Room for Critique

By M. Gouldhawke, February 28, 2022

In Keston Sutherland’s article, Marx in Jargon, he asserts that there is a misunderstood idea about Marx’s book Capital, due to certain English mistranslations, as he describes them, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, and later Ben Fowkes.

This misunderstanding, which Sutherland claims is central to interpretation of the book, is that Marx, in the first chapter of the German edition, wrote that abstract human labour (abstrakt menschliche Arbeit) is “a mere jelly of undifferentiated human labour” (bloße Gallerte unterschiedsloser menschlicher Arbeit.)

Sutherland critiques Moore and Aveling for translating Marx’s “bloße Gallerte unterschiedsloser menschlicher Arbeit” as “a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour,” and Fowkes for translating it as “merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour.” ⁽¹⁾

Sutherland is admirably concerned with Marx’s use of the German term Gallerte (which translates as jelly or gelatine), with the characteristics of this particular commodity, and with how it relates to Marx’s approach, his choices in literariness, style, poeticness and satire.

Sutherland laments that these aspects of Marx’s work get left by the wayside in other people’s readings and commentary, in which Marx’s writing is “programmatically decontextualized” and “transformed into a mere array of undifferentiated concepts for theoretical consumption.”

When Gallerte (jelly) is replaced with the terms congelation or congealed, English readers miss out on Marx’s intentions in more ways than one, in both style and substance.

Marx wanted “not simply to educate his readers but also to disgust them,” to employ necessary “satire and allegory” in order to write at the expense of the “bourgeois consumer who eats [the worker] for breakfast.”

Gallerte is a “comestible mass, inconvertible back into the ‘meat, bone [and] connective tissue’ of the various animals used indifferently to produce it,” Sutherland explains.

In this light it could almost seem that I’d be a downer for critiquing Sutherland’s interpretation, but my hope is that critique is like dessert, in that there’s always room for it. I for one enjoyed Sutherland’s article, even if I didn’t quite digest all of it.

Laborious Language

Sutherland, in his piece, doesn’t address the first French translation of Capital by Joseph Roy, which Marx himself somewhat hurriedly edited, and which also doesn’t include the equivalent of the term jelly or gelatine, either omitting it or replacing it with terms like “sublimations” (sublimés) in the aforementioned sentence, “crystallizations” (cristallisations) or “crystalized” (cristallisé) in other sentences, and as “condensation” or a “transparency of value” (transparent de valeur) in yet others.

Sutherland also doesn’t address Marx’s use of variously tangible metaphors in the paragraph that contains the sentence and term Gallerte (jelly) that he does discuss. These metaphors being “residue,” “ghostly” or “spectral,” and “crystals.”

So what was it anyway that Marx was describing with these various terms? In my perhaps flawed interpretation, Marx wasn’t simply discussing abstract labour, but commodities, as values, which represent abstract labour but are not precisely abstract labour in and of themselves. In other words, the social objectivity of commodities as values.

The full sentence of which Sutherland critiques the English translations reads in French as, “Metamorphosed into identical sublimates, samples of the same indistinct labour, all these objects show only one thing, that in their production human labour power has been spent, that human labour is accumulated there.” ⁽²⁾

Moore, Aveling and Fowkes may stand rightly accused of leaving out the term Gallerte (jelly), just as Marx himself did in editing Roy’s translation, but I contend that the subject of the terminology isn’t exactly what Sutherland claims.

Going Through Changes

As readers of Capital may easily notice, Marx makes plentiful use of both the term and the concept of metamorphosis, of transformation from one social form into another.

Sutherland points out that Gallerte (jelly) is a concrete noun, not the name of a “process like freezing or coagulating, but of a specific commodity.”

Sutherland rightly quotes Marx as having written later in Chapter 1 that “Human labour-power in its fluid state, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value.”

But Sutherland leaves out the follow-up sentence, in the same paragraph, where Marx’s line of thought continues, and which is translated literally by Moore, Aveling and Fowkes.

“It [human labour / menschliche Arbeit] becomes value in its coagulated [geronnenem] state, in objective [gegenständlicher] form.” ⁽³⁾

That is to say, human labour does not simply remain or reappear just as it was, but transforms, coagulates into value in the form of a commodity, or an “object,” as Marx puts it in the French translation (Il ne devient valeur qu’à l’état coagulé sous la forme d’un objet.)

Since Sutherland doesn’t mention this, he obviously can’t address it, or its relation to Marx’s use of the term Gallerte (jelly.)

Sutherland also doesn’t address Marx’s quotation in Capital of himself from his previous Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (this quote being omitted from the first French translation of Capital), where Marx wrote, “As exchange values, all commodities are only definite measures of solidified labour time (Als Tauschwert sind alle Waren nur bestimmte Maße festgeronnener Arbeitszeit.)

Concrete Cold Fact

Sutherland writes that “Human labor is abstract when it is frozen: lifeless, cold and immobilized.”

Abstract labour in this sense would seemingly be the result of the production of commodities rather than, or at least alongside of being the unifying social quality and the expenditure of labour power that produces such results. The question of reciprocal influence could have been fruitful here, as Marx uses it even in his early writings, but Sutherland doesn’t engage with it.

Sutherland writes, “The important word used in Das Kapital to describe the opposite condition of labor, that is, unabstract, living human labor, must then be flüssig, flowing.”

“This use of flüssig in Das Kapital is no doubt significant,” comments Sutherland, “and it of course is used by Marx to describe the lived experience of labor that is not represented in abstract human labour.”

But I would argue this is not Marx’s meaning. Living or fluid labour might not be “represented in abstract labour,” whatever that means, but abstract labour is represented by commodities.

Sutherland’s claim runs the risk of collapsing the distinction between abstract labour, the commodity and value, which Marx of course thought was important to make.

However, it’s also important to keep in mind that distinction does not negate relationality. Rather they both form each other’s reciprocal basis. Transformation from one social form into another implies both distinction and relationality. ⁽⁴⁾

When we go back to Sutherland’s initially mentioned sentence, the English translations of which he critiques, and look at its paragraph, the surrounding sentences that Sutherland omits, Marx’s subject becomes clearer (in line with the French translation.)

In the Fowkes translation this paragraph begins, “Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour.”

The Moore and Aveling and French translations are basically the same, the important concept and context being that in the first place we are talking about commodities and their value, the social objectifications of abstract labour, or representations of abstract labour, not simply abstract labour in itself.

In the final sentence of the same paragraph, the Fowkes translation reads, “As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values – commodity values.”

The French reads basically the same (En tant que cristaux de cette substance sociale commune, ils sont réputés valeurs.)

The only significant difference being the French equivalent of the word “deemed” (réputés), noting human consideration.

This also comes across in the Moore and Aveling translation that reads, “When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.”

The point being that the subject matter here is the commodity and its value, not just abstract labour.

Marx’s phrasing seems to me to be practically the reverse of the one proposed by Sutherland.

For Sutherland, abstract labour is Gallerte (jelly), the allegorical substance that living labour is boiled and cooled down to, whereas for Marx, abstract labour is an aspect of the living labour that forms the unifying social basis for commodities as values, those commodity values being allegorized variously, in the same paragraph as “residue,” “ghostly” or “spectral,” “jelly” and “crystals.”

For Marx, abstract labour is the social (not physical) substance that constitutes the value quality of commodities, their quality of exchangeability and their social unity.

The term “substance” has been cause for persistent misunderstanding, despite Marx repeatedly emphasizing value’s purely social (not at all physical) character, as well as his consistent contention that the magnitude (socially necessary labour time) of the value of already produced commodities can and does change when the societal conditions of production change, or when commodities’ use value degrades or is lost.

Abstract labour and value are not some physical or material ingredient added by workers to commodities, so there is nothing of the sort to be conserved within a commodity. Rather, abstract labour and value relate to the living “expenditure of human labour-power,” which the commodity as a social form, and as an object or service, can only represent, but never embody.

Value for Marx is never set in stone, even two decades before Capital, from the time of his first solo book, which critiqued Proudhon, and where he used Ricardo and Sismondi’s writing on the subject against Proudhon.

In fact, the change in the magnitude of value can be not just a partial but a total loss, so that the product no longer has any value, is not exchangeable, loses that particular social quality, not just a particular quantity of social necessary labour time.

In this regard, the title of the second subsection of the first chapter of Capital is more usefully translated in the French than in the English versions, appearing as “The Double Character of Labour Presented by the Commodity (Double caractère du travail présenté par la marchandise), rather than as “The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities.”

Abstract labour is described by Marx as the counterpart to the concrete aspect of the same labour, not as a kind of labour in itself that could be separate from some other kind of labour (including concrete labour.)

The concrete aspect of labour is the abstract concept, based on the social reality, that all commodity-producing labour necessarily takes some particular form.

The “abstract” counterpart to the concrete aspect of labour being that these particular forms are various, together all comprising labour in general, the practical unity of all the particular forms that make up the whole societal division of labour under capitalism.

As Marx puts it toward the end of the same subsection, in a phrase present in the French (and first German edition) but removed in the later German and English editions, “It follows from the above that if there are not, strictly speaking, two kinds of labour in the commodity, nevertheless the same labour is opposed to itself, depending on whether one refers to the use value of the commodity as its product, or to the value of this commodity as its pure objective expression.” ⁽⁵⁾

Use-values “constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be,” wrote Marx. ⁽⁶⁾

“The physical bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour.” ⁽⁷⁾

“Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth,” wrote Marx, “nevertheless, an increase in the amount of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value.” ⁽⁸⁾

“This contradictory movement arises out of the twofold character of labour.” ⁽⁹⁾

As Marx explained in Chapter 8 of Volume 1, Constant Capital and Variable Capital, “The worker does not perform two pieces of work simultaneously, one in order to add value to the cotton, the other in order to preserve the value of the means of production […] this twofold nature of the result can be explained only by the twofold nature of his labour; it must at the same time create value through one of its properties and preserve or transfer value through another.” ⁽¹⁰⁾

The concrete aspect of labour transforms the use-values of previous commodities, raw materials and means of production, into new use-values, while the abstract aspect of the same labour adds new value. The finished commodity represents both the old and the new value, and it belongs to the capitalist.

Newly produced commodities must of course be sold in order for their full or partial value, including surplus value, to be recouped, and for more rounds of production to continue. Exchange and the continuous valorization of value are the starting point and the main goal of capitalist (re)production. Which is the vicious circle that necessitates, as Marx said in a speech in English, a theory of “what the economists call ‘previous or original accumulation,’ but which ought to be called original expropriation.” ⁽¹¹⁾

While the material and the social are not identical, they remain relatives. Value is the commodity itself, as a social form, not something placed inside an object. Nonetheless, social forms are still capable of changing and being changed by material reality. Such contact and reciprocal influence doesn’t run any risk of contaminating some supposed theoretical purity of social forms.

Spending Time and Trouble

The abstract aspect of labour is related to the same “human labour-power in its fluid state,” which “creates value, but is not itself value” as mentioned by Sutherland, but which he instead claims is “unabstract” and contrasts to the labour which he says is “abstract when it is frozen: lifeless, cold and immobilized.”

In Capital, Marx uses “human labour,” the expenditure of “labour power” and “abstract labour” relatedly, or even synonymously, if not always exclusively as such.

In French, “abstract human labour” is replaced with “equal human labour” (travail humain égal) in the first chapter’s subsection on The Double Character of Labour Presented by the Commodity.

In German, the word “abstrakt” doesn’t even appear in the sentence that Sutherland critiques the English translations of, or in its surrounding paragraph. Only the terms “human labour” (menschlicher Arbeit) and “labour power” (Arbeitskraft) are found.

In other German sentences where Gallerte or Arbeitsgallerten (jelly or work-jellies) are used, the terms clearly refer to commodities, as values.

In later chapters, Marx presents labour power as also being a commodity, as a social objectification of a potential, an abstract capacity for labour, rather than simply the expenditure of labour or its product.

In Volume 2 of Capital, in Chapter 19, Marx reaffirmed the distinction between the expenditure of living labour and its result, that being the commodity and its value.

“The process of production disappears in the finished commodity,” wrote Marx.

“The fact that labour-power was expended to create it now appears in the form that the commodity has the following concrete property: it possesses value.” ⁽¹²⁾

In the posthumously added appendix to Volume 1 (based on an earlier manuscript), and in Volume 2, Marx also briefly specifies that certain services can be value-producing, if service workers are employed by a capitalist for sale of their services to others, rather than for the personal consumption of the capitalist or anyone else. ⁽¹³⁾

Labour power and services as commodities, and as commodity-producing, reaffirm Marx’s non-physicalist understanding of value, which is nonetheless related, if not identical to material wealth and the material world.

There obviously can’t be any material substance of abstract labour or value that could be placed within a non-material social objectification such as labour power or a service. Yet the reproduction of social relations and the worker are continuously connected to the material world.

Differences in Taste

Sutherland writes that “human labor reduced to Gallerte [jelly] is disgusting.”

However, the abstract aspect of labour is not simply, or at least not only the product or result of any particular act of production or exchange. And besides, dessert is delicious.

Labour power as a commodity is purchased on the market, then consumed in production by the capitalist. The commodities that workers produce belong to the capitalists who sell them, not to the worker who produced them.

“Let us consider the commodity product as it is before it is transformed into money,” wrote Marx in Volume 2.

“It belongs completely to the capitalist.” ⁽¹⁴⁾

With the wage exchanged for labour power, the worker purchases then consumes the meagre means with which to reproduce their own peculiar commodity, labour power.

With the development of capitalism, “the commodity form of the products of labour becomes universal,” as does the workers’ view of their own labour power as a commodity and as their own property. ⁽¹⁵⁾

“The secret of the expression of value,” Marx wrote, “namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion.”

This only becomes possible in a society “where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between people as possessors of commodities.” ⁽¹⁶⁾

However, the transformation of money and commodities into capital, Marx writes in later chapters, can only take place where there is the “confrontation of, and the contact between, two very different kinds of commodity owners,” capitalists with money and means of production and workers with only their labour power. ⁽¹⁷⁾

Getting Physical

Sutherland writes that “The image of human labour as Gallerte brings most forcefully to mind not the antonymical word flüssig […] but another passage in Das Kapital, namely, the passage where Marx insists that labour is in reality a ‘…produktive Verausgabung von menschlichem Hirn, Muskel, Nerv, Hand, usw,’ ‘a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc.’”

To the consternation of some professional artisanal marxologists, Marx really did associate abstract labour with the physiological expenditure of labour power.

To Sutherland’s credit, on the other hand, he, like other writers such as William Clare Roberts, not only doesn’t seem to mind the physiological, but engages with it, mentioning Marx’s analysis of the unnatural and physically harmful character of wage labour under capitalism.

I would have mentioned Sutherland’s article in my own article from last year on the subject of reduction, consumption and homogeneity in Marx’s thought, if only I had found his piece beforehand instead of just after.

From my perspective, in an age of growing activity and consciousness around transgender and anti-racist movements, social reproduction, and the inequalities of pandemic management by governments, when biology itself is increasingly understood as socially constructed, a marxological aversion to understanding the physiological as also being social and historically specific (under capitalism) seems a bit old fashioned.

Not to mention Marx’s own voluminous examination of the working conditions, and at times the living conditions, of workers in his time, as I mentioned some examples of in my article, as for instance when Marx wrote that the capitalist working day “usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body.”

Instead of having a little something as a treat, Marx pointed out, workers were getting tricked into eating adulterated bread, made with ingredients unfit for human consumption.

Marx’s theory was not just of production but also reproduction (however incompletely), including workers’ necessary consumption in order to replenish their labour power.

Normally, he wrote, “All the capitalist cares for is to reduce the worker’s individual consumption to the necessary minimum, and an immense distance separates his attitude from the crudeness of the South American mineowners, who force their workers to consume the more substantial, rather than the less substantial, kind of food.” ⁽¹⁸⁾

More strenuous labour requires more sustenance. You don’t get something for nothing.

As Marx put it, “labour, a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve, brain, etc. is expended, and these things have to be replaced.”

“Since more is expended, more must be received.” ⁽¹⁹⁾

Producing Separation, Together

The worker, wrote Marx, “constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-labourer.”

“This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker,” Marx reminded us, “is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production.” ⁽²⁰⁾

The worker themself produces the value that the capitalist pays them in the form of the wage. But access to the wage depends on the capitalist, because all the necessary means are the capitalists’ property, not the workers’.

The basis of juridical-economic relations and actions of exchange, including the exchange of the commodity labour power, is an abstract legal and political equality, which has as its basis the vast inequality of social conditions and political relations as a whole.

The capitalist, like the worker, is subject to value. The capitalist might even worry about spoiling their appetite by eating dessert before dinner, but they don’t have to be worried about how to afford to put food on a plate, or how to pay the rent for their home to house themselves and their plates. And dinner time isn’t the only time either the capitalist or the worker have to be concerned with.

Even the higher-paid worker’s time is mostly wasted in a world not of their own, while the capitalist can never be caught napping when it comes to making sure the worker isn’t slacking, even if surveillance technology can do most of the heavy lifting for them nowadays.

From an Indigenous perspective, the necessary relation between the social and the material, and the importance of social reproduction, aren’t exactly new subjects.

But under capitalist colonialism, with accelerating damage to lands, waters, air and animal life, and the social disintegration and infighting of a settler society that can’t seem to agree on anything except competition and mutual destruction, everything, old and new, only becomes more urgent all the time, while much needed time for rest seems to get harder to carve out.

Endnotes:

Capital, Vol.1, pg.128, Penguin edition (1976)
“Métamorphosés en sublimés identiques, échantillons du même travail indistinct, tous ces objets ne manifestent plus qu’une chose, c’est que dans leur production une force de travail humaine a été dépensée, que du travail humain y est accumulé.”
Capital, Vol.1, pg.142
Distinction does not mean complete separation, or a lack of relationality, any more than relationality means identicality.
“Il résulte de ce qui précède que s’il n’y a pas, à proprement parler, deux sortes de travail dans la marchandise, cependant le même travail y est opposé à lui-même, suivant qu’on le rapporte à la valeur d’usage de la marchandise comme à son produit, ou à la valeur de cette marchandise comme à sa pure expression objective.”
Capital, Vol.1, pg.126
Capital, Vol.1, pg.133
Capital, Vol.1, pg.134
Capital, Vol.1, pg.136-137
Capital, Vol.1, pg.307
Value, Price and Profit, 1865
Capital, Vol.2, pg.462, Penguin edition (1978)
Services in Marxian Economic Thought, by Fiona Tregenna (2009)
Capital, Vol.2, pg.463
Capital, Vol.1, pg.274
Capital, Vol.1, pg.152
Capital, Vol.1, pg.874
Capital, Vol.1, pg.718
Capital, Vol.1, pg.274-275
Capital, Vol.1, pg.716