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17 | What is Dialectics? Part III: What's the Deal with Marx, Anyway? (Patreon)

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2021-07-02 16:46:14
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2026-06
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In this Patron exclusive episode, we move to the third part of our mini-series “What is Dialectics?” and take on the works of Karl Marx. The WLOP crew investigates what Marx took and rejected from Hegelian dialectics while defending why Marx remains deeply relevant in our contemporary moment. We cover the role of mystification under capitalism, Marx’s moral and political critique of value, and the future of Marxism in the context of ecological crisis. There’s even a mention of spectres for you Derrida fans out there! It’s a can’t miss episode for sure.

patreon.com/leftofphilosophy | @leftofphil

References:

Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 53-66.

Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 67-77.

Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Preface of the 1859 Critique,” at Economic Manuscripts: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859 (marxists.org)

Karl Marx, “Appendix to the 1859 Critique,” at Economic Manuscripts: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859 (marxists.org)

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1982).

music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Comments

M Martinez
>>66486283

You can listen to 20 mins of the podcast version which indicates that yes, despite the teachings, people have to eat.

Marina P-K

I finally grok dialectics! Thank you so much, love what you do, it’s my honor and privilege to give you all some coins each month.

Philip M

Great overview y'all, I want to touch on what Lillian said toward the end of the discussion and shed light on the "what do we do?" question. Thus far we have not seen a planned economy that avoids extractivism. Neither have we seen markets that avoid the formation of classes. I agree with the assessment that accumulation is the great enabler of capital. So why would we entertain silly notions like everyone having a yacht? What are such things aside from being conspicuous symbols of wealth anyways? This discourse still suggests a paradigm of individual wealth, rather than shared wealth. Such wealth is just a kind of hoarding that I will emphasize is the essential critique in Marx's analysis of human history. From this I will introduce the necessity of a redefinition of wealth and value for the post-capitalist future. In using ecological comparison, I will show how capitalism is literally global parasitism and that self-organized decentralization is an ubiquitous, ancient, and self-stabilizing means of reproduction. First, accumulation should not be conflated with surplus. I define accumulation as the unidirectional isolation and concentration of surplus. There are a number of ways other organisms use surplus. Some animals like the bear store surplus on their bodies for seasonal scarcity. Others, like the squirrel, externalize their surplus in burying their nuts. Many plants have tubers that are dense energy stores. These surpluses do not constitute accumulation because what is not expended by the creature is eaten by prey, recycled by decomposers, or in the case of the acorn, creates new oak trees. Indeed many trees secrete excess sugars to fungi and bacteria that can distribute, synthesize, or make more available necessary nutrients. As long as surplus is recycled and distributed, it does not create an accumulation dead-end. At each trophic level, there is a drop in the efficiency of surplus formation which makes for regulation of predation. Even parasites perform a function in curtailing any one organism's overabundance. Indigenous American societies were able to generate tremendous amounts of surplus (i.e. years worth of corn, venison, dozens of arts and crafts, etc.) but did not exhaust their utilization of land and life because they either allowed their natural and/or directed/assisted regeneration, or had a stable rate of use thanks to wise practices of agronomy. Their economy was fundamentally inseparable from its integration in ecology. In other words, surplus was maintained by feeding it into regeneration, not exploitation. When an organism is allowed to grow unchecked by the bounds of the ecological system, it precipitates its own destruction. For instance, the blight that wiped out the American Chestnut ruined that parasite's chances for reproduction. When aggressive colonization targets a key group, it quickly overwhelms the self-stabilizing capacity of that environment. Without selection pressure, the most virulent strata of humanity are bound by their nature to be no different than say the cholera of the 1840s-50s. In my view, there is little functional difference between the usurer and the virus. A virus invades the host and weaponizes it's manufacturing center--the ribosome--to reproduce more copies of itself. It's growth is exponential and reproduction is the only end (or lack thereof). Marx in chapter 36 of the economic manuscripts uncovers the slippery evolution of usury as the precursor of finance capital. "Usury, in contradistinction to consuming wealth, is historically important, inasmuch as it is in itself a process generating capital. Usurer's capital and merchant's wealth promote the formation of moneyed wealth independent of landed property. The less products assume the character of commodities, and the less intensively and extensively exchange-value has taken hold of production, the more does money appear as actual wealth as such, as wealth in general — in contrast to its limited representation in use-values. This is the basis of hoarding. Aside from money as world-money and as hoard, it is, in particular, the form of means of payment whereby it appears as the absolute form of commodities. And it is especially its function as a means of payment which develops interest and thereby money-capital. What squandering and corrupting wealth desires is money as such, money as a means of buying everything (also as a means of paying debts). The small producer needs money above all for making payments. (The transformation of services and taxes in kind to landlords and the state into money-rent and money-taxes plays a great role here.) In either case, money is needed as such. On the other hand, it is in usury that hoarding first becomes reality and that the hoarder fulfills his dream. What is sought from the owner of a hoard is not capital, but money as such; but by means of interest he transforms this hoard of money into capital, that is, into a means of appropriating surplus labour in part or in its entirety, and similarly securing a hold on a part of the means of production themselves, even though they may nominally remain the property of others. Usury lives in the pores of production, as it were, just as the gods of Epicurus lived in the space between worlds. Money is so much harder to obtain, the less the commodity-form constitutes the general form of products. Hence the usurer knows no other barrier but the capacity of those who need money to pay or to resist." "The really important and characteristic domain of the usurer, however, is the function of money as a means of payment. Every payment of money, ground-rent, tribute, tax, etc., which becomes due on a certain date, carries with it the need to secure money for such a purpose. Hence from the days of ancient Rome to those of modern times, wholesale usury relies upon tax-collectors, fermiers gènèraux, receveurs gènèraux. Then, there develops with commerce and the generalization of commodity-production the separation, in time, of purchase and payment. The money has to be paid on a definite date. How this can lead to circumstances in which the money-capitalist and usurer, even nowadays, merge into one is shown by modern money crises. This same usury, however, becomes one of the principal means of further developing the necessity for money as a means of payment — by driving the producer ever more deeply into debt and destroying his usual means of payment, since the burden of interest alone makes his normal reproduction impossible. At this point, usury sprouts up out of money as a means of payment and extends this function of money as its very own domain." In synopsis, hoarding is the valorization of money (pure exchange value) over real value. For the foreseeable future, it seems highly unlikely that commodity markets can avoid the tendency to privilege exchange value. The only ways out of this trap are 1. eliminate the parasites 2. to recycle surplus for regeneration. This can provide the example of how collective surplus offers far greater and sustainable abundance than individual hoards. The hopeless goal of equal redistribution in central planning and production is just an attempt to ameliorate what is still a process of accumulation. Any system that requires central authority to distribute surplus will give rise to stratification. The greater the agglomeration, the greater its capacity to produce surplus. Until humanity can relearn how to practice collective, regenerative reproduction, social agglomerations are destined to repeat the folly of hoarding.