Comments on James Mill. Reading Notes.
Make sure that you understand the following key ideas and think about their significance.
Page XXV. Paragraph 1: The abstract law and the real movement
Is this distinction a particular feature of economic laws? Or of social laws? Or of all laws?
What is the real content of this distinction as a critique of political economy? Does it have a
wider application in social theory?
Paragraph 2: Two conceptions of money
Marx apparently starts by endorsing Mill’s conception of money, providing a philosophical
critique (a critique in the sense that he develops the philosophical implications of Mill’s
argument, providing the analysis with a philosophical foundation, not in the sense of
disagreeing with Mill): the essence of money is not (the mercantilist idea) that property is
alienated in it but (the substance of Mill’s idea, though Mill does not put it like this) that the
social act of the mutual exchange of products is estranged from man and becomes the
attribute of a material thing outside man. This is Marx’s key idea: it is the basis of the theory
of alienated labour in the 1844 manuscripts and of the value form and fetishism of
commodities in Capital. Do not move on until you understand it. Marx took the philosophical
idea from Moses Hess (see especially Marx’s On the Jewish Question) and the idea of the
inversion comes from Feuerbach’s critique of religion. There is an inevitable reversal of the
original relationship: the mediator has now become the real power over what it mediates.
Compare and contrast the idea with Simmel’s quasi-psychological account of the inversion of
means and ends as money is transformed from means of exchange to social power, an idea
taken up in Weber’s Iron Cage: formal rationality giving rise to substantive irrationality.
What is the basis of this inversion for Marx?
End of Paragraph 2, paragraphs 3, 4, 5: Property, money and the redeemer
Money is the ‘estranged essence of private property’. What does this mean? What does Marx
mean by private property here? Why is it now alienated?
Is the religious analogy just an analogy? Or is Christian doctrine a reflection of/on the
illusions of commodity exchange (see Alfred Sohn-Rethel on commodity fetishism as the
constitutive idea of western culture)?
Page XXV(2) The money system
Why must private property develop into the money system? Here Marx is providing a
theoretical paraphrase of Mill’s traditional story of the development of money out of
exchange and exchange value. The social relationship between things ‘is already a
relationship in which private property is estranged from itself’. Money is the `form of
existence for itself of this relationship’, it is the ‘alienation of private property’. What does
this mean?
Modern economics versus the monetary system
Now Marx moves from a purely philosophical critique, which has shown the underpinnings
of Mill’s analysis of money, to a substantive critique, showing the one-sidedness of Mill’s
view. The economist (Mill) has quite correctly pointed out to the monetarist/mercantilist that
money has no inherent value, it is just a commodity like any other that has been selected to
serve as the means of exchange. But the monetarist is quite right to respond that once the
money commodity has come to take on that role, it is money that is the embodiment,
expression, representation and measure of value.
In fact, far from debunking the monetarist myth, the economist has used his power of
abstraction to `recognise the existence of money under all forms of commodities’. The `soul
of money’ is present in all branches of production and all activities: again the religious
analogy of body and soul. How does this relate to the opposition of content and form?
So the modern economists `have conceived the essence of money in its abstract universality’,
but they have only universalised the mercantilists’ superstition. But the `economist does not
attack the essence’ of money. This is why Marx’s philosophical critique takes us beyond the
economist: it attacks (criticises) the essence of money by showing that the economist merely
describes the superficial results of the alienation of private property in the form of money
without explaining the process by which this takes place and so discovering private property
(whatever that is) lying behind money.
What is the distinction between `the personal mode of existence of money as money’ and `the
hidden social relationship between commodities’?
Why is paper money `the more perfect mode of existence of money as money’?
Why does it appear in the credit system `as if the power of the alien, material force were
broken’?
Why is `an organised banking system’ the Saint Simonian ideal?
Page XXVI Critique of the socialists
Why is this `abolition of estrangement … only an appearance’?
What is the essence of credit? Why is credit the ultimate form of self-estrangement? (Again
Marx distinguishes content, which is of only passing interest, from form/essence, which is the
focus of his critique).
What is the status of this critique of the credit system? Is it only a moral critique? Or is it a
phenomenological critique? Or is it a theoretical critique?
Where has the `antithesis between capitalist and worker’ come from? What, if anything, has
this to do with money and credit?
Page XXVII
What is `the secret contained in the lie of moral recognition’?
Marx now moves back to exchange to develop further the philosophical critique that he began
in relation to money at the beginning of the text. What is the difference between the exchange
of human activity `within production itself and of human products against one another’? Why
is this `equivalent to species activity and species-spirit’? How does this relate to Adam
Smith’s idea of the propensity of humans to `truck, barter and exchange’? What is human
nature? What is the `true community’? Why does this community appear `in the form of
estrangement’?
Why does Marx counterpose the idea of the community as being produced directly by the
life-activity of individuals to the idea of the true community as coming into being through
reflection and counterpose men as an abstraction to men as real, living particular individuals?
What would Marx think of post-modernism?
The critique comes back to political economy which `defines the estranged form of social
intercourse as the essential and original form corresponding to man’s nature’. What does
Marx mean by this?
Page XXVIII The critique of political economy and the critique of property
The key lies in the starting point: `Political economy - like the real process - starts out from
the relation of man to man as that of property owner to property owner’. If this is the real
starting point, why is it wrong to start with it in theory? Marx summarises the logic of
political economy’s argument in this and the next page, developing his critique of political
economy that will be the basis of his theory of the form of value in Capital.
`The social connection between the two property owners is that of reciprocity in alienation …
whereas in simple private property, alienation occurs only in relation to oneself, one-sidedly’.
What does this mean, precisely?
Exchange is the social act which is the opposite of the social relationship. What does this
mean?
What is alienated private property?
What does the word alienation mean?
Is it good, bad or indifferent for personal property to become alienated property?
How does the mode of existence of private property become that of an equivalent?
What is an exchange value?
What does this mean: `Its mode of existence as value is an alienated designation of itself.
Different from its immediate existence, external to its specific nature, a merely relative mode
of existence’?
Page XXIX
What is the significance of Marx’s distinction between the purpose of labour and the mode of
existence of labour?
Is the division of labour a bad thing? Or is it the exchange of the products of labour as values
that is a bad thing? Does Marx distinguish the two here? What is the difference? Look at the
second half of page XXXIII for a description of human exchange.
In the middle of the page we have the first formulation of the theory of alienated labour that is
developed shortly afterwards in the 1844 manuscripts. Compare the two passages.
`Just as the concept of the equivalent, the value, already implied the alienation of private
property, so money is the sensuous, even objective existence of this alienation’. Is this just
rhetoric? What is its theoretical basis?
Page XXX
`Political economy is only able to grasp this whole development as a fact, as the outcome of
fortuitous necessity’. Marx started off by contrasting real living individuals to abstractions.
Now he seems to be denouncing political economy for its empiricism. Is Marx offering a
metaphysical, anti-empiricist critique of political economy?
The rest of the text does not really add anything more. The bottom of page XXXI and top of
page XXXII develops the phenomenology of exchange a little bit, drawing heavily on Hegel
and getting a bit rhetorical.
At the bottom of page XXXII Marx contrasts alienated property with ‘true property’.
There is an interesting discussion of means and ends at the top of page XXXIII that adds
something to the discussion.