Curate’s egg (2013)

Book Review from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Guide to Marx’s Capital, Volumes I-III. By Kenneth Smith. Anthem Press, 2012.

Readers of Volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital may have found the early theoretical chapters difficult. In a letter to Kugelmann (30 November 1867) Marx advises him that the following chapters were the most immediately readable: ‘Working Day’ (Vol. I, Part III), ‘Co-operation’ and ‘The Division of Labour and Machinery’ (Part IV) and ‘Primitive Accumulation’ (Part VI). In a letter to Wollmann (19 March 1877) Marx explained why he did not follow his own advice and start the book with the descriptive historical material: ‘In the scientific exposition the arrangement is prescribed for the author, although some other arrangement might often be more convenient and more appropriate for the reader’.

Building on Marx’s advice to Kugelmann, Kenneth Smith’s guide presents the three volumes of Capital in a different order of reading to that in which they were published, as a more user-friendly way of reading Marx’s work. However, in the course of his exposition Smith argues that for most of the twentieth century the full development of capitalism has been undermined by the existence of a non-capitalist ‘third world’ which has caused capitalism to take on the form of a highly developed mercantile system. Mercantilism, as Smith points out, is basically ‘buying cheap in order to sell dear’, rather than the accumulation of capital in industrial enterprises. But while some sellers can profit in this way, the seller’s gain is exactly offset by the buyer’s loss. The total amount of value in existence remains unchanged. If all sell dear then they cannot buy cheap and all lose as buyers exactly what they gain as sellers. Exchange, in Smith’s interpretation, is a zero-sum game. There has undoubtedly been a growth of speculative finance, but without the surplus value provided by the accumulation of capital there would have been no growth of ‘mercantile-capital’.

Smith also repeats a few myths, such as the claim that capitalism for Marx was characterised by increasing ‘immiseration’ of the working class. Despite the usual use of quotation marks, Marx never used that term. Central to the notion of ‘immiseration’ is increasing poverty of the working class, but this is based on a misunderstanding of Marx’s discussion of paupers in mid-nineteenth century Britain. The increasing pauperism Marx mentions in Chapter 25 of Volume I refers to the then ‘lowest sediment’ of society (the unemployed, the ragged, the sick, the old, the widows and orphans), not the entire working class. This issue is important because many commentators cite this misunderstanding as proof that Marx was completely wrong. For instance, the influential economist Paul Samuelson has asserted that since ‘the immiseration of the working class’ (using quotation marks as though he is quoting Marx) ‘simply never took place’ Capital can be disregarded (‘Marxian Economics as Economics’, American Economic Review, Vol. 57, 1967). Capital still demands attention, but Smith’s guide cannot be recommended.

Lew Higgins