Every time Marx murders a scholar in his footnotes, I start laughing. Especially when he start inserting (!)s all over the place
Marx's :clapping hands: Tweets :clapping hands: Would :clapping hands: Have :clapping hands: Looked :eyes: :clapping hands: Like :clapping hands: This :clapping hands::grinning face with sweat::rolling on the floor laughing:
Capital would have been a very, very long tweet thread. Or a podcast/stream. Imagine having Marx explaining capital, in real time.:lenin-heart:
text version:
This shows the absurdity and triviality of the view adopted by J. B. Say, who claims to derive surplus-value (interest, profit, rent) from the ’services productifs’ rendered by the means of production (land, instruments of labour, raw material) in the labour process via their use-values. Mr Wilhelm Roscher, who seldom loses the opportunity of rushing into print with ingenious apologetic fantasies, records the following example: ‘J. B. Say (Traité, Vol. I, Ch. 4) very truly remarks: the value produced by an oil mill, after deduction of all costs, is something new, something quite different from the labour by which the oil mill itself was erected’ (op. cit., p. 82, note). Very true! The oil produced by the oil mill is indeed something very different from the labour expended in constructing the mill! By ‘value’ Mr Roscher means such stuff as ‘oil’, because oil has value, despite the fact that ‘in nature’ petroleum is to be found, although in relatively ‘small quantities’, which is what he appears to refer to when he says ‘It (nature!) produces scarcely any exchange-value’ [ibid., p. 79]. Mr Roscher’s ‘nature’ and the exchange-value it produces are rather like the foolish virgin who admitted that she had had a child, but ‘only a very little one’. This ‘man of learning’ (’savant sérieux’) continues on the same subject: ‘Ricardo’s school is in the habit of including capital as accumulated labour under the heading of labour. This is unskilful (!), because (!) indeed the owner of capital (!) has after all (!) done more than merely (!?) create (?) and preserve (??) the same (what same?): namely (?!?) the abstention from the enjoyment of it, in return for which he demands, for instance (!!!) interest’ (ibid. [p. 82]). How very ‘skilful’ is this ‘anatomico-physiological-method’ of political economy, which converts a mere ‘demand’ into a source of value!
Chapter 8: Constant Capital and Variable Capital
Thanks. I'll try to remember to post a text version in the future
Yep. It's pretty common, especially in his footnotes. He's often really sarcastic, and funny. Marx deserves his reputation for being hard to read, but like half of his footnotes make me laugh.
And some of his successors have inherited this trait. (don’t laugh!)
I need to get to Lenin eventually. I just wanna finish Capital first though
Capital is a trek even I haven't made it through. One of these days though...
Listening to State and Rev after Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, it's like listening to someone with a 'modern voice' versus what I imagine people talked like around Civil War times.
