Class 19: Capital Ch. 24, So-Called Original Accumulation

(dramatic music) - I am reading for the first time now maybe something you've all read. "Middlemarch. " Has anyone read this? Came out at exactly the same year as the second edition of "Capital," another great 19th century book, "Middlemarch" by George Eliot, otherwise known as Mary Ann Evans. In that book, one of the main characters is Dorothea Brooke, Ms. Brooke. And she confronts a situation in the 19th century, which is this. She's a young woman with very strong drives and intelligence who's thwarted by her society and is looking for an understanding of this. Who has read "Middlemarch. " Okay. She's looking for an understanding and the thing that tempts her the most is an understanding of the whole. So she gets hooked up with this guy Casaubon. It's really worth reading this. Who is writing the solution to all mythology? A giant book. I'm not sure if Marx is Casaubon. He does in some ways stay in the library and propose to us that he's gonna give us a solution to all the mythologies of capital. But he is also Dorothea in that he's looking for the reasons for our unfreedom. And the reasons are not given. In fact, all the opposite of the reasons for our unfreedom are what's given and what you read in polite conversation. Marx is obviously not talking about the emancipation of a young woman within bourgeois society. He's talking about the emancipation of workers within capitalist society. But there is a general thirst for understanding the world and I expect that we have the same thirst we are all Dorotheas in that regard. And I hope that in reading this book for the first time, some vistas have opened for you to understand the modes of unfreedom that we live under. There's almost no other place to look for such a concentrated present of these modes of unfreedom. It can make you feel like it's a pessimistic book. Marx was really unsatisfied with the freedoms that were offered. So I hope it's opened these things up for you in a certain way. One way you become unfree is through historical processes. Marx wants to lay those out for you so you have a sense of how this big cage capital, moving cage came into existence. And I just wanna point out some new things he's doing with history, which had been written in the 19th century as a trail of triumphs of states, of human beings, of populations even. What he shows is that, at least with regard to the capital system, this is the movement of history, at least with regard to the state. It starts out with laws against everything having to do with capital because it goes against the social form, which is independent producers that own their own means of production. All the laws are against it. It's absurd to imagine that a peasant wouldn't have four acres of land. It's absurd to imagine that you would enclose the commons so they wouldn't be able to pass through their meat, pasture their meat. I'm skipping a step there. That is followed by violence to destroy the old system. Pure destruction. That violence is then as the tides turn aided by the state in England, he's tracking the laws that originally restrict exploiting workers, restrict settling workers without enough land, peasants, without enough land. And then there's a big switch. He says it happens between the 15th and 16th centuries in which the laws start to support the new social order and give all the justifications for it imaginable. From do Dorothea's perspective. You can't really go to the law to understand why women are subjugated in the 19th century in Europe in their bourgeois milieu. The same is true for workers. You cannot go to the law to tell you why you're subjugated only to find the justifications for it. The second kind of new way of working is to think of historical processes. Again, these are operations that are not operations of capital, but they lead to it and Marx is giving us these categories so we can understand what happened. The first is enclosure. This was a set of activities taken up, enacted by to unplug my thing 'cause last time I forgot it.

You know what these cost. Capitalists, they're really expensive. Enclosure is something enacted by private individuals who are trying to get peasants to become workers trying to ruin subsistence. But the state starts to help with this. So it looks like nearly all land in England up to 1600 contained some rights for common pasturing of animals, all land in England up to 1600. By 1600, sorry, in the middle ages, by 1600, less than a third of it did. And by 1850, virtually all land had become private. This is the operation, the historical process of enclosure was taken up by individuals and then eventually supported by the state. So this first movement supports the processes. This is what a state is for Marx. It supports these historical processes. It naturalizes them, justifies them, and then supports then enforces them. Along with enclosure generally refers to the fencing or I'm reading my own note on this from the back of the book. Enclosure generally refers to the fencing or walling off of grazing land that had been freely usable by small landowners and that had been managed cooperatively. It's very important that it There were people whose whole job it was to make sure that the commons were remained common and were not overused by anyone. So the what is that ridiculous economic saw, the something of the commons, the tragedy of the commons. That was not actually the case. The commons were cooperatively maintained. People could, you know, exploit them to some degree, but the cooperative would regulate that. That was the idea of a mayor of a town. Companion processes to enclosure were consolidation. Of course, you can't have a capitalist farm without putting the small farms together into a big farm that we know increases productivity, makes it more efficient, makes uniform processes, all the kinds of things you need for capitalist production of food. And then clearing. You will have read all of these about this in the text. Clearing means the moving of the agricultural peasants off the land, subsistence peasants, but also you know, the remnants of feudalism in which the peasants also produce a quantum of goods for lords. But clearing is not enough because those cleared peasants have to be somehow converted into wage workers. And I wanna just point out to you some of the modes of conversion. So this tells you where the land came from. workers came from. There's then a question of where the capitalists came from and that's an interesting question that's a little bit less well treated here, but you need capitalists when we get to the last little bit on capitalist colonization. Don't mistake the last chapter for colonization two core, which is a much older phenomenon. It has all sorts of other impulses in it. Usually, very economic impulses. Where did the workers come from? Well clearing were a set of acts that Marx brings together under this category. Gives us all of the historical evidence for. That they were brutally pushed off land by bans that were hired by capitalists. And then this was reinforced by laws that moved people to the cities that took away their rights to land and made it absolutely necessary for them to labor in a capitalist system. The clearing and conversion process, he gives you a few tips to it. There's a lot of work that's been done on this in history and in historical sociology. You need a whole bunch of things to move people off the land and move them to work. First of all, once you get them off the land, you have a bunch of poppers. So you criminalize pauperism. You make workhouses. You have to then discipline people into the habit of and the need for work. This is not natural. He talks all about that. On pages 688 to 689. Legislation needed to come in to dictate a wage maximum

which I mentioned last time. There's an important sidebar on the French revolution there on page 674 if you wanna look at it, which was as we know, but Marx emphasizes not a worker revolution. In fact, although it could have been a worker revolution because a lot of the force came from the peasants. fear on the part of the aristocracy came from their fear of a peasant uprising. But legislation was quickly put into effect even before the terror to keep workers from having more rights than they needed and to keep them from moving out of industrial production of food and goods. So conversion is also violent. Clearing is also violent. Consolidation is I guess less violent. But enclosure is certainly a kind of violence done by architecture, geographical activity, putting up fences and walls. Just to say the historical processes that move towards capitalism. This by the way, is the meaning of so-called original accumulation whose real name is expropriation by violent means. If you wanna know Dorothea, how we got in this position, this is the Dorothea of the capitalist world. This is how we got into this position and understanding the position is a step towards understanding what's missing, what's been taken away. In addition, when you look at the colonization, very short chapter at the end, incidentally he probably put that some people conjecture that he put that funny little colonization chapter at the end. Because the end of chapter 24 is so inflammatory that the sensors might have censored the book. Had they read just the beginning and the very end, which seems to be a call for revolution. So he flipped them. This is a thought nobody really knows. Colonization chapter shows you that these processes are still going on all around the world and have to go on for capital to expand so it doesn't end with capital. And the argument of a great successor of Marx, a great reader of Marx intellect in her own right, Rosa Luxemburg argued that there are even internal to Europe modes of appropriation that are still going on. Capital is not just an efficient machine that takes care of itself. It's constantly sucking up things that are not capital violently. - How it develop? - Call it development in the external world. But yeah, it certainly goes on after the so-called colonial age is over. Capitalist development, invasion expropriation, appropriation is happening all over the place and facilitated by big international organizations like the World Bank. I wanna give you in the this part of it, understanding of where workers come from. Just a little sidebar on what freedom is in this book. It's a kind of sight for endless jokes. So as I said, workers are either free as a bird and just as right less. Or free to sell their labor power or starve. These are the ironic notes on freedom. Freedom is an ironic word in capital. It doesn't mean Marx is not interested in freedom, but he's not interested in modes of unfreedom dressed up with the word freedom. I would say in the deep background is a very robust and world transforming German idealist notion of freedom. That would be freedom as self-determination. But involving questions of communities and the world. That's a topic for another class. In the air is the notion of liberal freedom or liberty, which means not being restricted in commerce opinion or movement. Again, you can see how this would already be a facilitating liberty for the capital system. It doesn't mean we wanna get rid of liberal freedoms. Believe me. And Marx as a young thinker was confused about whether to support liberal freedoms because who doesn't want freedom of expression and freedom of movement and freedom to support yourself, but they become shills for capitalist unfreedom under capitalism. Marx adds some other forms of freedom that happen under capitalism, for example, to be freed of a possession, expropriation. the product of one's own labor, alienation.

To be freed of one's ability to make a life independently, independently of the system. To be freed of the ability to subsist is extortion or the capital relation. And finally, to be free legally to be totally dominated by the system. That's just a happy little sidebar. He then talks quite a bit about where the capitalist farmer came from. You know why this is important, right? You remember because making the means of subsistence into a productive enterprise where the prices can be driven down, you must have capitalist farmers. It's a kind of a basis. And he gives a great genealogy. You start with the farm bailiff who's basically an employee of the lord of a total vassal. 'Cause since I'm not a historian, I had to look this up on the great scholarly source, Wikipedia. Farm bailiffs exist on landed estates. The farm bailiff is employed by the proprietor and his managerial duties can include collecting rent taxes and supervising both farm operations and laborers. The whole thing is a matter of futile servitude. Money doesn't exchange hands but you know, benefits a crew from doing these services. The farm bailiffs often worked in medieval times with serfs. Serfs are peasants who are indentured to the lords and indentured through debt to the land and the work. The difference between a serf, so you know this you probably know and a slave in modern times is that serfs are usually not able to be sold from the bailiff farmer with serfs develops the free farmer in which there is an exchange of money. The means of production are supplied by the Lord in fact. Or there's an exchange. It means a production like seeds and tools are supplied by the Lord but there's no debt and the free farmer owns the land that they farm. Marx then sees a transformation to the sharecropper, which is someone who owns the land crops it, farms it, harvest crops and then has to give a share of the crops to the lord. You can see how the relationships become more independent, less dependent in a social and moral and legal sense and they become more dependent on exchange and independence and what has to be exchanged. Finally, you get to a farmer who uses wage labor and this happens after a set of operations. They invest their own capital, they pay the landlord with the part of surplus product that they get from their own exploitive practices and they pay that as rent. So the great other two surplus value made in production comes into existence when farmers are kind of minor capitalists. Not yet industrial farmers is rent. We have these new categories suddenly coming to existence after the 16th century. Agricultural capital, waged farm capital and ground rent. Ground rent, he will deal with some in volume two and more in volume three. Looking at the biggest picture, we've just been stuck in one book. Ground rent is one of the forms of profit. Surplus value being another form of profit and interest being a third form of profit. He will demonstrate that all of those other forms of profit, ground rent and interest and others are floated as well. Derived from surplus value and that's his big advance over Ricardo. Okay, there's a couple of other questions that are answered in the so-called original accumulation chapter. They are, where did the market come from? Because of course you can't only have production. Any idea where the market came from? I can wait. I can wait and you can conjecture. Why not? You've read the whole book. Where do you get a market? Peter. - (indistinct) Surplus. - Okay, I have a lot of stuff. Why does that mean there's someone wants it?

- There is the couple of commodity circulation. - Commodity circulation. There might be, but someone has to want it. And you have to make them want it. You make them want it by enclosing the commons, by consolidating this, by clearing them off the land, converting them into wage labor so they can't make it for themselves. The market comes along with all of this expropriation. Makes humans dependent on capitalists. Freed of the ability to subsist. Peasants had to buy their food. Starting what Marx tends to describe as a chain reaction. Because of course, they can get their much cheaper, who would work all year long when you can just go to the grocery store and being anachronistic. But this mode of providing for yourself takes over. That is going through exchange. Oddly, there's a set of contradictions here, one of which is that farmers sell produce to the workers who used to work beside them on the same land and subsist on their own. You see how they're alienated even as consumers. He has some thoughts about where industrialists come from. So we are asking these questions, where does the land come from? Where do the workers farmers come from? Where do the markets come from? And finally, where do the industrialists come from? But I wanna point out that he answers that question with a list of systems. I forget what page this is on. If someone finds it, will you shout it out? This is later in the maybe six '80s in the so-called accumulation chapter. I'll just point them out to you. He's looking much broader here at a set of systems that arise as this is happening that support the production of industrialists, the colonial system, which allowed much more goods to come in and you could have industrial production. It developed shipping and trade and it brought original accumulation, so-called expropriation from Europe to the rest of the world. The national debt system. So here he's starting to think in like political science terms or terms of kind of macroeconomics. Why is the national debt system helpful to producing industrialists? Well, national debt had to be paid in currency. So you had to have a big gross national product. If you borrow from other countries, you're not gonna ship them eggs. Doesn't make any sense, right? You're bringing in currency from elsewhere. Again, this is the chain reaction that happens. The modern tax system, which requires all citizens to pay taxes. They needed money for this. They needed large amounts of money if they were wealthy. And you needed this because this is the new way to protect your nation and its internal economy from foreign invasions that is now we have a tax system. Then he mentions the protectionist system. Is this exciting? Yeah, you're like this. I think it's really interesting to be honest because these systems all interlock to make capitalism work and if we want to see how it works, we have to take them apart. The protectionist system, it might be the case that you want free trade, but in order to get to free trade, you have to have an economy to trade with. So there's always going to be limited nation state protectionism on your economy a certain level that has to proceed free trade so that you have something to trade. He calls this an artificial way to manufacture industrial manufacturers. It's a great line. We say you have to make everything here. Sorry. This is also the state's involved in a certain movement of capital construction, of a capital system. A country with no industry of its own would not be able to survive in an international market. And then one that he talks about around the edges, but I wanna emphasize here is the slave system or the plantation system, which he definitely, he doesn't call a system as part of the construction of the capital system, but he does mention it all through this chapter. What does the slave system do? The American chattel slave system and the Americas chattel slave system. 'cause it's certainly not limited to North America.

The Caribbean, Brazil and other world locales. It allows for the injection of cheap goods at breakneck speed with a massive horrific human cost. He calls on page 688 and this is a point of contention but also a point of recognition. He calls slavery and the cotton industry that it holds up, especially in US America, the veiled pedestal for capital. It is that hidden pedestal in which capital is standing at the time. People have come and argued that the chattel slave system, the plantation system is not just a pedal for capitalism, is a model for capitalism. It's all throughout the center of capitalism. But this is Marx's reference. Okay, this is the exciting moment. Now we get to section seven. This is the kind of the hidden core of the whole thing. You had to read the whole book unfortunately to be able to accept it. Should we look at it? Let's open to page 689. The historical tendency of capitalist accumulation. We talked a little bit last time about why this is not a law of capitalist accumulation. It's just a tendency. It is historical. So capitalism may have a lot of necessity in it. As a system, it may need to keep reproducing itself and keep expanding, but it isn't perfect. It isn't a God given totality or even a philosopher given totality. It has many internal tensions and contradictions. It came about historically through something that is not systematic at all, violence, that gathered force over centuries. I'm not sure how to approach this. I'm looking at page 690 to 692. Just a couple of like explosive pages so we could read them out. We could go through and talk about the steps. What's the most helpful thing? What did you think of these pages? I'm feeling seminary. This is page 690. Once it reaches a certain level, it brings into being the material means of its own destruction. There's a theory of history here, which they call historical materialism. Why don't you take a look at these pages and we can key off of your interests and questions? It ends on page 691 with the line. The expropriators are expropriated. Woo hoo. I have ambivalent feelings about that line. AJ. - I'm specifically thinking about the, once it reaches the certain level it brings into, it brings into being with the serial, means it some destruction and also this underlying capital's monopoly. Now shackles a very mode of production that have flourished because of an under a cell. Like do you read any quote into these pages? And is Marx here arguing that you know, the capital system hospitalizing competencies like, inevitably lead to its demise? And if so, like what's the whole agency for us? - These are the classic questions. it's great that you say that, I'm gonna repeat them. One is, is there hope in these pages for overcoming capitalism as a system, the capital system for finding real kind of freedom for workers emancipating themselves? Is this an inevitable movement? And if it is an inevitable movement, what's the role of agency? Do you find answers to these questions in these pages? You'd have to read the text very carefully

because it isn't said. A lot of those things are not said directly here. Which is interesting. You've been through a text that has done rigorous analysis to the point that you wanted to throw it out. And I was writing my dissertation partly on Martin Heidegger at one point. I took my fist and I was like that to being in time and it's split in half. Well, time is unfortunately a stub already, but it didn't help me. It was just an expression of frustration. Well, we get to a point of synthesis here, of a synthesis of the whole book, the movement of history and we hope the possibilities for emancipating ourselves. Somebody emancipating themselves. Hey, Jay. I mean I think one thing that's pointing out is that raised, brought by the members of that class being the work also increases and they're brought together during or by this mechanism capital production. So I think I'm kind of reminded of the idea of cooperation and how, you know, industry brings together large swaths of workers. You know obviously, extracting more and more surplus value, but also in certain sets. Know those workers can talk to each other and understand the shortfalls that they're going to collect it. Then perhaps, you know, organize for a better future. But if so, does it seem sufficient or you know, the destruct (indistinct). - I just wanna, necessary but not sufficient. That's an interesting way to talk about these pages. More is maybe needed. I wanna point out some things that you said. We're looking at the passage towards the bottom of the big paragraph on page 69. Let's go back just a minute here now. Now we're towards the end of the historical movement here. It starts with on page 690 with the mode of production prior to capital, which reaches a certain level and brings into the material into being the material means of its own destruction. That is really the movement from precapital. Into capital, new powers and passions begin to stir deeply within the belly of society, of a society in which they feel themselves fettered, this is the end of the feudal age. It must be destroyed. It is destroyed. There is a history seems to have a kind of almost mechanical movement. If you take those sentences seriously, they don't have a subject. It is destroyed. Now you might say that society is the subject there 'cause he talks about the powers and passions. So it may well be, but somehow from these powers and passions or in a company with them, there is a kind of inevitable outcome. Maybe. Is it inevitable or is it just what happened? Well, first he describes it as what happened with a lot of agency on the part of states and actors and proto capitalists and armies and walls, all of these regimes of exp appropriation and techniques of exp appropriation that people are enacting themselves by their own wills with the idea that this is good towards a better organization of things, at least for themselves. Here, there is a change. It reaches a certain level. It's almost a kind of thermodynamic or feedback system. Once it reaches a certain level, there's a lever that's triggered and it tips over into something else. Which account is the account we should follow? To me, sometimes these pages feel tacked on much as I might agree with the desires that motivate them. In a book like this, you have to wonder how tacked on these pages are. Then we get to eventually, through the whole in a very compact, so if you wanted to read this book, you could just read these two pages. If you didn't want to read the book, you could read the two pages, but you wouldn't believe them. At least now you have a chance of believing that Casaubon or Dorothea has found the understanding that will make the world that they live in available to them. At the height of techno capitalism, it's not only the workers who are expropriated, but the capitalists. They get thrown out of their position as owners and as industry leaders because concentration is necessary for productivity and for get ringing more value out of the system

under the accumulation imperative. So you can't even, it's not even really easy to be a capitalist if you want to. You may have been a capitalist and now you're just working for someone else. Your company got bought up, right? All of this incentive to be an entrepreneur is really an incentive to eventually get bought up. Uber driver was telling me the other day, "I've owned nine companies. " There's a lot more to say about that but. On the other side, so the number of capitalist magnets falls continuously and the remaining ones monopolize and usurp for themselves. All the advantages that this process of transformation holds. Meanwhile, misery increases as does the amount of pressure, subjugation, degradation and exploitation different than the bloody violence that led up to it, but its own kind of problem inflicted upon the constantly growing working class. Now we get to the sentence that AJ cited, quoted, but the outrage felt by the members of that class also increases. Okay, we have a counterforce here. Outrage. A good one. One we need to take into account of right now, take account of where we live, that there is outrage and it outrage is felt though maybe not understood. They're brought together and are trained and organized by the mechanism of the capitalist production itself. Here's where within the capitalist movement, something like a new collectivity is born and a lot of people exploit this idea in interesting ways, Lenin being one of them. That it's the Massification. The new kind of collaboration that makes what gets called the proletariat the proletariat. Now there's a set of sentences that lead away from that, but we do have one counterforce here, which is outrage and the total concentration and de-skilling of the workforce into a, you could say a group that has no other way out but revolution. This is between the lines, but this is what Marx is alluding to here. It's an old thought, there's no other recourse. You can't work your way to prosperity. You can't even really become a capitalist unless you're musk or one of the giant capitalists. Very hard. Is that hope? I don't know. Richard. - Oh, I think we're drawn back to be the expropriators are expropriated. I sort of like didn't actually think that. To me, the past has read more like Aristotle's politics actually. When Aristotle thoughts sort of like all those in like a sicker net about the differing types of regimes that are possible and the different ways in which certain passionate groups decide to take for themselves the arms of this history. And like I don't really think that maybe socialism necessarily is just immediately the result of the proletarians revolting, is just the revolted which is another contraction of the sister that then somehow capitalism besides modify for itself and brings about a new type of (indistinct). - expropriation is seek is brought about here according to Marx's very like deductive way of working here. It's different I think than other parts in the book. It's a deduction from the history that has come before to something that should happen, a deduction from. All of the operations we've been tracking. And I'll just mention a couple of things that Richard said. It's like, let's say a more traditional account of political theory in which a group, through their interests and passions, takes power. Wouldn't you say? That's what you're saying? And you refer that to Aristotle, but you could refer it to other political theorists. That's what politics is supposed to be in the European tradition. And Marx has been saying up till now all through the book that politics has very little effect on this system. But we might have a real political moment, a real place where what is politics for Aristotle that the people defines itself its needs and can act together to secure the polls of the policy. That's politics. Maybe politics comes in after all of this dismal science. AJ, do you have a response to this? AJ? Let me go to the back and then I'll come to you.

Yeah. - Yeah, this bill was counter but I mean, we are at the end of the bowl. So I guess my question is, Max's survey described the whole capital system, right? And but it just sort of like did all its initial question about agency, right? Marx assumed that the capital, the sister would generate its own competitions and therefore be issued, right? And then people like Lenin wanna say, (indistinct) that would be the still the vision between the officers maxes we say okay, the system will digital will destroy itself and there'll be linearness on all say no, the revolution has to be brought about by the banger, right? The revolutionary banger. So again, the question is, is much assumption that the capital, the proletarian class, which has this offers that you are just coaching to outside the capital system or is it filter on the capitalist system? And the reason I'm stuck clear is because if the system is supposed to be at least to extreme contradiction, then it will have to assume that the proletarians are part of the capitalist system itself. Well if the pros are outside the system, then it means it is not, you know, the system is destruction. It is rather than proprietary cloud that is external to the system that will need to destruction in the system. - No, I think you're right and the first thing you say that the proletarians are the internal limit of the system. That's what I would say in good German idealist fashion. They are the limit condition of the system. They have to be there. But if they're really massified and the capitalists are really few, there's nothing holding them back from simply taking over. There's a thought. There's that thought in here too. But I would say to you that these questions that are coming up from AJ's questions about the kind of classical issues that arise in thinking of the transition to socialism. Is it automatic in history? Does history do it? Is there a spirit moving through history or do agents carry this out? This is a question that is answered by the different Marxist fashions in the early 20th century. Lenin in a very complex way and I would advise you all to read Lenin carefully. He read these pages very carefully. The pages have a terrible, even terrifying ambiguity in them. A set of ambiguities, which we should not ignore. The tendency of readers is to pick one or the other and neither is fully supported by these pages. What pages is everything that leads up to them. The picture of the capitalist system and how it got to be. What isn't really supported here are the modes of emancipation. I don't think you can land on one or the other. That doesn't mean that careful study wouldn't lead you to a better solution, let's say than the Leninist solution or the Maoist solution or the Western Marxist solution. You can imagine the last 150 years of intellectual activity, if not being only about these two pages. Then being oriented towards one way or the other, the people who are trying to get an answer out of these two pages. So I wouldn't wanna leave you with a dogmatic answer and in fact, if you go to volume two, which we're gonna do now, it shifts the question a little bit and I will be teaching next spring and continuing to translate and work on the next volume. Because there are other obstacles besides just let's say the number of capitalists, or the unified ness of the proletariat. One obstacle to emancipating ourselves from the system is the circulation system which provides everyone with what they need. That's what volume two is about. Keep in mind that Marx wrote volumes two and three before he wrote volume one. That is to say he wrote a version of volume one, two and a version of volume three and then he rewrote volume one into this form. The other, versions of volume two and volume three. This is where philology is revolutionary. I've been trying to convince the Marxist of that a little while since this book came out. Philology is radical, we need to know how the book came to be. it came to be written. We need to know what was left out and what was put in. We need to know what misgivings he had after he wrote it so we can get to better answers. There's very few guides for us to get to better answers than Marx himself. Readers of Marx are also often very good guides. What is hoped for at the end here, let's just end on this.

Some of these ringing notes. It's amazing prose first of all. It harks back to the communist manifesto, which, you know, rhetoric is not a small tool against domination. Sometimes it's a tool for domination. We shouldn't minimize the non dialectical, the non-economic modes that Marx uses here to try to get people free, including polemic, insult, ridicule, and rhetoric. Those are all good. If they work, it doesn't matter what brings capital down for Marx. AJ. - I mean, it seems like then, right? Like politics actually play a much larger role than destruction of the capital system than Marx would have us believer at the rest of the book, right? Why? You know, he has these pages in here that seem like very insignia and very revolutionary, but why is he so hesitant to actually lend credence to the agency of politics like throughout the rest. I feel like it's actually a leap away inside Jake, but like it seems like Marx is so closed off to that idea. - The question is why Marx seems closed off to politics in the rest of the book. And the answer is that it doesn't touch the core of the capital relation for him. It only is there to support the core of the capital relation states. If that's what politics is, states. Legislative politics, jurisprudence. Policing, all of those things are there to keep the core capital relation active according to Marx. And he shows you throughout history how it was set up that way, how law became the support of the capital system and the justification of the capital system. And of course, it does seem lately that capital processes dominate political processes and that political processes are quite weak to challenge them. Let's end with some ringing words. Capital's monopoly, now shackles the very mode of production that had flourished because of an under it. The concentration of the means of production and the socialization of labor reached the point where neither process is compatible with its capitalist shell. This bursts and now the bell tolls for capitalist private property, the expropriators are expropriated. I leave you with the line with no interpretation because it is very ambiguous. (ambient music)