By Gordon Hull
Over at Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant has a nice post on how Marx’s distinction between C-M-C and M-C-M’ helps to explain an otherwise puzzling ideological construction. Marx’s distinction, arrived at in chapter 4 of Capital, is about how commodities circulate. In the C-M-C formula, we consider someone who starts with a commodity, sells it, and uses the proceeds to buy another one. For example, I start with a shirt, sell it, and use the money to buy some bread. In this formula, a couple of things become apparent: use value is both the beginning and end of the process insofar as the individual offers up something she doesn’t have a use for (or has less of a use for), and essentially trades it for something she has a greater use for. In contemporary economic-speak, the market is efficiently helping individuals satisfy their preferences, by moving goods to whoever values them the most. This is the perspective of the worker, who sells his labor for money.
The M-C-M’ relation is one that the capitalist uses. Here, the capitalist has money, sells it to get a commodity, and then sells the commodity for more money than he paid for it. As a result, he has more money at the end of the day than before. Marx emphasizes the M-C-M’ relation because it helps to get him to labor as the source of value: whatever commodity occupies the middle place in the M-C-M’ relation has to be one the use of which increases its value. The answer, of course, is labor.
Leave labor power aside for a moment. In distinguishing the two circuits, Marx writes:
“The path of C-M-C proceeds from the extreme constituted by one commodity, and ends with the extreme constituted by another, which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the satisfaction of needs in short use-value, is therefore its final goal. The path of M-C-M, however, proceeds from the extreme of money and finally returns to that same purpose. Its driving and motivating force, its determining purpose, is therefore exchange-value” ([Penguin Edition], 250)
What first struck me about this passage, and others immediately around it (“The process M-C-M does not therefore owe its content to any qualitative difference between its extremes, for they are both money, but solely to quantitative changes” (251)) is that this is the moment where commodity fetishism most clearly happens. In the C-M-C circuit, commodities are always at least partly understood as use-values. But in the M-C-M’ relation, the commodity is only viewed in terms of its exchange value, as a placeholder for a certain amount of exchange value in the form of money that the capitalist has put into circulation. The capitalist cannot but fetishize commodities, insofar as he behaves as a capitalist.
Bryant points out that the perspectival switch between the two forms also explains a persistent ideology: that the rich somehow have necessarily worked hard for their wealth. It’s an ideology that is particularly held by those who work. As Bryant observes, this is attributable in part to the fact that the worker only ever experiences the C-M-C version of the circuit, where she sells her labor to get some money, and then buys a commodity with that. The capitalist, on the other hand, doesn’t have to work, because she is in the M-C-M’ circuit. As Bryant suggests, we ought to ask a Nietzschean question about who sees from what perspective. He answers: “who is it that sees massive accumulations of wealth as the result of hard work? The answer is that only the worker – the person who must sell their labor as a commodity to live –can see the world in this way.” This is all the worker sees, because it is the only world in which he lives. The capitalist, on the other hand, lives differently: “it is not hard work that makes a capitalist money– which isn’t to say there aren’t hard working capitalists – but money that makes their money.” Marx’s M-C-M’ formula schematizes this social condition perfectly. To revert to Marx, “use-values must … never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist; nor must profit on any single transaction. His aim is rather the unceasing movement of profit-making” (254). He does it by using his money to buy some labor power, which has a positive ROI (hence the even more extreme formula for financialized transactions, M-M’).
I think Bryant’s argument implies something else important: Marx really does work, frequently, with a constitutive understanding of power. Or, to put things differently, Marx operates with an understanding of power as productive, rather than subtractive in the Foucauldian juridical sense. The C-M-C relation operates as a form of subjectification for workers (and capitalists) insofar as it constitutes the “truth” of their world and how the economy works. In other words, and as Bryant signals by calling it a Nietzschean question, the point isn’t one of ideology, where we can point out that the “truth” is different from what the worker believes. Here, the worker really does experience the world in C-M-C terms, and the capitalist really does experience it as M-C-M’; there is no underlying fact that would allow us to adjudicate a “truth” beyond the subjectifying processes. In “The Mesh of Power” lecture, Foucault credits Capital chapters 13-15 with such a view of power. In a recent paper on the Foucault-Marx relation, Sandro Chignola suggests that the discussion in chapter 4, especially the way Marx talks about the worker’s body as incorporated into capital, implies that “what precedes setting the worker to work is the subsumption of the force of work into capital, that is to say the realization of the conditions under which this [labor] power is actualized” (51).* He accordingly proposes that chapter 4 is part of the setup for chapters 13-15.
Elsewhere, I’ve argued that the “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse has a similar view of power, as does the primitive accumulation part of Capital. I haven’t presented the argument out loud, but I think the same case can be made for the commodity fetishism section in Capital. In short, it seems to me that the case for reading Marx along these lines is increasingly strong, at least for the post “Theses on Feuerbach” works.
* Chignola, S. (2015). Foucault, Marx: le corps, le pouvoir, la guerre. In C. Laval, L. Paltrinieri, & F. Taylan (Eds.), Marx & Foucault: lectures, usages, confrontations (pp. 45-58). Paris: Editions la Découverte.
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