Ep. 359: Karl Marx’s Project (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 359 are something like what is it to explain the economic world? Or what is economic value? We're starting another two episode run here on Karl Marx, centering around the first chapter, preface and the afterword of Marx's magnum opus Das Kapital, whose first volume was published in 1867. To help orient us to this project, we also read the introduction to his Grundrisse, I.e.

foundations of a Critique of Political Economy, written in 1857, and a few other little bits that we'll get into. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmeier in Madison, Wisconsin producing this podcast and by then consuming it, returning to myself as a productive individual reproducing himself.

1:01 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, 20 yards of linen in Austin, Texas.

1:05 Wes: This is Wes Alwan quietly treating bourgeois relations as if they were irrefutable natural laws of society in Abstracto in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:16 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey sensuously contemplating the use value of my labor after building my Lego tranquil garden in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:23 Mark: It must say something about the reading of the length of our intros in a given week. Aside from Seth's punchy one which left us asking questions, there are some tortured formulations of things in here, which I guess is what Marx is known for. Right. We again gave ourselves like with this Feuerbach one, two full episodes to basically take on one kind of ponderous set of readings. And I think in this one we're going to. Besides, for sure we'll go through the introductory material. The Grundrisse introduction is sort of, even though it was written years before, serves as an introduction to the whole project.

Some comments on his method. I think the thing that we maybe wanted to start on was this theses on Feuerbach, which is actually from way back in 1845, but it's a one page document, so maybe we can dispense with that pretty quickly. We're going to have plenty of time to give our overall Marx impressions. Any introductory words before we get into this theses on Feuerbach.

2:19 Wes: I think in a way getting into the thesis is a good introduction because it gives us a transition from the 1844 manuscripts. Right. Did you give the dates on Capital and Grundrisse or did you say what?

2:33 Mark: Yeah, I tried to. I know. So the grundrisse again was 1857, Capital, Volume 1, 1867, but then he wrote four editions of it, so there are things added from later.

2:48 Wes: Yeah, Grundrisse, in a way, is notetaking that he was doing for the sake of writing Capital.

2:54 Dylan: It's pre capital.

2:55 Wes: But yeah, 1844, those manuscripts that we already recorded on, that's often considered early Marx. And in fact, when they were discovered, I think they were banned in the Soviet Union at first. I don't remember that exactly, but they were a bit controversial because they deviated from his later work. And one of the deviations is he's a little bit more Feuerbachian that. So, for instance, he seems to imply that he thinks there's such a thing as human nature. He just sounds a bit more Feuerbachian. The theses on Feuerbach is a year later, I think, right, 1845, than the manuscripts.

And he's going to show us how he differs from Feuerbach. And we remember that Feuerbach was trying to take this turn to materialism of a sort. And there was a big critique of Hegel in there, big critique of the speculative philosophy of idealism. And Marx is here to tell us, as usual, that your materialism is not as good as my materialism. You are still stuck in the abstract. You are still stuck with the legacy of Hegel. You can almost think of this as people successively trying to extirpate themselves from like, or extract themselves from this thicket of Hegelianism of which they are a part.

In a way. They're very Hegelian in many ways. And I think Marx thinks he's finally done it with these theses.

4:22 Dylan: Is there anything in an introduction worth saying about? I mean, we already did an episode on Marx, 1844. But is it obvious why you would read Marx?

4:34 Mark: All right, sure. If we're going to get into this. Say why you're asking this question?

4:38 Dylan: Well, no, I guess Marx is one of those, like a lot of the philosophers we read, you either don't know

4:43 Wes: who they are or you hate them.

4:47 Dylan: Yeah, but Marx is one of the few, right? That his legacy has changed the world, at least in name and in attribution, in past 150 years.

5:00 Wes: And people say philosophy doesn't have any effect on the world. Look what Marx did.

5:05 Dylan: Some people say that's exactly why we should get rid of philosophy.

5:08 Mark: Well, of course he was dismissive himself. He did not consider himself a Marxist, that people were already, during his lifetime calling themselves Marxists, doing things in his name, that he did not approve of. So people say Marxian rather than Marxist. If we're talking about, like, what his actual thought was.

5:25 Dylan: I understand that. And I understand also that there's the whole. When I say something like, of all the philosophy, that his legacy has had a gigantic effect on the world. That's not to say that he would have agreed with it. I don't think he agreed with anybody who said anything that he couldn't help himself but to tweak it. And also that it's a standard criticism of anybody, any regime, certainly, that claim to be Marxist, that they're not actually genuinely Marxian or Marxist.

5:59 Wes: Yeah, I think it's a complicated issue.

6:01 Dylan: Yeah.

6:01 Wes: So Marxists and socialists will want to defend him by saying what happened historically is not really a reflection of what Marx is writing about. And so, for instance, in the Soviet Union, going straight from feudalism maybe to communism and imposing that from the top down, as opposed to letting history play out right, there should be a natural development from capitalism to communism. But from the secondary reading I've done on Marx, it's quite complicated. It's not clear that authoritarianism is not in the spirit of Marxism. You know, I agree there are big debates, for instance, about what he means by dictatorship of the proletariat.

And he himself was an activist. He himself was very political. And a lot of what he did was writing for newspapers. And he is quite cranky in his writing. Yeah. So I think others will argue there is this authoritarian strand. And what happened historically is very much in. As disastrous as it was. You could see the seeds of it in his writing. I'm not taking a position either way, but I wouldn't just cede the ground immediately to defenders of Marx and say, okay, there's obvious separation between history and his theory.

7:17 Mark: Well, I can say it is entirely irrelevant to what we read for this time. What I'm seeing here is a person who read, he's reacting less to Hegel and Feuerbach and Stirner and more to Adam Smith and this guy David Ricardo and other folks writing in about English political economy. So he's interested in. Every philosopher should be interested in the foundations of sociology, of like, how do we talk about things that are not just about one individual people, but are about systems, about the social sciences, about laws that somehow apply to human society?

Are we comparable to cells or atoms that we can give these models? So we're going to right here in theses on Feuerbach get into what kind of materialism is he pursuing? In other words, how concrete is his thought. And he's often accused of being highly abstract of giving these models that do not apply. I mean, I think most economists are accused of this, that even though the data is supposedly taken right from things actually happening in the world and he is in parts of capital just, just giving economic histories, here's all the laws of the attempt to lengthen and shorten the workday in England between these 20 or 30 years, et cetera.

So he thinks he is very much making generalizations based on real things, real data, real material stuff, but it is still so abstracted. And he necessarily makes all these simplifying assumptions like I'm going to assume capitalism is working correctly and still I'm going to show you that it does something wrong happens with it. That's very. Especially if you get into historical determinism. Oh, which is again something we didn't really read about today. But if you think that once you have to get full blown capitalism and then its internal contradictions will inevitably put us into a.

Make the proletariat worldwide join together and rebel. From what I saw here, it would be very hard for me to say that he is being dogmatic in that way. He is pointing out problems in the way that folks mostly not Adam Smith himself and not even Ricardo, which is a guy didn't know anything about, but he really respects this guy Ricardo. But he just characterizes all these as bourgeois economists. And he has in mind most clearly like guys like the say people I'd never heard of who he thinks are just holding water for the bourgeois and just trying to say, oh, as long as we had a completely free market economy, everything would be wonderful.

It would be a paradise on earth. In fact, it is a paradise on earth. It is the best of all possible worlds. And oh, it seems like he's making pretty good observations against that, both theoretically and practically right. That he points out that just the capitalists and the workers, their interests are not aligned. So the capitalists will invariably try to lengthen the workday as far as possible, eke out every bit of exploitation, every bit of free labor out of the workers as possible. There are advances in productivity. It's not going to mean the workers are going to work less.

No, in fact it's just going to make their work sort of worth less per hour. Feel free to throw them out on the street if not needed. So he's pointing out just these fundamental inequalities and that's all very legitimate.

10:47 Wes: All right. So I think that interpretation makes him out to be more of a social Democrat, which he is not. And he hated those people and so did all of his followers forever. And Adam Smith himself, right, was not arguing for a free market economy. Quite the contrary. The entire second half of his book is devoted to arguing for a welfare state, so a robust welfare state to deal with the. The problems of making pandemic. And yeah, and Marx himself can point to stuff in Smith. He can borrow those critiques, essentially. I think he does. And I don't know what these other economists are arguing.

I'm very skeptical that they. That many of them are arguing for a free market economy or I doubt that, but I don't know. But I think he does. He believes that they are sketching out quote unquote, laws of nature, which is to say economic laws, or they're supposed to be natural and inalterable. They're not historically contingent. But Marx thinks that in many cases their economic theories are just really not. They're about capitalism, not about economics in general. And capitalism is a historical moment. So they're not really universal in the way those economists think they are.

Although it gets complicated. It's not clear what he thinks is universal in what he.

12:08 Dylan: Because it's conditional.

12:09 Wes: What he thinks is contingent.

12:11 Dylan: Yeah.

12:14 Wes: And he's not giving us a great deal of information, at least in chapter one of Capital about the details of what's in there that he's arguing against. I think one of them implicit. Right. He's arguing he's going to give us a deduction of his labor theory of value in chapter one, which by the way, despite capital being very empirical, that's very a priori. And actually it's a really. I find it a fascinating argument. But he's giving this a priori deduction of his labor theory of value. And I think he thinks that these other writers do not see it that way. And I imagine they probably think value is something subjective and something related to supply and demand. That's probably this bourgeois economics that he's objecting to.

13:00 Dylan: Your point, Wes, that he. And I guess you said this too, Mark, he's going to have a model for how to understand economy, broadly speaking. And I agree that it's a little bit confusing about how historically contingent everything is because he's adamant that basically the way things work in the world and even like the rules of the game change over time if the feudal rules are different than the capitalist rules are different than the rules to come after that. But then on top of that, or maybe underneath that is all of the stuff about labor theory of value, which Seems to be more universal.

It's in that model of how the world works that you get those different kind of waypoints of the evolution of social life, of us as social beings, and the importance of the economy of that. And the economy to me is for him the lever of materialism. If there was something to bring forth what makes the world real, it ends up being economic interactions.

14:13 Mark: Seth, do you have any opening words before we get into theses?

14:16 Seth: Well, if I do an equivalent opening as the three of you, then we'll be breaking for part one.

14:22 Mark: That's fine. That's what. That's why we're doing two episodes.

14:26 Seth: No, no. Well, so I had an interesting experience preparing for this because we were having conversation about how we were going to structure the episode and. Is this really philosophical? Mark, I said, I think you said you didn't think the Das Kapital stuff had much in the way of philosophical content. And is the labor theory of value, has it already been disproved? And blah, blah, blah. And basically, when I started reading the first section of Chapter 1 of Das Kapital, I immediately saw connections to what we read in the Grundrisse. And so I wasn't thinking about, like, how does Marx fit in the history of philosophy or anything.

I was really just. I think there's a really interesting set of ideas that he's bringing across here in these two. And they are interesting philosophically at the very least. They're interesting as conceptual arguments around sociopolitical organization and economic systems. So I don't know, I just. And I also thought his writing is very clear in these two works. So that was my experience.

15:34 Mark: All right. Unlike the theses on Feuerbach, I think, which technically were part of our German ideology. Episode 70. But I see in my write up for it that I didn't even mention it because we must have spent so little time on it because they were like, this is one page. And besides which, we had not read Feuerbach and not read what he had to say about Hegel. So I don't think it was a lot of meat. But.

15:56 Dylan: Yeah.

15:56 Mark: Should we just start reading from it or.

15:59 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think the overall gist of this is the turn to what he calls the practical, which has been. Right. This has been around since the beginning of German idealism, a critique of the theoretical and this desire to turn to the practical. The worry that the theoretical somehow obscures or overshadows the practical. And one of the problems was that the theoretical gives us determinism. Theoretical just being right, both science and Metaphysics. But the problem of determinism looms large. And a lot of it, German idealism, was a response to that and a way to privilege the practical, such that the freedom and the ethical still had a place.

But this turn is a bit different, Right. It's coming in the wake of Forbach's materialism. And the suggestion is, I think he. Right. Marx means something a little bit different by the practical than previous philosophers. He's thinking specifically about what he calls revolutionary activity. So that we get. I think he sees his previous philosophers as thinking of revolutions as primarily being in thought. And then maybe societal change would be predicated on that. But here it's gotta be right. We're. The revolution in thought has to come about by way.

And we saw this in the 1844 manuscripts, by way of doing things right, by way of political change. You don't really resolve the contradictions in the Hegelian dialectic by writing about it. You resolve those contradictions through political change. So, for instance, in the second thesis, he'll say, truth must be proved in practice. That the standard of truth isn't some theoretical standard, but it's what happens in practice, right?

18:03 Mark: So the famous part of this is the last of the theses. Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. If that meant, let's not do philosophy anymore. Just go out and protest, change the. That's a very common thing we hear from people. But clearly, then, he's still writing a lot. He's very carefully studying other people's manuscripts as well as actual happenings in the world, as well as performing political action. So something in the neighborhood of philosophy does not get wholesale rejected here.

It's just, let's do philosophy in a different way. This sounds to me kind of like. Actually, there were several things to me in here, in his writings that sounded like Williamson in terms of that what philosophy has been doing is spinning its wheels. Here is a different model. I'll go with a different historical strain and try to build on that. That, I think, is actually doing some work and requires some mathematical acumen and things that are not strictly the humanities in order to fully elaborate.

19:08 Wes: I think some of it is about consciousness raising. And it shows up in critical theory. It's very much a part of contemporary academia where you have certain political ideals, right? Like gender equality or racial equality. And those show up in the way you do humanity. So if you read Shakespeare, you look at gender in Shakespeare. That's a large part of what happens now in Literature departments. And why are you doing that? It's not. You're not arguing about gender per se. You're trying to show how gender roles are manifested in say, Renaissance society or in Shakespeare's work, with a view to undoing that ideology.

Right. Marx is very much about this concept of ideology where the interests of a few are represented as the interests of the many. And part of the problem is we get hoodwinked by that and we need our consciousness raised. So when you do something philosophically, you're not just engaged in this theoretical activity of truth seeking in a way analogous to the physical sciences. You have an agenda and you're trying to get people to see through the ideology that binds them.

20:20 Dylan: But isn't that characteristic of all truth seekers? Right. Is that so? What you're describing is this inversion of Hegel. Right. Of taking the dialectic and turning it to deconstruction so you deconstructive activity is intended. I think the term consciousness raising, it's a good one because that characteristic. I guess I'm going to back off from the truth seeking aspect of it. I think that there are two things that end up happening is the activity of just sort of uncovering and deconstructing what's happening behind the scenes, but then also the conceit that you're uncovering sort of the truth of the matter, that you're revealing something about the way in which the world works.

And I'm interested to. For us to talk about where Marx ends up on this and whether what the role of say it being true or not in the second thesis when he says man must prove truth and dispute over reality or non reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. It made me wonder, is he really saying is anything that's in practice is truthful, like anything that's done is truthful,

21:42 Wes: or is it trial by combat? Yes, it reduced to might makes right. Yeah. There's all sorts of questions that. That raises.

21:49 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. So if I just take it very surfacely, very generous, it there's just a call for put it in practice and build the machine rather than just write it down on paper. And so there's that. But when he starts, he's using the rhetoric of prove the truth. Right. Then I'm wondering sort of what's going on with that.

22:13 Mark: I was just confused even in the first thesis. Right. Just to read from it. The main defect of all hitherto existing materialism that A. Feuerbach concluded is that the object, actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity practice, not subjectively. So how is he using? First of all, I don't even know what he's. What he's talking about, how he's using objectively versus subjectively, how he's using. The best I could come up with was the form of the object. Basically, he's making Heidegger's distinction between things as the focus as present-at-hand.

That would be focusing on the form of the object, treating it as an object, as opposed to the things that are merely ready to hand. The merely part of our practice, part of our background. So in other words, what Marx wants to do is dig into the things underlying the practices that we pursue every day. The subconscious, the social backing, the social conventions, the social constructions. Whereas these folks are only seemingly able to focus on ideas that are in front of them, which then think about to what extent those resemble the world or not.

23:32 Wes: Yeah, so he's pivoting off again. This. This distinction from German. Well, it predates German idealism. Right. But it's part of early modern philosophy as well. But between the theoretical and the practical. In the theoretical, we are trying to understand what is and how we can know it, epistemology and metaphysics. And in the practical, we're talking about ethics, we're talking about what we ought to do. That's the subjective part. So what he calls the active side and the practical and the subjective, those are all synonymous. The objective and the theoretical are synonymous.

So if we're trying to figure out the categories, the basic categories of being. Right, we're in the objective theoretical realm. Or if we're doing Hegel's speculative philosophy, we're largely in the objective realm, looking at the dialectic and all that. But I think he's thinking of the subjective realm as the realm of freedom, the realm of right. Then that's also another part of the. The ethical, this close association with freedom. And he's accusing Feuerbach of being just another theoretician without treating objects in terms of human freedom and political and ethical activity.

I don't know why. Like, I don't see that in Feuerbach. I think Feuerbach sounds a lot like Marx does here in his critique of Hegel. So it's a little unclear to me why Feuerbach isn't going far enough for Marx. But that seems to be the idea.

25:12 Mark: The last sentence in the essence of Christianity, Feuerbach regards the theoretical attitude is the only genuinely Human attitude. The big thing I took away from the essence of Christianity is again that he's basically an atheist. But he likes the idea of God as an idea. Right? As long as you don't see God as an idea alienated from humanity. But you should still make humanity the object of your contemplation. Right. Your species being that our ability to self reflect, to see ourselves as in solidarity with other people, as in these relationships of love like this allows it. We're not just going through the motions and oh well, if we love, that's just because it's an instinct to be attached and gain warmth and sex from other people. No, it's to elevate this stuff, to be self reflective. So is that what Marx's re God

26:08 Wes: is a projection of our essence, right, of the human essence. Which is another thing that Marx is going to ultimately reject, and this is part of the critique of Feuerbach is Marx doesn't like the idea of a human essence anymore, even though it's there in 1844. So yeah, I think that's part of it. That this idea, that part of the theoretical idea is that there are self knowledge, as it is in Hegel, self consciousness, consciousness of our own essence, the practical flows out of that. It has these practical implications. And what he wants to say here, and what he said in the 1844 manuscripts is that we are self making.

It sounds very existentialist. We aren't. Yes, we're the product of social forces, he'll say in one of these theses, but we also create those forces. So we are not simply beholden to contemplating the essence theoretically and then living up to that. That's part of the alienation. Right? We just create these standards for ourselves, whether it's Christianity or our own supposed ideal essence. Then we're supposed to behave, we're supposed to live up to that. I think that's what he's rejecting. We define who we are and then we act practically on behalf of that.

27:20 Dylan: Yeah, I thought that you're pointing to theses 6. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in a single individual. Feuerbach resolve resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality is an ensemble of social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is hence obliged to abstract from the historical process and to divine the religious sentiment regarded by itself and to presuppose an abstract, isolated human individual.

The essence therefore can by him only be regarded as species, as an inner dumb generality which unites many individuals only in a natural way. And I took him to be taking Feuerbach the task of not really sufficiently engaging in the social aspect of human relationship. And that in the end, Feuerbach funnels everything through an individual. An individual may be a species being, but that's not a social being from Marx's perspective. And the impact of that person as a member of a social entity is exactly what you say, Wes, is that you end up being an active part of something that can change because of your activity.

And I took him as lumping in Feuerbach with everybody else before, theoretically, in considering human beings, essentially individual particles that are part of a whole, but still only via their individuality, not via their interactions. Right. And so there's a kind of radical idealization of what a human being is that is abstracted out of their connections with each other and the way in which that feeds back, both back on the individual, but also into the society,

29:13 Wes: even though that, again, that's not the way it sounds in Feuerbach. And yeah, right, if we remember, we read that, we slogged through that and then he does sound a lot like he's talking about the social. But I think two points to emphasize here, it's social and it's contingent. So just like the laws of economics that are supposed to be universal and eternal turn out to be historically contingent, they're just laws of capitalism. Same thing here. The supposed human essence that is about human nature and it's eternal. Right. This is an ideological moment, that's just ideology.

Right. The truth is that's one version of the human that's based on specific social relations at a specific point in history. So you could even say, even if you acknowledge there's something social in Feuerbach, he's treating that as a function of human nature and not thinking of, okay, this is a particular historical social arrangement. And then here's another. And these two essences are quite different.

30:10 Seth: I think Marx thinks that his critique is stronger because it's not strictly about Feuerbach and the social. It's also about the question of historical. Even if you bought Feuerbach's general thesis and you weren't thinking about social interactions, Feuerbach's end result is ahistorical. And so the key things is you have the historicity and the historical production, so to speak, or creation of the situation that we're in, and then you have the social aspect, meaning it's not for the individual to self reform or or self gain, self enlightenment.

It's that you have to change the circumstances that the individuals live in, which is to say, you have to change the way that social interactions take place. So it's. And that's when he bangs hard on the word revolutionary. When you're talking about history and the social together, and you're talking about change, then you're talking about something that goes beyond what I think he thinks Feuerbach was pointing towards.

31:08 Wes: And when he says practical too, I think he's thinking about industry. This becomes clear over the wider swath of his writing, right? But he's thinking specifically of labor, right? When he says all social life is essentially practical, he wants to highlight in the practical the importance of work, the importance of labor. I think, actually we did see quite a bit of this in the 1844 manuscripts. And the way that the development of industry, labor over time determines social relations.

31:42 Mark: So this critique, he's going back to Aristotle, and he mentions Aristotle a few times in Capital as right. Aristotle was in positing the good as the contemplative life that is moving the necessary work that by nature, each of us has to do to survive onto slaves, onto other people. It was only made possible by slavery. So I think there was an ambiguity, right, in Hegel in terms of this isolated individual versus society. Because on the one hand, we start out with this sort of herd, right, that Nietzsche talks about, this mass, and the individuals rise out of this.

But how do they arise? Well, they arise through social interactions. And for Hegel, this enables. Geist, enables, like an authentic society. So species being as different from the species being of any other kind of creature or species being, for man, is only enabled because of some level of self consciousness, right? The stuff on spirit in the phenomenology of spirit on Geist comes after human beings are self reflected. And so for Marx, ultimately the human being, right, is supposed to be somebody who is exercising all of his faculties, right?

Who is not just ruled by unceasing labor that dehumanizes him and makes him an idiot. So he is wanting us to, like Hegel, like Nietzsche, grow into these flowering individuals who can do philosophy, who can contemplate, but at the same time to think that we are that that is getting back to our original nature, right? Our original nature is to be disembodied souls. And it's only through some weird metaphysical accident that we're in bodies that have to do work to survive. Like, he just thinks that that sort of animism is replete in all philosophy and just the fact that Feuerbach is so interested in sort of a religious existential way, in our attitude, our personal relationship with God, even if God is not a metaphysical being distinct from you.

So it's, it's this navel gazing, I'm contemplating what's best in man like that. There's something really weird about that to then just write about that for the rest of your career.

33:52 Wes: Yeah, I think he thinks that Feuerbach tries to secularize religion. Basically. Point of thesis four is that secularizing, and he uses the word secular, secularizing the religious is not enough. So it again, it produces the same alienation, the same quote unquote, self estrangement. You get this division of the secular world from this imaginary other world. A theme which Nietzsche by the way picks up and runs with. So that you again, you have this image of human essence that you're supposed to, it's an ideal that you're supposed to live up to.

It's alien, it's beyond. Because real human beings don't live up to this ideal good human being that we're supposed to strive for. And the end of this thesis 4 is quite shocking because he wants to say we don't just have to transcend religion, but we have to transcend the secular as well, insofar as it's treated religiously or treated as an ideal. And the way he puts it is that once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must itself be annihilated theoretically and practically. So it's not just that we annihilate the holy family, we annihilate the earthly family as well.

35:17 Mark: All right, so moving on to the Grundrisse. Yeah, where do we want to start with this? So what is this is his draft introduction to his future economic treatise?

35:27 Wes: Well, yeah, we're going to get this broad overview of the relationship between different, I guess, moments in economics, production, consumption, distribution and exchange. And we're going to find out they're not easily separated from each other. So ultimately he's going to want to say production will be the dominant component. And there's an overall critique here. So I think the overall, the high level critique here is that traditional economists treat the production aspect of economics as if that's universal and unchanging. And they think of it and it's not historically contingent, but a distribution is.

Right. So you have these economic laws that define how production works. And if it turns out distribution ends up historically being a slave society or something like that, or low paid wage slaves, then that's not production's fault. That doesn't have anything to do with that fundamental arrangement in society. That's just a historical contingency. And he's going to want to say no. Actually, these other exchange and distribution, consumption, they're very closely related to production. And production itself is historically contingent. And so that when you do, when you have a distributive situation which is horrible, like slavery, it reflects the productive moment.

Right. Which might be capitalist or it might be feudal, or it might be this or it might be that. So that's the overall idea.

37:02 Mark: Yeah. Distribution itself. The word is ambiguous. Are we talking about after goods have been produced, how do they get distributed versus how do the initial goods? Like who has control of the means of production in the first place? And so economists normally see, as you're saying as well, of course, society starts by some people enslaving other people, basically dominating, rolling into town and saying, and setting up governments by force and saying all this land is mine. And it would take a great miracle or social reform to somehow be egalitarian about this. So of course distribution starts unevenness. But that's just the raw unfairness of life. So let's just proceed with that. Economics is not about undoing history in that way, whereas he thinks obviously it should be.

37:57 Wes: Also, there is no mode of production which is predicated at base level on plunder. This is a point he wants to make contra previous economists, because there has to be something to plunder. So there is already. There isn't an economy which is just based on going and taking other people's things. People have to be producing those things in the first place. So that's another example in which right, production always precedes distribution. The plunder is a distributive moment. I'm taking it for myself, I'm distributing it to me. But there's got to be production beforehand. So I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Should we go through section by section?

38:41 Dylan: Sure.

38:42 Mark: I mean, I think, as you were saying, that this is not unique to him. He has lots of footnotes and things. But even in Hegel we are seeing a rejection of social contract theory. So he says Smith, Adam Smith, concentrated on the isolated hunter fishermen as sort of the economic, the initial economic unit. Individuals producing in a society is the starting point that, you know, that's what the state of nature would be is individuals having to make their own stuff. But no, that's just something. It's an artifact of the then current time. He says this idea of the isolated individual That's a socially contingent myth.

39:22 Seth: Yeah, he mentions, he calls it Robinsonades. So he's talking about Robinson Crusoe. The for anybody who doesn't know it's somebody who gets stranded on an island and you know, then has to kind of like Gilligan's island it up. But.

39:40 Wes: Well, do we remember why Smith was doing that?

39:44 Mark: I mean, I thought so it's just so he could build more complex systems that he thought this was the atom. Whereas we're going to see that Marx wants to starts with the commodity, not an individual person, but something that is already created within a system.

39:58 Wes: Well, I think he was trying to explain the way division of labor leads to an increase in the standard of living. Right. So you are a hunter, I'm a fisherman, or let's just say you are the hunter and I am the blacksmith. And if we start out and if we are Robinson Crusoe and we have to do all those things for ourselves, there's a very limited amount we can do. But if I concentrate on hunting and you concentrate on blacksmithing, you can make great hunting weapons. And I can do a really great job at hunting because I can't do a great job at both. So that's what I think he's. That's the way I remember Smith and I. That's what I think he's pointing to. And that's a kind of universal law that he just doesn't like.

40:39 Seth: Right? Well, it's a methodological move as well as a kind of universal law. So he wants to say he doesn't like the myth of the two self interested independent actors forming a social contract or the two individual self producers forming an exchange agreement. Because that's one, it's a complete abstraction, it's not historically based or at least it hasn't been traced historically. And secondly, it's an abstraction. So just like he says that we seem to take for granted now everybody assumes like the state of nature is just commonplace. And he says capital starting from capital.

The economists who are doing the analysis of labor through capital or they're doing the analysis of capitalism through capital are just taking for granted an abstract universal concept that has in itself been questioned. And so his inverting and talking about beginning with the commodity to understand capital instead of the other way around. Again like one of his big moves because there aren't a lot of ton of new ideas here. He's just sort of trying to explain and justify something that he thinks other economists have gotten wrong.

41:58 Dylan: Isn't part of the criticism that if you talk about Robinson Crusoe or you talk about the blacksmith or the hunter. All three of those presuppose an entire society's worth of interaction that created them in the first place. So, so to, to conceive of your state of nature as being made up of hunters and gatherers or hunters and blacksmiths is already making an idealization that is woefully insufficient to account for, to be a starting place for talking about fundamental economic interactions. Because they were fundamentally social beings and wherever you start them off acting, you can't take them as like the free particle version of a human being and then start having social contracts and social interactions arise out of that.

42:56 Wes: Yeah, I mean, this is something that social contract theorists acknowledge. Right. Every social contract theorist prefaces it by saying, I can't give you the actual evolutionary account. And we can't do that with anything. We can't do it with language, for instance, what's the evolutionary account of the advent of language? It's too complicated and happens over such a long period. So I'm going to give you this very simplified version. So I find these sorts of critiques unimpressive that you say, oh, this is too idealized a state. We saw the same thing in Judith Butler and it's a very common critique today. This critique of social contract theory is just repeated over and over again.

43:32 Dylan: But, but, but isn't Marx making that same critique?

43:34 Wes: Yep.

43:35 Dylan: Okay. I just, I just want. Yeah, sorry, sorry, I just thought I was characterizing Marx.

43:40 Wes: Yeah, no, that's right. Sorry.

43:42 Mark: So I like this quote though. In the middle of 18, man is not only a social animal, but an animal that can isolate itself only within society.

43:51 Wes: So does that help the isolated individual? So. Right. He's accusing the bourgeois economist of treating 18th century individuals who are products of the dissolution of feudalism as if they were universal. So that that kind of individualism and atomism and however you want to put it that you see in 18th century individuals was there all along. So you reimagine the way things were in ancient times or in feudal times. And when you think about those subjects, when you think about those types of human beings, you just think like, okay, yeah, these are just the same as 17th century individuals and they function the same way in society as individuals.

And he's going to say, no, they don't. They have much different social relations and they. We can't conceive of them as isolated and we can't even say the same thing. If we go back to hunter gatherer societies to talk about an hunter gatherer society is to talk about a society in which isolation, ironically, is impossible. In the same way. In the same way it is in a small town. Try to be isolated in a small town. Do it better in a big city.

45:04 Dylan: Yeah, but this is a big deal because this is the piece that was mentioned earlier that there is no human essence. And this is going to become the fulcrum for the ability to transition, say, from pre bourgeois society to bourgeois society to communist to capitalist to communist society is the fact that the individuals will change the circumstances and the circumstances will change the individuals such that you can have a stable individual, stable societies, because the rules are changing. That's Marx's contention. Who we are as human beings changes based upon these environmental social dynamics fundamentally. And there isn't a carryover. And the level at which there isn't a carryover is a big deal. There's a fundamental fungibility of individuals, I think in Marx.

46:07 Mark: I want to just ask one question before we wrap up part one here. Since we bothered to insert Stirner in here. I know that he's objecting explicitly to Smith and Ricardo and other English economists, but this idea that a man is an animal that can isolate himself only within society. Is this also a rip on Stirner, who seems to be, from your discussion, ungrateful about society? Society is just pushing the individual down, whereas he should have. Like Nietzsche said. Oh, it's actually. And like Hegel said, the society has given birth to the modern individual. Maybe now that he's born, let's push society aside. But did Stirner share the sort of naivete that you think he's criticizing here, Marx is criticizing here?

46:54 Wes: I don't know. And I'm hesitant to say anything since he did write hundreds of pages criticizing Stirner, which we haven't read. Hesitant to speculate whether that's part of this. And also because he's been influenced by Stirner as well. So it's complicated.

47:08 Mark: All right, maybe somebody can fill us in on that and we'll address it in a nightcap more explicitly. Thanks for listening and we're gonna obviously talk more about this in just a couple minutes here. If you are a Partially Examined Life citizen, a supporter at a certain level, then you can get that right now or very soon as the next thing in your feed. Otherwise you'll see it next week. Also, if you support us just through Apple, you'll see it next week. That's just the way that Apple works. Thanks for listening. Please reach out to us if you'd like. Plartiallyexaminedlife.com talk to you soon.

47:43 Seth: Bye.

47:44 Dylan: Bye.