CAPITAL ON AGRICULTURE AND ECOLOGY

While Marx thus takes a balanced and historically informed view of the role of modern industry, he does not, by any means, romanticise the actual process of industrial modernisation under the aegis of the capitalist mode of production. In an interesting discussion of the relation between modern industry and agriculture, Marx anticipates some of the contemporary ecological concerns. In a typically dialectical assessment of the impact of capitalist industrial modernisation on agriculture and the working people in agriculture, here is what Marx has to say:

Capitalist production completely tears asunder the old bond of union which held together agriculture and manufacture in their infancy. But at the same time it creates the material conditions for a higher synthesis in the future, viz., the union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the more perfected forms they have each acquired during their temporary separation. Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural labourer. But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the maintenance of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its restoration as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race.

(Capital, Volume I)

Marx concludes this discussion thus:

Moreover, all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility... Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer. (A good introduction to Marx’s perspectives and views on issues of ecology and environment can be found in John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (Monthly Review Press, New York.)

CENTRALITY OF CONTRADICTION

A key feature of Marx’s method, which Capital is suffused with, is that of showing the contradictory character of all the phenomena under investigation. We saw this in the earlier quotation from Capital on the historical role of machinery and modern industry and in the passage on the historical tendency of the capitalist mode of production. The remarkable 25th chapter in the first volume of Capital on ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’ is another outstanding example of Marx’s method of argument of starting out with simple categories depicting various aspects of the phenomenon under study, and showing the process of their dynamic evolution through the working out of their inherent contradictions. It is of course important to emphasise that the contradictions being discussed by Marx are real ones on the ground and not merely contradictions of the theoretical categories used to represent the real world.

 It is, in retrospect, astonishing that Marx managed to make such a deep and profound structure of argument – and several substructures within the overall structure – so eminently readable. One feature of Capital that contributes to this readability is that every theoretical argument is immediately illustrated from contemporary history – and in many instances with the events and phenomena of earlier historical epochs as well. Marx makes abundant but rigorous use of official records and reports and data sources in illustrating his arguments.

Marx’s frequent references in Capital to fine works of literature and appropriate quotes from them relieves the reader struggling with dense arguments from time to time. Consider, for instance, the following passage on the capitalist engaged in the accumulation of capital:

To accumulate, is to conquer the world of social wealth, to increase the mass of human beings exploited by him, and thus to extend both the direct and the indirect sway of the capitalist. But original sin is at work everywhere. As capitalist production, accumulation, and wealth become developed, the capitalist ceases to be the mere incarnation of capital. He has a fellow-feeling for his own Adam, and his education gradually enables him to smile at the rage for asceticism, as a mere prejudice of the old-fashioned miser. While the capitalist of the classical type brands individual consumption as a sin against his function, and as “abstinence” from accumulating, the modernised capitalist is capable of looking upon accumulation as “abstinence” from pleasure.

Marx captures this contradiction between wanting to enjoy the good life and the compulsion to accumulate by quoting from Goethe’s Faust:

“Two souls, alas, do dwell with in his breast;
The one is ever parting from the other.”

Marx then elaborates the argument, bringing out the contradictions involved and showing how they change with the dynamics of capitalism in history:

At the historical dawn of capitalist production, – and every capitalist upstart has personally to go through this historical stage – avarice, and desire to get rich, are the ruling passions. But the progress of capitalist production not only creates a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation and the credit system, a thousand sources of sudden enrichment. When a certain stage of development has been reached, a conventional degree of prodigality, which is also an exhibition of wealth, and consequently a source of credit, becomes a business necessity to the “unfortunate” capitalist. Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation. Moreover, the capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out the labour-power of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life’s enjoyments. Although, therefore, the prodigality of the capitalist never possesses the bona fide character of the open-handed feudal lord’s prodigality, but, on the contrary, has always lurking behind it the most sordid avarice and the most anxious calculation, yet his expenditure grows with his accumulation, without the one necessarily restricting the other. But along with this growth, there is at the same time developed in his breast, a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment.

There are many such delightful passages in Capital, dripping with irony in their relentless expose of capitalist hypocrisy.

A FINAL WORD

Reading Capital is clearly a very worthwhile exercise. It may be advisable to read Capital, at least when doing it for the first time, in a study circle (not too large in size, 10 to 15 members would be optimal) whose members are serious about meeting regularly for this purpose. It will also be helpful to read the prefaces and the after-words to the various editions by Marx and by Engels.