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Cuckolding Marx: David Harvey’s ‘Unfaithful Companion’ to Capital (therealmovement.wordpress.com)
submitted 1 week ago by quarrk@hexbear.net to c/marxism@hexbear.net
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[–] ComradeRat@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I will finish it, but i'm already sceptical of the author given that they rely so much on "harvey uses [word]" -> "word has [synonyms]" -> "synonyms have bad connotations" -> "harvey is basically saying bad things about marx"

E.g. with a priori, author has given a list of imperfect synonyms, and one of the definitions of the term. But even a quick google search reveals (in the american heritate dictionary) that this is but one definition of the term—not even the top definition. Rather than “in a way based on theoretical deduction rather than empirical observation” the impression i got reading Harvey's work is that by a priori he more means "Proceeding from a known or assumed cause to a necessarily related effect; deductive" which is what Marx does, proceeding from known economic categories (and this is in fact what Harvey says Marx does!)

Wrt cryptic, its genuinely sad but to most people in the modern day, marx comes across as very cryptic (in sense sense of mysterious or obscure). Even stuff marx wrote to aid understanding (e.g. the references to popular literature, like shapespeare, goethe or robinson crusoe) have themselves become obscure, cryptic, in need of decoding. I say this from my experience in my org trying to get folks to read capital. Even stuff like the categories are (again, as harvey says) cryptic to the modern reader. Saying that something is difficult isnt some slight or conspiracy against marxism, it is good pedagogical practice.

[–] ComradeRat@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Like stuff like

Perhaps it wasn’t his intention, but the impression Harvey has left us with is that Marx’s starting point in analyzing the capitalist mode of production was arbitrary. This is utter bullshit. In fact, just by looking at the foot notes to this section — twelve in all — we can see Marx was trying to map his own categories to the categories commonly employed in contemporary political economy.

Is just misrepresentative on the one hand (literally, i have an epub of harveys companion in front of me, and several of the quotations the author cites, the author has altered[1]) and on the other hand fails to fully comprehend what a priori means (i.e. that starting with previously known knowledge as a priori premises is also a priori). The negative connotation of a priori the author is using is colloquial and develops from criticism (academic and anti-intellectual) of the recieved knowledge

[1] e.g. article says, my emphasis

While Harvey is saying:

“Marx abstracts from all the useful qualities of commodities because we cannot perform experiments.

But the author has actually cut out massive portions of this quote, without indicating it, to massively change the meaning. What harvey actually wrote is:

[Marx] abstracts from the incredible diversity of human wants, needs and desires, as well as from the immense variety of commodities and their weights and measures, in order to focus on the unitary concept of a use-value. This is illustrative of an argument he makes in one of the prefaces, where he says that the problem for social science is that we cannot isolate and conduct controlled experiments in a laboratory, so we have to use the power of abstraction instead in order to arrive at similar scientific forms of understanding.

I.e. harvey is not saying that marx abstracts from the diversity of needs, wants, etc, because we cannot preform experiments, but rather that marx's need to abstract from the diversity of needs, wants, etc is illustrative of an argument marx makes in the prefaces about his method.[2]

The misrepresentation in this point goes still further. The author of the article writes:

But is this why Marx abstracts from the particular useful qualities of the commodity? In fact, Marx abstracts from the particular useful qualities of the commodity in order to establish these qualities play no role in value.

But, in fact, marx does both in chapter one of capital—and in the quote, harvey is describing the first three paragraphs of chapter one, where marx is, exactly as harvey says, abstracting away from the manifold human needs and their measurements to focus on use value.[3]

[2] Specifically harvey is referencing the preface to the first edition, the end of paragraph 3:

Moreover, in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both. But for bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour, or the value-form of the commodity, is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but so similarly does microscopic anatomy.

And to bring it back to the authors bullshit about "how dare harvey use words like cryptic"—here is marx, being similarly self-depracatory about his work. The workings of capital are, in fact, cryptic, arcane, obscure, enigmatic! If they were not, there would be no commodity fetish!!

[3] specifically Marx writes:

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an 'immense collection of commodities ' ; the individual commodity appears as ib elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.

The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man's need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production.

Every useful thing, for example, iron, paper, etc., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. Every useful thing is a whole composed of many properties; it can therefore be useful in various ways. The discovery of these ways and hence of the manifold uses of things is the work of history. So also is the invention of socially recognized standards of measurement for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of the measures for commodities arises in part from the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, and in part from convention.

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. [Etc]

Which also aligns exactly with what harvey talks about (in even the same order!), in contrast to the authors insistance that Marx never does this

Overall, bad, bad, bad article imo, author is evidently some sorta shitstirrer who's maliciously misrepresenting people. Harvey helped get me through capital, i find most of the people criticising him to have a much less firm grasp on it than harvey tbh. He has issues (e.g. he misrepresents his accumulation by dispossesion as a critique of marx instead of the return to marx's original critique against the distortions from the 1910s on it actually was)

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Apologies for the delayed response. I have not had time to give a thoughtful reply.

David Harvey was also my very first entry into Marx. I listened to all of the many hours of his lectures and read a couple of his books. Then I learned about Michael Heinrich, one of the leaders of the value-form school — the interpretation of Marx which this blog accuses Harvey of implicitly repeating. I listened to many hours of Heinrich as well, and read a couple of his books, including actually a pretty good biography of Marx's early years.

I posted this article because it expressed some frustrations about Harvey's exposition of Marx; frustrations which I share after having shed things like Harvey's Companion for the source text written by Marx, and after having devoured all Marx's other canonical works. In the Companion, Harvey takes position as the expert, so he can and must be criticized for any inaccuracy intentional or not. Harvey repeatedly describing Capital chapter one as a "cryptic" and "a priori" is anything but an idle point. It's an attack that was levied at Capital almost immediately after publication, to which Marx had to reply:

"Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction."

Here (and in the subsequent paragraphs) Marx refers to the dialectical method used to obtain his result which, when laid out sequentially as in chapter one, might give an impression as a contrived model, produced entirely from Marx's own imagination and fancy.

There are many critics of Capital, especially from the Austrian school e.g. the classical anti-Marx critique by Bohm-Bawerk, who claim that Marx did not succeed in proving that labor is the content of value. A certain interpretation prevails among anti-Marx critics, and even certain Marxists, that the third thing argument in chapter one does not necessarily lead to a conclusion of that third thing being precisely labor; that the third thing could be energy, utility, or any other thing you like that could be conceived as common between two commodities. I think that critique is quite spurious, yet it has trapped even many well-meaning Marxists, including, apparently, David Harvey. Andrew Kliman I think is the one who has most directly discussed Marx's third thing argument and its critics in the last few decades.

On this question of how Marx identifies labor as the unique third thing it is my opinion that I. I. Rubin gives the most correct interpretation of how Marx was able to conclude it. In brief, Marx's method required both analysis and "genetic" (dialectical) construction, a bi-directional movement:

Rubin excerpt

The former, the analytical method, consists in taking a complex concrete phenomenon as the starting point of the investigation, and selecting a single, or several of the most important, characteristics, disregarding the multiplicity of its features, and so making the transition from the more concrete to the more abstract concept, to the simpler, or thinner concept, as Marx says. By further analysis we move on from this concept to an even simpler one, until we have reached the most abstract concepts in the particular science or the particular complex of questions, which interest us.

To cite just one example as an illustration of the problematic we are dealing with, I may remind you of the reciprocal relation between the following concepts. The Marxian theory of value builds on the concepts: abstract labour, value, exchange value and money. If we take money, the most complex and most concrete aspect of these concepts, and by examining the concept of money make the transition to exchange value, as the more general concept underlying money; if we then move from exchange value to value, and from value to abstract labour, we are moving from the more concrete to the more abstract concept, i.e. we are following the analytical method.

But, Marx says, however necessary the use of the analytical method is in the first stage of scientific enquiry, it cannot satisfy us in itself, and it must be complemented by another method. Once we have traced the complex phenomenon back to its basic elements by means of analysis, we have to take the opposite direction and, starting from the most abstract concepts, show how these develop to lead us on to more concrete forms, more concrete concepts. In our case, this progression from the simpler concepts to richer and more complex ones would be the movement from abstract labour to value, from value to exchange value and from exchange value to money.

Marx calls this method ‘genetic’, at one point, because it enables us to follow the genesis and development of complex forms. Elsewhere he terms it the dialectical. I hope we can also agree to describe the first method as the analytical, and the second (which includes both the analytical and the synthetic method) as dialectical.

Marx indicates that he considers the dialectical method to be the only one which solves scientific questions satisfactorily. Accordingly, we have to subject the problem which interests us, the question of the relationship between labour and value, to investigation not only by the analytical method, but by the dialectical as well. [...] Following Marx, we must solve our problem in this way. Our task does not only consist in showing that the value of a product can be attributed to labour. We must also show the converse. We must reveal how people’s productive relations find their expression in value.

This is the basic statement of the problem, which must be considered the most methodologically correct from the Marxian standpoint.

my bold format there at the end.

I believe Rubin is correct about Marx's methodology here. For Marx to be able to deduce specifically labor in his third thing argument, what is "a priori" is something already established in earlier of Marx's works and those parts of Political Economy which he accepted, i.e. certain categories like commodity, exchange-value, use-value, etc. (of course not without Marx's further categorical critique).

Marx mostly accepts the analysis done by prior political economists:

"Political economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value."

... the point of Capital, besides critiquing some aspects of that earlier analysis, is to reverse direction using a dialectical approach, reconstructing the theory on the basis of a corrected understanding of value and of (the dual character of) labor. It is not needed to prove that labor is the third thing because that was already known during the analytical phase of the investigation. Marx then starts from labor in order to discover value, as Marx writes in a letter:

"Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour. It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products."

This was a bit of a detour, but I had to point to some of the context surrounding this notion that Marx had contrived his labor theory of value, and why Harvey should be criticized for repeating it.

[–] ComradeRat@hexbear.net 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I can understand this criticism of labour and third thing, but I do not recall it being present in Harveys companion, and i have less than no respect for people like the author of the article who maliciously edit quotes (as i demonstrated above) instead of engaging in good faith. To me it seems like pointless and petty wannabe academic dramastirring on the authors part more than any principled analysis, much less any aim to work towards comminism

I maintain my points about cryptic and a priori, the first being objectively true about marx as read by most people in the modern day (again, even his robinson crusoe examples have become cryptic to modern readers) and the latter as not being inherently perjorative (laying out the current state of knowledge is also a priori) and therefore not something to need to defend against accusations of. Edit for more clarity: to be clear, i view there as a distinction between the reviewers claiming marxs whole analysis is a priori, and harvey saying marx starts the book with some rapid fire a priori statements

[–] quarrk@hexbear.net 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I'll admit after perusing the blog a bit more, that I agree with you on the general character of this blogger as ultra pedantic and shit-stirry. I can't agree that the blogger did any malicious editing of quotes. It's clearly a paraphrase of both Marx and Harvey despite the quote formatting:

More important to me is the general complaint about Harvey, which imo is not pedantic. It is actually a rather large debate in modern Marxism; you're free to argue the importance of the debate, but it is relevant, and I am certain that Harvey is aware of it and the special significance of terms like a priori in relation to chapter one. There is continuity between this misinterpretation by Harvey and his rejection of major pieces of Capital, like the tendency of the falling rate of profit. It's not a separate matter that Harvey is one of the least revolutionary Marxists in popular discussion.

[–] ComradeRat@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago

Wrt misrepresentation, i'll repost what I already wrote earlier both demonstrating the malicious editing, and explaining how these edits are more than mere formatting, and change the meaning of what harvey said to create a strawman punching bag:

author writes (my emphasis):

While Harvey is saying:

“Marx abstracts from all the useful qualities of commodities because we cannot perform experiments.

But the author has actually cut out massive portions of this quote, without indicating it, to massively change the meaning. What harvey actually wrote is (my emphasis):

[Marx] abstracts from the incredible diversity of human wants, needs and desires, as well as from the immense variety of commodities and their weights and measures, in order to focus on the unitary concept of a use-value. This is illustrative of an argument he makes in one of the prefaces, where he says that the problem for social science is that we cannot isolate and conduct controlled experiments in a laboratory, so we have to use the power of abstraction instead in order to arrive at similar scientific forms of understanding.

I.e. harvey is not saying that marx abstracts from the diversity of needs, wants, etc, because we cannot preform experiments, but rather that marx's need to abstract from the diversity of needs, wants, etc is illustrative of an argument marx makes in the prefaces about his method.

I agree with you on the front of harvey not being particularly revolutionary and displaying this bias in his work