Ray Brassier Session 2 Reproduction, Presupposition and Struggle

okay thanks uh dan thanks uh separately also for um inviting me okay um so today um my talk is about um this book by a pierre dardom christian laval it's called um Marx Renon-Karl. It was published in 2012. It's a very big book. I'm going to try to summarize the central threads of its arguments, but actually I won't... the end of... I don't

really have a proper conclusion. I wasn't able to kind of tie everything together in way in which I'd hope to. So what, you know, I really just want to kind of introduce the, you know, the lines of investigation that they kind of chart in this book. And then we can, you know, hopefully, hopefully kind of discuss their implications in the discussion. The book, so I'm going to give a kind of a, this PowerPoint presentation, again, trying to kind of summarize you know the the main kind of lines of argument in the book the first story begins with you know an account of the what they call the process of

you know the way in which humans produce and reproduce the material conditions of their existence and they kind of they draw attention to the specifics of Marx's accounts of this especially in his you know in his early work in the German ideology in particular and then they tie this to an account of the logic of capital okay so the first the opening move is a contrast between what they call the strategic logic of class struggle and the speculative logic of capital. The second part of the talk will really go into the middle section of the book,

which is their reconstruction of the logic of capital, which involves reconstructing Marx's relationship to Hegel. And it's in a way, it's the trickiest part, it'll be the hardest material. But then it reconnects this whole kind of rather arcane debate about the finer points of Marx's analysis of the commodity culminates in a re-articulation of the relationship between you know capital and labor and you know the role of class struggle and I won't yes and that's the

third and final kind of part of the presentation doesn't really you know I don't succeed in bringing those two together but you know we can hopefully discuss this okay so Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval are not you know are both elderly French academics they're both in their late 60s I think Dardot was born in 52 and Laval in 53. Christian Laval is a professor of sociology at the University of Paris 10, Nanterre. And he is known, he had published, you know, several works on Jeremy Bentham. He's known as a kind of a specialist in the work of Bentham.

Since 2007, Dardot-Lavard have published, you know, a remarkable number of books, nine books. So they published, you know, these nine books, which you see here, I think three of which have been translated into English. Okay. So, the New Way of the World, which, you know, that was from 2009, was published by Verso in 2017. Common, on Revolution in the 21st Century, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. And, you know, Neverending Nightmare, the Neoliberal Assault in Society was published also by Verso in 2019. And they've since, you know, published three more books, you know, in the last three or four years.

So Dardot, as far as I know, had never published anything except for, well, he wrote a PhD thesis in the 1980s, which obviously plays a kind of a central role in their accounts of Marx. But so it's really there's this long silence and then this explosion of productivity in the last, you know, really 12 or 13 years. Now unfortunately the book I'm talking about today which is the Marx book published in 2012, which is the longest of all these books, it's like 800 pages, is not, you know, has not been translated which is a pity because it's really a remarkable work and it's remarkable because of the

way in which it combines historical erudition and really intricate conceptual analysis. So it's it's really kind of a remarkable achievement. I'm not, you know, I don't know if I agree with all its theses but I'm just going to try to kind of lay them out for you today as clearly as I can. The opening in a way that their entire account is based on their account of the importance of material reproduction in Marx's account is based on glossing two very famous quotes from

Marx, one from the German ideology and the second from the 18th Vermeer. The first is this from the opening of the German ideology, where they say the presuppositions from Marx and Engels, right, the presuppositions from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but effective presuppositions. Now this is, the English translation sometimes has like real presuppositions, but actually the German is Wichlichen Wrautsenzung, excuse my pronunciation, it's terrible, but as Dardone Laval points out, this is really, you know, Marx does not choose this expression, you know, arbitrarily. It's a very kind of, it's, you know, pregnant with philosophical

significance, this concept of effective presuppositions. So these, you know, these effective presuppositions are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. And these premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way. Okay. So the key idea here is that there are already existing conditions which provide the starting point for human productive activity. And from this starting point, humans produce new conditions. And I don't know, I'll take this to be the kind of the, you know, the primacy of practice, you know, what's Marx's

practical materialism, you know, as, you know, expressed certainly around 1845, in the German ideology, but also in the thesis on Farback, is the claim that, you know, humans, you know, We have to take into account the practices through which produce and reproduce their material conditions in order to understand the thoughts relationship to reality or consciousness's relationship to reality. The second quote is from the 18th Vermeer, which really is a kind of, it's written later,

but it's really a kind of a version of the same thought, which is a past production conditions, present production. And so Marx famously writes, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already given and transmitted from the past okay so now we were able to gloss this concept of effective presuppositions okay um and it's basically the the idea that human activity is both determined by existing conditions and productive of new conditions and it is this circuit of conditioned and conditioning activity that is the empirically as opposed to logically

effective starting point for materialist theory. These effective presuppositions are empirically verifiable insofar as they are concretely sensuous, which is not the same as simply empirically perceptible. So that this, the contrast between sensuous and super sensuous, which Marx takes over from Feuerbach, which I think is really rooted to Kant, to the kind of the distinction between phenomena and noumena, doesn't map on to the kind of the familiar empiricist distinction between the perceptible and the imperceptible. To say that, so in other words, the realm of the centrist

is not simply coextensive with what is, you know, given in sensation or immediately accessible to sensory perception. So they are empirically verifiable but they are not merely empirical. These effective presuppositions are not, you know, kind of directly empirically perceptible. They are not abstract data, okay, they're not purely kind of, you know, conceptual abstractions but nor are they merely empirically perceptible matters of facts of the kind favored by empiricism. So this concept of effective presuppositions is opposed both to the given presuppositions of empiricism and to the posited presuppositions of idealism.

And in a way this, you know, the articulation of, you know, what is given and what is posited is something that we'll discuss in much greater detail shortly. Empiricism assumes certain objective facts as given without inquiring into their conditions or how they came about. And the whole point is that the effect of presuppositions tell us the historical conditions under which a state of affairs came to be generated, was socially generated through this practical human activity idealism on the other hand turns every factual premise into the result of the subject's productive activity um so idealism abstracts from the empirical altogether

but in doing so it's in a way it kind of um you know it reifies you know self-consciousness or or subjectivity as this autonomous sphere of cognitive activity. And in fact, it separates cognition and intellectual cognition from the human life process, from the total social process of which it is a part. So the effective presuppositions for historical materialism the social productive activities of humans that's why it says effective presuppositions plural and not simply effective presupposition in the singular it's humans in the plural not humanity

you know as this abstract generic subject and these humans bring about the empirical states of affairs that are either objectified by empiricism or subjectified by idealism okay Now, at this point, the claim is that if the effect of presupposition is this practical, productive activity carried out by a multiplicity of human social subjects, it doesn't presuppose a constituted subject or agent. Okay, and this is something that Dardone and I've also emphasized, and here I've used a couple of quotations from the translation of a common.

So what they define praxis as the self-production of its subject through the auto alteration of the actor in the very course of action. So in other words, this kind of practical productive activity is, it doesn't kind of, you know, unfold from a fully constituted, you know, homogenous subject. It actually, you know, you know, the subject is generated in and through this, you know, productive practical activity. and secondly they you know they define instituting praxis as the self-production of a collective subject in and by the continuous co-production of the rules of rights and law so in a way

a social subject a collective social subject is instituted through this you know practical activity as which generates norms, norms of conduct, standards of behavior, etc. etc. Okay, so the key thing is that the idea that you know the the effective presupposition of human practical activity does not require the hypothesis of you know of an agent okay of a of an independently existing agent or subject

Okay, so now, and this, and what the first definition that they give of struggle, of class struggle, is that this, you know, the, this, you know, productive practical activity, you know, is, you know, shaped by social conflict and social antagonism, okay. So the first definition of class struggle given by Dardot-Laval is that class struggle is a struggle in which the process of struggle constitutes the agent of the struggle. Which is also to say that class is engendered through struggle and does not pre-exist it.

Okay. But then the constitution of class through struggle generates economic conditions that reconstitute class and in a way that kind of the emergence of capital and the capitalist class relation in a way reshaped the nature and the structure of class. Okay. So So, there's two distinctions to be made. First, the constitution of class through economic reproduction. Class as constituted in and through the reproduction of capital. And the constitution of class through social struggle. In a way, the class struggle through which the capital relation was originally instituted.

okay um and this is the first kind of um you know um summary or schematic um you know definition we can give of the two logics of the two logics um which dardone level identified marks one being the strategic logic of class struggle as a process of transformations of the conditions of antagonism that is also the process of the self-transformation of its agents and a speculative logic of capital as producing and reproducing its conditions of development. Now, so, but in order to understand the articulation of the strategic logic of class

and the speculative logic of capital, or in a way, our human social reproduction and capital reproduction, we have to understand what speculative reflection means. Here, we need to revisit Hegel's logic of essence. And Ardant-Lavalle are adamant, you know, it's, you know, have a considerable amount of textual evidence to substantiate the claim that the logic of capital is modelled on the

logic of essence. Now, that's not an original claim. lots of people have made it, but the way in which they defend it is original, I think. Hegel distinguishes between three moments of reflection, positing reflection, external reflection, and determining reflection. The logic of reflection in Hegel is the logic of relation. it's the relation of mediation and the immediacy okay um you know essence you know follows the kind of um you know follows being and the initial moment of essence is positing reflection

um which hegel defines you know i've tried to keep these definitions as simple as possible because otherwise it's just a kind of it's a nightmare trying to wade through um hegel's account of the logic of essence so positing reflection is a positing in as much as it is immediacy as a turning back that is to say there is not an other beforehand one either from which or to which would turn back it is therefore only a turning back or as a negative of itself and in a way that don't have how usefully kind of you know they really try to kind of explain this through you know, the analogy of light, okay? It's light that is reflected, and in positing reflection,

it's reflection that is immediately, it's as if light is reflected back into itself without, in a way in which it cancels itself out. It doesn't have any, you know, there's no, in a way it can only relate to itself by bouncing back from something, you know, from a surface, a reflecting surface, but because it only, you know, it is only as this process of, you know, reflection or bouncing back, there is no image, okay, there's nothing, nothing is reflected,

there's a reflection without anything being reflected, and that's why Hegel describes it as a movement from nothing to nothing, okay, nothing is generated through this process of reflection. That's why it's a negative of itself. And then we have external reflection. Okay, so this is numbers. So reflection and positing immediately sublates its positing. And so it has an immediate presupposition. It therefore finds this presupposition before it as something from which it starts and from which it only makes its way back into itself, negating it as its negative. So here, the idea is that an external reflection, reflection is reflected back from an

image, okay? There is a, you know, a reflecting instance, but reflection forgets that this, you know, this, you know, the reflecting instance is itself, is its own product or its own result. So it treats, you know, the image, the mirror image from which it bounces back into itself as something that exists separately and independently. In other words, it treats the image as external to the movement of reflection. okay in other words it's something is posited but the movement of positing has been erased or denied

okay so in the first in positing reflection you've got positing but positing that you know doesn't generate you know a posited positive you know a positive positive thing so that keeps on kind of vanishing into itself. In the second movement, you've got the positing of something positive, but then the movement of positing is cancelled or negated, so it finds itself relating, you know, bouncing back from something which is taken to be, you know, external and independent to it. And finally, the third movement brings together positing and external reflection. So

this is determining reflection. The positing is now united with external reflection. In this unity, the latter, the positing, is absolute presupposing. That is, the repelling of reflection from itself or the positing of determinateness as its own so now instead of having you know the positing and the posited as separate moments they are brought together so that positing understands itself as always you know relating to a posited instance but now it doesn't forget that this

positive instance is its own product or something that it has generated itself so now the presupposition is positive okay it's instead of having something which is simply presupposed as external and kind of independence um it's now the the presupposition is now fully you know um integrated into the act of positing okay so this is the positing of the presupposition and this is determining reflection um now this you know so that one of our claims that kind of this model that you know um um

determining reflection is, you know, the core of idealism of, you know, or that the logic of speculation is, you know, governed by determining reflection. Okay. So speculation, the kind of idealist speculation that Marx is setting himself against, you know, unites the acts of positing and presupposing, or if you want, of making and taking. You know, positing is the act of making, of producing, whereas presupposing is the act of taking something that is already there.

And idealism, you know, in the positing of presuppositions in idealism, is the unification of making and taking. Okay. But then you get this closed kind of circle. The positing of the presuppositions means that there's no longer a transcendent exteriority for reflection. And that's Hegel's whole point is that there's a thinking can't simply that anything that, you know, is, you know, assumed, taken as given or kind of assumed to be, you know, already constituted, already kind of conditioned involves a kind of a deliberate abstracting from

the conceptual movement through which that datum has been shaped and determined. But practical human activity separates positing and presupposing, or making and taking. So it's both conditioned and conditioning, but there is no, unlike in ideal speculation, what is conditioned and the conditioned object and the conditioning activity are separated okay they're no longer kind of fused together in this kind of in this circle and in a way it's you know

the the logic this you know the the logic that all credit Marx was kind of discovering a kind of a logic of history because the logic of history is this movement from condition to conditioning. Human activity or human production produces structures and institutions and relations like which it is then subsequently conditioned. Okay, so there's a conditioning, a productive conditioning, you know, moment in human activity, which generates kind of, you know, relations, forms, institutions.

But this is a temporal process and these, you know, relations, forms and institutions then become the objective framework within which, you know, subsequent, you know, productive activity unfolds. Okay, so it's a movement from the, you know, the, you know, the present generation produces the conditions, you know, which will shape the productive activity of their successors. Okay. So here's a lengthy quote from Dardone Laval about the importance of this, you know, the

distinction of the way in which Marx re-articulates positing and presupposing. In the schema of speculative reflection, the initial immediacy has the place of an originary positing. It posits exteriority as autonomous with regard to itself by repelling itself from itself or by negating its first act of positing. This is the first presupposition. Without this initial moment of positing reflection, the subsequent process cannot follow. For if external reflection starts from the immediacy resulting from this act, it is by separating it from this act, i.e. by taking it

as a given immediacy that is already there. Only then can there be a return to the first immediacy. The given immediacy resulting from the first presupposition interiorizes its own origin by positing the given immediacy as its ground. This is the second presupposition. But only the simplicity of the first immediacy renders possible the return into self accomplished by the second presupposition. But the distinction between the presuppositions of speculative formation and those of effective reality has as its major theoretical consequence, the evacuation of any specifiable site for the first immediacy whose role is to engage the entire process.

The dialectic of the two sorts of presupposition is the radical destitution of the speculative thesis of the originariness of positing. relative to its external conditions of formation capital is in a relation analogous to that which external reflection has to the given immediacy which is its starting point first it finds them already there and then once born from them it cancels their exteriority through its own act So, Daudon-Laval's argument is that capital starts from given presuppositions.

The development and the formation of capital starts from given historical conditions. But once capital comes into being, it starts to posit its own presupposition, it starts to kind of, you know, to produce its own conditions of existence. And in a way, so what I don't want to do is to distinguish between historical conditions of emergence and what they call, you know, actual conditions of existence.

Okay, so the claim, the arguments, as I understand it, is that it's capital comes into being as a result of human productive activity, human, you know, social practice. But then once the capital relation has been instituted, then capital starts to kind of reshape and reconfigure every aspect of human practical activity in order to serve its own, to guarantee its own reproduction. Okay, so what capital, capital's historical conditions are initially external to it, okay, they're given presuppositions, but capital gradually integrates them within itself.

It posits these initially external presuppositions. It cancels their exteriority through its own act. So the process then of the process of historical development is a process of reflection in that it is activity of positing and of presupposing. But this does not make it a speculative process because it excludes any originally positing and the return to a first image. And this is the key claim for Dardone-Naval, is that the difference capital, the logic of capital is, you know, specular and speculative. However, there is no, you know, capital does not kind of proceed from an originary positing, an originary self-positing.

There is no first immediacy from which capital arises to deposit its own presuppositions. And this is important because in their reconstruction of Marx's method in Capital, especially in volume one of Capital, the reason why Marx starts from the commodity form is precisely because the commodity form is, you know, as a self-form of capital's reproduction, is itself split. It's not simply a kind of a pure,

it's not an immediate self-relation. It is a mediated self-relation. So the commodity form, the commodity is kind of internally split between the aspects of, you know, use and exchange. But this split is precisely irreducible to any originary immediacy. the first immediacy of positing reflection. We'll see this in a moment. So, the process of historical development on their account is a non-speculative logic of reflection in which the act of positing and presupposing can only be accomplished on the basis of historical conditions that are external to it. Okay, and in a way the summary, to see how this,

you know, there are accounts of, you know, the effect of presuppositions and the way in which effective presuppositions can be articulated with capital's positing of its own presuppositions is summarized in Dardot's 1988 PhD thesis on the question of the beginning of science in Hegel and Marx. This is a very useful, this is Dardot's own kind of description of the thesis, and it encapsulates, you know, the argument actually that is developed in, you know, 30 years later in the Marx book. So Dardot writes, Hegel begins with pure being, Marx with the commodity.

But whereas pure being is the simple itself, the commodity is only the simplest. Okay. In other words, it's a simplest instance of the self-relation that constitutes capital. David Sloan- And so that's why capital is not. David Sloan- You know, simply can you know can't be identified to the kind of you know immediate self relation that is exemplified by you know the sheer know that the sheer indeterminateness of being pure being at the beginning of Hegel science of logic.

David Sloan- Within this infinitesimal divergence and essential part of Marx's debate with Hegel comes into play. What is at stake here is the status of a key concept, the concept of presupposition. David Sloan- The first meaning of this term for Hegel is anything which is given from outside to thought any external datum in which thought is alienated. The simplicity of the Hegelian beginning expresses merely the fact that pure thought is without presupposition. But for Marx, the notion of real, or what he will later call effective presupposition, indicates an object given before any thought. And thus, the presupposition of political economy as a science is capitalist society,

whose simplest element is precisely the commodity. But from 1857 onwards, Marx gives another meaning to this concept, one directly inherited from the Hegelian doctrine of reflection. And according to this second meaning, the commodity is defined as capital's elementary presupposition. The logic of this borrowing from Hegel required that the commodity be reduced to the pure immediacy of a self-relation. But instead, Marx will think the commodity as a social relation with two aspects. One is the immediacy of use value, the other is the positive being of value. And as a result, Marx will encounter difficulties he will never overcome.

So the key feature of Marx's analysis of the commodity, and the reason why Marx begins with the commodity and not, for instance, with value, as some people think, some commentators think would have been a more logical starting point is because in a way the commodity encapsulates capital self-relation, but it encapsulates it as a way which is, um you know we never um which is contradictory okay because capitals self-relation is contradictory

and in order to understand this um contradictoriness it has to be unfolded from the analysis of the commodity form and this is what um Dardot and Laval do when they move to their account of capital, in the central sections of the book. So we know, again, everyone knows that the commodity has two aspects. It's composed of use value and exchange value. And the dualism of use and exchange

is connected to the duality of labor, the double character of labor as concrete labor and abstract labor. But it's a mistake, Cédard d'Onavel to think that abstract labor corresponds to exchange value, whereas concrete labor corresponds to use value. You can't map the duality of concrete and abstract labor onto the duality of use and exchange.

And they also want to point out that although abstract labour is often understood as the abstraction from the qualitative specificity of various types of concrete labour, But what they point out, and something which is, I think, often elided in a concept of abstract labor, is that abstract labor itself has a qualitative characteristic. In other words, abstract labor as measured in socially, abstract labor is a substance of value as a socially necessary abstract labor time. labor time. But this is, there's a qualitative homogeneity to abstract labor, which is the

condition for its quantitative heterogeneity. So in other words, it's a mistake simply to oppose David Sloan- Concrete to abstract labor as quality to quantity, you know. David Sloan- Concrete labor is qualitatively heterogeneous, whereas abstract labor is quantitatively David Sloan- You know. David Sloan- Is merely quantitatively heterogeneous but this quantitative heterogeneity of abstract Labor presupposes a qualitative homogeneity. David Sloan- So they write.

David Sloan- For abstract human Labor or value forming Labor is itself defined by the qualitative identity of labors differing from one another in terms of magnitude of value which is to say quantitatively the double character of labor which is exposed in a double manner in value and use value is not identical with the quantitative and qualitative character of labor because the character of the labor that is formative of value is itself also qualitative and not only quantitative. Abstractly human labor is only susceptible to quantitative determination because it is first

and foremost the qualitative identity of quantitatively different labors. expressed in Marx's own language, the differential determination of the magnitude of value presupposes the identity of the substance of value. And the second, the substance of value is constituted by the reflexive relations among commodities.

Okay, so value is a relation, and it's a relation among commodities, you know, the simple, the kind of the elementary or the isolated form of value is, you know, in Marx's famous equation, you know, 20 yards of linen equals one coat. the linen has a relative value which is expressed in the coat which is the equivalent value and as Marx famously explains it is you know the use value of the coat that expresses

the value of the linen. So, this, you know, the value relation is governed by a speculative logic in which diversity, you know, the mere kind of difference, eventually becomes opposition. And it's this development of the simple kind of, you know, the diversity, you know, the manifoldness of the value relations amongst commodities, which is developed into opposition.

This is what the analysis by D'Ardoin-Laval is charting. So Marx writes, by means, therefore, of the value relation expressed in our equation, the bodily form of commodity B, i.e. the coat, becomes the value form of commodity A, i.e. the linen, or the body of commodity B acts as a mirror to the value of commodity A. And the fact, I mean, even though, you know, Marx's use of the term mirror, the claim that one commodity mirrors the value of another commodity, you know, is a key, you know, is an obvious kind of reference to the, you know, the logic of reflection. By putting itself in relation with commodity B as value in, you know,

David Sloan- In proper persona and its own person as the matter of which human Labor is made up, which is the abstract human Labor the commodity a converts the value in use be into the substance in which to express it's a zone value value value of a that's expressed in the use value of B has taken the form of relative value. So value then is this reflexive relation. The value forms through which the use value or body of one commodity becomes a phenomenal form of the value of another. The body of the coat is the

phenomenal form for the value of the linen, in Marx's example. This accomplishes the reflection of each of the single commodities two opposing determinations into one another, i.e. the opposing determinations of value and use value. Ultimately it is the reflection of the value of a commodity in the use value of another and vice versa that remedies the impossibility of the relation of the value of a commodity to its own use value and hence the impossibility of its immediate self-relation. So what is the point? The point is that value is not an immediate self-relation. Value is a relation, but it's a specular relation.

It's a reflexive relation amongst a kind of, you know, amongst different, you know, a variety or a manifold of commodities. Okay. And that's why Marx starts from the commodity and not from value. Even though it's, you know, it seems that, you know, money, commodities and monies are, you know, ultimately forms of value or embodiments of value. But value can only manifest itself in, first of all, in the diversity of commodities and then ultimately in the opposition and the contradiction that is constitutive of the commodity.

Or as Marx puts it, by positing itself as equivalent to the other commodity, it relates to itself as value in relating to itself as value the commodity simultaneously differentiates from itself as use value um okay again so this is the don't allow now um the analysis of the commodity and the simple value form obliges us to specify that marx will hence henceforth conceive the internal structure of the social relation within the double element of reflection which is to say as unity of immediacy and mediation precisely in opposition to the simplicity of the simple self

relation um okay um the point is that there's a social relation capital is a relation it's a social relation um but it's um it's a social relation which articulates you know mediation and immediacy and it's a social relation which is encapsulated in the commodity okay so the claim is that you know the capitalist social relation is you know embodied in the commodity and you can only understand the specificity of the capitalist social relation by unpacking

the internal structure of the commodity. So initially, so from diversity we move to opposition. Reflection transforms the relation of indifferent exteriority of the two sides of the commodity, use and exchange, into a relation of internal opposition. So in other words, the exchange value of one commodity can only be embodied in the use value of another commodity. A commodity can only manifest its value

in relation to another commodity and in relationship to the use value of another commodity, which is why the positions of relative and equivalent value are irreversible. Okay, a commodity can't sit no commodity can simultaneously play the role of equivalence and relative value it's always has to be. They have to, you know, to be repositioned vis a vis one another in order to express. the two aspects that they possess, the two aspects of their nature's commodities.

But eventually, this relation of simple exteriority is gradually internalized into the two poles of the relation. So as reflected into one another, the two aspects of the commodity are opposed and not merely indifferent. And the relation of opposition is one of reciprocal exclusion and internal constitution of the opposing terms. So what is Mark, okay, again, What's going on here? He's saying that initially, in most commodities, use and exchange stand to one another in a relation of indifferent exteriority.

You need another commodity to express the exchange value of one commodity. But there is a commodity in which used and exchange are reflected into one another, in which the two aspects of the commodity are opposed and not merely indifferent. And that commodity is labour power. Okay, so this is why Marx introduces the commodity labour power into, you know, a stage of the analysis of the commodity form.

For the worker himself, labour power only has use value in so far as it is exchange value and not in so far as it produces exchange value. David Sloan- Labor only exists as use value for capital, and it is the use value of capital itself, I eat the mediating activity through which the latter expands. So this is the, in a way, the contradiction. It's labor power is the commodity that expresses the contradictoriness, which is latent in the commodity form, and the contradictoriness which is, you know, fully effectuated in the

capitalist social relation. So Marx, so this is Daudon-Laval glossing Marx now. We see that the commodity labor power, because of its specific use value, it's the commodity that is used to produce value. It's a commodity that is used to produce every other commodity. and therefore the use value of labour power is to create value, not only surplus value. So because of its specific value, which is to say its aptitude for producing surplus value, is one at the same time capital as use value of capital

and non-capital as pure potentiality of labour absolutely separated from all the objective conditions of production. At the same time, and with respect, so the claim is that labour power is a potency or a capacity which is actualized in specific concrete labours. But until it is is actualized, you know, as this, you know, actualizes this kind of, you know, value creating activity. It exists merely as a pure potentiality. And as a pure potentiality, labor power is

nothing. Okay. It's a pure, it doesn't, you know, it has no actuality. Okay. Labor power is actualized in its use in the production process. But, you know, apart from that concrete actualization, it's just this pure potentiality. Okay, but as a pure potentiality, which is separated from the objective conditions of production, from the means of production, it is effectively, you know, it's null. It is socially, you know, null. So this is why it's both capital and non-capital. It's capital because it can only be used by capital.

It's constitutive of labor power, that labor power is bought by the capitalist and used by the capitalist to produce value and ultimately surplus value. That's why its use value belongs to the capitalist. And, you know, independently of this use by the capitalist, you know, in the capitalist production process, it is just this, it's not capital, but it's this pure kind of, you know, this empty virtuality.

Okay, so to continue the quotation. to consume it, whereas it is above all exchange value for its owner who sells it to subsist. So the paradox of labor power is that the use value of labor power belongs to capital. It is as use value absolutely separated from value that labor power is creator of value.

So again, if the capital relation is truly contradictory in itself, this is because the contradiction traverses through and through the commodity that is labor power. It is the positive contradiction of use value and value only insofar as it is the contradiction between itself as non-capital or non-value and itself as use value of capital, which is to say use value of value. This contradiction is thus of a piece with the specificity of labor power, which is at the same time capital and non-capital.

Paul Jayneeson, M.D.: So what Marx calls the you know the. Paul Jayneeson, M.D.: The the positing of the contradiction. Paul Jayneeson, M.D.: Is which is latent in the commodity. Paul Jayneeson, M.D.: Is. Paul Jayneeson, M.D.: carried out through Labor power. Paul Jayneeson, M.D.: The contradiction, which is merely latent in the single commodity is only positive within capital as a social relation. Again, let me clarify this, okay. Marx begins with the analysis of the single commodity, but the point is that a commodity is only what it is in relation to not only one, but to the

totality of commodities, which is why it is the relations amongst commodities in a way that represent you know the social relations amongst commodities that take the place of material relations amongst laborers or producers okay so the claim is that the it's the latent contradictoriness inherent in the commodity as a relation of reflection that is fully, that becomes explicit or that is, as Mark knows, the Hegelian jargon is to say becomes

explicitly posited in when we it becomes positive when we understand that labor power embodies the contradiction of the capitalist social relation then only then the commodity labor power is as such only insofar as it is at the same time when it excludes from itself capital or in other words it is autonomous relative to value only in so far as it is at the same time posited by the latter as use value of value in other words its autonomy you know its independence relative to value or capital

depends is is posited is itself kind of conditioned and generated by its relation to capital or value because it's nothing but the use value of the use value of value okay so this contradiction this is a properly dialectical contradiction okay which is to say that a dialectical contradiction is where both, you know, something is itself by not being itself and is not itself by being itself. Okay, so it's not merely an abstract or logical contradiction, such as, you know, a and non-a.

Okay. And this, you know, Dado and Lave are making this point against, you know, readers of Marx, like, you know, Coletti, who insist that, you know, Marxist confusing, antimony and contradiction. So they write, labor power is indeed non-capital, non-A, but as such it is assuredly something, and specifically the immediate corporeality, devoid of all objectivity, just as the son is assuredly something outside his relations as a father. However, in its relation to capital, A, it is itself posited as use value of capital, which is to say determined as the possibility of producing wealth in the form of value, just as the son is son only through his relation to the father.

Okay, so the point is being that, you know, father and son are determinations of reflection. you can only be a father or a son in relation to you know to someone else but at the same time if you abstract from that relation you know the son or the father you know has you know they have other characteristics or other properties but those properties are disregarded or abstracted from in this reflexive relation um Now, the problem that Dardone-Laval fastened upon at this stage is the problem of the transformation of money into capital.

because the analysis of the commodity, a commodity expresses its value in relation to other commodities. the money form arises as you know the you know the general equivalent which embodies you know the exchangeability you know the value of every other commodity but the money form itself is not capital okay so the problem is how do you know commodities and money are both instances of value, but neither is equivalent to capital. So once you've moved

from commodity to money, once you understand how the money form mediates the relations amongst the totality of commodities, you still have to understand how a sum of commodities can constitute capital. And the labor power is required at this point because it's precisely the use of labor power and the extraction of surplus value in the capitalist use of labor power that converts money into capital. Because the extraction, surplus value is the source of capital.

and it's only by being reinvested in the production process that the process, the MCM prime movement, the conversion of a magnitude of value into a greater magnitude of value, So the key, the use of the commodity labor power is crucial for the conversion of money into capital. But as Dardot-Laval points out, there's a paradox because Marx begins his analysis of the commodity, he begins with the market, and he says,

because Marx begins his analysis of the commodity, he begins in the domain of the circulation of commodities. And I see famously, the famous first line of capital is, appears as an immense accumulation or an immense circulation of commodities. So that's why circulation, circulation of commodities is the starting point. But while capital, you know, appears, first appears in the sphere of circulation, it's not, it can't be generated from within

the sphere of circulation. There's the, you know, the, the, we must enter into the hidden board of production to explain how the use of labor power generates capital. So here's the problem as Marx sets it out. Capital cannot be born from circulation, and it cannot not be born from it. It must at once be born and not be born from it. David Sloan- Capital must be born from circulation, because the exchange of Labor power for money falls within the sphere circulation.

David Sloan- With a capitalist you know that the buying and selling of Labor power occurs within the sphere of circulation, but but both the commodities use value and the realization of this use value are indifferent for the economic relation in the strict sense. David Sloan- This first act. corresponds to the independence or autonomy of labour power to its status as non-capital. But at the same time, capital cannot be born from circulation because the capitalist use of labour power falls outside the sphere of circulation and occurs within the sphere of consumption. And thus the use of labour power's use value here constitutes a specific economic relation.

So, there's a sense in which the use of labour power falls outside this, you know, it's internal to the sphere of circulation and is indifferent to the the structure of the economic relations that Marx is trying to foreground in his analysis but there's also a sense in which it constitutes a specific economic relation

You know, it's this paradox that has to be clarified. So Marx writes, the particular use value of this commodity and its effective realization as use value concern the economic relation, formal economic determinateness itself, and falls under the purview of our study. Why? Because in a way, the use of labor power in the production of commodity is the source of surplus value and ultimately drives the accumulation of capital. So it falls in a way, it's at the core of the economic determinateness that Marx is

studying. This second act corresponds to the moment of labour power's being posited or internal dependence in opposition to the moment of its autonomy or depends on it. The use of labour power is positing by capital. It's incorporation in the creation of value by capital. This paradox falls from the internal contradictoriness of labour power. Capital must be born from within circulation insofar as labour power exists prior to exchange in the immediate corporeality or purely subjective existence of the labourer, and hence as non-capital or non-value.

non-value, but at the same time capital must not be born from within circulation in so far as the same use value is only use value for capital and is only realized as use value of capital within the labour process. So okay, here's the paradox. The paradox is that capital can't be born within the sphere of circulation because the sphere of circulation already presupposes fully constituted capital. So you can't explain the emergence of capital from within the sphere of circulation because the sphere of circulation already presupposes a fully constituted capital. But at the same time it can't be explained

outside it, because without the use of labour power, capital can't, there's no creation of surplus value and therefore no capital. I think that's the simplest way of putting the paradox. So, Darón Avala pointing to, and actually Marx himself is signalling a paradoxical aspect of his attempt to deduce capital from the commodity and money.

And it's the contradictoriness of labor power that explains in a way why capital, you know, both can and cannot be born from within the sphere of circulation. So only the elucidation of the contradiction in terms of labor power, which is not a mere appearance, makes it possible to overcome the actual appearance whereby value is a substance in process moving itself, entering into a private relation to itself, so to speak. So here's what I think is going on. In the sphere of circulation, the conversion of money into capital within the sphere of

circulation seems to happen as through capital entering into a private relation to itself. So, capital seems to be generating itself from itself. Okay. So, this is the appearance. Okay. The conversion of money into capital seems to, you know, happen miraculously. Why? Because labor power, you know, the, you know, labor power can only contribute to the creation of surplus value by being posited by capital. In other words, as a component part, as an elementary

component of capital. So the existence of labor power here already presupposes capital, so it can't explain you know the emergence of capital from money. So the second point here follows from this observation. So Marx's analysis reveals that what lies beneath the appearance of capital's private self-relation is capital's relation to labor power as its opposite or non-capital while also showing that the use value of this power is only realized in a production process governed by capital. So in other words capital can only constitute itself through

something that is its opposite, that is not it, through something that is at once it and not it. Okay, so that's the paradox of capital is that capital is contradictory because it is itself and not itself and it is constituted through something that is at once independent and dependent upon it. So it's this, it's the the apparent self-relation of capital that Marx wants to analyze and you know to expose as a necessary appearance. Marx demonstrates that capital

necessarily assumes the appearance of an immediate self-relation so long as one remains within the sphere of circulation. In other words, the conversion of M into M' through the intermediary of C seems to be capital's private self-communion. But this is an objective appearance if one so long as one remains merely at the surface of capital, which is to say at the level of the sphere of circulation. Okay, so the claim is that this, you know, capital's self-relation or its immediate self-relation

is actually mediated by its relation to another, okay, to something that is and is not itself. Okay, if one ignores this distinction between the appearance of a self relation, which is that of capital considered from within the sphere of commodity circulation. And the reality of capital as the social relation that the relation between you know the owners of the means of production and the owners of labor power. power, which can only constitute itself on the basis of conditions that are external to circulation and only subsequently introduced in the exposition, one cannot understand the equally contradictory formulation used by Marx in Point 2 of Chapter 5. Hence, after having left behind

the sphere of commodity circulation in order to explain the process of money's transformation into capital on the basis of the hidden abode of production. And Marx writes, this entire cycle, the transformation of money into capital takes place within the sphere of circulation and does not take place within it. It takes place within it because it has as its condition the sale of labor power on the market. And at the same time, it does not take place within it because this sale merely precedes the valorization process, the creation of surplus value, a process that for its part takes place in the sphere of production. So capital arises from the circulation of commodities as existence

in act of the contradiction between value and use value, which remained enveloped within the single commodity. And the points, just to go back to the previous slides, is that the reason why the transformation of money into capital both does and does not take place within the sphere of circulation is because labor power is both internal and external to capital. It has this, you know, equivocal or rather a labour power exists as a commodity.

You know, it's only labor power is, you know, actualized within the capitalist production process and therefore serves the, you know, the creation of surplus value. But the existence of labor power presupposes the existence of living labor, laborers. And this is a fact that cannot be wholly incorporated into capital.

So in other words, the split between living and dead labor, between, you know, it's the living laborer who is the bearer of labor power. And it's the fact that the living laborer needs to reproduce her existence that makes the capitalist consumption of labor power possible. And therefore the creation of surplus value possible. So all this complicated argument is simply trying to show that capital seeks to posit its presuppositions,

to integrate its elementary presuppositions. But in a way, the existence of the most essential of these presuppositions, i.e. the availability of labor power, depends on something that capital cannot wholly incorporate within itself. Just to say the existence of living labor. David Sloan- So this is why. David Sloan- If commodities and money are elementary presuppositions for the formation of capital. David Sloan- Can one affirm that insofar as the transformation of money into capital does not take place within them, but within the production process commodities and money presuppose capital as a proper condition, i.e. are posited by it as its presuppositions.

David Sloan- And here. Here, Marx distinguishes between, or rather, the distinction between simple commodity production and capitalist commodity production is important. What is at stake is the immediacy of simple circulation as pure appearance, whose truth resides in its supersession by capital as relation of production. It is necessary to abstract from the determinations of production and examining the relation of circulation, because the commodity relation can only be posited as relation of production as capitalist relation of production. The proof of the specifically capitalist nature of commodity production is also proof of the historical specificity of capitalist production.

Or, as Daudon Neville put it, it is precisely because it stamps all its products with the commodity form, including all those that feature as conditions for the production of a single commodity, that capital's only necessity is historically conditioned. Richard Schauffler, M.D.: So. Richard Schauffler, M.D.: Why then start with the commodity and it's so why does marks begin with the circulation of commodities. Richard Schauffler, M.D.: So either one starts from non capitalist commodity production or from capitalist commodity production and with the former. Richard Schauffler, M.D.: One could anticipate a correlation between the order of exposition and historical development in so far as non capitalist commodity production.

furnishes an abstract model that encompasses pre-capitalist production. It's difficult to see how one could start from a non-capitalist mode of commodity production in which all products have the commodity form, since this is precisely the hallmark of the capitalist mode of production. So with the latter, the problem, and if one starts from capitalist commodity production, the transformation of commodities and money into capital is simply annulled. So it is to avoid this double pitfall that Marx chooses to begin not from non-capitalist commodity production or from capitalist commodity production, but from the commodity as it is immediately given in the sphere of circulation and thereby from this sphere itself,

reserving for a later stage of the exposition the demonstration that the commodity only appears thus on the surface on the basis of the separation of the producer from the means of production thereby exposing within capitalist production the internal condition for the given immediacy of commodity circulation um but now marx introduces two external conditions for the transformation of money into capital. The owner of money finds these conditions already there on the market. And this is the, you know, these conditions being that the free laborer is free in the double sense of being a free individual, that's one condition, rather than a slave,

and also in the sense of being free or deprived of the means of production necessary to realize our labor power. And these two conditions are not logical presuppositions, but rather the results of a unique historical condition. So Marx writes, capital's historical conditions of existence are in no way given with the mere circulation of commodities and money. Capital's historical conditions of existence are the conditions for the transformation of capital's elementary presuppositions, commodities and money, into capital. Or as Marx puts it, commodities and money are both elementary presuppositions of capital but only develop into capital under certain conditions

okay so at this point what's going on here is that you know the Marx has to appeal to to, in a way, the dialectical exposition of the structure of the commodity and how the structure begins as diversity and is consummated as contradiction and expresses the contradictoriness of the capitalist social relation, the unfolding, the dialectical unfolding of this analysis

is at a crucial moment in the process of explaining the conversion of money into capital. Marx brings in these two historical conditions. availability on on the markets of um you know individual wage laborers okay that the existence of individual wage laborers you know of you know free individuals but who own only their labor power is um um you know historically conditioned okay that's a that's you know it's a consequence of of originary accumulation.

But this, the intervention of this extrinsic historical condition at this moment in the analysis and the unfolding of the relationships between commodities, money, and capital is a problem, according to Dardot-Navann. Okay, I have more to say about why I think this is a curious objection, or I'm not sure I completely, because they've already told us in the first part of their account that obviously capital, that the logic of capital, capital's kind of speculative

positing of its presuppositions is historically conditioned. There's a purely speculative positing of presuppositions, which integrates historical factors, but the existence of these historical factors can't be speculatively accounted for. Paul Kingman, M.D.: So. Paul Kingman, M.D.: it's not so I think it's because they claim that marks fails to articulate. Paul Kingman, M.D.: You know the dialectical and the historical aspects of his account okay so here's what they say that marks did not manage to establish.

Paul Kingman, M.D.: The holy imminent necessity of the passage from the circulation of commodities to capital. Paul Kingman, M.D.: And that, as a result of transformation of money into capital set out in volume one. is not equivalent to a passage within capital is in our eyes undeniable. There is in this regard well and truly a failure of the dialectical method initiated in 1857. The development of diversity into the contradiction is achieved only at the cost of a rupture within the dialectical process a rupture introduced by the non-mediated eruption of two conditions external to the circulation of commodities. So this this implies that the necessity of money's transformation into capital is only ever a

conditional necessity and in no way one that is conceptually it's a conditional necessity it's It's historically conditional because it depends on the existence of individual wage laborers. The commodity posited as a result of capital is nothing but the commodity as a result of the reproduction of capital. So Marx will then write that the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus value. Okay, that the, you know, with the circularity, the circle that is, you know, implicit in

capital's self reproduction is, you know, needs to be run through in both directions in both ascending and descending orders. So in a way, it's a conversion of money into capital that is required to explain through the use of labor power that is required to explain the accumulation. Capital as accumulation, as accumulation of surplus value. Okay, but once this accumulation has been identified, you can run backwards. The accumulation of capital presupposes surplus value, surplus value presupposes capitalist

production, but the latter in turn presupposes the existence of large masses of capital and labor power in the hands of commodity producers. So at this stage, you know, capital in reproducing itself capital reproduces its own historical presuppositions. So initially, you know, the historical condition, the availability of, you know, individual wage laborers is initially, you know, an exogenous condition for capital's reproduction, but it must be rendered endogenous, it must be incorporated. So in reproducing itself, capital must reproduce the wage relation and labour power.

So when surplus value is once more posited as capital, the externalities attendant upon its first appearance, i.e. the historical externality, the existence of individual wage laborers, these are banished. So Marx writes, the first time the presuppositions themselves appear as coming from outside circulation, as external presuppositions for the birth of capital, and hence as not emerging from its own internal essence and as not explained by it. And now these external presuppositions will appear as moments in the movement of capital itself, such that it has presupposed them as its own moments, regardless of the manner of their historical emergence.

So Marx writes, this is the capitalist accumulation merely presents as a continuous process, what appears in original accumulation as a particular historical process as a process of the birth of capital, and as a passage from one more of production to another. production to another. So in other words, the capitalist accumulation process must try to integrate the dynamic of originary accumulation, which is the separation of the laborers from the means of production or the producers from the means of production, which is the historical condition for the emergence of capital, which is why originally accumulation is not just a kind of

punctual event. It doesn't just punctuate the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It's also something that has to be repeated, incorporated within the reproduction of capital or the continual accumulation of capital. I realize, okay, I've been going on for way too long. I'm sorry. Surprised anyone's still listening. So I'm gonna try to really come to a close very soon. Yes, I'm going to skip this.

This is simply emphasizing that this is why the account of originary accumulation comes at the very end of Volume 1 of Capital, because it reveals the historical process of the production of the conditions that precede the existence of capital, which in this sense pertains to its prehistory as the condition for the process whereby capital posits these same conditions. In other words, capital has to integrate its historical preconditions. It has to produce its historical preconditions. Okay, so I'll skip this. Yes, okay, this is important. So there's a double movement. At this point, you know,

they don't want to identify this double movement, okay. The double movement achieved by the process of capital self-positing. A movement, okay, so in other words, they want to say that there's a, I take this to be their attempt to kind of explain the junction of the speculative capital's positing of its own presuppositions and the junction of the two

forms of ideal speculation and historical speculation. So on the one hand, there's a movement coming from a past situated, so to speak, beneath it, you know, beneath capital. The historical precondition, you know, originally accumulation as, you know, kind of this past event that is, you know, external to capital. but then capital interiorizes and must continually interiorize this you know its own historical emergence the events of its historical emergence but in doing so in continually interiorizing this you know this historical condition

it pushes beyond itself towards the future by actively tending right now towards its own abolition. So as they put it, capital's interiorizing recapitulation of its own conditions of historical genesis is the movement of the constitution of the conditions for its own abolition. And these are not two movements succeeding one another, but one and the same movement acting right away in a double relation to the past and the future. And this is why you know the circle of positing presupposing appear is a broken circle which cannot completely close upon itself the circle of capital is a circle that cannot circle itself because it escapes from two sides from its past as well as from its future okay

yeah I really should stop now okay I was going to say to try to kind of reconnect this to the kind of class struggle, but maybe we could save this for the discussion. What do you think, Dan and Sepide? Well, I think this was a very, very good talk and it's never too long. It's very, very interesting and illuminating. Yeah, you can take your time and finish your slides if you like. Well, I'll just try to reconnect all this stuff again to the issue of class struggle.

Class struggle is both the historical and the positive presupposition of capitalism. But just as he distinguishes it between capitalism's systemic and historical conditions of existence, Marx distinguishes between the two forms of violence associated with capitalism, the economic and the extra economic. The former index is the silent compulsion of economic relations, enforcing valorization, surplus value extraction, and the latter, the overt violence of originally accumulation, which he describes in terms of spoliation, fraud, theft, user patient, these non-economic categories. So Marx writes, okay, this is at the end of, you know, capital volume one, the spoliation of the church's property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism.

all these things were just so many idyllic methods of original accumulation. Sarcastically kind of alluding to the idyllic accounts of the emergence of capital in, you know, classical political economy. But then Marx says something that's Dado Neuvel take to be very, you know, worrying, or rather kind of, you know, or rather what they see as kind of pointing to attention in his account of class struggle, okay? And I'll just read out, I won't read out this whole, this whole, I'll just read out, you know, a couple of sentences. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition, and habit looks upon the

requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. Thus the organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance. And he then talks about the silent compulsion of economic relations that sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra economic forces still, of course, used but only in exceptional cases in the ordinary run of things the worker can be left to the natural laws of production it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital um so um class struggle again

it's both exogenous and endogenous to capital on the one hand class struggle is capital's exogenous historical condition according to gardon novelle's initial accounts but on the other hand it is its endogenous economic condition because it's the you know the class relation the separation of the producers from the means of production is what you know is the condition for for for valorization so does the claim that capital's economic violence breaks down all resistance reduce class struggle to capital's unilateral domination of labor because the contradiction inherent in labour power as capital and non-capital is constitutive of capital, capital's continual

expropriation of labour from the means of production is also its appropriation as labour power, its positing as capital's necessary presupposition. As Marx puts it, you know, as the chosen people bore in their features the sign that they were the property of Jehovah, so the division of labor brands the manufacturing worker as a property of capital and it's Dardot and Lavelle glossing this you know this quotation right if the wage labor belongs to capital because her life depends upon capital if she's already a moment an aspect of capital its being is shaped by the use capital makes of its labor by the organization of production which brands into its flesh increasingly mutilating characteristics um so um this means that capital's

creation of its own technical foundation in the form of the system of machinery and the completion of labor's real subsumption under capital um now capital's creation of its own technical foundation in the form of the system of machinery and the completion of labor's real subsumption under capital are two sides of one in the same irresistible process. And in this regard, labor struggles are economic struggles for the survival of labor, but not for the destruction of capital. The extraction of absolute surplus value under the formal subsumption of labor makes way for the extraction of relative surplus value once capital has completely taken over the labor process and achieved a real subsumption of labor. And the struggles limiting the working day,

as Marx himself shows in capital, they contribute to the modification of the labor process in order to increase productivity. In other words, the struggles over the, you know, by shortening the working day, you simply kind of provide the catalyst with an opportunity to intensify time, you know, the extraction of surplus value, okay, to find new ways to, you know, to generate, you know, surplus labor from necessary labor, okay. So in other words, no longer, you know, the exploitation is no longer extensive, but it becomes intensive.

This increase in productivity is not intended to diminish labor time, but to diminish the labour time necessary to produce the value of the commodities consumed by labourers and thereby to lower the value of labour power. If the socialisation of labour engendered by the capitalist production process creates the condition for the eventual overcoming of capital, the global proletariat, as Marx insists, it's not considered for itself in relation to the possibilities for struggle available to laborers within the labor process. So in other words, Marx's account says that the kind of, you know, the induction of the entire human population

into the proletariat, you know, the reduction of all of humanity to the status of bearers of labor power will generate the conditions for revolution, but not any kind of economic struggle between labor and capital. It's precisely to the extent that labor struggles ultimately facilitate and augment the extraction of relative surplus values, that they intensify the contradictions and antagonisms to the breaking point. And Marx's accounts, Dado Navar are kind of emphasizing, you know, that on Marx's accounts, it's, Marx is well aware of this. Marx kind of, you know,

underlines the extent to which the shortening of the working day, all these kinds of, these gains the gains made by wage labor vis-a-vis capital are actually actually contribute to the intensification of exploitation and the intensification of the contradiction you know of the uh which is it you know intrinsic to to the capitalist social relation so that and this is what will you know ultimately kind of sharpen the contradiction to breaking points um um this and this is a quotation for marks where he says exactly this um i'm not going to read the

whole the whole thing um um it's well i'll just read the last two sentences um by destroying both the ancient and the transitional forms behind which the dominion of the capital is still partially hidden and replacing them with a dominion which is direct and unconcealed capital also generalizes the direct struggle against its rule finally by maturing the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one on this account and it's marx's accounting capital um according to dardot

revolutionary transformation is not the result of labor's victory but of capital self-destruction so then the class struggle is subservient to the unconscious and involved an involuntary movement of the negation of negation or the expropriation of the expropriators it is an auxiliary to an an objective historical process. So the point is that, that one of our pointing out that there's a fundamental, this is a fundamental tension that they see in Marx's work. So on the one hand, the claim that men make, humans make their own history, but not in conditions of their own choosing. And that capital is, you know, the alienated manifestation of human productive capacities,

human productive capacities, you know, and on the other hand, that's, you know, the class struggle. So, you know, capital is the result of a class struggle, which manifested the active, you know, the active side of human activity or human, you know, human social production. but now capital in a way restructures you know or in a way integrates the class struggle to such an extent that this struggle becomes a passive kind of reflection of capital's you know own active expansive dynamic okay.

and it seems that the at least that's well it's not obvious how you can reconcile these you know you can reconcile the claim about the you know the irreducibility of the effective presuppositions you know, human practical activity as, you know, the making, the constant, you know, production of history, and the claim that the next, you know, the decisive historical transformation from capitalism to communism, in a way will not be the result of, you know, human activity, but of the, you know, the

the self-destruction of the objective contradiction generated, you know, but no longer governed by that activity. And, you know, what I want to say in there, so they claim that, you know, what Marx calls communism is in fact an ideal, It's an attempt to reconcile the tension between these incompatible conceptions of class struggle, the subjective and the objective. There's a subjective historical aspect to class struggle and an objective economic aspect. and Marx you know what wants or claims to be able to reconcile one but in fact

his analysis of capital and the logic of his analysis of capital is purely objective so in other words it's almost as if there's a there's an objective reconciliation of the subjective and the objective which is why they think it's an idealist he has to resort to an idealist kind of resolution of the antagonism between the two, between the two logics. Okay, and I'll just, just stop, just stop there. Thanks for your patience. Okay, thank you, Ray. This was a very good talk today. I think now we can start the share of the

screen and you can go into questions and it's how long you want to go but definitely we have time and to ask this is very very interesting now as a reminder it's good to have the cameras on so we see who we are even if you don't plan to ask questions it's good to have the camera on so we see who we are. If you do want to ask a question, please, you are definitely free to unmute and ask the question. You can use the raise hand feature just as a way to establish a sequence on what the next questions would be. I think Avrim was the first to raise hand. So Avrim, please feel free to unmute and ask the question.

Thank you. I would like to ask a question about the relationship between presupposition and positive. So it reminds me of your reading of Leroy, especially in your PhD thesis, for example, you are making use of the operation of dualysis, which separates presupposition and positing, and so that the real is presupposed without being posited, and posited without being presupposed. And you are proposing to supplement the revolutionary subjectivity

with a prosthesis or with an alien subjects in order to effectuate this separation of presupposition and positing. And this is necessary because the logic of capital already depends on the intrication of presuppositional positive. So I'm thinking of how what you are saying here connects to that and how how the separation of presuppositional positive is effectuated in your reading here.

or are you still trying to to do that um okay well so this i mean i'm simply kind of um you know here just reconstructing um you know dardon lavalle's accounts um but obviously it's one you know i find it very very interesting because it's um you know it's uh it's very close to my own to things I've been interested in for a while. And the key, I think, is that they, you know, as they see it, you know, idealism, by which they mean kind of, you know, Hegelianism, is, you know, an attempt,

you know, to bring, you know, to distinguish positing and presupposing you know but ultimately to kind of to bring to bring them together as you know mediation and immediacy but this they can only be brought together in what you know bringing them together results in a kind of an immediate self-relation okay and no it's it's the example that dardone level always give is um the the opening of hegel's science of logic which is you know where there's no distinction between um you know subject and

object or between you know thinking and what is thought um and this point of coincidence between thinking and being, where you open with being, pure being, without any further determination, is this simple self-relation, this simple self-relation, which is speculative, although its speculative form will only be, you know, explicated, you know, in, you know, in the logic of essence. So, in, so they credit Marx with understanding, with trying to break out of this logic.

So in a way, Marx is neither, he doesn't want to be an idealist, but he doesn't want to be an empiricist. Okay, so the empiricist presupposes, you know, without understanding how every presupposition implies, you know, a positing or a position. And the subjective idealist merely posits without, you know, by autonomizing positing, turns positing itself into a presupposition. And then you get this, you know, the subject-object identity that Hegel thinks is a problem. you can't just you know that the shot fired from the pistol if you start with the indifference of

subject and object you know you can't um you know you can never um you know reach um you know the you can't you know recover the kind of the uh the richness of determination of the concrete you can never you're still thinking abstractly you're still kind of um still thinking just communing with itself. So, on D'Ardon Neuval's account, it's kind of Marx kind of finds a solution in this account of effective presupposition, which is that, you know, you can't, there's something that has to be presupposed. What is presupposed is, you know, the, in a way, is this activity, this kind of,

you know, praxis, okay, this productive activity, which is always historically concrete and determinants, okay. So the point is that you begin with the analysis of capital, okay, to begin with the analysis of a social formation, you have to understand it as, in a way the result of an effective presuppositions, but also as having a rich, complex internal structure, which can be simply deduced from the activity of, from this practical, from praxis, okay? So the point is that even if every kind of,

concrete historical datum is the result of practical activity. Its structure can't be, there's no kind of transitivity from the structure of that activity to the internal characteristics of that structure so that's why you have to find a way to analyze the structure and then to to reconnect it to that kind of productive activity so they think this is marx's great you know kind of you know breakthrough his great theoretical breakthrough um but to go back

to the example that you mentioned you know larryl larryl you know tries to separate those two things but in a way um the separation of those two things is carried out on the basis of you know what he calls this you know radical imminence you know this you know this um what is given without given us etc etc and um this is is the problem there is that this is itself never um you know, it is kind of, it's not dialectical, it's not kind of, it's not the result of a speculative kind of, you know, reflection, it's not of the order of determinate reflection,

but at the same time it's it can only um you know you can only put it into effect to think something by you know um using a material you know you know there has to be something else um that, you know, occasions the, you know, the production of a subject. And that's something for La Ruelle is, you know, philosophy as a world. So the problem is that La Ruelle, you know, he staves off speculation, you know, and empiricism, but at the price of an even of a kind of a punitive

level of abstraction because this you know this reel of the last instance um is you know um it's not that he you know he can explain how it's um you can you know you can it can be effectuated in thinking but the thinking It doesn't really allow you to grasp any kind of... The way in which it gives you access to what is concrete is through the element of philosophical

form. is that there's a i think that there is a kind of a disavowed dependence between you know the indivisibility of this real of the last sentence of this radical limits on the one hand and his insistence that the basic gesture of philosophy is division okay and so he he has division and indivision but he doesn't want to dialectically articulate them but the part but But indivision only gives rise to thought. You can only think on the basis of indivision by using division. And that's, it's not that I think Larell is kind of inconsistent, it's just that there's like the consistency he achieves

that ultimately is still very formal and seems to be kind of comparatively impoverished in a way doesn't, you know, gives you very little traction on, you know, kind of the kinds of phenomena and the kinds of social realities that Marx was interested in dealing with. And that's why, you know, Langewell's book on Marx is so curiously kind of unsatisfying, at least to me. So, yeah, there is a connection. But I think that the way so the way in which if if Dardone Laval are right, and I think that, you know, they are right that this is what Marx was trying to do,

then his account of effective presuppositions is, you know, a real breakthrough, an immense philosophical kind of advance, but then it immediately entails the critique of political economy, because that's how you understand it's through the critique of political economy that you you know, or you objectify the concrete, social historical, you know, situation, which is,

you know, within which you find yourself, you know, which is the starting point. So, okay, so yes, there is, I think, ultimately Marx's account, if it's, you know, coherent, would be an advance over both, you know, Hegel and Laravel. It's an alternative to Hegel and Laravel. It's neither speculative nor is it kind of this axiomatic as La Ruelle's is, and it gives

you real traction upon the concrete. but not by fetishizing an abstract concretion, not a phenomenological concretion, but actually it's the way in which Marx reconstructs the nature of the concrete is, you know, it's informed by the, you know, the Higgin critique of empiricism, but it doesn't kind of, it breaks free of the circuit of speculation. And that's incredibly important. But the question, what Dardone-Laval's question

or that critical interrogation is that, does it not ultimately, even if he initially breaks free, doesn't he end up reconstituting this kind of idealist, the coincidence of subject and object in the figure of communism. That's the critique. The critique is that he breaks with Hegel and then unwittingly reproduces the Hegelian fusion of subjective and objective with communism. And that's what they find problematic. Great, thank you, Ray. Let's go next to Flika.

Thank you. For me, the most complex part is distinguishing between dialectical and historical parts of Marxian analysis. and um i'm i'm a reader of phenomenology of spirit and i've started to read it recently not not for long i read it but uh as i understand And Heckel's thought is about his dialectics is about the thought process of the human

itself. And when I understand it that way, for me, it's very simple to imagine what is object, what is subject and what is a distinction. uh the object is something that i'm thinking about and subject is the process and they're uh interchangeable uh in the whole process itself uh then uh then i'm i can imagine simply uh that society is a result of the thinking process too. And things like class, like class itself,

in that perspective, becomes a subject which is born in that process of the society thinking. And then my question is, why is there in the first place, there must be two perspectives, dialectical and historical. Why isn't it just one dialectical kind of logic, which goes through different levels? Okay, so you're asking why must there be a distinction between the dialectical and historical dimension?

Because, okay, here I think if At the core of dialectics is this speculative logic, according to Dardot and Laval. And that means that if you think that history is dialectical or that there's a kind of a dialectical structure to history, then, well, that structure cannot but be conceptual.

So you have to justify this claim that history has a dialectical structure. And Marx, you know, begins, you know, his, you know, various criticisms of Hegel are, he thinks that history is, what governs history is this process of material production and reproduction. And he refuses the, you know, I think he rejects the claim that there's,

that if there's a logic at work in history, it's not dialectical, okay? It's this, It's a logic of antagonism and a logic of struggle. But this antagonism and this struggle cannot be dialectically encapsulated. And why? Because dialectic means something very specific. It means something precise. And it's not just about if you understand kind of what it means for a process to be dialectical. well, it has to have this structure and it has to have this kind of movement, at least which involves these, certainly the transition from difference to opposition to contradiction.

And contradictions require conceptual determinations. So I mean, look, on the one hand, it seems plausible to assume that Marx thinks that that capital has a dialectical structure. History doesn't have a dialectical structure. Capital has a dialectical structure because it is generated by…

What I was going to say, I'm changing my mind about my answer. Actually, it's not clear. I'm actually not sure that it's possible to claim on the one hand that capital has a dialectical structure but history doesn't because capital is however complicated and you know difficult to objectify it's still the product of human activity and human social relations

and even if it ends up kind of controlling and governing those social relations It doesn't, you know, it doesn't, its structure is not purely logical. Why? Because it doesn't unfold within the order of the concept. This is, the whole question is, Marx thinks you need a concept of capital to understand capital. But then what is the relationship between the concept of capital and the phenomenon capital? Now, there are some Marxists who think, well, you have to be Hegelian, and you just say, well, there has to be, you can only think this object by, you know, in a way, you know, reproducing, you know, by being confident that the structure of thinking can limit the structure of the object.

Okay. And, but then if you think that, then you're a Hegelian. And, you know, it's then simply then Marx is a Hegelian. And he's simply, in a way, extended Hegelianism, you know, or rectified Hegelianism by identifying capital as, in a way, as this, you know, as this social structure which can't be um you know which can't be understood using the resources that you know hegel himself for instance tried to use in his philosophy of right and he you know

so in other words it can't you know simply kind of um which is to say that for you know according to to Marx social structures are not merely you know objectifications of spirit okay and so he insists that spirit is the manifestation of human social life and human social life is not the manifestation of spirit so he insists there's something about um practical productive activity um that unfolds you know that operates behind the back of spirits um you know that there's a you know that there's a material unconscious

which um is not like the uh the formal unconscious of spiritual self-consciousness okay there's at the lit in the phenomenology there are things that you know spirits um there are spirits you know misrecognizes itself misunderstands itself uh and it's only you know gradually that it kind of you know begins to kind of that it's you know becomes transparent to itself on the standard reconstruction but marx at least seems to want to say that there's something about social practice that is opaque to self-consciousness that cannot be simply recaptured from the vantage point of

self-consciousness. So that means that the kind of the coincidence of thought and object, that means that the concept of capital, the congruence between the concept of capital and the phenomenon and capital can't be enveloped within the ambit of self-consciousness. And then this is where, you know, Marx's kind of these mythological remarks about kind of reconstructing the concrete in thought that you must, precisely capital is not something that is, it's not an objective, it's not intellectually intuitable, but neither is it simply empirically perceptible so therefore you must try to kind of you know to reconstruct it in thought but then

um you know the way in which you reconstruct it in thought um you know is somehow you know must be conditioned by its um you know its real structure um you know what is um what is concrete in thought you know, the fully fledged, you know, concrete conceptual development of the object of thought must somehow correspond to what is, you know, concrete in reality. But there's no kind of, you know, straightforward. But the correspondence is not

I don't know, it's not... the nature of that correspondence is what is kind of mysterious, or at least it's mysterious to me. So that's why... Okay, so what point am I trying to make? The point is that... On the one hand, it's tempting to say that the reason why, for instance, capital can

be contradictory, and contradiction is a speculative category, is because it's generated in and through human activity, which must have some kind of, you know, which must have a conceptual underside, even if it is, you know, unconscious, okay, or not self-conscious. Okay, but then if that's the case, then it's not clear why this conceptual, what distinguishes this, the conceptual underbelly of social activity, you know, which generates the contradiction capital of Marx's account from the from what you know the um from what is um

from the formal unconscious of uh of spirit from what you know from whatever self-consciousness has not you know whatever dimension of itself self-consciousness has not yet fully um you know recuperated or grasped. So, you know, to be perfectly honest, I think I don't have a good answer to this, because I think, you know, I think I know what the, sometimes I think I know what the answer is supposed to be, and I think I know what one should say from a Marxian perspective, but then it becomes difficult.

What can account for the contradictoriness of capital if its structure is not conceptual? And then, okay, then here, it depends what you mean by conceptual. And the point is that, you know, Hegel's account of the conceptual is, you know, not at all that of, not only is it not psychological, but it's not simply kind of reducible to,

you know, what can be, you know, grasped through a concept is not simply, you know, whatever can be, you know, has a predicated function or whatever can be kind of, you know, understood, you know, using the resources of language. language um so yeah so i um i mean look it's obvious that marx rejects a kind of a kind of the version of hegel that says that there is reason in history and the reason that is unfolding in history is the coming to self-consciousness of spirits okay is is is you know spirits coming

to grasp its own essential freedom um because marx wants to say that kind of um you know spirit might be spiritual self-consciousness might be a manifestation of certain aspects of human social activity but it's a mistake to think that all um all the dimensions of those activities can be recapitulated within the medium of spirit and but then i don't know exactly you know um i mean here the hegean would say well how you know why why not okay and this is what um i actually don't know i don't have an answer um

So, yeah, this is, your question is very simple, but actually it's incredibly, I find it incredibly difficult to answer. All I know is that Marx wants to articulate the dialectical and the historical. He thinks that fusing them is not permissible. If you simply fuse them, you're a kind of speculative idealist in a bad way. but you know it's impossible to wholly you know even that you know the the concept of history and the category of history is itself obviously conceptual so in making the distinction you're already articulating you know dialectics and history and you have to give some kind of you

know even if history is not kind of even if there's no kind of isomorphy of history and speculative dialectics then perhaps their articulation could be dialectical um and i think that that's what you know marks ultimately he thinks that um when he says look he says you know the the anatomy that famous line you know the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape he's saying that there is only that the only you know historical movement historically historical development can only be retrospectively constructed so in other words you have to

understand you know the uh the present to understand you know how it was uh how it came to be um and if that's hegel's account of his i think that that is also kind of a hegelian thought you know the uh philosophy is you know the comprehension of its own time and so but it always comes after the fact, after the event, then maybe Marx is Hegelian. And the claim about, you know, Marx doesn't think that modes of production can be simply kind of, you know, threaded next to one another in a linear sequence, which is why he thinks that there's

there's these ruptures and discontinuities between them, but then these, you know, the violence of, you know, originally accumulation, for instance, which punctuates and separates feudalism from capitalism, says that, yeah, is the violence of originally accumulation dialectical or not. That would be the issue. I mean, the claim is that if you kind of, if there is reason in history, then there is still kind of, you know, every historical atrocity and crime must be kind of rationally recuperable. And famously, this is what, like,

a materialist is supposed to reject. But Hegel is, I think Hegel is often caricatured as a kind of someone who thinks that affirming reason in history has a consulatory function, but actually it might be terrible. you know maybe admitting that there is reason in history it might be an appalling admission actually everyone thinks that it's a kind of uh it's saying something that is you know consolatory and that is supposed to commit but maybe having to admit that there is reason in history is admit that there's you know the monstrosity of reason or the atrocity of reason

because then it depends on whether you think reason is all about reconciliation or not and again that's you know there's a caricature of hegel that says you know that it is but it's it's not so clear it's not so clear okay so yeah so this is you know i really don't know yes the more i think about these questions the less sure i am of the answers actually so um that's the best i can do i'm afraid thanks a lot it helped okay Thank you, Ray. I see a voice hand from a participant called the user. Sorry, my name is . I don't know how to change that.

Thank you. I wanted to ask actually same question more or less, but I want to elaborate maybe from that perspective when you say Marxist failure, which dialectic wasn't supportive enough to explain the arisal of capitalism and the rupture needed. And was this rupture, historically? I mean, I want to really put an aim on it, like colonialism, slavery, which is never mentioned in the primitive accumulation at all.

If you go to the opening of the first volume, There is this story, you know, how countryside is, you know, people pushed into the cities and, you know, how, so to speak, living labor broke into the potentiality to be part of the capital. I mean, can you elaborate on the rupture? I mean, is there a... So that makes Marx completely anti-Hegelian. in some ways, which is quite a novelty, if you think. Can you say more about the rupture? What is rupture? I mean, what is rupture in that thing that Marx experienced,

these trials, so to speak, but never talked about? Sure. OK, let me try and answer. So first, yes, so it's, you know, I kind of, I think I wrote, you know, Marx's failure in inverted commas because that's, you know, that's Dardone and Laval call it a failure. What they're referring to is the fact that in the dialectical exposition of the conversion of money into capital, you need at one point, you know, he needs to, all of a sudden he brings in the existence of, you know, the free laborer,

the individual bearer of labor power who is free, formally free, to sell their labor on the market, to sell their labor to the capitalist, but who's also kind of, who's been dispossessed of the means of production. So they say that this is a historical condition for the capitalists' conversion of money into capital, but it's not strictly dialectical.

In other words, it's not dialectical in the sense of it's not governed by the logic of reflection. Because here, when they're talking about the dialectical nature of Marx's analysis of the commodity, they mean dialectical in this very kind of specific sense of governed by the logic of reflection, you know, and, you know, the articulation of, you know, relation to self through another, etc, etc. So they say that all of a sudden, with the introduction of the free wage labor, you're bringing in a historical condition. And it's not that they, you know, they're saying that whose role in this particular juncture, in this particular phase of the dialectical analysis is not properly explained.

Okay, so they're saying that there's no so I think that it's a bit of an overstatement to call it a failure and I'm actually not sure why they call it a failure. because, but they simply say that here, this is a factor in the process of the conversion of money into capital, which is not, you know, governed by this, you know, speculative logic. Of course, it makes sense. So then the question is, well, but look, but haven't they themselves has been saying that Marx is trying to articulate the speculative and the historical, or the positing of presuppositions

and these effects of presuppositions. And obviously the availability of free, of wage labor is the result of an effective presupposition. It's a historical consequence. It's a consequence of the dispossession of the producers from the means of production. And they think that although Marx is always, he insists that that's at the core of the capital relation. capital relation is a result of this dispossession, originally accumulation, but they're saying

that it doesn't... that polar opposition between labor and capital, between the proprietors of the means of production and the proprietors of labor power is not itself um doesn't embody the contradiction that they think Marx is analyzing and unpacking um at this stage of his account and when you mentioned in the kind of original accumulation he doesn't mention it's true that he's talking about the enclosure and he's talking about you know the um you know the the enclosure

of the commons and the um you know the the forced kind of um um you know expulsion of of kind of you know farmers tenant farmers etc from their land and their kind of relocation to kind of notice to towns and cities. But that's, but he does, and so, but even, you know, he may not mention colonialism in Peter's name, but he mentions them shortly after, okay, I'd have to reread, but there are several junctures towards the end of, you know, volume one, and after the discussion of origin and accumulation, where he mentions colonialism as simply kind of an extension of this of the process of dispossession. So it's clear that

originally accumulation, even if it starts locally, with the the expropriation of, you know, local inhabitants or whatever, it will proceed, you know, it will kind of, you know, expand outwards. And as the expansion of the capitalist market entails the colonization and the expropriation of peoples everywhere, basically. So it seems that it's indissociable from the process of original accumulation.

So yes, so in that regard, yeah, I mean, so I don't think that there's a kind of, you I think you can draw a line from clearances within what happened in Europe to what happens subsequently all over the world. It actually also happens the other way. I mean, in a sense, because the colonization of Africa and America also facilitated the, or at least it seems to have facilitated the development of capital in Europe, in England,

France, Holland, et cetera. I don't know enough about this, but it seems that the process of dispossession doesn't need to be, it doesn't need to start, first of all, it's intrinsic to capital, and secondly, it doesn't need to start locally and expand outwardly. It could also kind of be, you know, correlate the local, you know, something that is a local kind of area and something much further away. So and then, but I'm not sure why you think this doesn't make Marx Hegelian.

I mean, the whole, or could you say more about why you think it's, you know, this seems to kind of ignore Marx's, the Hegelian dimension of Marx's thoughts? I think you establish a parallel between what happened one enables labor force to freely move which is internal to European sphere but the other one is enslavement it moves into the opposite direction incomparably bigger amounts to the European sphere.

You know, you multiply the labor force when it comes to, say, Brazil and, you know, Caribbean, etc. And colonialism, likewise, where capital to its own, compared to its own development in Europe, which is breaking the feudal rules, acts on opposite, which is, I would say, a contradiction, irreconcilable. And this is very anti-Hegelian, because that's like Hegelian Marx sees it as a sort of one-way direction towards capital,

subsuming the previous relations of reproduction. Whereas when we go to India, China, or wherever, we see the opposite move. Capital reinforces the previously held... Ah, well... You see what I mean? There is this problem, and yet it develops on the back of that. Oh yeah, but even within Europe, and actually Marx actually says, he says at several places, he says, first of all, capitalism is, you know, okay, it's this

fundamental kind of social relation but it can happily coexist with um you know pre-capitalist you know with all sorts of kind of you know pre-capitalist social strata okay so in other words it's a mistake even in europe for instance in germany in 19th century germany you know 19th century germany is still largely a kind of a feudal in its structure and its institutions But that doesn't prevent capital from taking hold. So it's a mistake, I think, to think that capital is, you know, immediately kind of, you know, it's all or nothing. That, you know, a society is, you know, either, you know, capitalist or not capitalist.

as if because capitalists doesn't immediately, the capitalist mode of production doesn't translate into a set of, you know, a specifiable set of civil or political institutions. So, for instance, bourgeois civil society, you know, in one sense is, you know, seems to kind of be the result of capitalist social relations, but capitalism can exist with, you know, with feudal relations as well. It just needs certain kind of, it can establish itself in a society whose social relations are not bourgeois. There hasn't been a bourgeois revolution,

but marshall's point is that once it does it will inevitably kind of gradually you know transform those you know social relations and in a way that capitalism's great force is that it's not um you know it's not well i mean you know it's kind of um it can reshape any culture or any set of historical practices or conventions, you know, to, you know, to suit its own purposes. So, yeah, so that's why I think, yes, I mean, the relationship between within, even within, you know, so-called advanced capitalist societies, you know, there are feudal and even ancient strata.

And then all these, I mean, the debates about Russia, I mean, Lenin's kind of, you know, discussions about, you know, Russia and Russian capitalism, you know, it's, so I don't see any straightforward, you know, kind of discontinuity between, you know, the way in which capitalism can coexist with pre-capitalist institutions and relations in Europe and the way in which it does so in other parts of the world through colonization. I mean, but we are talking about emergence,

genesis of capitalism. Ah, yes. once it is the dominant form it can sort of appropriate all these forms and you know use them whatever but we're talking about emergence of the capitalism yes primitive accumulation itself uh which strictly framed to where capitalism arise in capital first volume i mean spatially like you know certain parts of Hungary and you know where certain parts of Germany and Britain and so on you know there where the capitalism arised but primitive I mean the capital

what you are saying the labour force is the virtual source of that capital which was never accounted because it's the slave labour but it was present in the initial formation of a genesis of the capitalism because without which capitalism wouldn't arise. There wasn't enough labor force for capitalism to arise. No matter how much country, you know, farmers you push into the cities, you wouldn't have capitalism at the end. You would have another form of feudalism. That's why I see in a sort of deficit which

needs to rupture eventually kind of this lack of income so to speak when it comes to the analysis of money and capital sort of exposed and this is why I see the payload is inevitable because there's an unaccounted input into the system in the very conception of it and where inevitably somewhere along the line it will the accounts will collapse. Because it's never accounted. It's like black money in the system never explained. You see what I mean? That's not why the failure as such.

Okay. No, no, thanks. Yeah, this is, I mean, I'd need to know, yeah. I just, I'd need to know a lot more than I actually do about history. And I really don't know. I mean, I agree. I agree that the account of the emergence of capital is, or how to make such an account theoretically plausible is actually very difficult. and some original accumulation doesn't seem sufficient on its own.

Then that's why it has this curious status in Marx's own text. He recounts it as something like, you know, he says it's written in letters of fire and blood. It's like, you know, and obviously that, you know, original sin, original accumulation, it's like this, he wants to, I mean, although it is what the status of it is, what kind of historical, you know, event it is, is I think quite mysterious. It's not, he seems to be saying that kind of this is, you know, this is required in order to account for, you know, dispossession occurred, and we

need to kind of, you know, account for dispossession as a condition of, you know, the capital relation. But also, you know, capital itself, like industrial capital, merchant capital, you know arises before there are different kinds of capital industrial so marx you know wants to kind of focus on industrial capital or see that as a kind of um you know the culmination of the development of capital but like merchant capital exists um so the way in which capital assembles itself historically is i think very complicated and but i think that marx you know

knew that, and this is why I think that he doesn't just think that, you know, the account of original accumulation is not supposed to be kind of, you know, here's an explanation for the emergence of capital. I think it has another, it plays another role in his kind of, his system, or at least in the system of capital. But no, I agree with the points you were making, but the problems. OK, great. So Ray, I know it's been about three hours now, so it's up to you if you'd like to move on.

We do have a few more questions in the chat. I can do a couple more questions, maybe two or three more questions, and then I'll have to stop. So if you want me to read it or you have to read it yourself, going back to Simin. I can read it for you. Simin, okay, yes. Okay, yes, I see it, I see it. So I'll read Simin's question. um according to gotari after the 60s capitalist production has become the production of subjectivity what is the concept of resistance and struggle in the current situation um well the short answer is you know i don't know um i mean yes the production of subjectivity

in a way that's part of what you know even marx is acknowledging the same thing when when he talks about the way in which capital you know um you know imprints itself upon you know the minds and bodies of laborers and it reshapes their minds and their bodies you know to satisfy its own ends and that process has been going on for a long time. So I don't think it's new. I don't think this idea that, I mean, I guess the question is what you mean by subjectivity when you talk about production of subjectivity.

Is this, you know, is in a way, the way is, you know, is this a kind of the production subjectivity. Is this required because does the production of subjectivity do something that, for instance, ideology doesn't do or ideology can't do? And I know that doesn't go to already hate ideology and, you know, think it plays no role. I disagree with their assessment. I think it does have a you know a role to play um so um the link i mean obviously like you know resistance and struggle everything depends on whether you think there needs to be you know um

whether subjectivity is a product of resistance or a condition of resistance okay and i think You know, it's more plausible to say that, you know, subjectivation happens in and through resistance. And again, resistance here needn't be. I mean, look, people and workers resist capital simply because they find it impossible to live. It becomes, it makes their lives increasingly impossible. and the way in which they resist, you know, their resistance can take myriads, you know, microscopic forms. I mean, the question is whether, you know, how this kind of,

how these small, you know, localized gestures of resistance can be gathered and, you know, coordinated into something you know into into political form um and um and here it depends what your analysis of the situation is here depends what you think it depends how you understand your oppression makes all the difference to how to the nature of your resistance if you think um it's just about um you know if you think it's about corruption for instance if you think that you're kind of um you know the problem is corruption or um you know

dishonest politicians then you might you will still kind of you know invest your hopes in you you know, electoral politics perhaps, but if you think the problem is deeper and if you think that it's that class and exploitation have something to do with it, then you'll realize that, you know, it's not possible to kind of, that electoral politics won't be able to kind of deliver the um the political results one hopes for so um um i like what um frédéric lord i think he's you know he writes about this you know resistance

and struggle and the struggle against capitalism and um he's one of the most lucid you know writers about the stakes and the scope of the struggle and naming capitalism, at least just calling, naming the root source of the oppression is crucial. Just calling it by its name, I think, is the first step. Because then you'll see that a struggle against capitalism is more daunting, but also more, perhaps more kind of radicalizing than a struggle against some other kind of,

a more manageable form of injustice. Yeah, so yeah, I can't say much more, I'm afraid. Okay, I'll go through the next questions. Ayn says, capital makes history more, can we say that capital makes history more dialectical? Do you mean the concept of capital or the book capital? If you're there. I mean, this, in a way, yeah, this takes us back to the problems, you know, I was trying

articulate in my response to the first question um um i mean look in a sense the answer is yeah like in a way this the point of donald level's criticism is that they say in the final analysis you know marx's account makes the overcoming of capital or or the kind of the self-destruction of capital, a dialectical process. In other words, it is internally contradictory and it's internal contradiction that is its undoing, that leads to its overcoming.

But here, so in this sense, if the transition from capitalism to communism is dialectically necessitated because of the, you know, because capital is a moving contradiction, then the answer would be that ultimately, you know, Marx does end up resorting to a dialectical account of history. But that's exactly the problem. that's what I take Dardot and Laval's criticism to be. I think his account of the

contradictoriness of capital is really completely compelling. Then the question is whether this this contradiction has a subjective dimension or whether it can be subjectively manipulated or affected in some way. And that goes back to the question of like, is the class struggle within capital really ultimately simply about you know intensifying the contradiction to the point of its you know

to the point of explosion or can it be something else or can it or is it a way of actually you know know appropriating the contradiction and actually using it as a weapon okay that would be the the other alternative um okay i'll go to the next question um max um asks how do you see the relationship between primary and real subsumption in relation to the argument of the increasing autonomy of capital i.e in the accelerationist reading how would you respond to the argument and capitalism in the process of real subsumption is abandoning human elements and replacing them for their own fully capitalist ones and in the process eliminating human agency and

the ability of self-determination from within. I think, although capital wants to reshape human needs and desires to suit its own ends, in a way, the extent to which it does this, it doesn't want to… It's one thing to say that labor power is incorporated into capital, is a kind of a,

you know, becomes an elementary presupposition for capital. It's another thing to say that the bear, the human, the living labor, you know, that carries labor power can be turned into a machine part. And I don't think that that can be the case. And it can't be the case because, in a way, in order to, the sphere of consumption requires the availability of desires and appetites, which are not, requires the transformation. And in a way, the kind of the sometimes more or less unforeseeable transformation of needs and desires.

So in other words, you know, capital, you know, exploitation happens through the wage relation. And the wage relation means, entails, you know, the distinction between, you know, living labor and labor power. And capital consumes labor power, but not living labor. OK, and it can't eliminate living labor altogether because then that would destroy the wage relation, because then you wouldn't have wage laborers, you just have slaves. But then you can't have you can't exploit, you know, you can't. I mean, although slave labor plays a role in capitalist accumulation, you know, or at least I don't see how you could have a capitalist economy, you know, based entirely on slave labor.

So it looks like the kind of the distinction between living labor and labor power is necessary and living labor has needs and desires which you know must be in a way independent of capital so that capital can then kind of, you know, expand to satisfy them in a way. So in a way, it's the kind of the impossibility of the complete absorption of living labor into capital that is necessary for capital's expansion and accumulation.

Because if the desires and needs of living labor could be simply fixed by capital once and for all, then there wouldn't be, you know, there'd be a restriction in the range of commodities producible, you know, needing to be produced. So in a way, that's why I think that capital can't, you know, wholly, it subsumes labour power, and it subsumes, but it doesn't subsume labor, living labor in the same way. And it can't for structural reasons, because if it did so,

it would, you know, it would diminish the sphere of consumption. And the sphere of consumption needs to keep expanding as for the, you know, for the valorization process for the conversion of surplus value into profit so so i guess um so in a way so i think that capitalism wants to shape and constrain you know human autonomy or human self-determination but it doesn't want to eliminate it altogether because it can use it okay it can use it um so that's that would be my response um uh and may has a

question but isn't primitive accumulation really an ongoing process how to understand the ongoing colonial wars whatever yes it absolutely is an ongoing process and i think this is you know marx you know says this in a way the capital's you know self-reproduction entails the reproduction of originary accumulation so it's something that keeps happening it's not something that happened once at the beginning and then stopped it's something that is repeated in the process of capitals um you know self-reproduction um um okay i think that's it is that it um yeah i think that

That might be it. Thank you. Thank you, Ray. OK. Thank you for staying this late. Appreciate it. OK. Thanks, OK. Thanks again. Thanks for the invitation. Thank you so much, Josh. Thanks, everyone. OK, thanks. Thanks for the questions. Thank you. Great. OK. OK. Good night. Good night. Thank you.