the discussion was.

And my sense from talking with students here

is that while that's still a core of what you're trying to do with the book,

that the

way you're teaching it has really evolved

and changed in its own way.

And, in one sense it's a much larger, it's no longer just around a small seminar table

where you're having a reading group, it's a much larger group. You've certainly got a lot of the same mix of

academics, students, faculty, activists, and so on who are involved in it.

But at the same time my sense is that your approach to the

book has changed somewhat too. So I wonder if you might want to try and

spin that out a bit. » DAVID HARVEY: One of the great things about doing this all this time-

and when you think about it,

teaching the same book for nearly forty years sounds like an incredibly boring thing to do.

And most people, if they taught the same course for forty years,

would go nuts

just doing it. But

every time I go through it I find a fresh angle on it.

And the fresh angle is sometimes something I didn't see in the text before which now jumps out

at me as being very significant.

And the other thing that happens is that circumstances change,

people's interests change,

the intellectual background with which they come to

Capital changes, so

actually taking this text and sort of,

putting it with

the changing historical and geographical circumstances is actually… actually in itself,

a very interesting exercise. I've always found a great deal of excitement about that.

But the other thing that happens is that,

there are many things I see in the book now which I didn't see before - in part

because I've gone through it with so many different people seeing it from different angles,

that I start to see it from their angle, and then and I see things that I didn't see before.

But partly also because I think my own intellectual interests have grown and shifted

and therefore,

in a sense I'm

changing the way in which I think about Capital and teach Capital, depending very much on

the kind of circumstances that I'm writing about today.

[Music]

I'm curious to know how many of you

actually read these two chapters?

Wow. How many didn't?

Don't do it again.

One of things I suggested last time was,

a good idea when you're looking at

a particular section, to

go over what the main idea is, because that way you can chart your way

through what's going on.

And last time we dealt with

section one

of Chapter One

and I suggested that you could decompose this into a very simple

sort of structure

which looks like this.

Marx starts with the commodity

as the foundation

for his investigation of a capitalist mode of production,

immediately suggests

it has a dual character: it has a use-value

and it has an exchange-value.

The mystery about the exchange-value was that the tremendous heterogeneity which existed

of use-values is somehow or other rendered

compatible, commensurable.

And so

Marx argues there must be something that lies behind

exchange-value which explains that commensurability.

And what it is that lies behind is the notion of value.

And he defines that as

socially necessary labour time.

In order to be socially necessary

the labour expended on something has to be a use-value for someone.

So Marx reconnects

to use-value and so you start to see value

as a coming together of both use-value and exchange-value in the concept of social necessary labour time.

Now if you ask yourself this question of what is the structure of the

next two sections,

they go something like this:

He concentrates on

labour time.

He's already

distinguished between

the tremendous variety of labour times that might be actually spent

and something which he calls abstract labour.

So here he takes a concept which was just simply

referred to in the first section

and splits it out and says, well, socially necessary labour time

has two aspects:

concrete labour

and abstract labour,

and he talks about the difference between the two.

But in the end there's only one labour process, it's not as if one labour process is doing the concrete

and one's doing the abstract.

No, there's one labour process and it has this dual character.

It is both concrete, and it is abstract.

The question is how do you find out

what the abstract value is in the commodities which you've produced?

And the answer to that can only be found at the moment when

abstract and concrete labour come together at the moment of exchange.

So we're now going to look at exchange and the way in which exchange generates a way

of expressing value,

representing value, because we know that value is a social relation,

therefore it's immaterial.

So what we got out of exchange, coming out of exchange, is

a duality again.

Relative and equivalent forms of value.

And these relative and equivalent forms of value eventually coalesce at the end of this

long, and in my opinion and somewhat turgid, third section

into the idea that there is

a way in which value gets expressed.

And it gets expressed

in the form of a money commodity.

You want to take this further into the next section, the money commodity conceals something,

it conceals the social relations.

So the next section is about

the way in which

there are social relations between things, and material

relations between people.

Now you can see a certain pattern

emerging here in the nature of the argument.

There is an unfolding going on.

There is an expansion of the argument going on.

And actually if you look at the logical structure

of the argument in Capital you see it is in continuous expansion of this kind.

Now the classic way of thinking of the Hegelian logic is of course

thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

But these are not synthetic points.

These are points which internalize a tension,

a contradiction

that needs to be

further expanded and looked at.

In this section, the first section,

we have the argument that there is a distinction between abstract and concrete labour, but now

we expand it.

And out of that comes an understanding of how

exchange processes produce a representation of value

in the money commodity,

the money form,

the universal equivalent, as he puts it.

So you see how this process

of representation unfolds in Capital.

But of course at each point

in this he's going to make many other observations.

This, if you like, is the sort of

skeletal structure of the argument. But as he built his argument he builds in

extra elements.

And as those extra elements are built in,

so what we see is a gradual

expansion not only in the terms of this kind of linear way that it sort of expands

in this way as well. It goes from

a very narrow conception of the commodity to a broader and broader and broader conception

as he works through these different elements.

So let's look very concretely then at

this section two.

He starts off on page hundred and thirty-two

where he makes the very modest claim that "I was the first

to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities.

As this point is crucial to an understanding of political economy, it requires further elucidation."

This is a polite way of saying:

to the degree that classical political economy never made this distinction,

they got their political economy all wrong,

and I'm going to get it right because this distinction is fundamental.

Now the first part looks at concrete labour

and in much the same way that he's looking at the heterogeneity of use-values,

he's looking at the immense heterogeneities of

concrete labour processes,

producing different items- shirts and shoes and apples and pears

and all the rest of it,

different skills involved

different techniques involved, different raw materials involved,

and, therefore, the labour process is itself heterogeneous.

It is not simply that you're producing heterogeneous products

you're also witnessing a heterogeneity of labour processes,

spinning and weaving,

shoe making and bread baking and all the rest of it, call for different skills that

the heterogeneity of it is simply stunning.

So he goes over that heterogeneity.

In the process however

he makes one move to broaden the argument.

And that move is, I think, of singular importance

and this move occurs at the bottom of page hundred and thirty-three,

well about halfway down, he says:

"Labour, then, as the creator of use-values as useful labour

is a condition of human existence

which is independent of all forms of society."

Now, usually you don't

find Marx saying that in Capital, because he's interested only in how things work under

capitalism. But here he is saying

use-values have to be produced no matter what kind of society you're in.

He says "it is an eternal natural necessity

which mediates the metabolism between man and nature and, therefore, human life itself."

What we're doing here

is at this point, we're introducing

the whole idea of a metabolic relation to nature

as being something which has to be integrated into the argument,

integrated into the analysis.

He doesn't pay that much attention to this in Capital, but

the point of him making this statement here is to say:

there's no way which you can examine

this whole process without actually looking at this

metabolic relation to nature.

And he goes on to explain a little bit, "the physical bodies of commodities

are combinations of two elements: the material provided by nature

and labour.

If we subtract the total amount of useful labour of different kinds which is contained

in the coat, linen etc, a material substratum is always left.

This substratum is furnished by nature without human intervention.

When man engages in production he can only proceed

as nature does herself."

That is you have to proceed in accordance with natural law.

You "(…)can only change the form of materials. Furthermore,

even in this work of modification he is constantly helped by natural forces.

Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth, i.e. of use-values(…).

As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth,

the earth is its mother."

That gendered metaphor is very common of course from

seventeenth-century onwards, and so Marx is simply repeating

something that had been there from the Enlightenment onwards.

But, notice something here:

material wealth is not the same as value.

Material wealth,

it's going to be the total quantity of use-values available to you.

The value of those use-values

can vary in all sorts of ways.

You can have a lot of use-values

and very little value because there's very little labour input,

or you can have

very few use-values and a lot of labour input, so the relationship between wealth

and value is not one-on-one at all.

So, Marx's conception of wealth

is about the material assemblage

of use-values which are available to us.

He then goes on to make some comments.

This heterogeneous labour contains a bit of a conundrum.

Different skills, different capacities for productivity

of different labourers,

and we have to look at that which he does over the next two pages.

And he says in order to really advance his analysis,