Colin Chalmers, author of the newly published Capital Condensed , spoke to Solidarity .
The idea of the book was just to condense what Marx said in Capital into something that was more easily readable and much, much shorter.
Capital is divided into 18 parts and I’ve always been surprised that no one has actually written a guide to Capital that just went through those 18 parts. There’s quite a few guides to the first volume, some of which are very good, and one or two go a bit further, but they don’t take all 18 parts, from all three volumes, and just go through the arguments. There is a very clear, concise, logical argument through Capital and that’s what I wanted to get across, in a way that people can understand, because a lot of people give up.
Massive
It’s a massive work, Capital , and the first volume is much better known than the other two, which Engels edited after Marx died, and I think that stops people seeing it as a whole. And Marx did see it as a whole.
Taken one by one the arguments can seem difficult and unclear. The first part can be quite tricky and that puts a lot of people off going further. I’ve tried to make it as simple as possible. I think you need to get the basics to be able to build up. So that’s what I’ve tried to do — take the basics and build on them, so that you can see how the argument progresses. I’ve tried to do that rather than be overly descriptive. I’ve tried to just strip it down to the clear argument that runs throughout. And I’ve listed all the meanings for the terms Marx uses at the back. Which takes up about half the book!
Capital is normally considered as just an economics book, and it’s not just economics — it’s a critique of economics. Economics is a very narrow way of viewing the world, that assumes that money is always going to be around; profits are normal; classes are just natural; rent (an absurd idea, as Marx says) is, along with the rest of these things, absolutely normal and the starting point for any understanding.
Marx doesn’t take that as a starting point, he explains it within an examination of the relationship of humans and the rest of nature, and how capital organises that relationship. Ecology is about how human beings and nature interact. Capital certainly explains the ecological problems we face now better than any other book. So I think it is fair to call it an ecological book.
I wanted to draw out Capital ’s relevance to society today. One criticism thrown at Marx is that Capital is a book about nineteenth century capitalism. But it wasn’t. It was about capitalism as such. And it explains that capital, once it gets going, just has to keep growing. It is self-expanding. It is something that is created by human beings — it is about how we relate to each other — but the way we relate to each other means that capital has to constantly grow. And that means more commodities, more expansion of needs and so on.
Progressive
Capital has played a progressive role in history by developing the productive forces, but throughout the book you can see this dual nature of things, so alongside this it has also created crises, horrible exploitation and so on.
Capital is relevant today because what a lot of people are saying in response to the crises we face is, “we need to change government policies”. But what Marx is saying is that actually it goes a bit deeper than that. The reason that we have the problems we have today is largely because of capital and capital’s need to constantly grow and expand.
Some of the figures I give show that, since Marx’s time, the tendencies that he saw have played out. Productivity has grown enormously. Centralisation, the concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands, has grown immeasurably. An obvious one is the effect on nature, which Marx deals with in Part Four, about productivity. What he shows is that the “circulation of matter” as he calls it, or ecology, is ruined by capital. It has no interest in retaining nature in the way that previous modes of production did. The need is for growing capital, it’s not for looking after nature. So we end up in a situation where we are doing things which we know are going to cause enormous problems for humanity but we just keep doing it.
Something I didn’t know when I first read Marx, but it is there all through Capital , is that colonialism and the exploitation of the rest of the world by the early capitalist countries was essential to the development of capitalism. Capitalism didn’t come about independently of other things. The development of wage slavery here was dependent on actual slavery in America.
What capitalism was able to do is increase productivity, the amount that a unit of human labour can produce, and do so quite incredibly. And this is the big contradiction, that capitalism on the one hand increases productivity and on the other hand wants to expand its own value — capital is self-expanding value.
In the early days of commodity production, people made things so that they could exchange these things for other things — so you make shoes and exchange them for a table or you exchange food for clothing and so on. But with capital, with money in circulation (because for commodities to circulate money has to circulate), money begins to develop a life of its own and the point of production stops being to make a commodity that is useful to you and starts being abot money and wanting to make more money. That’s what capitalism is. Once money starts expanding, productivity has to expand.
And there we reach a contradiction because the more productive things become, the more you can produce, but each thing you produce holds less surplus value, it becomes less profitable. There is a fall in the rate of profit at the same time as the mass of profit grows. And that is the contradiction that capitalism has built into it, and that leads to its crises.
There is a dominant idea in the labour movement that we can improve capitalism, that we can adjust demand and interest rates and so on and somehow avoid crises, but Marx pointed out that it is not simply about that, it’s not about how the policies play out, but it is in the nature of capitalism to have crises and it always will be until capital is taken away from the capitalists.
Capital is no different from exploitation. The value that capitalists get from workers is exploitation, is capital. The basic relationship in capitalism is the relationship between a wage worker and a capitalist. Very few people own absolutely everything and most people own practically nothing, and those people have to work in order to live.
So that class relationship is at the heart of capitalism. Capital itself doesn’t go into all the different classes that exist but the fundamental difference is between a few capitalists and the majority of people — people who have to work for a living — the working class.
I wrote this in order to help people understand the basic argument in Capital and I hope that happens. I think that sometimes — and I have some sympathy for people who say, “look we have to just do something, never mind all those books”. It is important to struggle against what capitalism is doing, it’s damaging the planet, it’s increasing exploitation, it’s causing misery to a lot of people, and it’s important to struggle against that. A lot of people don’t think that it is possible to do anything about that, that it is possible to think outside the box of capitalism. And that’s what Marx argues against. It’s worth understanding that.
Dull compulsion
Commodity fetishism is important. There’s a line he uses, he calls it “dull compulsion”, so this continues; it just becomes how things are. What Marx and Engels said was: things can be better, and not just in an idealistic way, because we have the means now to feed and clothe everyone quite easily. But we don’t do it. And Capital looks at why that is.
Marx says here that we can go beyond capitalism.
Of course all socialists would support increasing taxes on the rich and increasing public expenditure. If that was to happen it would mean real gains for working class people. Just as if you strike for better wages — far from increasing prices you take your pay rise out of profits, and you win real gains — based on the balance of forces. These are all good things, but if capitalism remains the capitalists can take those gains back. So working class people need to take the means of making stuff off the capitalists who currently own them and into their own hands.
I hope that this book can make Capital reading groups easier and people can go through the basic arguments from Capital in just a few weeks and increase their understanding.
• Colin Chalmers is a socialist activist and was active with the Simon Jones Campaign and the anti-capitalist newsletter Schnews