STOLEN LABOUR

  Out of Marx’s first Parisian residence, there survives a set of notes and excerpts, which were discovered in Holland and published in 1932 by the Soviet scholar, David Ryazanov (who was shot by Stalin for his pains).  Christened by the Soviet Institute of Marxism-Leninism  Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the Pariser Manuskripte were widely read in Germany after the war and left a profound impression on the generation that reached its political maturity in Berlin and the West German cities of 1968.  They are early drafts, of course, of the great compendium to out-Hegel Hegel that survives in its most lengthy form in Capital.   Their focus is money, rather than, as in later works, its anterior or underlying reality, which Marx thought of as alienated or stolen labour.  Yet they preserve, in the freshest and most affectionate form, the kernel of Marx’s view of society, which is close to that of Proudhon:  that a social system that evaluated men and women in terms of money and made morality a function of credit was unworthy of the human being.  Society is quite simply deranged:

“Private property has made us so stupid that an object is only ours  when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when it is directly eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., in short utilised  in some way . . . . All the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by . . . .  the sense of having.”

  Or from the same manuscript, numbered 3 by the editors:

“Man becomes increasingly poor as a man; he has increasing need of money  in order to take possession of a hostile nature; and the power of his money  diminishes exactly in inverse proportion to the increase in production:  in other words, money  increases his neediness.  The need for money is therefore the real need created by the modern economic system, and the only need which it creates.  The quantity  of money becomes increasingly its sole important attribute.  Just as it reduces every entity to an abstraction, so it reduces itself in its own development to a quantitative entity.  Excess and immoderation become its true standard.  The expansion of production and of needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural and imaginary appetites.  Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need; its idealism is fantasy, caprice and fancy.”

  In these manuscripts, one hears, not for the last time from Marx, the authentic voice of the Quixote:  that the world of money is a phantasmagoria, and one must ride out to break lances with it, astride the bony charger of philosophy and helmed with political economy (though the helmet appears, to the philistines, to be a barber’s basin.)"

James Buchan, Frozen Desire – The Meaning of Money, New York, Farar Straus Giroux, 1997, pp. 200-01.
 

NOTE:  

Reading this passage in Frozen Desire prompted intense and odd feelings of nostalgia -- very odd because nostalgia is something I rarely experience.  I remember college dormitory rooms, lecture rooms and friends' voices.  I remember knowing little, fearing much, and not knowing what fear really was.  I think I had sound instincts concerning quality, worth and value, but I couldn't tell walls from bridges.  

The Pete Seeger song below, which I've always loved for its broad applicability and click-clack-slotted-in train sound, seems appropriate here, but I wish I could lighten the mood by including Peter Blegvad's song of innocence and experience Card For Bernard.  Unfortunately, along with Crumb de la Crumb and most of this fine artist's recorded work, he remains largely ignored by the youtube community.  Oh well -- I'll include Special Delivery instead.  Although I experienced it much later than the schooldays memories it summons, it is pertinent.  And it does mention Vincent Price, a relevant touchstone, fine actor and great man.
 

Pete Seeger: Waist Deep In The Big Muddy (Link)  

Peter Blegvad: Special Delivery (Link)