> Limits to Capital is great, still my favourite Harvey book, although
> his stuff on 19th century Paris is maybe more fun. I always recommend
> it to people when I hear they're going to embark on a reading of
> Capital, to read first or even instead, because it's a better way to
> get an overview of the whole, restructured in a more rational way, and
> with open discussion of the problems. Especially due to the 'chapter 3
> problem' - I reckon it's better to not read Capital at all than to
> only read the first few chapters of Vol 1, because you'll come away
> with a distorted view of what it's all about.
Vol. 1 of Capital is ultimately "about" capitalism as a "stage" in the historical process conceived as a set of internally related "educational" "stages in the development of the human mind", the "educastion" taking place within the successive forms of the "labour process" understood as "schools".
The end point of this process is what Marx in vol. 1 refers to as the "totally developed individual" capable of creating and living in "the true realm of freedom".
It's capitalism's inconsistency with "freedom" in this sense and its ultimate "fettering" of the individual development such freedom requires that constitute the ultimate "limits to capital".
The ideas found in vol. 1 that are most obviously connected to this essential feature are the idea of capitalist motives as "passions" in Hegel's sense (the idea underpinning Marx's treatment of capitalist production as M-C-M' and of capitalist products as "commodities") and the idea of the capitalist labour process as positively developmental of the "virtuosity" (in Aristotle and Hegel's sense) of wage labourers (one aspect of this being the alleged positive developmental effect of capitalist "variation" of labour in developing the "capacities" that define "the totally developed individual").
Harvey largely ignores this aspect of the argument.
For instance, he does this in his lectures on chap. 15. <http://davidharvey.org/2008/08/marxs-capital-class-08/>
These begin with a discussion of the following footnote:
"A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature’s Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter? Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them. Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material basis, is uncritical. It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one. The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm>
Harvey's discussion of this and related texts ignores that for Marx the development of "forces and relations of production" is an index of "the development of the human mind". The development of "technology" objectifies this development.
Elsewhere, Marx explicitly identifies this treatment of technology as "idealism" and contrasts it with "crude materialism".
"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm
>
"According to Hodgskin, circulating capital is nothing but the juxtaposition of the different kinds of social labour (coexisting labour) and accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive powers of social labour, so that the accumulation of the skill and knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief form of accumulation, and infinitely more important than the accumulation—which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents it— of the existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity. These objective conditions are only nominally accumulated and must be constantly produced anew and consumed anew.
“… productive capital and skilled labour are […] one.” “Capital and a labouring population are precisely synonymous” ([Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital, London, 1825,] p. 33).
"These are simply further elaborations of Galiani’s thesis:
“… The real wealth … is man” (Della Moneta, Custodi. Parte Moderna, t. III, p. 229).
"The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities', vanishes here as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly performed anew, of socially producing men. Compare this 'idealism' with the crude, material fetishism into which the Ricardian theory develops in the writings 'of this incredible cobbler', McCulloch, where not only the difference between man and animal disappears but even the difference between a living organism and an inanimate object. And then let them say that as against the lofty idealism of bourgeois political economy, the proletarian opposition has been preaching a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch21.htm
>
"Galiani's thesis" that "the real wealth ... is man" is implicitly endorsed and elaborated in the definition of "wealth" in the Grundrisse identifying it with fully developed individual "universality".
"what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?" <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm>
The remarks at the end of the footnote about the relation of the "history of religion" to the "history of technology" are, when the "history of technology" is interpreted as the history of the "development of the human mind", a repetition of the claim about the history of religion made in "On the Jewish Question".
"The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that their respective religions are no more than different stages in the development of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history, and that man is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/>
Marx's treatment of the history of technology as an index of the history of "the development of the human mind" and his treatment of the "labour process" as the "school" bringing about that development are also found toward the end of chapter 15 in another application of Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception" to the capitalist labour process.
This treats it as a "steeling school" working through the "variation" of labour it imposes on the wage labourer to bring about positive development in the direction of "the totally developed individual", this individual being the "educated" individual in Hegel's sense of the individual "able to do what others do", the individual characterized by the "integral development" that would complete the elimination of "the old division of labour" characteristic of "handicraft" production to which development within capitalism had already contributed.
"if, on the one hand, variation of work at present imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that meets with resistance [227] at all points, Modern Industry, on the other hand, through its catastrophes imposes the necessity of recognising, as a fundamental law of production, variation of work, consequently fitness of the labourer for varied work, consequently the greatest possible development of his varied aptitudes. It becomes a question of life and death for society to adapt the mode of production to the normal functioning of this law. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.
"One step already spontaneously taken towards effecting this revolution is the establishment of technical and agricultural schools, and of 'écoles d’enseignement professionnel,' in which the children of the working-men receive some little instruction in technology and in the practical handling of the various implements of labour. Though the Factory Act, that first and meagre concession wrung from capital, is limited to combining elementary education with work in the factory, there can be no doubt that when the working-class comes into power, as inevitably it must, technical instruction, both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in the working-class schools. There is also no doubt that such revolutionary ferments, the final result of which is the abolition of the old division of labour, are diametrically opposed to the capitalistic form of production, and to the economic status of the labourer corresponding to that form. But the historical development of the antagonisms, immanent in a given form of production, is the only way in which that form of production can be dissolved and a new form established. 'Ne sutor ultra crepidam' — this nec plus ultra of handicraft wisdom became sheer nonsense, from the moment the watchmaker Watt invented the steam-engine, the barber Arkwright, the throstle, and the working-jeweller, Fulton, the steamship." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm>
These aspects are ignored in Harvey's discussion of the passage.
This idea of the capitalist labour process as a "steeling school" is an essential aspect of Marx's treatment of capitalism as a process producing the means required for the "abolition" of "private property", means that include "an all-round development of individuals" - a requisite degree of "integral development of every individual producer".
“private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives.” <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03o.htm
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“the historic tendency of [capitalist] production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer.” (Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otyecestvenniye Zapisky 1877) <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm>
Ted