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P RI N T

PLSC-118: THE MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICS

Lecture 9 - The Marxian Challenge [February 8, 2010]
Chapter 1. Marx and the Enlightenment [00:00:00]

Professor Ian Shapiro: Okay , good morning. We're going to make the transition today to talking about Marx ism, the second of the three Enlightenment traditions that we're going to consider in the first part of this course. And I should warn y ou at the outset that I hav e something of a heterodox v iew of Marx . I hav e something of a heterodox v iew of Marx in that if y ou went and read, for instance, there's a book by a man called Graeme Duncan called Marx and Mill. He basically , his story line is that Marx and Mill operate with fundamentally opposed paradigms, paradigms meaning foundational assumptions, so that Marx and Mill make completely incommensurable and incompatible assumptions about how the world works, and the political theory that can flow from those assumptions. And so to some ex tent they are, he thinks on all the big questions, speaking past one another. That they 're basically y ou can't adjudicate, if y ou like, the disagreements between them in part because he thinks they 're speaking from fundamentally opposed paradigms. I think that v iew couldn't be more wrongheaded. Marx and Mill are creatures of the Enlightenment, both, and therefore we will find in ex amining Marx , that just like all of the utilitarians we'v e already considered so far, they 're both committed to basing politics on a scientific theory of human association, and to committing themselv es to indiv idual freedom as the basic and most important principle of politics. Now, so let's, before we get into the details of Marx 's own argument, let's say a few general things about Marx as an Enlightenment thinker. And if we think about the Enlightenment thinkers first of all as committed to science there's no question that Marx was committed to a scientific theory of politics. If y ou read his attack on Proudhon and the utopian socialists, for ex ample, it was all about attacking them for being unscientific in their thinking. It was all about rejecting sentimentalism or wishful thinking in try ing to understand what was feasible and what was not feasible in politics. So Marx has a scientific conception. Of course it doesn't come within a country mile of the scientific conceptions we saw both among early Enlightenment theorists like Bentham, or mature Enlightenment theorists like Mill. Rather, Marx is committed to something called the materialist conception of history . And the materialist conception of history is the idea that, to use another one of his rather impenetrable phrases, he's committed to the idea of dialectical materialism. Y ou might say , "Well, what is dialectical materialism?" This comes from the idea first articulated by a German philosopher called Hegel that history mov es in a kind of zigzag of fits and starts. The dialectical idea is that some change gets made, some innov ation gets made. This, though, breeds a kind of undertow, a resistance against the change, the first change, and then y ou get as a result of the initial change, the undertow, the kind of pushback, but which isn't the same as a pushback to where
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y ou started from, y ou get a new starting point. So Hegel's famous terms were thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The thesis is a change. So y ou get, say , the transition from serfdom to a market-based society . Then y ou get resistance to that marketbased society . Y ou get a new working class comes into being, let's say , and then that working class becomes the agent of a new change that will produce its own antithesis and new sy nthesis. So history goes like this, if y ou like. It doesn't go in a straight line, but it goes in a direction. It goes forward in some sense. And Hegel's idea had been that history ev entually reaches an ending point, and he thought the ending point was the Prussian state of his day . He thought all of history was ev olv ing toward this supreme highest point of the Prussian state of his day , and it was guided by the working out of ideas in history . Marx turns this on his head; on its head I should say , not on his head. Marx turns it on its head say ing, "Well, y es history goes in this kind of zigzag direction of thesis, antithesis, sy nthesis, and then the sy nthesis becomes the new thesis and so on, and y es, it has an endpoint (which he thinks is a communist utopia), but it's not driv en by ideas. It's not driv en by ideas at all. Instead it's driv en by material interest." So that's why Marx 's v iew is sometimes called, as I said, dialectical materialism. It's driv en by material interest, or as Bill Clinton did put it in the 1 992 campaign, "It's the economy , stupid." "It's the economy , stupid." That's the basic idea behind materialism that ideas, culture, beliefs, all of that stuff is what Marx referred to as superstructure. It's not really important. What is important is the economic base, so that economic interests driv e ev ery thing ov er time. And if y ou want to understand how a political sy stem works y ou better understand the economic sy stem. So in this sense it's a v ery different v iew than Bentham, or Mill, or any of these folks because they 're really working in the realm of ideas, right? They 're not Hegelians to be sure, but they think that this idea of shaping society in terms of their utilitarian calculus can be used in order to reorganize things. For Marx that would be a completely absurd agenda. Y ou hav e to start with the economy . It's the economy , stupid. Y ou hav e to understand what the power of forces are in the economy and what the tensions and possibilities are within the economy before y ou can understand any thing else about politics. And in that respect I think one thing y ou should really get straight right away is just what Marx thought about capitalism. How many people here thought Marx was against capitalism? Marx was against capitalism? Almost nobody ? Max wasn't against capitalism? How many think he wasn't against capitalism? One? Why do y ou think he wasn't against capitalism? Just get to a mic. Student: He wasn't against capitalism because Marx thought capitalism was a necessary step in getting to socialism. Professor Ian Shapiro: Y ou're ex actly right. So what Marx thought about capitalism was, and we're going to understand the reasons for this in detail in the nex t couple of lectures, that for a certain phase of history it was essential. He thought capitalism was the most innov ativ e, dy namic, productiv e mode of production that had ev er been dreamed up, and there was no way y ou could ev en think abut a socialist or a communist society dev eloping unless y ou had capitalism first. And Marx would hav e had absolutely no sy mpathy for the Russian Rev olution which was done in a
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peasant society , or the Chinese communist sy stem either. He would hav e said they were completely premature because in the end it's going to be capitalism which is necessary to generate the wherewithal to make socialism possible. So he wouldn't hav e had any sy mpathy with the Leninist or Stalinist projects, which we'll talk about later. So he's not against capitalism. What he thinks about capitalism is that it's sawing off the branch it's sitting on ov er time. That is to say there are basic contradictions within the way capitalism works, and indeed the v ery things that make capitalism the most productiv e mode of production ev er to hav e ex isted in human history at one point, those v ery same dy namics ultimately will undermine it. So in that sense don't think of him as simply against capitalism. He, rather, wants to understand the dy namics process that brings capitalism into being, leads it to maturity , and ev entually leads it to self-destruct. And that is the story that he's going to tell us. So he has a scientific theory . It's a materialist theory , and it's based on this metaphor of the base and superstructure. People hav e come up with other metaphors, skeleton and flesh and so on, but y ou can play with them. But the core idea is that it's the material relations that shape ev ery thing else. More controv ersially , though, people might say , is to say , "Well, Marx is really a believ er in indiv idual rights and freedoms." Most people say , "What? Marx , a believ er in indiv idual rights and Marx thinking that freedom is important?" Most people say , "No, Marx is an egalitarian. Marx is all about equality ." And one of the things I'm going to suggest to y ou in my ex position of Marx is that that is basically wrongheaded. Y ou'll see that when we come to talk about his idea of a communist utopia one of his bumper stickers for that is the claim that, "The free dev elopment of each is a condition for the free dev elopment of all." "The free dev elopment of each is the condition for the free dev elopment of all." So he's an egalitarian in the sense that, y es, he wants ev ery body to hav e freedom, and he thinks that that is denied to many people in most forms of social organization. But freedom is the most important v alue, nonetheless, and he wants to assure it for ev ery body . And related to that, y ou'll see when we come to talk about on Wednesday or nex t Monday the labor theory of v alue, that the basic thing that driv es Marx is a theory of alienation from our true selv es. We can't be free unless we're at one with our true selv es. And ev ery sy stem of social organization before communism, in his v iew, makes it impossible for us to be at one with our true selv es. We are alienated from our true natures as productiv e creatures by the way in which society is organized, and that's the basic problem. So we're denied our capacity for free action, according to Marx , and he thinks we can nev er realize it until we reach this communist utopia. So the takeaway point is going to be that Marx is an Enlightenment theorist par ex cellence. Passe people like Duncan it's simply not correct to see him as doing something fundamentally different than the real Enlightenment thinkers such as Mill and Bentham. Marx is an Enlightenment thinker, and when y ou want to see radical critiques of the Enlightenment y ou hav e to go to people like Burke and other anti-Enlightenment thinkers who we're going to be getting to after spring break. A second point related to Marx and indiv idual rights and freedoms is y ou're going to see that we're going to go back to our discussion of Locke, and y ou're going to discov er that Marx is a true Lockean believ er in the workmanship ideal, not in his theory of science, but in his theory of rights and
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entitlements. Marx is going to embrace a kind of doctrine of self-ownership and the idea that we own what we make as the basis for his theory of ex ploitation, because his theory of ex ploitation is going to turn on the claim that people are, in fact, denied the fruits of their own labor because of the way that the sy stem is set up. Well, y ou could say , "So what? Why should we care that people are denied the fruits of their own labor unless they 're entitled to the fruits of their own labor," and indeed that is Marx 's v iew. So y ou will see that I was once accused of belittling Marx by calling him a minor post-Lockean, but with respect to the labor theory of v alue y ou will see that the main conceptual ideas that go into it are straight out of Locke's Second Treatise and it's straight out of the workmanship ideal. What Marx is going to try and do, when we get to the labor theory of v alue, is giv e a secular v ersion of the workmanship ideal. And indeed, dev eloping a v iable secular v ersion of the workmanship ideal is a project with at least as long a history as the history of utilitarianism, and at least as fraught with difficulties as the history of utilitarianism. And we will see when we get to Rawls, an ev en more radical attempt than Marx to dev elop secular v ersion of the labor theory of v alue and the workmanship model, and the difficulties it runs into. So Marx , we will see, is the first in a long line of people who tried to secularize the workmanship ideal by creating this labor theory of v alue that's going to hav e a rather checkered future as we ex plore it into the twentieth century . So that's where we're heading. We're going to ex plore Marx as an Enlightenment thinker by means of three lectures, and the first one is going to deal with Marx and the challenge of classical political economy . Now, why do I say that? Because really there are two Marx es. If y ou were taking a course in the history of ideas that had more than three lectures on Marx , what y ou would discov er is a lot of attention to his German roots. I'v e already mentioned that he was a disciple and critic of Hegel, the German idealist philosopher, but much of his writing until the mid-nineteenth century was inspired by his critique of Hegel's other followers and disciples, and we're pretty much not going to deal with that. We're not going to deal with the German Marx . We're not, by in large, going to deal with the y oung Marx . Rather, what happened to him was Marx thought y ou may or may not know this, but in the 1 830s there were rev olutions across Europe. Kings and queens were kicked out of office and democracy came to power. And Marx and many of those around him thought this is the beginning of the end of capitalism. By 1 832 or 1 833, all of those democratic rev olutions had failed, and the monarchies had been restored across Europe. But then in 1 848 there was another whole series of rev olutions across Europe, and once again Marx thought may be this is the beginning of the end, and had great faith and optimism that that was going to be the case. But by 1 851 those rev olutions had all, again, failed and the monarchs were back in power. And Marx , after that, became steadily more dejected and steadily more skeptical ov er his remaining y ears that, in fact, he was going to see a communist rev olution in his lifetime. And rather, he inv ested in the project of try ing to understand capitalism in a much more sy stematic way than he had done in his y outh. He was kicked out of Germany . He couldn't go to France and he wound up in London, and he liv ed the last decades of his life in London, and in fact died and was buried there. If y ou're ev er in London
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y ou can go up to Highgate Cemetery on the Northern Line. It's a v ery interesting cemetery . There are all kinds of interesting people there. George Eliot is there. Any way , there is Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery . It's all ov ergrown and v ery interesting. Any way , he spent his last decades working in the basement of the British Museum, and that's where he composed his magnum opus, his three-v olume work Das Kapital. It was actually env isaged as a twelv e-v olume work, and the only v olume that was published in his lifetime was actually v olume one. The second and third v olumes were put together by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. And unfortunately for us the v olumes about politics were nev er written. So y ou hav e to, to some ex tent, put together his mature v iews about politics from scraps he wrote here and there, and some of the short pieces about politics that do appear in the early v olumes.
Chapter 2. Marx's Intellectual Biography [00:20:27]

So we're going to mostly focus on the mature Marx . We're mostly going to focus on Marx as he set himself the task of understanding the dy namics of capitalism after he had pretty much giv en up on his y outhful enthusiasm for the quick transformation of the world into socialist and then communist societies, which he had basically started to shed after 1 848 with a brief rev iv al of interest in 1 87 0 giv en ev ents in France, but basically it was a trajectory from y outhful optimism into mature pessimism, at least from his point of v iew. Okay , so what he did was, he said to himself, "Well, what is it that people are inv olv ed in who are engaged in the serious sy stematic analy sis of capitalism?" And here we tend to present Marx as an unorthodox or radical thinker, but in fact he was a v ery conv entional thinker for his day . That is to say Marx was a follower of Adam Smith and Dav id Ricardo, and he saw himself largely as tackling and refining the theories that they dev eloped. And what I want to do with the rest of our time this morning is say something about the project of classical political economy that Marx inherited and contributed to, and why he thought getting the basic problems that the classical political economists were try ing to solv e solv ed would enable us to understand what the real conditions were that would ev entually lead to the collapse of capitalism. The most important feature of capitalism, as far as Adam Smith was concerned in The Wealth of Nations and his followers after him, was the div ision of labor. The div ision of labor is really important because it has two features. One, as far as Marx will be concerned, it begins the process of alienating us from ourselv es. Why does it do that? It does that because, instead of producing things that we then consume, we start producing things in a situation where we div ide up tasks and that makes it impossible for us to liv e rounded liv es. That's ultimately where it's going to go. But second, and much more important from the point of v iew of economics, is that the div ision of labor is the engine of productiv ity . The more y ou engage in the div ision of labor the more productiv e y ou make people. And Smith has this wonderful ex ample right near the beginning of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about a pin factory . Smith has been going around England try ing to understand where the dy namism in the English economy is, and he giv es this description of a pin factory . He say s, One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at
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the top for receiv ing the head. To make the head requires two or three distinct operations. To put it on is a peculiar business. To whiten the pins is another. It is ev en a trade by itself to put them into the paper. And the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, div ided into about eighteen distinct operations. As a result of that div ision of labor, though, Smith calculated that ten workers could make 48,000 pins a day , but if they had all worked separately and independently all they could hav e produced was a few dozen. So that basic insight of Smith's, that it's the div ision of labor that is the engine of capitalist productiv ity , sets the terms for Adam Smith's analy sis of markets in The Wealth of Nations, for Ricardo's refinement, and for Marx 's refinement of both of their arguments in Das Kapital.
Chapter 3. The Project of Classical Political Economy [00:25:19]

So what was the project of classical political economy ? What was it that Marx was stepping into and try ing to contribute to? Well, one way of describing it, as I hav e it here, is, it was the search for theories of natural and market I'v e got theories there twice, sorry search for theories of natural and market wages, prices, rents, and profits. They wanted to understand what determines wages, prices, rents, and profits, but they thought y ou had to hav e a theory of natural wages, prices, rents, and profits, and market wages, prices, rents, and profits. Now, let's focus on prices, because the way the other three are treated is basically by analogy to the analy sis of pricing. A modern neoclassical economist would say , "There is no natural price of any thing." A modern neoclassical economist would say , "What determines prices is supply and demand in the market. There is nothing else to say about prices." And they gav e up the notion that there's any natural theory of wages, prices, rents, and profits to be found. So a big difference between the classical theorists, and the modern theorists, is this idea that there's a theory of natural prices. Now, why would they think there's a theory of natural prices? The reason they thought there was a theory of natural prices was they were arguing with people like the phy siocrats and the trade theorists about where v alue comes from. What is the source of v alue? The phy siocrats in France said the source of v alue is the land, that somehow it gets transferred to the products. Whereas the trade theorists, who had been impressed that countries like Holland which had so little land but had become so rich said, "No. V alue comes from trade." So they were all sort of say ing, "Where is the it? What is the source of v alue?" And the English theorists following Locke, Petty Sir William Petty , John Locke, Hobbes, all believ ed that the way y ou find v alue is to go into labor; that work, workmanship is the source of v alue. So all classical political economists, Smith, Ricardo and Marx believ ed in the labor theory of v alue, and they counter posed it to theories based on trade, or the phy siocrats' theories that were popular in France, as I'v e said. So that's one reason, but another is that it's not the case that they were ignorant of the laws of supply and demand. So and we'll see how Marx handles them on Wednesday . It's not the case that they 're ignorant of the laws of supply and demand, but they thought it couldn't possibly tell y ou the whole story . So y ou can think about it this way . Suppose there is a dearth in the supply of coffee mugs? The price will go up. They didn't disagree with that, right? And if there are too many coffee mugs, more coffee mugs than any body wants, the price will go down. May be somebody will realize y ou an drill
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holes in the bottom and then use them to grow plants in, and then may be the price would go up a bit because there will be more. But they thought that supply and demand fluctuate with what it is that people actually want. They didn't hav e any problem with that notion, but still in all they thought there must be something that will tell y ou what the price is when supply and demand are in equilibrium. Another way y ou can think about it is supply and demand go up and down, but they go up and down around some point, and what tells y ou what that point is? Okay , that's what the labor theory of v alue was supposed to do. That's the natural price. I think a modern economist might call it the long-run equilibrium price. That's one way in which if y ou wanted to find an analogy in modern economic thinking to this classical idea of a natural price, it's the long-run equilibrium price. It's the price of a commodity when supply and demand are in equilibrium. So the labor theory of v alue was a theory of that. It was going to tell y ou what the long-run equilibrium price of a commodity would be, okay ? And all of the classical political economists were try ing to hav e a theory of that. So when y ou read "natural prices," that's what y ou should think. They 're try ing to understand what not marginal changes in the sense of a Pareto diagram, but the long-run changes giv en the marginal fluctuations around some point. The question is, what is that point? And that's what the labor theory of v alue was designed to giv e y ou. It was a theory , in that sense, of natural prices, not a theory of market prices. They thought y ou had to hav e both. Supply and demand gav e y ou the market price. The labor theory of v alue gav e y ou the natural price. A second big problem that framed the project of classical political economy was that they all believ ed, as they looked around them, that there was a declining tendency in the rate of profit. This was taken as a giv en; as a giv en, widely -accepted empirical fact. And so if it was the case that the rate of profit tends to decline ov er time, it can be offset by v arious things and so on which we will talk about, but if it's the case that the rate of profit in capitalist economies declines ov er time, y our theory isn't going to be worth a damn unless y ou can ex plain why . So one of the tests, if y ou like, of a good theory , as far as Smith was concerned, as far as Ricardo was concerned, and as far as Marx was concerned, was it had to ex plain the declining tendency in the rate of profit. And Smith had an account, Ricardo had an account, and Marx had an account. They all differed somewhat. They all ov erlapped in some way s. We'll see part of the reason all three of them thought y ou would hav e to hav e imperialism was y ou needed new markets to offset this problem of the declining tendency in the rate of profit at home, but that was only going to be a temporary stopgap or solution. But in any ev ent, y our theory wasn't going to be worth any thing unless it could ex plain why prices are what they are, the theory of long-run equilibrium prices, and second, unless it gav e a credible account of why profits fall in capitalist sy stems ov er time. Now, a third conceptual point to make that y ou need in order to understand the project of classical political economy as Marx understood it is actually related to the first point, but I'm just singling it out because people sometimes get confused about it. It's a distinction that Marx makes between usev alue and ex change v alue. Sometimes y ou'll see Marx uses the word v alue with a big V . Y ou should just read that as ex change v alue. So v alue with a big V is ex change v alue. So what is the difference between use-v alue and ex change v alue? Well, for Marx use-v alue is utility .
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That's all it is. Use-v alue is simply usefulness. And he has a kind of binary theory of use-v alue. Either things hav e use v alue or they don't. So coffee cups hav e a use-v alue, y ou can drink out of them. If somebody drilled holes in the bottom of them they would hav e no use-v alue until somebody came along and said, "Well, we can use them to grow plants," then they would hav e use-v alue. So things either hav e use-v alue or they don't, and I'll come back to that in a minute. And that's going to affect the supply and demand, but it's not going to ex plain the price. It's not going to ex plain the long-run equilibrium price. That is the ex change v alue and that is what we learn about from the labor theory of v alue as far as Marx was concerned. So it's the labor theory of v alue ex plains the price, and is not to be confused with the use-v alue or utility of an object. Again, one important difference, and may be the most important difference between classical political economy and neoclassical political economy is, we will see later, the neoclassical people shed the labor theory of v alue and so there is no ex change v alue independent of utility , but we'll get to that. That's getting ahead of ourselv es. When y ou're concerned with the classical formulations, and in the nineteenth century , ex change v alue or price, or v alue with a big V , is determined by the labor theory of v alue and use-v alue is usefulness. And that brings me to Marx 's definition of a commodity . A commodity has a v ery special meaning for Marx . It's something that is produced for ex change. So if y ou plant an apple tree and y ou grow apples in order to eat them, y ou're producing for consumption, those apples are not commodities. But if y ou plant an apple tree and grow apples and sell them, then those apples are commodities, right? And something is a commodity if it's produced for ex change. And that's v ery important because once y ou hav e a div ision of labor y ou hav e more and more commodity production. And y ou might recall in my v ery first lecture I said that one of the things Marx shares in common with Bentham is he's somebody who pushes the idea he has to the absolute ex treme and then ev en bey ond that. So what we're going to see happen with Marx and commodification is ex actly analogous to Bentham and utility . That Bentham say s, "How would the world look if utility max imization was the only game in town, if there was nothing else at all?" and so his theory runs. With Marx it's, "How would the world look if commodification was the only game in town?" Ev ery thing in a capitalist sy stem becomes a commodity , ev en the worker himself. Ev en the worker himself. And when we start to understand the dy namics of capitalist production we'll see that the analy sis of the v alue of a worker is no different than the analy sis of the v alue of the pin that the worker produces in Adam Smith's factory . So he takes this idea of commodification and pushes it to the hilt. So I think if y ou think about those four features of the project of classical political economy it giv es y ou a sense of what was in Marx 's head as he set off to try and understand the dy namics of capitalist sy stems. And what he did was, he said, "Well, we hav e to understand, first of all, how capitalist sy stems look to the participants, because the way in which they look to the participants is not the same as the way in which they really work." So there's a basic distinction, if y ou like, between appearance and reality . The way in which people think market sy stems work isn't the way in which they actually work. So it's a little like Bentham say ing, "Y ou might think y ou're not motiv ated by utility and all the rest of it, but in fact y ou are, and the rare case is we get it right, not the rare case is that we get it wrong." In this sense Marx , like Bentham, is an objectiv ist. He thinks he's describing scientifically the laws of
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motion of capitalist sy stems regardless of whether the participants in those sy stems understand these laws of motion, and for the most part they don't. Indeed he's going to claim ultimately that a socialist rev olution differs from all others because for the first time in history , people understand the social relations that they 're part of, and so can self-consciously transform them and create an unalienated social order. So at the beginning of v olume one of Kapital he's basically say ing, "How does it look to the participants?" Well, if y ou hav e a div ision of labor, y ou look around, what do y ou actually see? Y ou see people producing commodities. They ex change those commodities for money , and then they use that money to buy other commodities, which they consume. So y ou hav e these cy cles of ex change; commodity , money , commodity , right? So the person working growing apples, sells the apples for money , and then uses the money to buy milk and eggs and so on, in the simplest case, right? So if someone landed from Mars in the middle of a capitalist economy , that's what they would see; all of these people producing things, ex changing those things for money , and buy ing other things which they then consume, right? That was the idea. But then if y ou look a little bit more carefully , y ou see that actually some people are doing something entirely different. Most people are producing commodities, ex changing the commodities for money and then using the money to buy other commodities that they consume. But Marx say s, "Some people are doing something different. They 're taking some money , buy ing a commodity (in this case the labor of the worker for a certain time) and then selling what gets produced for more money ." So they 're not interested in consumption it doesn't seem, at least at first sight. And indeed, if y ou look ev en more closely y ou'll see that when they do that, the money they end up with is more than the money they started with. M prime is bigger than M. And the question, the organizing question of Das Kapital and it was the question that preoccupied Adam Smith and Dav id Ricardo before Marx , and as I said, in this sense he was completely orthodox classical theorist, his radicalism comes in later. The question is where does prime come from? What makes profit possible? Y ou're not going to ex plain why profits decline, after all, if y ou can't understand where profit comes from. What is the origin of profit? That's the basic problem. The transformation of money into capital has to be dev eloped on the basis of the immanent laws of the ex change of commodities, in such a way that the starting point is the ex change of equiv alents. The money -owner who is as y et only the capitalist in larv al form, must buy his commodities at their v alue, sell them at their v alue, and y et at the end of the process withdraw more v alue from circulation than he threw into it at the beginning. His emergence as a butterfly must, and y et must not, take place in the sphere of circulation. These are the conditions of the problem. A v ery famous passage at the beginning of Kapital telling us that if y ou want to understand why the capitalist winds up with more y ou hav e to understand the source of v alue, because there's no cheating; equiv alents ex change for equiv alents in ev ery one of those cy cles. It's not that somehow the worker is tricked into selling his labor power for less than its worth. On the contrary , he's paid ex actly what its worth. So once y ou can understand that puzzle of how, when equiv alents ex change for equiv alents, new v alue is still nonetheless created, then y ou understand the secret to where profit comes from, y ou
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know the source of v alue, and y ou can begin the process of understanding the dy namic productiv eness of capitalism and why it will ev entually start to fall apart. And we will dig into those subjects on Wednesday . [end of transcript] Top (#n av i gati on -top)

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