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As promised my review of Marx! Blog version for nice photos
We finally did it! I started the first volume of Capital with an offshoot of my philosophy book club last July, and we wrapped up the book late last month. I’m very glad I read Marx, as I think his historical work, and some of his theories are incredibly insightful, most significantly his materialist analysis of history. However, I found myself incredibly frustrated by several of Marx’s assumptions, and his poor form when citing both sources and engaging with other philosophers. While I probably missed and misunderstood a fair chunk of the book , I think I clearly understood The Commodity and the Labor Theory of Value, The Historical Development of the Capitalist System, and Historical Materialism. The second of these is by far the best part of the book.
I would recommend that most serious philosophers of history read this book, and actually not the Communist Manifesto, as the later book is largely irrelevant to modern society, while I found much to take away from Capital that seemed relevant to how the world still works today.
My History with the Book
I’ve almost always been on the left politically, despite my disdain for identity and gender politics, and the disastrous political strategy and lack of discipline of the Democrats, at least in the United States, since the 1970s. In high-school and early college, this meant identifying with people like Sam Harris, but throughout college I began to move further and further left economically, voting for Bernie in the 2020 primary, and holding many communist-adjacent ideals going into graduate school. During this time, I also read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century with my friend Billy, and found it convincing.
In my second year of graduate school however, one of my roommates gifted me a copy of James C. Scott’s Seeing like a State, which made me reconsider if I actually supported socialism or communism, as more often than not, these forms of government required coercive and damaging forms of political centralization. It was around this time that I suggested to philosophy book club that we read Marx: I wanted to understand what the problems of Capitalism that communism and socialism actually proposed solutions to, and to start to figure out if there might be other ways to address those problems besides coercive state action.
When we finally got around to reading the book nearly three years after I initially suggested it, my political outlook shifted almost totally. I became energy-pilled, and skeptical of modernity and progress in general, and a proponent of degrowth. This will be largely the lens through which I discuss Marx.
The Commodity and the Labor Theory of Value
Unlike the Communist Manifesto, Capital is a critique of Capitalism, not a proposal for an alternative system. Thus, throughout the book Marx is focused exposing the inherent contradictions of capitalism, rather than proposing solutions to those problems. Two key reasons to read this book rather than the Manifesto are that these critiques are still relevant today, and that Marx’s (and his successor’s) solutions often don’t work in practice.
Marx begins the book by attempting to define what value is. He does this in the context of what he calls the commodity, an item like wheat, or coats, or coal that has both a use-value (how useful it is) and an exchange-value (how much it’s worth on the market). These two things can obviously be different, and according to Marx almost always have to be. If the two values were equal you wouldn’t participate in the exchange market because you would just use your commodity. Money was created to facilitate this exchange, as well as a marker of price. This dual nature of money creates the first problem of capitalism: the conflict between the need for the commodity behind money to be stable in value, but also adaptable enough to allow rapid exchange of commodities. I don’t we’ve found a satisfactory solution to this yet, given historical currency collapse following debasement. The current credit/petrodollar system doesn’t seem any more stable either.
The other issue that money creates is the mass production of commodities for their exchange value rather than their use value. This is not necessarily problematic, but tends to lead to things that certainly are. Commodity production creates a dependence on trade for subsistence, which creates fragility. The specialization inherent in specialized commodity production also alienates the laborer from the means of production actually necessary to his or her subsistence. This also leads to what Marx calls “commodity fetishism”, where certain properties are given to commodities that actually are caused by social relations. A good example of this is land rent, which seems like it comes from the “land” or “housing” commodity, but actually comes from the social relation of the landlord-tenant relationship. Neither hunter gatherers nor the Soviet Union had “rent”, so the concept can’t from the commodity in of itself.
Commodity fetishism leads Marx to the question of where value actually comes from, if it’s not from the goods in of themselves. He posits that this use-value comes from a single place: human labor, and that any profit in the capitalist system comes from stealing or appropriating some of this value from the worker. Marx was not the first to come up with this idea: the labor theory of value originates from Adam Smith, but Marx builds on this theory, and in fact the rest of the book is built on this one premise.
Unfortunately, I think the labor theory of value is wrong, or at least incomplete. The first problem with the theory is the issue of supply and demand, or put in another way, that a commodity can have vastly different use-values in different temporal and geographical locations. A winter coat will have much more value in Siberia in the winter than in India in the summer for example. Marx tries to get around this by defining only “social useful” labor as contributing to value, but this is so vague as to be incredibly unconvincing. The second issue comes from how Marx defines natural resources like land, sunlight, or clean water as “free gifts of nature”. These things are not truly free and require immense amounts of non-human labor to maintain and produce. The physiocrats were probably much more right than they were wrong.
Even if we do take the labor theory of value as true, Marx makes some headscratching exclusions. Neither merchants nor managers actually create value, despite the former enhancing use-value by transporting goods to distant markets, and the later creating value by enhancing the value of his charges’ labor.
If I had to replace the Labor Theory of Value with something it would be the Energy Theory of Value. This preserves some aspects of the Labor Theory of Value: human labor is the oldest form of energy transfer in the books, and makes space for the value added by sunlight (solar energy), the water cycle, and fossil fuels. Energy is also incredibly correlated to GDP in the way that labor value is not. Of course this still doesn’t fix the supply and demand problem, but I, unlike Marx, don’t require a totalizing explanation.
The Historical Development of the Capitalist System
After laying his groundwork, Marx then charts the development of the capitalist system, both in theory, and then in practice. Two elements are necessary to seed the creation of this system are separating peasants from their means of subsistence, and a large market for commodity trade. The first is necessary so the worker has no alternative other than to participate in the labor economy, as they are unable to go back to subsistence farming, either by law or because they couldn’t live off the land available. This part of the historical process has happened many times, from Sumner up to the modern day, but Marx most closely studies it in England, where starting with the Tudors, the government of England slowly stripped rights and privileges away from the peasantry that made it more and more difficult for these people to maintain themselves as independent farmers. The second element, commodity trade, is required to give the system a place to sell large amounts of goods, and thus outcompete artisans that don’t benefit from economies of scale.
Early capitalism developed from the medieval guild and workshop system, where the traditional apprentice-journeyman-master relationship began to breakdown and masters began to employ large numbers of journeymen or apprentices that would never have their own workshops. In this stage, masters began to try and more heavily exploit their workers through increasing work hours and reducing pay, but the amount that they could push was heavily limited due to the large amount of power that the workers had over the production process. Many societies, including Ancient Rome, reached this level of capitalist development, but were hamstrung by lack of access to critical technologies that allowed the harnessing of extra-somatic energy.
What allowed the West to break out of the proto-capitalist→collapse cycle was two things: the discovery of the Americas and the advent of truly global trade, and the discovery of fossil fuels. The former opened huge markets that would reward economies of scale much larger than could be served with workshops, and raw materials to serve these larger “factories”. The later allowed the development of machine technologies that would replace the input of human laborers. Marx calls these machines “Capital”. Over time, capitalists are incentivized to replace more and more of their workers with these machines, to increase the investment in what Marx calls “fixed” capital, rather than variable capital. The capitalist might want to do this for a number of reasons. Firstly, machinery tends to be less complicated than artisanal hand crafts to operate, meaning less skilled workers are required to operate it, meaning the capitalist doesn’t need to pay his workers as much and can profit more. Secondly, machinery allows capital to harness extra-somatic energy to do work, which is much cheaper than paying a worker. Marx doesn’t really acknowledge this second reason, but I think it’s an important addition to his argument from an energy perspective. Over time as this process snowballs, workers have less and less power to fight back against the increases in working hours, loss of wages, etc. because the labor required is so unskilled that they are easily replaceable. This kind of labor is also extremely degrading mentally and morally, and leads to psychological harm and alienation.
Capital tends to accumulate in larger and larger conglomerations, which also has the dangerous effect of centralizing political power. Piketty extensively documents this in Capital in the 21st Century: we were only saved from a snowballing capital accumulation by the massive capital destruction of the world wars.
Marx documents this process in England extensively, and most of the second half of the book is taken up with showing that this system does indeed exist in England and has become significantly more exploitative over the last fifty years, to the point where parts of England are beginning to become depopulated because labor practices chew through workers so quickly. The conditions in 19th century English sweatshops were also famously documented by Charles Dickens, and were eventually put a stop to by the government due to the action of labor unions, excessive emigration, the issue of national defense, and moral outrage, among other things.
Today we can see the same behavior from tech companies, as they attempt to replace large chunks of their workforce with AI, perhaps the biggest capital expense in the history of capital expenses, which has already resulted in massive quality of life decreases for those tech workers that remain.
Historical Materialism
The final point I want to discuss is Marx’s development of historical materialism. The philosophy of history can be split into two general schools of thought. Idealism, where ideas drive the development of human societies, was the one I was taught in school. Feudalism→ Capitalism→ Enlightenment→ Democracy→ Global Prosperity. The other school, materialism, posits that the social relations and ideas of human societies are determined primarily by their material conditions. Of course it’s not really an either/or question, it’s a both/and: ideas and material conditions are symbiotically related to each other. But I tend to lean heavily towards the material side of the question: societies with similar material conditions tend to have similar ideas and institutions, and merely transplanting an idea from one society to another with completely different material conditions rarely, if ever leads to that idea taking root. This idea is central to Marx’s understanding of the development of capitalism, which he views as a deterministic process that flows from specific material conditions. While the exact teleological implications of this are not important for this book in particular, historical materialism is important for understanding what kind of policy and moral prescriptions might be effective.
For instance, in this book Marx discusses the interplay between the capitalist system of production and family structure. While some have erroneously interpreted his commentary as advocacy for destruction of the nuclear family, Marx merely is observing that the nuclear family cannot survive an economic system where women are required to work in the same way as men. The fertility decline and all its downstream “causes” (feminism, dating crisis, etc.) are due to this fact. As I have argued extensively before, if we want to reverse the fertility decline, we have to change the arrangement of labor that brought it about. Ideas are not enough.
Actually reading this book
As much as I got a ton out of reading this book, the actual experience of being immersed in Marx wasn’t terribly pleasant. Marx is a bit of snarky asshole, and the fact that I had not read any of his intellectual enemies made this snark confusing rather than funny. He also had a nasty habit of interpreting these same enemies in the worst possible light and of poorly paraphrasing or sometimes almost completely making up sources. I can see where modern leftists get some of their worst tendencies. Because of this, I can only give the book 4/5 stars.
Anyway, thanks for reading, and I would appreciate any corrections on my understanding of Marx and materialism in general.
Am I missing something obvious here, or is this immediately debunked by the word "specialization"? The only people who could "just use their commodity" for the entirety of their needs are subsistence farmers, who I guess still existed when the book was written, but were on the way out already. And even that's only if you squint heavily, because they would need to also miraculously have every construction material they ever need in the surrounding area, which at this point moves us further back to the hunter-gathers, more or less.
I'd argue that access to information flattens the variance here, and prices are asymptotically approaching some kind of equilibrium, as exemplified by the The Digital Provide paper (see graphs at page 21). Obviously, such equilibrium would include some amount of profit for the fishermen - steelmanning the first thing I've quoted, certainly you have to get more from your work that you put in it, otherwise why work at all? Other than mere survival, but that brings us back to the subsistence farmers, which we're not, and revealed preferences even at Marx's time show that people would rather work at Dark Satanic Mills than farm.
No I think we have the same understanding here, I think there's just a confusion of terms. If you're in a factory making widgets, maybe the first twenty have a positive use value for you (maybe you can feed your robot pet with widgets). After that the use value of each widget quickly approaches 0, so you'd rather sell them on the market. The same is true for any commodity you might produce, as a subsistence farmer or otherwise. The only situation in which use value and exchange value are exactly equal (or use value is always higher) is when you have a society of hunter gatherers, as you note.
Right, so it seems to me like Marx describes a basic feature of any society more complex than an anprim one, and goes "A ha! This is an inherent problem with capitalism!". How would that follow? It's like the apocryphal story about Euler and Diderot.
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Well not exactly. The enclosures act made subsistence farming less than subsistence for most farmers, so people either had to starve or migrate to cities. It wasn't a preference.
Noted. Although now I'm interested in how the industrial revolution would look like if the inclosures never happened. Theoretically, less available workforce would put a premium on labor, which could drive innovations in labor efficiency faster, otoh there could've been not enough "critical mass" to make the early industry feasible.
This is a good question. I think the massive labor glut eventually would have happened (see the US in the early 20th century/developing countries today where people voluntarily leave/left productive farms to pursue wealth in the big city), but labor saving would probably been a priority for capitalist investment even more than it already was. I think we would also probably have a much weaker union culture, although that might be a good thing depending on who you ask.
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Trying to salvage LTV in any form just seems like a mistake. It's a lens that exist to glorify the worker and stoke resentment against the wealthy, it falls apart when you put any pressure on it. It can't explain scarcity as value, as put in one if its earliest critiques "Pearls are not fetched from the bottom of the sea because men have dived for them, but men dive for them because they fetch a high price." and I don't think your energy theory of value would survive much better. I think it's just cleaner to say that everyone has their own theory of value and there is no universal theory, which is a source of great surplus from the market.
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Nice write up, and big oof for actually reading theory. You just have the book on a shelf with the spine facing out, don't actually open it!
Re. that, if we are being (extremely) charitable you could do some interpretation such like: Merchants aren't moving shit and managers aren't managing shit, merchants own something in some theoretical sense and they pay laborers to do the moving and selling and what have you, managers simply employ proll bosses to do the managing while they get blowjobs in their corner suite, somthing somthing 1920's political cartoon.
I don't think this is clearly stated or well supported in the actual text, but you could make the argument.
I did get a lot of out of it, so it wasn't a total waste, but yeah the theory doesn't really fully clarify things. Back to being a pretty shelf decoration I guess.
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I suppose so. If you own capital, then you can pay people to make pretty much every decision on how that capital is managed, how the risks are hedged, et cetera. At this point, the only thing you're actually doing is allowing the money to move - which is not, strictly speaking, labor. The owner does not have to be the manager.
There is risk, and the mainstream theory of value rewards those who dare to risk and do so profitably. However, I don't see how risk debunks the labor theory of value. It's plainly not labor to risk what you own.
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You may be interested in some of what Steve Keen is writing these days, as he's very interested in making sure that core economics fully incorporates awareness of energy and stays consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. He also started out studying Marx and stumbling on a specific critique of his theory of value: that apparently in Marx's notes and earlier writing, he (seemingly correctly) had the source of capitalist 'value' as any place where you can get more use-value out of inputs compared to their exchange-value costs. But then Marx just turned on a dime at some point when writing Capital and declared that this only applied to labor (in a scientific way, assuming that 'fair' prices are paid for all inputs), seemingly just because he wanted to proceed with a classical labor theory of value.
I never read Capital, but followed along with David Harvey's lectures on it on youtube. It was interesting, and the use-value/exchange-value distinction is pretty useful. But it always seemed a bit confused and unrefined by mostly staying away from money and not quite knowing what questions to ask. Attempting to scientifically ask "where does value come from?" in 19th century industrial capitalism feels vague, where one was probably really wondering "how is it that all the companies in aggregate are perpetually profitable?" So compared to the lineage of classical/neoclassical econ, I much prefer the 20th century post-Keynes finance macro stuff that deals with actual money creation, balance sheet accounting, flow-of-funds analysis, etc., like Levy's "Where profits come from".
As for any current culture war angles for this, I think they've dwindled. 15 years ago I definitely encountered some status games in niche leftist communities where the marxists who could claim to have actually read Capital were 'real ones'. But the more distance we've put on since the financial crisis and even Occupy, the more any spiked interest has faded from Marx or people like Harvey/Zizek/Wallerstein/Alperovitz/etc. A lot of big story collapse narratives, from the falling rate of profit, to peak oil, had a 'final boss' big pillar where government deficit spending was somehow holding the house of cards together, and was about to topple. But people have rediscovered just how resilient that pillar actually is (and how important it's always been).
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Great write up! Thanks!
How does your energy theory of value deal with high value and low energy services such as medical consultation? How does it deal with more efficient machines? A machine that created 1000 widgets and hour and requires 2 kilowatts to operate is clearly less valuable than a machine which produces the same number of widgets per hour and requires 1 kilowatt. I do think energy is a useful tool for examining economies in general. We can learn useful things by comparing night time light pollution in China with their stated GDP numbers. That doesn’t mean it is a good theoretical basis for a theory of value though. It’s better than labor, but still wrong, and still seems politically motivated. Marx wanted to do a socialist revolution, so he grounded value in labor and I think you may be doing something similar.
For your next book I suggest Human Action by von Mises. He has a similar discussion of theory of value, and I think this “subjective theory of value” makes the most sense of any I’ve heard. Before I read him I just called it the “market theory of value.” Basically he points out that there is no inherent value to a good, value is determined through a process of negotiation with the people around you. The only way to price something is to see what the market will pay for it.
Quite a few EToVs have been proposed. My main lens of seeing things is biophysical economics which takes a lot from EToV ideas (read this book review for an introduction) leading me to work with commodities.
The obvious solution is: The energy was spent training the physician before the service was rendered. You can do accounting directly with industrial inputs. The matching principle recognizes expenses when the revenue they generate, is earned. The physician simply charges for past energy investment (along with profit from carrying uncertainty/risk, temporary or structural distortions preventing rapid reskilling etc.) Depending on the framework e.g. strict GAAP, the physician exercised pricing power leveraging intellectual assets capitalized (years ago, when studying) blabla scheduled amortization.
Not very well, but the same book review describes related ideas about capital efficiency, relative yield etc.
Attention/throughput of energy expenditure is also important, which @crushedoranges alludes to with "capital being the infrastructure of which energy flows" but in Marx' framework, you could replace "labor" with anything including capital and rewrite my above paragraph simply talking about the capital costs of having supported and trained the doctor. Modern economics/finance struggles under Cobb-Douglas where everything is money to enable simpler math (but we can't always/directly transmute gold into oil and transmuting oil into food often takes time...) Cobb-Douglas is a production function used to handle input substitution (increasing capital reduces labor etc.) If the elasticity of substitution (conversion cost) is 0, you can't transmute. Leontief functions have fixed proportions, where you require 60 food and 20 gold to train a soldier; in ideal situations, the free market(place) does allow conversion, with further transaction costs. Normal economics has a closed loop (and helicopter money style hetereodox economists just see a... slide), but my school points out entropy via EROI etc. Nothing has a conversion cost of 0, non-substitutibility is just an impossibly high cost for instant conversion.
This also leads to super silly results. Leaving aside that it would still value the medical advice way below a flight if you do your amortization properly, it also means that different doctors advice would have different value and that difference would have nothing to do with how good they are but instead the fact that one took an elevator to class throughout medical school and the other had classes on lower floors.
I view your example of different doctors similarly to "efficient machines" which I said this doesn't deal with well.
Indeed! However, you're looking to disprove it by coming up with comical definitions instead of looking for useful and insightful definitions, this is the opposite of productive (mathematical) reasoning. It's akin to throwing away a hammer because it's bad at turning screws. Sure, some communists would probably argue this steak is worth more because you burned 20 barrels of crude to cook it, but that's obviously just waste. The actual energy used to do the thing - that's a more useful lens. In context, you'd recursively consider all the energy used to get through the bureaucratic and credentialing requirements, to be better than others vying for spots etc. and those failed people who invested but didn't make the cut, the energy they invested is also included in the end (otherwise the supply of physicians would be higher and the price lower etc.) It's more useful to search for situations and problems where this tool is useful, leads to insights etc. so you can take it out of your toolbox for them. I find it helpful for macroeconomics and valuing commodity companies, as a measure of competitive of advantage etc.
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Capital being the infrastructure of which energy flows makes a kind of sense - certainly science fiction has toyed with the idea of currency representing energy. Like Stellaris. But like all Marxist thought, it focuses too much on the commanding heights of heavy industry. It's not like you can dump gigajoules of energy to make software programming go any faster. At least, with our current level of technology.
But maybe that will change. Maybe LLM models and emergent AGIs will align Marxist theory with reality again - that you can brute force services by dumping measurable fractions of solar output into server farms. But if we're going to reach that postscarcity state, it will be through capitalism outmoding itself, not communism usurping it. Subjective value means that there will always be an economy of some sort, even as human beings are detached from material base needs as the engine for growth.
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1/ I learned the Soviet Union didn’t have rent - not sure how I’ve missed that in the last forty years.
2/ you kinda compared tech workers to Dickens’ era sweat shops. Come on.
I think I’d like to read more of your opinions.
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I don't really have anything to add but I wanted to thank you for the write-up.
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