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Capital & Class
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DOI: 10.1177/030981680107500105
2001 25: 65 Capital & Class
John Holloway
Why read Capital?

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65 Why read Capital?
Why learn Latin? Both Latin and Capital are dying
languages. How many Capital reading groups are there
now? How many courses on Capital in colleges or
universities? How many individuals ploughing on their
own through the three volumes?
Yet it was reading Capital that brought many of us
into the CSE. Now that Capital & Class is celebrating
its twenty-fth anniversary, it is worth recording that
the change in the title of the journal of the CSE from
the Bulletin of the CSE to Capital & Class had much
to do with the inux of non-economists in to the CSE
at about that time.
W
c 1cnNcb to the csc, I think, (certainly it was so in
my case) because we were looking for a way of
developing a Marxist approach to our own
particular elds of interest. I think that at the time I was
inspired by Marxs words in the 18 Preface: My inquiry
led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor
political forms could be comprehended whether by
themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development
of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate
in the material conditions of life, the totality of which
Hegelembraces within the term civil society; that the
anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in
political economy. In order to understand the anatomy of
civil society, I turned to the reading of Capital, and the csc
was the obvious forum for discussion. This seemed the best
way to develop an understanding of the relation between
base and superstructure.
Why read Capital?
John Holloway
Capital & Class #75 66
Just the rst few lines of Capital are enough, however, to
throw us into a completely dierent theoretical world: this
is not an account of base and superstructure but a critique
of forms.
The question of form, and the tension it implies, are
introduced in the very rst sentence of Capital: The wealth
of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production
prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of
commodities, its unit being a single commodity.
The explosive tension implied by the concept of form is
even clearer when we come to the rst words of the next
paragraph. A commodity is, in the rst place, an object outside
us. From the beginning we are hurled into the midst of a
violent and unsustainable dualism.
The commodity does not just stand outside us. It stands
against us (as is clearer in the original Germanein usserer
Gegenstand). It spits in our face. It denies us, negates us. We
know that the commodity is our product, the result of our
doing. As Marx argues in the following pages, its value is
nothing other than the crystallisation of our work. And yet
it stands there and presents itself as an object outside us, as
something that has nothing to do with our work. The
commodity denies us, simply by being a commodity. From
the beginning we are told that we exist in the mode of being
denied.
1
The opening lines of Capital make it clear that the
commodity rules, that we are negated.
Sometimes it is argued, absurdly, that the subject is not
present in Capital, that Marx never got around to his book
on the wage in which the subject would have been theorised,
that we must complement Marxs discussion with a theory
of the subject. And yet there we are at the very beginning,
plain as can be. There we are, in the only way we can be in
a book on capitalism: as negated subject. A commodity is,
in the rst place, an object outside us: there we are, us, the
us who are spat upon by the commodity, the us who are so
trampled upon by the commodity that thousands of Marxists
reading Capital have not even noticed that we are there.
Trampled upon we may be, but we are there. That which
is in the rst place already contains the seeds of its own
destruction. The phrase in the rst place already announces
the force of that which exists in the mode of being denied,
of us who are already present in our negation. That which is
in the rst place obviously is not, in the second place. Marx
never says in the second place but it would make little
67 Why read Capital?
sense to say in the rst place if it were not to be contrasted
with in the second place. A commodity is, in the rst place,
an object outside us. And in the second place, what? In the
second place, clearly, a commodity is not an object outside
us. This becomes clear in the following pages, when we see
that the commodity is not an object outside us, for the simple
reason that we made it. The commodity, then, is and is not
outside us. What appears at rst to be a simple denition (a
commodity isan object outside us) is not that at all, for a
denition arms that something is, not that it is and is not.
What is announced here is rather an explosive tension.
In the rst place, we are negated, spat upon, trampled
upon. In the second place we are doers, active subjects who
produce the commodities that spit upon us. Both the rst
and the second place exist: the rst place is not mere illusion.
We really are active subjects and we really do exist in the
form of being denied, we really do live in a society which is
based upon the denial of our social doing. In the rst place
is domination, the denial of our subjectivity, of our humanity.
In the second place is the possibility of liberation, of self-
emancipation. The possibility of changing the world lies in
the tension between the rst and the second place, between
form and content, between denial and that which is denied.
Both despair and hope are there in the opening words of
Capital, as they must be in any honest reection on
capitalism. Yet so much of Marxism separates them, nowhere
more than in the reading of Capital as Marxist economics.
In this movement of despair and hope, despair is in the
rst place, in the supercial understanding of things as they
are. Hope lies in the piercing of the rst place, the recu-
peration of that which is invisible in the rst place, that
which exists in the mode of being denied. In the rst place,
our doing is denied, replaced with being. The movement of
hope is the recovery of doing, of the doing that is denied by
the rst place. This movement is the movement of criticism,
understood as genetic criticism, as the attempt to trace the
origin of phenomena in social doing. Marx presents us with
the horror of a commodity that negates doing, that presents
itself as being, and then immediately takes us beyond that
horror to show us its origin in doing, to show us the real
presence of that which is denied in the rst place, and not
only its presence but the absolute dependence of that which
denies on that which is denied. The commodity could not
exist without the doing which it denies, nor could money,
Capital & Class #75 68
nor capital. Capital depends on the doing which it denies:
therein lies the force of that which exists in the mode of
being denied, therein lies hope.
We are not yet home, however, for the doing which
criticism uncovers is inevitably a sick doing. What sort of
doers are we that produce products that deny our own
existence? Obviously, there is something wrong with us. If
we produce products that deny our own doing, then clearly
our doing is a doing which negates itself . A sick,
schizophrenic doing, a doing which is both concrete and
abstract labour, a doing which exists in antagonistic tension
with itself. That self-antagonistic doing, that two-fold nature
of the labour contained in commoditiesis the pivot on
which a clear comprehension of Political Economy (and
everything else) turns. What criticism uncovers, in other
words, is not a pure subject, but a divided self, a doer whose
doing turns against itself. There is no pure subject here, and
if we think of revolution in terms of the action of a pure
subject, as Lenin does with his vanguard party, as Negri
does with his multitude, then we are lost from the very
beginning. The only hope is the doing of a self-antagonistic
subject, ourselves. The only hope is a hope laden with despair.
Despair and hope develop inseparably through the three
volumes of Capital. The self-antagonistic doing which
produces the commodity which denies us, produces ever more
sophisticated forms of denial: money, capital, prot, rent,
interest, forms which obliterate hope more and more
eectively. Yet the same self-antagonistic doing is, inevitably,
the production of antagonisms or contradictions within the
done, however much that done denies the doing. A
contradictory doing inevitably produces a contradictory done,
which Marx discusses as the contradictions of capital and
the tendency to crisis. And the basic contradiction is the
contradiction between the doing and the denial of doing,
life and death. The basic contradiction is the done which
denies the doing that did it: the commodity that presents
itself as an object outside us. The same movement that
produces the closure of hope also opens cracks in despair.
We, as readers of Capital, are in the middle of all this. We
too are doers, weaving a social relation between our doing
as readers and the doing of the writer (Marx), a social relation
obscured, of course, by the insertion of the book in the
complex of commodity relations. Our doing too is
contradictoryhow else could one explain the absurdity of
69 Why read Capital?
Marxist economics. But, however contradictory, our
reading-doing is inevitably part of the struggle between doing
and its denial, between hope and despair. The attempt to
understand the relation between base and superstructure is
left far behind, as indeed is all attempt at trying to understand,
as though we could stand outside the process. Marx has left
for us rather an invitation into the movement of criticism,
into the struggle for the emancipation of doing, the struggle
of those and of that which exists in the mode of being denied.
That is surely why we should read Capital.
Notes
1. On existence in the mode of being denied, see Richard Gunn (1992),
Against Historical Materialism: Marxism as First-Order Discourse,
in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, K Psychopedis (eds) Open Marxism, Vol. II,
Theory and Practice, (London: Pluto) pp.1-45.
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