College Library Browsing #15: Not So New

 “Marx in Motion – A New Materialist Marxism” by Thomas Nail, 2020

This is an academic Marxist attempting some kind of updated development of Marxism. Lots of these innovations falter, so let's see if Nail hits it on the head and finds something further. There is much repetition in the book, much that has already been explained by other Marxists, it's highly abstract and includes a good amount of seemingly random points, so its not an easy book to read by any stretch.  But he does make some good points.

Nail describes 3 long-standing attacks on Marxism by anti-communists – that it is: 1) economically reductionist; 2) historically determinist; 3) Anti-environmental. All three are mostly based on crude ideologies promoted by reformist Soviet Communists so there's some smoke here. Yet many Marxists, including ones he cites, have answered these objections. His innovation is something he calls a 'materio-kinetic dialectics' - the study of motion and process in Marx, based on Marx's early doctoral thesis and notebooks on Epicurus. He thinks this will help Marxism address these attacks and errors. Nail claims Marx did not agree with Engels' dialectics of nature, but only addresses it in one slight paragraph so that is not convincing.

Nail thinks Marx saw various levels of motion as the basic character of matter and also social / economic forms. Under capital movement, change, disruption and speed have vastly increased and spread in society. In his earliest work looking at Lucretius, Epicurus and Democritus, Marx rejected mechanical / determinist materialism; external God-like 'causes'; and matter as discrete particles or atoms. In this he argues against Aristotle and Democritus. He saw matter as an interactive and constant 'flow' of a 'three-fold' movement, not an isolated thing. It is not a metaphysics but it might remind some of quantum mechanics. This unitary perspective was carried over into Marx's later works, reflecting the constant interaction of humans, nature and society in a specific time-based, historical context.

Nail applies this 'kinetic materialism' to the first chapter of Capital, Vol 1. He shows that Marx based his analysis on sensuous experience of the world, not ideas. Marx compares the commodity in Capital to that of an atom – real to a point, but actually part of a long process and movement, and he sets out to explain its actual place. What follows is a normal but overly academic description of Capital, including Nail's constant use of words like kinetic, pedetic, folds, fluxions, swerve and simplex. Marx is actually more graphic and descriptive than Nail. Nail emphasizes that the roots of capitalist value reside in the history of colonialism, slavery, migration, women's reproduction and primitive accumulation and that nature is an essential part of value.

Nail discusses the metabolism of nature; the metabolism of man within nature; and the subsequent social metabolism. He says the terms metabolic 'rift' or 'shift' are descriptions of the tear or alienation in these metabolic relationships, especially those induced by capital. As to the former, he quotes a writer that there is “a tendency for the ecological surplus to fall” as related to the so-called 'free' gifts of nature – minerals, oil, soil quality, water, air, animals, etc. This is an accurate riff off the 'tendency of the falling rate of profit' in Marxism. In Capital Marx discusses what Nail calls “the patriarchy of the wage” as women's discounted labor is appropriated. Birthing babies is likened to birthing use-values – it's the original human (re)production. To do this Nail analyzes Shakespeare's Henry IV's Falstaff and Dame Quickly, which Marx uses to comment on women's 'devalorization.' (Academese for devaluation.) In a way the home is another site of 'primitive accumulation.'

Diamonds are a girl's best friend?

Marx defined value has having 4 types of exchange: simple, expanded, general and lastly money. They are all processes of constant interconnection and response, of matter in motion, revealing their origin – creative labor power and labor time. He includes a chart of these exchanges and goes into a highly abstract discussion about them. He makes one point that “Consciousness and agency are not unique to humans but occur in all sensuous matter.” Certainly, of a sort, and up to a point. For instance recent research on the 'wood-wide web of trees' shows there is scant evidence to support the idea of fungi transmission. Nail discusses how gold became the money-form because it had already been a commodity – it was 'the germ' of money. Nail maintains that this led to the 'fetishization of the commodity' as a process of 'domination.' Evidently that domination is a work of social magic, though money has real empirical power under capital.

Marx mentions the Taiping rebellion, which was dominated by Christian deism but “abolished private property, communalized land, banned foot-binding, declared a classless society and the equality of the sexes and criminalized opium, gambling, tobacco, alcohol and polygamy” according to Nail. Marx equates fetishization with religion as forms of magical thinking, a fog hiding both gods and commodities, and the ultimate fetish of money. Nail discusses Robinson Crusoe, who was pictured by Smith and Ricardo as operating an ahistorical, priced commodity economy on his island, an idea Marx ridiculed – capital in the egg without history. This was their myth ignoring primitive accumulation and colonialism. There is even a slave whom Robinson names Friday but this is supposed to be normal. Marx thought this image was really a cock-eyed reflection of original primitive hunter/gatherer societies.

Lastly Nail turns to the nature of 'kinetic communism' – his concept. Marx looks at feudal, peasant and communist 'forms of motion.' Feudal relationships were dominated by God, the church and a proscribed nature, but it was clear what was owed by the serfs to each. English peasant society was based on subsistence agriculture that produced its own use-values, organized by patriarchy and simple production techniques. The 'communist form of motion' is an association of free people, working with advanced means of production held in common, expending labor power as one labor force. It has no class system, no domination, no state, no commodities, no alienation or rips in metabolism, yet still measures labor time according to Nail and Marx. Nail maintains that idealism, nature worship and folk religion are abandoned under kinetic communism.

Nail addresses the issue of the 'base and superstructure' in Marxist discussions through his 'motion' lens. These are not static parts of a building or ship. “An economy is a form or pattern of motion.” Nail is an expert in German, so his translations show that Marx understood this 'structure' to actually be an interactive and unitary social form, in flux, not of an active base that plays a role as direct causation in a passive superstructure. Once this is understood, then “reductionist, determinist and anthropocentric” crude communism will be overcome according to him.

He hides his most startling claims for last. Nail says that “Marx did not hold a labor theory of value” because theft and appropriation were prior to the exploitation of surplus value. I assume this does not negate the continuing exploitation of labor that has been going on since the development of capital. Nail believes that dialectical materialism was “invented” by Engels and the Soviets. As said previously, he makes this statement without backup. Because someone crams dialectics and materialism into one phrase does not negate the actual processes of dialectics and materialism. It might just be understood as a form of short-hand. His justified focus on women, animals, the earth and the colonized seems to leave out the working-class ... a phrase not found in the book or index at all. Abstract labor is present, workers are not. Nail hopes this book contributes to feminist, ecological and post-colonial Marxism through its focus on Marx's original philosophic work.  He is part of a current that seems to be avoiding the actual labor movement.

His best paragraph illustrates how every single commodity is linked forward and backward to a long chain of events, labor, time, natural sources, social systems and people in an endless web of actions and reactions, kind of a Marxist version of Gaia. I'm not sure this is a 'new' Marxism – it seems to be plowing a deeper furrow in ground already trod.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using this term: “Marx,” "matter in motion."

May Day Books carries many books on Marxism.

I got this at the UGA Library!

Red Frog / April 25, 2024