Notes From the Underground

 “Marx Dead and Alive – Reading Capital in Precarious Times” by Andy Merrifield, 2020

This is a unique take on reading the first volume of Capital. Vol.1 was the only one published during Marx's lifetime. Merrifield combines culture, biography, history and current events to illuminate certain key concepts in the book. He savors Joyce, Beckett and Balzac, Harvey and Fanon, knows Marx's miserable personal history and can identify the depreciation of fixed, 'dead' capital even today. He descends 'underground' with the “old mole” Marx, then Dostoevsky and Kafka, then real moles. Merrifield is a leftie academic specializing in urban geography, and at the end sounds like the romantic anarchists of the Invisible Committee. He's also a fan of literature and uses it profusely – Dickens, Gogol, Shelley, Conrad, Eggers, Shakespeare and more. That heterogeneous method is normal in this milieu.

The book begins and ends in Highgate Cemetery in front of Marx's massive plinth. While his body lies there, his thoughts are still alive, as the book title suggests. In Merrifield's discussion of the commodity – the heart of capitalist production – he notes that Marx used the example of the overcoat. Marx himself had to pawn his several times due to poverty. He was unable to visit the reading room at the British Museum from his hovel on Dean Street if he did not have it due to the cold. This human overcoat gained more relevance than Adam Smith's abstract pin factory, in fact and in theory. Marx had “written about capital in general, without having any capital in particular.”

Much of Marx's work in the British Museum was carefully going through the “Reports of the Inspector of Factories” - the only detailed set of official statistics then in existence. Many of the reports were written by Edward Horner, a tough and truthful investigator who could not be bought. Merrifield highlights Vol. 1's concepts of false consciousness, commodity fetishism, finance capital, 'surplus' populations, the industrialization of all labor, the falsity of Malthus, the error of Darwin and death by overwork. Marx mentions that last Dickensian fact, then Merrifield notes the many examples of workers in the modern world dying by overwork. Workhouses and child labor also make appearances.

Merrifield especially fixates on Chapter 15 of Capital concerning the dual nature of technology. He also closely reads Chapter 25 on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” tying it to how urban rent is now another profit center that Marx only touched on in Vol. 3. Merrifield points out that Marx refuted the idea that financial capital was the key to capitalism alleged by people like Michael Hudson and his nonsensical 'new feudalism.'  This is why Marx called it 'fictitious capital.' Merrifield breaks with Marx on the nature of the lumpen-proletariat by defining criminals has some kind of progressive representation.

Marx said of technology: “Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature.” Merrifield points out he was no technological determinist as the allegation goes. Merrifield never mentions the tendency of the rate of profit to fall due to increasing investments in machinery, but he does show how material depreciation – lack of use, overuse and intentional disuse due to 'moral depreciation' – threaten commodity exchange-values. Cheaper machines drive out the more expensive; better machines drive out the less efficient; all resulting in rust, waste and growing landfills. Regarding 'urban ground rent,' workers are being expelled from parts of cities by gentrification, much like they can be laid-off from a job. They are sent to the edges, the banlieues, the exurbs or to live on the streets. There is a one-to-one correlation between homelessness and rent rises.  Corporate monstrosities like Hudson Yards in Manhattan exemplify this process, enabled by vast public monies. Merrifield visits this absurd sterile NY complex with Harvey.

A Morrocan peddler from the country

The Precariat

Merrifield's idea of the revolutionary 'lumpen-proletariat' is the oddest romantic idea in the book. Certain middle-class radicals seems to like the concept until they get robbed - though most avoid that impact. It extends to the whole notion of various kinds of surplus populations thrown off by capital. Marx knew that labor precarity was inbuilt into the system. He mentions the stagnant, floating and latent populations – words that are rarely used anymore, though they do refer to real groups. They all populate the 'reserve army of labor.' Temp and part-time workers, the unemployed, 'independent' contractors, peddlers, day laborers, children, piece workers, on-call, self-employed and migrant 'illegals' all fit into these categories, as do slaves of every kind.

The real lumpen-proletariat, celebrated by the Panther Party's Eldridge Cleaver, is mostly concentrated in illegal activities. Merrifield is wrong that criminals have no connection to the capitalist system. They are merely the illegal shadow of profiteering. Organized gangs are businesses – from the Mafia to the Black P-Stone Rangers, Hell's Angels to MS-13 to any drug cartel. Even the high-end, organized gang Merrifield romantically described in Paris – the Society of the Seasons - was a business. Drugs, prostitution, gun-running, on-line scams, counterfeiting, kidnapping, slavery, robbery, car theft, protection, gambling, shop-lifting, fraud – all are businesses. They are celebrations of unhindered and unproductive profiteering, nothing actually dangerous or cool about it.  They are many times a form of survival, as capital ultimately pushes some people into crime.

There are many examples of these people blocking revolution, as Marx mentioned in 1848. Some work with the police in exchange for immunity. Would revolutionaries try to blunt, neutralize or recruit some? Would some in oppressed individuals or groups break towards socialism? Of course, but that is not the same thing as basing your struggle on the lumpen-proletariat, as some ultra-left and anarchist groups think. Merrifield's citations of Bakunin and the black bloc here are indicative. Merrifield's blurring of the precariat with criminals is poor, anti-social sociology. It ignores how most prey on workers – they are not all Robin Hoods. It ignores the power of the various strata of the proletariat to impede production, whereas the best lumpen-proletarians can do is episodic street action – some good, some bad. We saw this in Minneapolis around the Floyd events.

Merrifield ends the book with a trip back to Highgate while musing on the concept of 'the underground.' The cemetery gets a 100,000 visitors a year, most heading to Marx's grave. As dialectics presupposes, small quantitative changes over time result in qualitative turns. Yet this cave-like 'drip drip' in the underground is not always visible. The actions of burrowers and moles and revolutionaries go unknown until a certain conjuncture suddenly throws the underground into daylight. As we sit in our basement bookstore, chatting with the disabled, the retired, the worker, the unemployed, the socialist, the cadre, the writer, the migrant, it seems a certain model for Merrifield's image. And Marx's too. To close with a quote from Marx: “If the emancipation of the working class requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices and squandering in practical wars the people's blood and treasure?”

Relevant prior blog reviews from this book, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Open Veins of Latin America” (Galeano); “L'Assommir” (Zola); “David Harvey,” “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson), “Marx and Human Nature,” “The Young Marx,” “The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx” (Callinicos); “The Jester and the Sages,” “Marx and the Earth” (Foster & Burkett); “Marx on Religion.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / December 3, 2023