M–C–M’, where M’ is the original sum plus an increment. ‘This increment or excess over the original value I call “surplus-value”.’ And this movement from M to M’ is what converts money into capital. Of course, he admits, ‘it is also possible that in C–M–C the two extremes C and C, say corn and clothes, may represent quantitatively different magnitudes of value. The peasant may sell his corn above its value, or may buy the clothes at less than their value. He may, on the other hand, be cheated by the clothes merchant.’ Yet such differences in value are ‘purely accidental’ and do not invalidate the essential difference between the two formulae. The simple circulation of commodities – selling in order to buy – is a means to an end, namely the satisfaction of needs. The circulation of money as capital is an end in itself.

It is surplus-value that turns money into capital. But where does surplus-value come from? Marx examines this mystery from the perspective of an apprentice capitalist called Moneybags. Each stage of the circulation – M–C and C–M’ – is merely an exchange of equivalents. If goods are exchanged at their real value, it should be impossible for Moneybags to make a profit. More surprisingly, perhaps, the same holds true even if they aren’t:

Suppose… that some inexplicable privilege allows the seller to sell his commodities above their value, to sell what is worth 100 for 110, therefore with a nominal price increase of 10 per cent. In this case the seller pockets a surplus-value of 10. But after he has sold he becomes a buyer. A third owner of commodities now comes to him as a seller, and he too, for his part, enjoys the privilege of selling his commodities 10 per cent too dear. Our friend [Moneybags] gained 10 as a seller only to lose it again as a buyer. In fact the net result is that all owners of commodities sell their goods to each other at 10 per cent above their value, which is exactly the same as if they sold them at their true value… Everything remains as it was before.

There may be particular instances – as with the peasant and the clothes merchant – where an incorrigibly dim capitalist is hoodwinked into buying commodities at more than their value or selling them too cheaply, but this can hardly be the principle underlying the entire system. To extract surplus-value, our friend Moneybags must find a commodity which has the peculiar property of creating more value in its consumption than it actually cost. Luckily enough, Moneybags discovers a commodity with this unique characteristic – labour-power, which has ‘the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.’

Labour-power, according to Marx, is a commodity – in which case its value is measured like that of any other commodity, by the amount of labour-time necessary to produce and reproduce it. (Yet another echo of Adam Smith, who wrote that ‘the demand for men necessarily governs the production of men, as of every other commodity’.) It may seem grotesque to assess the worth of human beings as if they were tins of baked beans, but that is precisely Marx’s point: for Moneybags, the labour market is no more than another branch of the commodity market. So how does Moneybags assess the value of this particular commodity?

If the owner of labour-power works today, tomorrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions as regards health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a working individual. His natural needs, such as food, clothing, fuel and housing vary according to the climatic and other physical peculiarities of his country. On the other hand, the number and extent of his so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history… In contrast, therefore, with other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element. Nevertheless, in a given country at a given period, the average amount of the means of subsistence necessary for the worker is a known datum.

Since the worker is mortal, that sum must include ‘the means necessary for the worker’s replacements, i.e. his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity owners may perpetuate its presence on the market’. It may also have an element – ‘exceedingly small in the case of ordinary labour-power’ – for education and training.

Marx calculates that the total required for subsistence is equivalent to about six hours of labour a day. But will Moneybags allow his workers to knock off at the end of their six hours of necessary labour? Certainly not. To earn their wage they must work for another five or six hours, thus providing the ‘surplus labour’ that creates his profit. ‘There is not one single atom of [surplus] value that does not owe its existence to unpaid labour,’ Marx concludes, likening this exploitation to ‘the age-old activity of the conqueror, who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has stolen from them’. The only difference from previous epochs is the guile with which the robbery is concealed from the victims.

Having discovered the secret, Moneybags naturally wishes to collect even more eggs from those golden geese. The most obvious method is to make them work longer hours, and in chapter 10 of Das Kapital, ‘The Working Day’, Marx shows the human cost of his impersonal-looking formulae.

The Factory Act of 1850 had limited the British working week to sixty hours. (Sixty hours of actual labour, one should add: with a half-hour for breakfast and an hour for lunch, this meant a twelve-hour shift from Monday to Friday and eight hours on Saturday.) The Act also created a small army of factory inspectors, whose biannual reports armed Marx with detailed proof of ‘the voracious appetite of capitalists for surplus labour’. There were countless small thefts from the workers’ meal-breaks and recreation times, which added up to a bulging swag-bag: one factory-master boasted to an inspector that shortening meal-breaks by ten minutes a day ‘put one thousand a year in my pocket’. The bourgeois press provided further ammunition. A Daily Telegraph report on the lace trade in Nottingham revealed that ‘children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate’.

There is a strong echo here of Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), which interwove personal observations with damning information from newspapers, parliamentary commissions, factory inspectors and copies of Hansard. ‘I delight in the testimony of my opponents,’ Engels had written, happily amazed that the British establishment had published so much evidence against itself. The citations from government ‘blue books’ and Economist articles in Das Kapital show how much Karl Marx learned from this technique.

The chapter on the working day, one of the longest in the book, is a compendium of horror stories, framed by Marx in suitably Gothic style. ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks,’ he writes in his introductory paragraphs. More than seventy pages later, after a banquet of gore, he concludes that ‘the vampire will not let go’. To protect themselves from this bloodsucker, the workers ‘have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital’. But he admits that such a law would not in itself be enough to thwart Moneybags and his fellow capitalists, for they have another way of increasing productivity and therefore surplus-value.

If labour-power really is a uniquely valuable commodity, one might expect competition among employers to drive wages up – and in times of full employment this may indeed be the case. As the cost of labour rises, however, Moneybags finds that investment in labour-saving machinery, which might once have seemed uneconomic, now makes financial sense, especially if he cannot lengthen the working day. As Marx writes, ‘Capital… has an immanent drive, and a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labour, in order to cheapen commodities and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself.’

In theory, machines could ease the burden of the labourer. Under a system of capitalist production, Marx argues, their effects are invariably malign – though highly beneficial to Mr Moneybags. (His chapter on industrial machinery begins with a quote from John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy: ‘It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.’) By substituting its own awesome productive ability for independent human strength the machine leaves the worker increasingly subordinate to capital. He is deskilled precisely because of the inhuman skill of the automatons, and his ability to defend his position through combining with other workers – through craft associations, for instance – diminishes while the machines themselves combine into an ever more potent force. It is, as so often in Das Kapital, a vision from a horror story: ‘Here we have, in place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs.’ In so far as machinery dispenses with the need for human brawn it also becomes a means of employing children, who have slighter physiques but more supple limbs, and thus it revolutionizes the contract between worker and capitalist:

Taking the exchange of commodities as our basis, our first assumption was that the capitalist and the worker confronted each other as free persons, the independent owners, the one possessing money and the means of production, the other labour-power. But now the capitalist buys children and young persons…

Marx notes that advertisements for child labourers often resemble the inquiries for Negro slaves which formerly appeared in American newspapers, citing one reported by a British factory inspector: ‘Wanted, 12 to 20 young persons, not younger than what can pass for 13 years. Wages 4 shillings a week.’ The significance of the phrase ‘what can pass for 13 years’ was that under the Factory Act children below that age could work only six hours a day. An officially appointed doctor had to certify their age, and Marx observes that the apparent decline in the number of children under thirteen working in industry during the 1850s and 1860s ‘was for the most part, according to the evidence of the factory inspectors themselves, the work of the certifying surgeons, who adjusted the children’s ages in a manner appropriate to the capitalist’s greed for exploitation and the parents’ need to engage in this traffic’.

The capitalist application of technology produces a form of perpetual motion. A machine working sixteen hours a day for seven and a half years produces as much as the same machine working only eight hours a day for fifteen years. Although it transmits to the finished product no more surplus-value, it allows the capitalist to absorb that profit twice as quickly. So there is a strong incentive to use the machinery for as many hours per day as possible by lengthening the machine-minders’ shifts – and they are in no position to resist, since automation has also intensified the competition for jobs by creating what Marx calls an ‘industrial reserve army’ of the unemployed. This surplus population of workers is not only a necessary by-product of industrial capitalism; it also becomes, conversely, a lever of capitalist accumulation by providing ‘a mass of human material always ready for exploitation’. When a market expands quickly or opens new branches, as with the railways, ‘there must be the possibility of suddenly throwing great masses of men into the decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production in other spheres. The surplus population supplies these masses.’ The cyclic pattern of modern industry – a period of average activity, followed by production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation – depends on the constant formation, absorption and re-formation of the industrial reserve army. The various phases of this cycle recruit the surplus population but also become energetic agencies for its reproduction.

Surplus labour in turn regulates the general movements of wages. As Marx writes:

The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active army of workers; during the periods of over-production and feverish activity, it puts a curb on their pretensions. The relative surplus population is therefore the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work.

Marx has no illusions about the supposedly sacred symmetry of the law of supply and demand. The demand for labour is not identical with an increase in the supply of capital, since ‘it is not a case of two independent forces working on each other. The dice are loaded.’ Here he takes a swipe at ‘one of the great exploits of economic apologetics’ – the notion peddled by several mid-Victorian economists that the introduction of new machinery, or the extension of old, somehow ‘sets free’ the workers. They are set free, he maintains, only in the sense that they are out of a job altogether, ‘and every new bit of capital looking round for a function can take advantage of them’. When they do find employment, fear of rejoining the reserve army leaves them riper for exploitation. So, he concludes, the greater the productivity of labour, the greater the ‘relative mass’ of the industrial reserve army. The consequence of a rise in social wealth is therefore an increase in official pauperism. ‘This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation,’ he declares, in a fine italicized fanfare – then bathetically undermines this in the very next sentence: ‘Like all other laws, it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here.’

Having sidestepped any objections, Marx proceeds to one of the most notorious assertions in Das Kapital: that capitalism leads to the progressive ‘immiseration’ or impoverishment of the proletariat. Countless pundits have taken this to mean that capitalism’s swelling prosperity would be achieved by an absolute reduction in the workers’ wages and standard of living, and they have found it easy to mock. Look at the working classes of today, with their cars and microwave ovens: not very immiserated, are they? The American economist Paul Samuelson has said that Marx’s entire œuvre can safely be disregarded because the impoverishment of the workers ‘simply never took place’ – and, since Samuelson’s textbooks have been the staple fare for generations of undergraduates in both Britain and America, this has become the received wisdom.

But it is a myth, based on a misreading of ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’ in chapter 25 of the first volume. ‘Pauperism,’ Marx writes, ‘forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It forms part of the incidental expenses of capitalist production: but capital usually knows how to transfer those from its own shoulders to those of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie.’ In the context, he is clearly referring not to the whole proletariat but to the ‘lowest sediment’ of society, such as the permanently unemployed, the sick, the ragged – a stratum which still exists today, and is now often called the underclass. (Another Jewish outcast said that ‘the poor ye have always with you’, but no economist has yet suggested that Jesus’s teachings are wholly discredited by his prediction of eternal immiseration. Even Leszek Kolakowski, one of Marx’s most influential twentieth-century critics, has conceded that ‘material pauperization was not a necessary premiss either of Marx’s analysis of the dehumanization caused by wage labour or of his prediction of the inescapable ruin of capitalism’.)

What Marx did say was that under capitalism there would be a relative – not absolute – decline in wages. This is demonstrably true: no firm enjoying a 20 per cent increase in surplus-value will hand over all the loot to its workforce in the form of a 20 per cent pay rise. ‘It follows therefore,’ Marx writes, ‘that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.’ The crucial phrase here is ‘be his payment high or low’: labour lags further and further behind capital, no matter how many cars and microwave ovens the workers can afford.

Besides, Marx makes it abundantly clear in the very same paragraph that his definition of poverty (like Christ’s) goes far beyond pounds and pence: it is about the crushing of the human spirit. With the worker chained to capital ‘more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock’, misery for some becomes a necessary condition for the wealth of others:

Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker… they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital… Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital.

That last sentence, taken alone, could be adduced as another prediction of absolute financial impoverishment for the workers, but only a halfwit – or an economics lecturer – could hold to this interpretation after reading the thunderous philippic which precedes it.

In the 1970s there was much talk of an imminent ‘leisure age’ in which, thanks to automation, we would scarcely work at all – and a spate of books brooding earnestly on how we would fill our new spare time without becoming hopelessly lethargic. Anybody spotting one of these forgotten tracts in a second-hand bookshop today would laugh incredulously. The average British employee now puts in 80,224 hours over his or her working life, as against 69,000 hours in 1981. Far from losing the work ethic, we seem ever more enslaved by it. The new vogue is for books that ask anxiously how we can achieve a ‘work–life balance’ in an age when many people have no time for anything beyond labour and sleep.

This would not have surprised Karl Marx. In chapter 12 of Das Kapital he debunks those mid-Victorian economic treatises in which ‘we may read on one page that the worker owes a debt of gratitude to capital for developing his productivity, because the necessary labour-time is thereby shortened, and on the next page that he must prove his gratitude by working in future for 15 hours instead of 10’. What capitalist production aims at, he says, is not a reduction of the working day but a minimizing of the labour-time necessary for producing a commodity. ‘The fact that the worker, when the productivity of his labour has been increased, produces ten times as many commodities as before, and thus spends one-tenth as much labour-time on each, by no means prevents him from continuing to work 12 hours as before, nor from producing in those 12 hours 1,200 articles instead of 120. Indeed, his working day may simultaneously be prolonged, so as to make him produce 1,400 articles in 14 hours.’ The objective of this process is ‘the shortening of that part of the working day in which the worker must work for himself and the lengthening, thereby, of the other part of the day, in which he is free to work for nothing for the capitalist’.

But if all these extra commodities flood into the market while the workers (in their role as consumers) are no richer than before, the capitalist will be left with a huge pile of unsold products. What then? In the Communist Manifesto of 1848 Marx had already drawn attention to ‘the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production.’ The conditions of bourgeois society, he argued, were simply too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. Capitalism had two ways of surmounting the problem: ‘On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.’

This is the cycle of ‘boom and bust’ from which governments have struggled to escape ever since. According to Marx no escape was possible so long as capitalism prevailed: the tidal rhythm of expansion and recession was integral to a system with a natural tendency towards over-production. ‘The real barrier of capitalist production,’ he wrote in Volume III of Das Kapital, ‘is capital itself.’ If the preservation of capital’s value rests on expropriating and pauperizing the mass of people, it will always come into conflict with capital’s simultaneous drive towards an unlimited and unconditional extension of productivity. ‘The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces in such a way that only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit.’

Capitalism was thus threatened with mortal injury by its own weapons. After the failure of the 1848 uprisings Marx had argued that a new revolution was possible ‘only in consequence of a new [economic] crisis’, and he had been waiting impatiently ever since for the cataclysm to arrive. At Christmas 1851 he predicted that it ‘must blow up at the latest next autumn… I am more than ever convinced that there will be no serious revolution without a trade crisis.’ Every flutter in the markets or rash of bankruptcies brought similar gleeful forecasts. ‘On top of that there is the commercial crisis which is looming ever closer and whose early symptoms are erupting on every hand. Les choses marchent’ (1852). ‘Present conditions… in my view must soon lead to an earthquake’ (1853). His expectations were continually reinforced by Friedrich Engels, his agent in the citadel of capitalism, who informed him in 1856 that within the next year there would be ‘a day of wrath such as has never been seen before; the whole of Europe’s industry in ruins, all markets over-stocked… all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree.’ In the winter of 1857–8, as we have seen, Marx worked furiously on the economic notebooks which became the Grundrisse ‘so that at least I get the outlines clear before the déluge’. He returned to the theme in an afterword to the second edition of Volume I of Das Kapital (1873), written to defend its dialectical style:

In its rational form [the dialectic] is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction… The fact that the movement of capitalist society is full of contradictions impresses itself most strikingly on the practical bourgeois in the changes of the periodic cycle through which modern industry passes, the summit of which is the general crisis. That crisis is once again approaching…

When it arrived, he added, its intensity and universality would ‘drum dialectics even into the heads of the upstarts in charge of the new Holy Prussian-German Empire’.

A vain hope: almost a century and a half later, Marx’s use of the dialectic in Das Kapital remains a matter of hot dispute. The method derives from his early study of Hegel, who synthesized many previous dialectical forms – from Zeno’s paradoxes to Kantian critique – into what can best be summarized as a self-generating process of reason. Hegel himself called it ‘the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative’, the pursuit of contradictions and their incorporation into new and fuller ideas. Every idea is the product of a less developed phase of that idea, but contains within it the germ of a more advanced notion.

The relevance of this to Marx’s own conception of economic progress is clear enough – though Hegel, being an idealist rather than a materialist, would undoubtedly have protested at the inversion of his technique. For Hegel, the real world is nothing but an expression of ‘the Idea’, whereas for Marx the Idea is nothing but the material world reflected in the human mind and translated into forms of thought. ‘Hegel’s dialectics is the basic form of all dialectics,’ Marx writes, ‘but only after it has been stripped of its mystified form, and it is precisely this which distinguishes my method.’ In that 1873 afterword he recalls that he criticized the mystificatory side of Hegel’s dialectic almost thirty years earlier, at a time when it was still the fashion.

But just when I was working at the first volume of Das Kapital, the ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel… as a ‘dead dog’. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him.

As Marx knew, however, these dialectical dalliances had an extra use-value. After writing an article on the Indian mutiny in 1857, suggesting that the British would begin their retreat as soon as the rainy season started, he had confessed to Engels: ‘It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.’ When applied like this, dialectic means never having to admit that one was wrong.

Even the most apparently unambiguous prophecy in Das Kapital – the imminent demise of capitalism – can thus elude the critical blow-torch of those who seek to falsify it. In the peroration to Volume I, Marx asserts that competition between capitalists concentrates production into ever larger units, which intensify the oppression and exploitation of labour, ‘but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself… The knell of capitalist private property sounds.’ Most readers deduce from this that Marx thought capitalism was already on its death-bed – a reasonable inference, given the apocalyptic glee with which he greeted each new financial crisis. (‘Present conditions… in my view must soon lead to an earthquake.’) Yet it would be a surprising assumption for Marx, of all people, to make. His own account of the various historical phases of economic production – primitive-communal, ancient, feudal, capitalist – notes that each era lasted for many centuries, sometimes even millennia, before yielding to its successor. And Marx recognizes that bourgeois capitalism is far more dynamic and powerful than any earlier mode: as he wrote in the Communist Manifesto, ‘it has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.’ How, then, could he have believed that this awesome force would fizzle out after only a century or two?

Perhaps he didn’t. Volume I may have sounded capitalism’s death-knell, but in the final chapter of Volume II a ‘schematic presentation’ of hypothetical calculations provides an economic model of a capitalist economy which grows steadily without recurrent crises and could in theory continue indefinitely. Although Marx yearns for the collapse of capitalism and an end to exploitation – a yearning that occasionally erupts in blood-curdling prophecies of doom – the force of his rhetoric is qualified and nuanced when one studies his work as a whole. Marx has often been portrayed as a mechanical determinist who saw the world in terms of iron laws and inevitable consequences, but it is a caricature. True, he claimed in the Communist Manifesto that the fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat ‘are equally inevitable’; in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), however, he added that ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’

The original preface to Das Kapital promises to outline the ‘natural laws of capitalist production… working themselves out with iron necessity’. Yet as a former legal student himself, Marx knows that the mere existence of a law against, say, theft does not mean that all thieving ceases. This is particularly apparent with one of his most controversial formulations, the so-called law of the falling rate of profit.

The idea that the rate of profit would decline as an economy developed was common to all classical economists, including Adam Smith and David Ricardo, though they disagreed on why this should happen. Smith attributed it to a waning of profitable opportunities; Ricardo thought that a finite supply of land would cause rents to rise, thus reducing profit margins. Marx’s version, outlined in Volume III, is that competition among manufacturers will oblige them to invest more in ‘constant capital’ (plant and machinery) and therefore proportionately less in ‘variable capital’ (wages). If, as he believed, human labour is the source of exchange-value, then the rate of profit – if not its actual total – must fall. ‘It is thereby proved a logical necessity that in its development the general average rate of surplus-value must express itself in a falling general rate of profit.’

There have been many attacks on this bold, under substantiated assertion, and Marx seems to have expected them. In the very next chapter he tries to find reasons why in practice the rate of profit has not fallen as his theory would require. One is foreign trade: cheaply produced imports allow for a higher profit margin. There is also the familiar point about the industrial reserve army: increased productivity makes workers redundant and forces down wages, so slowing the tendency to replace human labour with expensive machinery. In short, there are ‘counteracting influences at work, which cross and annul the effect of the general law, and which give it merely the characteristic of a tendency’. Indeed, ‘the same influences which produce a tendency in the general rate of profit to fall also call forth counter-effects, which hamper, retard and partly paralyse this fall’. Once again, it looks as if he is rewording his proposition so as to be right either way.

Nowhere in Das Kapital does Marx explain why or how – still less when – the system will ultimately destroy itself. He simply states it as his conviction: each new slump leads to a greater concentration of capital, and this monopoly becomes a fetter on the mode of production until ‘centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder… The expropriators are expropriated.’ With this happy prospect he ends the first (and only complete) volume of Das Kapital.

Well, almost. After his resounding peroration, Marx decided to add an ironic coda in the form of a chapter on ‘the modern theory of colonization’, designed to show what happens if wage-labourers can break free of their shackles. In countries such as England, the capitalist regime has so thoroughly subordinated to itself the nation’s resources that economists see it as part of the natural order. But Marx notices that ‘it is otherwise in the colonies’, where Mr Moneybags comes up against the obstacle of working-class settlers who use their labour to enrich themselves instead of the capitalist. (‘It’s a splendid thing,’ Engels had written to Marx in September 1851, following the discovery of gold in southern Australia. ‘The British will be thrown out and the united states of deported murderers, burglars, rapists and pickpockets will startle the world by demonstrating what wonders can be performed by a state consisting of undisguised rascals.’)

The defining anecdote in this final chapter is the tragicomic tale of a Mr Peel, who took with him from England to the Swan River district of western Australia £50,000 in cash and 3,000 working-class men, women and children. He overlooked only one thing: the need to keep his workers separated from the means of production. Finding land freely available in this empty region they abandoned their employer, leaving him without even a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river. ‘Unhappy Mr Peel,’ Marx writes, ‘who provided for everything except the export of English relations of production to the Swan River!’

Marx found the Peel story in a book by the businessman Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who cited it as an example of the dire consequences of spontaneous and unregulated colonization. At the Swan River Settlement, Wakefield complained, ‘a great mass of capital, of seeds, implements and cattle, has perished for want of labourers to use it, and… no settler has preserved much more capital than he can employ with his own hands’. In the northern states of America, too, ‘it may be doubted whether so many as a tenth of the people would fall under the description of hired labourers’. When given the chance, workers ceased to be labour-for-hire and became independent producers – perhaps even ‘competitors with their former masters in the labour market’. To remedy this shocking state of affairs, Wakefield advocated ‘systematic colonization’, which would ensure a supply of subservient and dependent labourers, not all that different in function and status from slaves. It could easily be achieved by setting an artificially high price on the virgin soil, placing it beyond the reach of ordinary wage-earners and so compelling them to work for poor Mr Peel.

One can see why Marx takes such pleasure in this frank admission of capitalism’s requirements. ‘It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield,’ he writes, ‘to have discovered, not something new about the colonies, but, in the colonies, the truth about capitalist relations in the mother country… that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of that private property which rests on the labour of the individual himself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker.’ The fact that Marx chose this as the final sentence of the book tells us much about his authorial intentions. Had he ended with integuments bursting asunder and expropriators being expropriated, Das Kapital might be taken as essentially a prophetic work about the inevitable doom of capitalism. Instead, he turns again to the victims rather than the oppressors, leaving us with a restatement of the dominant motif: whatever its fate, whether it lasts for a century or a millennium, capitalism depends on exploitation.

We are back where we began, in an earthly hell that resembles a secular version of Dante’s Inferno. ‘What does it matter to you what people whisper here?’ Virgil asks Dante in Canto 5 of the Purgatorio. ‘Follow me and let the people talk. [Vien retro a me, e lascia dir le genti.]’ Lacking a Virgil to guide him, Marx amends the line in his preface for the first volume of Das Kapital to warn that he will make no concession to the prejudices of others: ‘Now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine: Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. [Go your own way, and let the people talk.]’ From the outset, then, the book is conceived as a descent towards the nether regions, and even in the midst of complex theoretical abstractions he conveys a vivid sense of place and motion:

Let us, therefore, leave this noisy region of the market, where all that goes on is done in full view of everyone’s eyes, where everything seems open and above board. We will follow the owner of the money and the owner of labour-power into the hidden foci of production, crossing the threshold of the portal above which is written, ‘No admittance except on business’. Here we shall discover, not only how capital produces, but also how it is itself produced. We shall at last discover the secret of making surplus value.

The literary antecedents for such a journey are often recalled as he proceeds on his way. Describing English match-factories, where half the workers are juveniles (some as young as six) and conditions are so appalling that ‘only the most miserable part of the working class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it’, he writes:

With a working day ranging from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labour, irregular meal-times, and meals mostly taken in the workrooms themselves, pestilent with phosphorus, Dante would have found the worst horrors in his Inferno surpassed in this industry.

Other imagined hells provide further embellishment for his picture of empirical reality:

From the motley crowd of workers of all callings, ages and sexes, who throng around us more urgently than did the souls of the slain around Ulysses, on whom we see at a glance the signs of overwork, without referring to the Blue Books under their arms, let us select two more figures, whose striking contrast proves that all men are alike in the face of capital – a milliner and a blacksmith.

This is the cue for a story about Mary Anne Walkley, a twenty-year-old girl who died ‘from simple overwork’ after labouring uninterruptedly for more than twenty-six hours making millinery for the guests at a ball given by the Princess of Wales in 1863. Her employer (‘a lady with the pleasant name of Elise’, as Marx notes caustically) was dismayed to find that the girl had died without finishing the bit of finery she was stitching.

If these characters hadn’t existed, Charles Dickens might have been obliged to invent them. There is a Dickensian texture to much of Das Kapital, and Marx gives the occasional explicit nod to an author whom he loved. Here, for example, is how he swats bourgeois apologists who claim that his criticisms of particular applications of technology reveal him as an enemy of social progress who doesn’t want machinery to be used at all:

This is exactly the reasoning of Bill Sikes, the celebrated cutthroat. ‘Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveller has been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? Only consider! Where would agriculture and trade be without the knife? Is it not as salutary in surgery as it is skilled in anatomy? And a willing assistant at the festive table? If you abolish the knife – you hurl us back into the depths of barbarism.’

Bill Sikes makes no such speech in Oliver Twist: this is Marx’s satirical extrapolation. ‘They are my slaves,’ he would sometimes say, gesturing at the books on his shelves, ‘and they must serve me as I will.’ The task of this unpaid workforce was to provide raw materials which could then be shaped for his own purposes. ‘His conversation does not run in one groove, but is as varied as are the volumes upon his library shelves,’ wrote an interviewer from the Chicago Tribune who visited Marx in 1878. ‘A man can generally be judged by the books he reads, and you can form your own conclusions when I tell you a casual glance revealed Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Molière, Racine, Montaigne, Bacon, Goethe, Voltaire, Paine; English, American, French blue books; works political and philosophical in Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, etc, etc.’ Et cetera indeed: in 1976 Professor S. S. Prawer wrote a 450-page book devoted entirely to Marx’s literary references. The first volume of Das Kapital yielded quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Homer, Balzac, Dante, Schiller, Sophocles, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Defoe, Cervantes, Dryden, Heine, Virgil, Juvenal, Horace, Thomas More, Samuel Butler – as well as allusions to horror tales about werewolves and vampires, German chap-books, English romantic novels, popular ballads, songs and jingles, melodrama and farce, myths and proverbs.

What of Das Kapital’s own literary status? Marx knew that it could not be won second-hand, by the mere display of other men’s flowers. In Volume I he scorns those economists who ‘conceal under a parade of literary-historical erudition, or by an admixture of extraneous material, their feeling of scientific impotence and the eerie consciousness of having to teach others what they themselves felt to be a truly strange subject’. A fear that he could himself have committed this offence may explain the anguished admission, in the afterword to its second edition, that ‘no one can feel the literary shortcomings of Das Kapital more strongly than I’. Even so, it is surprising that so few people have even considered the book as literature. Das Kapital has spawned countless texts analysing Marx’s labour theory of value or his law of the declining rate of profit, but only a handful of critics have given serious attention to Marx’s own declared ambition – in several letters to Engels – to produce a work of art.

One deterrent, perhaps, is that the multilayered structure of Das Kapital evades easy categorization. The book can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created (‘Capital which comes into the world soiled with gore from top to toe and oozing blood from every pore’); or as a Victorian melodrama (in his 1962 study, The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers, S. E. Hyman even proposes an apt title for the drama: ‘The Mortgage on Labour-Power Foreclosed’); or as a black farce (in debunking the ‘phantom-like objectivity’ of the commodity to expose the difference between heroic appearance and inglorious reality Marx is using one of the classic methods of comedy, stripping off the gallant knight’s armour to reveal a tubby little man in his underpants); or as a Greek tragedy (‘Like Oedipus, the actors in Marx’s recounting of human history are in the grip of an inexorable necessity which unfolds itself no matter what they do,’ C. Frankel writes in Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought. ‘And yet all that links them to this fate is their own tragic blindness, their own idées fixes, which prevent them from seeing the facts until too late’). Or perhaps it is a satirical utopia like the land of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile: in Marx’s version of capitalist society, as in Jonathan Swift’s equine pseudo-paradise, the false Eden is created by reducing ordinary humans to the status of impotent, alienated Yahoos.

To do justice to the deranged logic of capitalism, Marx’s text is saturated with irony – an irony which has yet escaped most scholars for the past 140 years. One exception is the American critic Edmund Wilson, who argued in To The Finland Station: a study in the writing and acting of history (1940) that the value of Marx’s abstractions – the dance of commodities, the zany cross-stitch of value – is primarily an ironic one, juxtaposed as they are with grim, well-documented scenes of the misery and filth which capitalist laws create in practice. Wilson regarded Das Kapital as a parody of classical economics, ‘and once we have read [it] the conventional works on economics never seem the same to us again: we can always see through their arguments and figures the realities of the crude human relations which it is their purpose or effect to mask’. No one, he thought, had ever had so deadly a psychological insight into the infinite capacity of human nature for remaining oblivious or indifferent to the pains we inflict on others when we have a chance to get something out of them for ourselves. ‘In dealing with this theme, Karl Marx became one of the great masters of satire. Marx is certainly the greatest ironist since Swift, and has a good deal in common with him.’

This tribute seems so hyperbolic or downright incredible that supporting evidence may be required. So let us turn to the posthumous Theories of Surplus-Value, the so-called fourth volume of Das Kapital, in which Marx recounts the various attempts by classical economists to distinguish between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ labour. In the latter class Adam Smith had placed ‘churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc’, all of whom ‘are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people’. But is the distinction really so clear and simple? Marx suggests that every conceivable occupation can be productive, and sets out to prove it with an apparently absurd example:

A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor books and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we look a little closer at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable book in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as ‘commodities’…

The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice, constables, judges, hangmen, juries, etc; and all these different lines of business, which form equally many categories of the social division of labour, develop different capacities of the human spirit, create new needs and new ways of satisfying them. Torture alone has given rise to the most ingenious mechanical inventions, and employed many honourable craftsmen in the production of its instruments.

The criminal produces an impression, partly moral and partly tragic, as the case may be, and in this way renders a ‘service’ by arousing the moral and aesthetic feelings of the public. He produces not only books on criminal law, not only penal codes and along with them legislators in this field, but also art, belles-lettres, novels, and even tragedies, as not only Müllner’s Schuld and Schiller’s Räuber show, but also Oedipus and Richard the Third. [If he were writing today, he could add that without crime there’d be no John Grisham, no Inspector Morse, no Tony Soprano, nor even James Bond.] The criminal breaks the monotony and everyday security of bourgeois life. In this way he keeps it from stagnation, and gives rise to that uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of competition would get blunted…

The effects of the criminal on the development of productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks ever have reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves? Would the making of banknotes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers?… And if one leaves the sphere of private crime: would the world-market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would even the nations have arisen? And hasn’t the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?

As Edmund Wilson says, this stands comparison with Swift’s modest proposal for curing the misery of Ireland by persuading the starving poor to eat their surplus babies.

Ultimately, however, even Wilson loses the plot. Only a few pages after praising Marx’s keen psychological insight and elevating him to the pantheon of satirical genius, he protests at ‘the crudity of the psychological motivation which underlies the world view of Marx’ and complains that the theory propounded in Das Kapital is ‘simply, like the dialectic, a creation of the metaphysician who never abdicated before the economist in Marx’. This sounds very like those German reviews of the first volume which accused Marx of ‘Hegelian sophistry’ – a charge to which he was happy to plead guilty, admitting that in Das Kapital he coquetted with Hegel’s mode of expression. The dialectical flirtations which so offend Edmund Wilson are all of a piece with the irony he admires so highly: both techniques up-end apparent reality to disclose its guilty secrets. As the American philosopher Robert Paul Wolff commented in a 1984 lecture, ‘it is an odd sort of compliment to call a writer the greatest ironist since Swift, and then to adjudge his most serious intellectual efforts crackpot metaphysics’.

What, then, is the connection between Marx’s ironic literary discourse and his ‘metaphysical’ account of bourgeois society? Or, as Wolff puts the question: ‘Why must Marx write as he does if he is to accomplish the intellectual tasks he has set for himself?’ Had he wished to produce a straightforward text of classical economics he could have done so – and in fact he did. Two lectures delivered in June 1865, later published as Value, Price and Profit, give a concise and lucid précis of his theories about commodities and labour: ‘A man who produces an article for his own immediate use, to consume it himself, creates a product but not a commodity… A commodity has a value, because it is a crystallization of social labour… Price, taken by itself, is nothing but the monetary expression of value… What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist…’ And so on. Whatever its merits as an economic analysis, this can be understood by any intelligent child: no elaborate metaphors or metaphysics, no puzzling digressions or philosophical excursions, no literary flourishes. So why is Das Kapital, which covers the same ground, so utterly different in style? Did Marx suddenly lose the gift of plain speaking? Manifestly not: at the time he gave these lectures he was also completing the first volume of Das Kapital. A clue can be found in one of the very few analogies he permitted himself in Value, Price and Profit, when explaining his belief that profits arise from selling commodities at their ‘real’ value and not, as one might suppose, from adding a surcharge. ‘This seems paradox and contrary to everyday observation,’ he writes. ‘It is also paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive nature of things.’

The function of metaphor is to make us look at something anew by transferring its qualities to something else, turning the familiar into the alien or vice versa. Ludovico Silva, a Mexican critic of Marx, has drawn on the etymological meaning of ‘metaphor’ as a transfer to argue that capitalism itself is a metaphor, an alienating process which displaces life from subject to object, from use-value to exchange-value, from the human to the monstrous. In this reading, the literary style Marx adopted in Das Kapital is not a colourful veneer applied to an otherwise forbidding slab of economic exposition, like jam on thick toast; it is the only appropriate language in which to express ‘the delusive nature of things’, an ontological enterprise which cannot be confined within the borders and conventions of an existing genre such as political economy, anthropological science or history. In short, Das Kapital is entirely sui generis. There has been nothing remotely like it before or since – which is probably why it has been so consistently neglected or misconstrued.