Marx’s Critique of Capitalism: History, Exploitation and Revolution

Name: Class 19: Capital Ch. 24, So-Called Original Accumulation
Uploaded: 2026-03-27T20:43:59.164935+00:00
Duration: 48 min 2 s
Channel: YaleCourses
Description: Summary and key takeaways on Class 19: Capital Ch. 24, So-Called Original Accumulation — Summary, covering “Middlemarch” and Marx George Eliot’s novel

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Mar 27, 2026

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George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch and the second edition of Karl Marx’s Capital were published in the same nineteenth‑century year. Dorothea Brooke, the novel’s intelligent young heroine, is portrayed as a seeker of a whole‑world understanding, thwarted by the limits of her society. Marx, like Dorothea, sets out to uncover the reasons for unfreedom and to lay out the “mythologies of capital” that cage humanity. The speaker identifies with this “general thirst for understanding the world,” suggesting that the audience shares Dorothea’s curiosity.

Historical Development of Capitalism

Marx reinterprets history by focusing on the emergence of the capital system rather than on state triumphs. Early laws protected independent producers who owned their means of production and restricted the enclosure of commons. Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, legislation shifted to support the new social order, justifying subjugation instead of revealing its causes. The legal transformation turned laws into tools that upheld the capitalist relation.

The Origin of Workers and Capitalists

Enclosure – private individuals and later the state fenced off common land, ending cooperative pasturing that had existed up to 1600. By 1850 virtually all English land was private. This violent process forced peasants toward wage labor.

Consolidation combined small farms into larger, more productive units, while clearing removed agricultural and subsistence peasants from the land. Conversion of cleared peasants into workers involved criminalizing pauperism, establishing workhouses, disciplining people into the habit of work, imposing wage caps, and restricting movement out of industrial production.

The genealogy of the capitalist farmer proceeds from the farm bailiff, who managed estates for a lord, to the free farmer who owned land but relied on the lord’s means of production, to the sharecropper who gave a portion of crops to the lord, and finally to the farmer who employs wage labor, invests capital, and pays rent from surplus value. New categories after the sixteenth century—agricultural capital, waged farm capital, and ground rent—reflect the emergence of profit derived from surplus value.

The Market and Industrialists

Markets arose alongside expropriation, stripping people of the ability to subsist independently and forcing them to buy food. Workers become both producers and consumers, experiencing alienation even as they purchase the goods they make. Several systems sustained industrialists:

Colonial system supplied goods, built shipping networks, and enabled global expropriation.
National debt system required large gross domestic product and currency inflows.
Modern tax system funded national defense and other state functions.
Protectionist system created an artificial market that manufactured industrial manufacturers.
Slave and plantation system provided cheap goods at high human cost, which Marx called “the veiled pedestal for capital.”

The Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation

Marx describes a “historical tendency of capitalist accumulation” as a tendency, not a law. Capitalism generates internal tensions and contradictions through violence and expropriation. Once it reaches a certain level, it creates the material means of its own destruction—a core idea of historical materialism. The process culminates in the paradoxical line, “The expropriators are expropriated.”

Agency, Revolution, and Emancipation

The final pages of Capital raise questions about hope, real freedom, and the role of agency if change is inevitable. Marx’s synthesis (pages 690‑692) suggests that the concentration of capitalists and the massification of workers generate a potential for revolution. Outrage and collectivity among workers, fostered by capitalist production, can lead to organization. Yet the text remains ambiguous: does the transition to socialism happen automatically, or does it require conscious agency? Lenin’s interpretation introduced a revolutionary vanguard, while Marx’s own rhetoric—polemic, insult, ridicule—targets domination. Politics, in Marx’s view, primarily supports the core capital relation rather than challenging it. The concluding observation is that the monopoly of capital shackles the mode of production, making the concentration of means of production and the socialization of labor incompatible with the capitalist shell.

Takeaways

Marx frames capitalism as a historically violent process that transformed common lands into private property, forcing peasants into wage labor.
Legal shifts between the 15th and 16th centuries turned laws from protecting independent producers into justifications for capitalist subjugation.
The emergence of markets depended on expropriation, making workers dependent on capitalists for basic subsistence and creating alienation.
Marx argues that capitalism’s internal contradictions generate the material means of its own destruction, summarized by “The expropriators are expropriated.”
While Marx sees a revolutionary potential in the concentration of capital and massified labor, he leaves open whether emancipation requires agency or unfolds automatically.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Marx mean by “freedom is an ironic word in capital”?

Marx uses the term “freedom” to highlight that under capitalism the word often disguises unfreedom; choices such as selling one's labor or facing starvation are presented as freedoms, but they mask coercive economic constraints.

How does the “expropriators are expropriated” mechanism work?

The phrase describes the process by which those who originally seized land and means of production eventually lose them as capitalism creates the conditions—concentration of capital and mass labor—that dispossess the expropriators themselves.

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Helpful resources related to this video

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Karl Marx Capital Book Recommended

This is the central text discussed in the transcript, providing Marx's critique of capitalism, its historical development, and theories of revolution. Reading it would offer a direct engagement with the core ideas presented.

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George Eliot Middlemarch Book

The transcript draws a parallel between Dorothea Brooke in 'Middlemarch' and Karl Marx as seekers of understanding. Reading 'Middlemarch' would provide context for this comparison and explore the character's motivations.

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History Of Enclosure Movement England

The transcript details the historical process of enclosure as a key mechanism in the origin of workers and capitalists under capitalism. Understanding this historical event is crucial to grasping Marx's analysis.

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Marxist Theory Of Historical Materialism

The transcript mentions 'historical materialism' in relation to capitalism's tendency towards its own destruction. This book would explain the broader theoretical framework behind Marx's historical analysis.

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Full Transcript YouTube

(dramatic music)
- I am reading for the first time now
maybe something you've all read.
"Middlemarch."
Has anyone read this?
Came out at exactly the same
year as the second edition
of "Capital," another
great 19th century book,
"Middlemarch" by George Eliot,
otherwise known as Mary Ann Evans.
In that book,
one of the main characters is
Dorothea Brooke, Ms. Brooke.
And she confronts a situation
in the 19th century,
which is this.
She's a young woman
with very strong drives
and intelligence who's
thwarted by her society
and is looking for an
understanding of this.
Who has read "Middlemarch."
Okay.
She's looking for an understanding
and the thing that tempts her the most
is an understanding of the whole.
So she gets hooked up
with this guy Casaubon.
It's really worth reading this.
Who is writing the solution to
all mythology? A giant book.
I'm not sure if Marx is Casaubon.
He does in some ways stay in the library
and propose to us that he's
gonna give us a solution
to all the mythologies of capital.
But he is also Dorothea
in that he's looking
for the reasons for our unfreedom.
And the reasons are not given.
In fact, all the opposite of the reasons
for our unfreedom are what's given
and what you read in polite conversation.
Marx is obviously not talking
about the emancipation
of a young woman within bourgeois society.
He's talking about the emancipation
of workers within capitalist society.
But there is a general thirst
for understanding the world
and I expect that we have the same thirst
we are all Dorotheas in that regard.
And I hope that in reading
this book for the first time,
some vistas have opened for
you to understand the modes
of unfreedom that we live under.
There's almost no other place to look
for such a concentrated present
of these modes of unfreedom.
It can make you feel like
it's a pessimistic book.
Marx was really unsatisfied
with the freedoms
that were offered.
So I hope it's opened
these things up for you
in a certain way.
One way you become unfree
is through historical processes.
Marx wants to lay those out
for you so you have a sense
of how this big cage capital, moving cage
came into existence.
And I just wanna point out
some new things he's doing
with history, which had been
written in the 19th century
as a trail of triumphs of states,
of human beings, of populations even.
What he shows is that,
at least with regard
to the capital system, this
is the movement of history,
at least with regard to the state.
It starts out with laws
against everything having to do
with capital because it goes
against the social form,
which is independent producers
that own their own means of production.
All the laws are against it.
It's absurd to imagine
that a peasant wouldn't
have four acres of land.
It's absurd to imagine that
you would enclose the commons
so they wouldn't be able to pass
through their meat, pasture their meat.
I'm skipping a step there.
That is followed by violence
to destroy the old system.
Pure destruction.
That violence is then as the
tides turn aided by the state
in England, he's tracking the laws
that originally restrict
exploiting workers, restrict
settling workers without enough land,
peasants, without enough land.
And then there's a big switch.
He says it happens between the 15th
and 16th centuries in which the laws
start to support the new social order
and give all the justifications
for it imaginable.
From do Dorothea's perspective.
You can't really go to the law
to understand why women are
subjugated in the 19th century
in Europe in their bourgeois milieu.
The same is true for workers.
You cannot go to the law
to tell you why you're subjugated
only to find the justifications for it.
The second kind of new
way of working is to think
of historical processes.
Again, these are operations
that are not operations
of capital, but they lead to it
and Marx is giving us these categories
so we can understand what happened.
The first is enclosure.
This was a set of activities taken up,
enacted by to unplug my thing
'cause last time I forgot it.
You know what these cost.
Capitalists, they're really expensive.
Enclosure is something
enacted by private individuals
who are trying to get
peasants to become workers
trying to ruin subsistence.
But the state starts to help with this.
So it looks like nearly
all land in England
up to 1600 contained some
rights for common pasturing
of animals, all land
in England up to 1600.
By 1600, sorry, in the middle ages,
by 1600, less than a third of it did.
And by 1850, virtually all
land had become private.
This is the operation,
the historical process
of enclosure was taken up by individuals
and then eventually
supported by the state.
So this first movement
supports the processes.
This is what a state is for Marx.
It supports these historical processes.
It naturalizes them, justifies them,
and then supports then enforces them.
Along with enclosure generally refers
to the fencing or I'm reading my own note
on this from the back of the book.
Enclosure generally refers to the fencing
or walling off of grazing land
that had been freely usable
by small landowners and that
had been managed cooperatively.
It's very important that it
had been managed cooperatively.
There were people whose
whole job it was to make sure
that the commons were remained common
and were not overused by anyone.
So the what is that ridiculous
economic saw, the something
of the commons, the
tragedy of the commons.
That was not actually the case.
The commons were cooperatively maintained.
People could, you know,
exploit them to some degree,
but the cooperative would regulate that.
That was the idea of a mayor of a town.
Companion processes to
enclosure were consolidation.
Of course, you can't
have a capitalist farm
without putting the small
farms together into a big farm
that we know increases productivity,
makes it more efficient,
makes uniform processes,
all the kinds of things you need
for capitalist production of food.
And then clearing.
You will have read all of
these about this in the text.
Clearing means the moving
of the agricultural peasants
off the land, subsistence peasants,
but also you know, the remnants
of feudalism in which the
peasants also produce a quantum
of goods for lords.
But clearing is not enough
because those cleared peasants
have to be somehow
converted into wage workers.
And I wanna just point out to you
some of the modes of conversion.
So this tells you where
the land came from.
This tells you where
the workers came from.
There's then a question of
where the capitalists came from
and that's an interesting question
that's a little bit
less well treated here,
but you need capitalists
when we get to the last little bit
on capitalist colonization.
Don't mistake the last chapter
for colonization two core,
which is a much older phenomenon.
It has all sorts of other impulses in it.
Usually, very economic impulses.
Where did the workers come from?
Well clearing were a set of acts
that Marx brings together
under this category.
Gives us all of the
historical evidence for.
That they were brutally
pushed off land by bans
that were hired by capitalists.
And then this was reinforced
by laws that moved people
to the cities that took
away their rights to land
and made it absolutely
necessary for them to labor
in a capitalist system.
The clearing and conversion process,
he gives you a few tips to it.
There's a lot of work that's
been done on this in history
and in historical sociology.
You need a whole bunch of things
to move people off the
land and move them to work.
First of all, once you
get them off the land,
you have a bunch of poppers.
So you criminalize pauperism.
You make workhouses.
You have to then discipline
people into the habit of
and the need for work.
This is not natural.
He talks all about that.
On pages 688 to 689.
Legislation needed to come
in to dictate a wage maximum,
which I mentioned last time.
There's an important sidebar
on the French revolution there
on page 674 if you wanna look
at it, which was as we know,
but Marx emphasizes not
a worker revolution.
In fact, although it could
have been a worker revolution
because a lot of the force
came from the peasants.
A lot of the fear on the part
of the aristocracy came from their fear
of a peasant uprising.
But legislation was
quickly put into effect
even before the terror to keep workers
from having more rights
than they needed and to
keep them from moving out
of industrial production
of food and goods.
So conversion is also violent.
Clearing is also violent.
Consolidation is I guess less violent.
But enclosure is certainly
a kind of violence done
by architecture, geographical activity,
putting up fences and walls.
Just to say the historical processes
that move towards capitalism.
This by the way, is the meaning
of so-called original
accumulation whose real name is
expropriation by violent means.
If you wanna know Dorothea,
how we got in this position,
this is the Dorothea of
the capitalist world.
This is how we got into this position
and understanding how we got
into the position is a step
towards understanding what's missing,
what's been taken away.
In addition, when you
look at the colonization,
very short chapter at the end,
incidentally he probably put
that some people conjecture that he put
that funny little colonization
chapter at the end.
Because the end of chapter 24
is so inflammatory that the sensors
might have censored the book.
Had they read just the beginning
and the very end, which seems
to be a call for revolution.
So he flipped them.
This is a thought nobody really knows.
Colonization chapter shows you
that these processes are still
going on all around the world
and have to go on for capital to expand
so it doesn't end with capital.
And the argument of a
great successor of Marx,
a great reader of Marx intellect
in her own right, Rosa Luxemburg
argued that there are even internal
to Europe modes of appropriation
that are still going on.
Capital is not just an efficient machine
that takes care of itself.
It's constantly sucking up things
that are not capital violently.
- How it develop?
- Call it development
in the external world.
But yeah, it certainly goes on
after the so-called colonial age is over.
Capitalist development,
invasion expropriation,
appropriation is happening
all over the place
and facilitated by big
international organizations
like the World Bank.
I wanna give you in the this part of it,
understanding of where workers come from.
Just a little sidebar on
what freedom is in this book.
It's a kind of sight for endless jokes.
So as I said, workers
are either free as a bird
and just as right less.
Or free to sell their
labor power or starve.
These are the ironic notes on freedom.
Freedom is an ironic word in capital.
It doesn't mean Marx is
not interested in freedom,
but he's not interested in modes
of unfreedom dressed up
with the word freedom.
I would say in the deep
background is a very robust
and world transforming German
idealist notion of freedom.
That would be freedom
as self-determination.
But involving questions of communities
and the world.
That's a topic for another class.
In the air is the notion
of liberal freedom
or liberty, which means
not being restricted
in commerce opinion or movement.
Again, you can see how
this would already be
a facilitating liberty
for the capital system.
It doesn't mean we wanna
get rid of liberal freedoms.
Believe me.
And Marx as a young thinker was confused
about whether to support liberal freedoms
because who doesn't want
freedom of expression
and freedom of movement and
freedom to support yourself,
but they become shills
for capitalist unfreedom under capitalism.
Marx adds some other forms of freedom
that happen under capitalism,
for example, to be freed
of a possession, expropriation.
To be freed of the product of
one's own labor, alienation.
To be freed of one's ability
to make a life independently,
independently of the system.
To be freed of the ability
to subsist is extortion
or the capital relation.
And finally, to be free
legally to be totally dominated
by the system.
That's just a happy little sidebar.
He then talks quite a bit about
where the capitalist farmer came from.
You know why this is important, right?
You remember because making
the means of subsistence
into a productive enterprise
where the prices can be driven down,
you must have capitalist farmers.
It's a kind of a basis.
And he gives a great genealogy.
You start with the farm bailiff
who's basically an employee
of the lord of a total vassal.
'Cause since I'm not a historian,
I had to look this up on
the great scholarly source,
Wikipedia.
Farm bailiffs exist on landed estates.
The farm bailiff is
employed by the proprietor
and his managerial duties can
include collecting rent taxes
and supervising both farm
operations and laborers.
The whole thing is a
matter of futile servitude.
Money doesn't exchange hands
but you know, benefits a crew
from doing these services.
The farm bailiffs often worked
in medieval times with serfs.
Serfs are peasants who are
indentured to the lords
and indentured through debt
to the land and the work.
The difference between a serf,
so you know this you probably know
and a slave in modern times
is that serfs are usually
not able to be sold
from the bailiff farmer with serfs
develops the free farmer
in which there is an exchange of money.
The means of production are
supplied by the Lord in fact.
Or there's an exchange.
It means a production like seeds
and tools are supplied by the Lord
but there's no debt
and the free farmer owns
the land that they farm.
Marx then sees a transformation
to the sharecropper,
which is someone who owns the land
crops it, farms it, harvest crops
and then has to give a share
of the crops to the lord.
You can see how the relationships
become more independent,
less dependent in a social
and moral and legal sense
and they become more dependent on exchange
and independence and
what has to be exchanged.
Finally, you get to a
farmer who uses wage labor
and this happens after
a set of operations.
They invest their own
capital, they pay the landlord
with the part of surplus product
that they get from their
own exploitive practices
and they pay that as rent.
So the great other two surplus
value made in production
comes into existence when farmers
are kind of minor capitalists.
Not yet industrial farmers is rent.
We have these new categories
suddenly coming to existence
after the 16th century.
Agricultural capital, waged farm capital
and ground rent.
Ground rent, he will deal
with some in volume two
and more in volume three.
Looking at the biggest picture,
we've just been stuck in one book.
Ground rent is one of the forms of profit.
Surplus value being another form of profit
and interest being a third form of profit.
He will demonstrate that all
of those other forms of profit,
ground rent and interest and
others are floated as well.
Derived from surplus value
and that's his big advance over Ricardo.
Okay, there's a couple of other questions
that are answered in the so-called
original accumulation chapter.
They are, where did the market come from?
Because of course you
can't only have production.
Any idea where the market came from?
I can wait.
I can wait and you can conjecture.
Why not?
You've read the whole book.
Where do you get a market?
Peter.
- (indistinct) Surplus.
- Okay, I have a lot of stuff.
Why does that mean
there's someone wants it?
- There is the couple of
commodity circulation.
- Commodity circulation.
There might be,
but someone has to want it.
And you have to make them want it.
You make them want it by
enclosing the commons,
by consolidating this, by
clearing them off the land,
converting them into wage labor
so they can't make it for themselves.
The market comes along with
all of this expropriation.
Makes humans dependent on
capitalists.
Freed of the ability to subsist.
Peasants had to buy their food.
Starting what Marx tends to
describe as a chain reaction.
Because of course, they
can get their much cheaper,
who would work all year
long when you can just go
to the grocery store
and being anachronistic.
But this mode of providing
for yourself takes over.
That is going through exchange.
Oddly, there's a set of
contradictions here, one of which
is that farmers sell produce
to the workers who used to work
beside them on the same land
and subsist on their own.
You see how they're
alienated even as consumers.
He has some thoughts about
where industrialists come from.
So we are asking these questions,
where does the land come from?
Where do the workers come from?
Where do the farmers come from?
Where do the markets come from?
And finally, where do the
industrialists come from?
But I wanna point out that
he answers that question
with a list of systems.
I forget what page this is on.
If someone finds it,
will you shout it out?
This is later in the maybe six '80s
in the so-called accumulation chapter.
I'll just point them out to you.
He's looking much broader
here at a set of systems
that arise as this is happening
that support the production
of industrialists, the colonial system,
which allowed much more goods to come in
and you could have industrial production.
It developed shipping and trade
and it brought original accumulation,
so-called expropriation
from Europe to the rest
of the world.
The national debt system.
So here he's starting
to think in like political science terms
or terms of kind of macroeconomics.
Why is the national debt system helpful
to producing industrialists?
Well, national debt had
to be paid in currency.
So you had to have a big
gross national product.
If you borrow from other countries,
you're not gonna ship them eggs.
Doesn't make any sense, right?
You're bringing in
currency from elsewhere.
Again, this is the chain
reaction that happens.
The modern tax system,
which requires all citizens to pay taxes.
They needed money for this.
They needed large amounts of
money if they were wealthy.
And you needed this
because this is the new
way to protect your nation
and its internal economy
from foreign invasions
that is now we have a tax system.
Then he mentions the protectionist system.
Is this exciting?
Yeah, you're like this.
I think it's really interesting
to be honest because these
systems all interlock
to make capitalism work and if
we want to see how it works,
we have to take them apart.
The protectionist system,
it might be the case
that you want free trade,
but in order to get to free trade,
you have to have an economy to trade with.
So there's always going to be limited
nation state protectionism on
your economy a certain level
that has to proceed free trade
so that you have something to trade.
He calls this an artificial way
to manufacture industrial manufacturers.
It's a great line.
We say you have to make everything here.
Sorry.
This is also the state's involved
in a certain movement
of capital construction,
of a capital system.
A country with no industry
of its own would not be able
to survive in an international market.
And then one that he talks
about around the edges,
but I wanna emphasize
here is the slave system
or the plantation system,
which he definitely,
he doesn't call a system
as part of the construction
of the capital system,
but he does mention it
all through this chapter.
What does the slave system do?
The American chattel slave system
and the Americas chattel slave system.
'cause it's certainly not
limited to North America.
The Caribbean, Brazil
and other world locales.
It allows for the injection
of cheap goods at breakneck speed
with a massive horrific human cost.
He calls on page 688 and
this is a point of contention
but also a point of recognition.
He calls slavery
and the cotton industry that it holds up,
especially in US America, the
veiled pedestal for capital.
It is that hidden pedestal
in which capital is standing
at the time.
People have come and argued
that the chattel slave system,
the plantation system is not
just a pedal for capitalism,
is a model for capitalism.
It's all throughout the
center of capitalism.
But this is Marx's reference.
Okay, this is the exciting moment.
Now we get to section seven.
This is the kind of the hidden
core of the whole thing.
You had to read the whole
book unfortunately to be able
to accept it.
Should we look at it?
Let's open to page 689.
The historical tendency of
capitalist accumulation.
We talked a little bit last time about
why this is not a law of
capitalist accumulation.
It's just a tendency.
It is historical.
So capitalism may have a
lot of necessity in it.
As a system, it may need
to keep reproducing itself
and keep expanding, but it isn't perfect.
It isn't a God given totality
or even a philosopher given totality.
It has many internal
tensions and contradictions.
It came about historically
through something
that is not systematic at all, violence,
that gathered force over centuries.
I'm not sure how to approach this.
I'm looking at page 690 to 692.
Just a couple of like explosive pages
so we could read them out.
We could go through and
talk about the steps.
What's the most helpful thing?
What did you think of these pages?
I'm feeling seminary.
This is page 690.
Once it reaches a certain level,
it brings into being the material means
of its own destruction.
There's a theory of history here,
which they call historical materialism.
Why don't you take a look at these pages
and we can key off of your
interests and questions?
It ends on page 691 with the line.
The expropriators are expropriated.
Woo hoo.
I have ambivalent
feelings about that line.
AJ.
- I'm specifically thinking about the,
once it reaches the certain
level it brings into,
it brings into being with the serial,
means it some destruction
and also this underlying
capital's monopoly.
Now shackles a very mode of
production that have flourished
because of an under a cell.
Like do you read any
quote into these pages?
And is Marx here arguing that you know,
the capital system
hospitalizing competencies like,
inevitably lead to its demise?
And if so, like what's
the whole agency for us?
- These are the classic questions.
it's great that you say
that, I'm gonna repeat them.
One is,
is there hope in these pages
for overcoming capitalism
as a system, the capital
system for finding real
kind of freedom for workers
emancipating themselves?
Is this an inevitable movement?
And if it is an inevitable movement,
what's the role of agency?
Do you find answers to these
questions in these pages?
You'd have to read the text very carefully
because it isn't said.
A lot of those things are
not said directly here.
Which is interesting.
You've been through a text
that has done rigorous analysis
to the point that you
wanted to throw it out.
And I was writing my dissertation
partly on Martin Heidegger at one point.
I took my fist and I was
like that to being in time
and it's split in half.
Well, time is unfortunately
a stub already,
but it didn't help me.
It was just an expression of frustration.
Well, we get to a point of
synthesis here, of a synthesis
of the whole book, the movement of history
and we hope the possibilities
for emancipating ourselves.
Somebody emancipating themselves.
Hey, Jay.
I mean I think one thing
that's pointing out is that
raised, brought by the members
of that class being
the work also increases
and they're brought together during
or by this mechanism capital production.
So I think I'm kind of reminded
of the idea of cooperation
and how, you know,
industry brings together
large swaths of workers.
You know obviously, extracting
more and more surplus value,
but also in certain sets.
Know those workers can talk to each other
and understand the shortfalls
that they're going to collect it.
Then perhaps, you know,
organize for a better future.
But if so, does it seem sufficient
or you know, the destruct (indistinct).
- I just wanna, necessary
but not sufficient.
That's an interesting way
to talk about these pages.
More is maybe needed.
I wanna point out some
things that you said.
We're looking at the
passage towards the bottom
of the big paragraph on page 69.
Let's go back just a minute here now.
Now we're towards the end of
the historical movement here.
It starts with on page 690 with the mode
of production prior to capital,
which reaches a certain level
and brings into the material into being
the material means of its own destruction.
That is really the
movement from precapital.
Into capital, new powers
and passions begin
to stir deeply within
the belly of society,
of a society in which they
feel themselves fettered,
this is the end of the feudal age.
It must be destroyed.
It is destroyed.
There is a history seems to have
a kind of almost mechanical movement.
If you take those sentences seriously,
they don't have a subject.
It must be destroyed. It is destroyed.
Now you might say that
society is the subject there
'cause he talks about
the powers and passions.
So it may well be, but
somehow from these powers
and passions or in a company with them,
there is a kind of inevitable outcome.
Maybe.
Is it inevitable or is
it just what happened?
Well, first he describes
it as what happened
with a lot of agency on the
part of states and actors
and proto capitalists
and armies and walls,
all of these regimes of exp appropriation
and techniques of exp appropriation
that people are enacting
themselves by their own wills
with the idea that this is good
towards a better organization of things,
at least for themselves.
Here, there is a change.
It reaches a certain level.
It's almost a kind of
thermodynamic or feedback system.
Once it reaches a certain
level, there's a lever
that's triggered and it tips
over into something else.
Which account is the
account we should follow?
To me, sometimes these
pages feel tacked on
much as I might agree with the
desires that motivate them.
In a book like this,
you have to wonder how
tacked on these pages are.
Then we get to eventually,
through the whole in a very
compact, so if you wanted
to read this book, you could
just read these two pages.
If you didn't want to read the book,
you could read the two pages,
but you wouldn't believe them.
At least now you have a chance
of believing that Casaubon
or Dorothea has found
the understanding that will
make the world that they live in
available to them.
At the height of techno capitalism,
it's not only the workers
who are expropriated,
but the capitalists.
They get thrown out of
their position as owners
and as industry leaders
because concentration is
necessary for productivity
and for get ringing more
value out of the system
under the accumulation imperative.
So you can't even, it's
not even really easy
to be a capitalist if you want to.
You may have been a capitalist
and now you're just
working for someone else.
Your company got bought up, right?
All of this incentive
to be an entrepreneur
is really an incentive to
eventually get bought up.
Uber driver was telling me the other day,
"I've owned nine companies."
There's a lot more to say about that but.
On the other side, so the number
of capitalist magnets falls continuously
and the remaining ones monopolize
and usurp for themselves.
All the advantages that this process
of transformation holds.
Meanwhile, misery increases as
does the amount of pressure,
subjugation, degradation
and exploitation different
than the bloody violence
that led up to it, but
its own kind of problem
inflicted upon the constantly
growing working class.
Now we get to the sentence
that AJ cited, quoted,
but the outrage felt by the members
of that class also increases.
Okay, we have a counterforce here.
Outrage.
A good one.
One we need to take into account
of right now, take account
of where we live, that there is outrage
and it outrage is felt
though maybe not understood.
They're brought together and are trained
and organized by the mechanism
of the capitalist production itself.
Here's where within the
capitalist movement,
something like a new collectivity is born
and a lot of people exploit
this idea in interesting ways,
Lenin being one of them.
That it's the Massification.
The new kind of collaboration that makes
what gets called the
proletariat the proletariat.
Now there's a set of sentences
that lead away from that,
but we do have one counterforce
here, which is outrage
and the total concentration
and de-skilling of the workforce into a,
you could say a group
that has no other way out but revolution.
This is between the lines,
but this is what Marx is alluding to here.
It's an old thought,
there's no other recourse.
You can't work your way to prosperity.
You can't even really become a
capitalist unless you're musk
or one of the giant capitalists.
Very hard.
Is that hope?
I don't know.
Richard.
- Oh, I think we're drawn back to be
the expropriators are expropriated.
I sort of like didn't actually think that.
To me, the past has read
more like Aristotle's politics actually.
When Aristotle thoughts
sort of like all those
in like a sicker net about
the differing types of regimes
that are possible
and the different ways in
which certain passionate groups
decide to take for themselves
the arms of this history.
And like I don't really
think that maybe socialism
necessarily is just immediately the result
of the proletarians revolting,
is just the revolted
which is another contraction of the sister
that then somehow capitalism
besides modify for itself
and brings about a new
type of (indistinct).
- A new type of expropriation
is seek is brought about here
according to Marx's very like
deductive way of working here.
It's different I think than
other parts in the book.
It's a deduction from the
history that has come before
to something that should
happen, a deduction from.
All of the operations we've been tracking.
And I'll just mention a couple
of things that Richard said.
It's like, let's say a
more traditional account
of political theory in which a group,
through their interests
and passions, takes power.
Wouldn't you say?
That's what you're saying?
And you refer that
to Aristotle, but you could refer it
to other political theorists.
That's what politics is supposed
to be in the European tradition.
And Marx has been saying up
till now all through the book
that politics has very
little effect on this system.
But we might have a real
political moment, a real place
where what is politics for Aristotle
that the people defines itself its needs
and can act together to secure
the polls of the policy.
That's politics.
Maybe politics comes in after
all of this dismal science.
AJ, do you have a response to this?
AJ?
Let me go to the back and
then I'll come to you.
Yeah.
- Yeah, this bill was counter
but I mean, we are at the end of the bowl.
So I guess my question is,
Max's survey described the
whole capital system, right?
And but it just sort of like
did all its initial question
about agency, right?
Marx assumed that the capital,
the sister would generate
its own competitions
and therefore be issued, right?
And then people like Lenin
wanna say, (indistinct)
that would be the still the vision
between the officers maxes we say okay,
the system will digital
will destroy itself
and there'll be linearness
on all say no, the revolution
has to be brought about
by the banger, right?
The revolutionary banger.
So again, the question
is, is much assumption
that the capital, the proletarian class,
which has this offers
that you are just coaching
to outside the capital system
or is it filter on the capitalist system?
And the reason I'm stuck
clear is because if the system
is supposed to be at least
to extreme contradiction,
then it will have to assume
that the proletarians
are part of the capitalist system itself.
Well if the pros are outside the system,
then it means it is not, you know,
the system is destruction.
It is rather than proprietary
cloud that is external
to the system that will need
to destruction in the system.
- No, I think you're right
and the first thing you say
that the proletarians are the
internal limit of the system.
That's what I would say in
good German idealist fashion.
They are the limit
condition of the system.
They have to be there.
But if they're really massified
and the capitalists are really few,
there's nothing holding them
back from simply taking over.
There's a thought.
There's that thought in here too.
But I would say to you
that these questions
that are coming up from
AJ's questions about
the kind of classical issues
that arise in thinking
of the transition to socialism.
Is it automatic in history?
Does history do it?
Is there a spirit moving through history
or do agents carry this out?
This is a question that is answered
by the different Marxist fashions
in the early 20th century.
Lenin in a very complex way
and I would advise you all
to read Lenin carefully.
He read these pages very carefully.
The pages have a terrible, even terrifying
ambiguity in them.
A set of ambiguities,
which we should not ignore.
The tendency of readers is
to pick one or the other
and neither is fully
supported by these pages.
What is fully supported by these pages
is everything that leads up to them.
The picture of the capitalist
system and how it got to be.
What isn't really supported here
are the modes of emancipation.
I don't think you can
land on one or the other.
That doesn't mean that careful
study wouldn't lead you
to a better solution, let's
say than the Leninist solution
or the Maoist solution or
the Western Marxist solution.
You can imagine the last 150
years of intellectual activity,
if not being only about these two pages.
Then being oriented towards one way
or the other, the people who are trying
to get an answer out of these two pages.
So I wouldn't wanna leave
you with a dogmatic answer
and in fact, if you go to volume two,
which we're gonna do now,
it shifts the question a little bit
and I will be teaching next spring
and continuing to translate
and work on the next volume.
Because there are other obstacles
besides just let's say
the number of capitalists,
or the unified ness of the proletariat.
One obstacle to emancipating ourselves
from the system is the circulation
system which provides
everyone with what they need.
That's what volume two is about.
Keep in mind that Marx
wrote volumes two and three
before he wrote volume one.
That is to say he wrote
a version of volume one,
a version of volume two and
a version of volume three
and then he rewrote
volume one into this form.
The other, versions of
volume two and volume three.
This is where philology is revolutionary.
I've been trying to convince the Marxist
of that a little while
since this book came out.
Philology is radical,
we need to know how the book came to be.
We need to know how it came to be written.
We need to know what was
left out and what was put in.
We need to know what misgivings he had
after he wrote it so we
can get to better answers.
There's very few guides for us
to get to better answers
than Marx himself.
Readers of Marx are also
often very good guides.
What is hoped for at the end
here, let's just end on this.
Some of these ringing notes.
It's amazing prose first of all.
It harks back to the communist
manifesto, which, you know,
rhetoric is not a small
tool against domination.
Sometimes it's a tool for domination.
We shouldn't minimize the non dialectical,
the non-economic modes that Marx uses here
to try to get people free,
including polemic, insult,
ridicule, and rhetoric.
Those are all good.
If they work, it doesn't matter
what brings capital down for Marx.
AJ.
- I mean, it seems like then, right?
Like politics actually
play a much larger role
than destruction of the
capital system than Marx
would have us believer at
the rest of the book, right?
Why?
You know, he has these pages in here
that seem like very insignia
and very revolutionary,
but why is he so hesitant
to actually lend credence
to the agency of politics
like throughout the rest.
I feel like it's actually
a leap away inside Jake,
but like it seems like Marx
is so closed off to that idea.
- The question is why
Marx seems closed off
to politics in the rest of the book.
And the answer is that
it doesn't touch the core
of the capital relation for him.
It only is there to support the core
of the capital relation states.
If that's what politics is, states.
Legislative politics, jurisprudence.
Policing, all of those things are there
to keep the core capital relation
active according to Marx.
And he shows you throughout
history how it was set up
that way, how law became the
support of the capital system
and the justification
of the capital system.
And of course, it does seem lately
that capital processes
dominate political processes
and that political
processes are quite weak
to challenge them.
Let's end with some ringing words.
Capital's monopoly, now shackles
the very mode of production
that had flourished
because of an under it.
The concentration of
the means of production
and the socialization of
labor reached the point
where neither process is compatible
with its capitalist shell.
This bursts
and now the bell tolls for
capitalist private property,
the expropriators are expropriated.
I leave you with the line
with no interpretation
because it is very ambiguous.
(ambient music)