... being a quote from a 19th century worker who, thanks to modern industry, found he could shift with ease from job to job. He didn't feel stuck in a single occupation anymore and could work where he wanted. Marx feels this is the revolutionary potential of modern industry, if it's run collectively for the social good.

I'm ploughing through more chapters of Capital Volume 1. It's heady stuff. I don't claim to understand it all, or even the majority. But I can see the outlines of concepts I'm familiar with. Marx's breadth is astounding. He touches on alienation, imperialism, wages, the family, Christianity, morality, the destruction of the peasantry, underdevelopment - it's all in there. And it's not ecleticism: he ties it together in the social form of the capitalist mode of production. Marx writes about how we reproduce ourselves, as a society. That encompasses everything. While Marx focuses on the 'prime movers' of society - in our case, that we have to sell labour power to a capitalist, and all the relations that stem from that exploitation - he doesn't stop there.

Observing all of society - Dziga Vertov's Man With The Movie Camera

I said this before: anyone who calls Marx reductionist has not read Marx. For example, go to

- his heartrending tales of child labour;
- his prediction that factory labour would destroy the patriarchal family and create 'new relations between the sexes';
- how, in capitalist agriculture "all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility" - by which Marx means both the soil itself, and the people who work it.

It would be foolish to say Marx settled all these questions; but he's the only theorist I've encountered who asked them, and integrated them into a whole.

Reading Capital reminds me of why I call myself a Marxist: Marxism allows me to understand society as a totality. Not as a chaos of undetermined parts, or an abstract moral imperative, but as a living organism, undergoing constant change, death and life. I'm sounding Buddhist now, and maybe this is what spiritual people get out of religion. But the difference is that Marx based his work on the lived experience of humanity, not on abstract principles. His 'meta-critique' comes from scientific (yes, there's that word again) observation, not revealed truths. That observation isn't of cells in a laboratory - it's of us, people, in how we live. This is not a naturalistic phenomenon: humans are Marx's subject, and only to the extent that we remake society consciously in our own interests. This is the communist revolution.

The small-c communist revolution - a call for peasants to defend land reforms in Spain, 1936

Here are two examples of Marx's observation, so I don't sound completely gaga.

Who does real work?

One of the most common anti-Marxist arguments is that we're not all factory workers. What about, say, teaching assistants? How are they exploited?

The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the capitalist... If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a school-master is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation. (644)

Refusing to be sausages - Malcolm McDowell and friend leading a boarding school uprising in If....

Teachers contribute to capital directly by the tuition they attract to schools, and by "belabouring the heads of his pupils." Today, when many (though not all) schools are state-run, we have to broaden our notion of 'the owner of the school'. Marx is ready for us, on the many occasions he calls parliament an association of landlords and capitalists. The point is not the source of a teacher's wage:

The concept of a productive worker therefore implies not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect... but also a specifically social relation of production, a relation with a historical origin which stamps the worker as capital's direct means of valorization.

Schools developed to serve the technical division of labour; even if I teach Marxism in school, that in no way changes the "social relation of production" I'm a part of, the fact that students come to university to valorize themselves i.e. to get a job. Marx concludes, "To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune." Touche.

Capitalism eats its young

Profit is 'natural' - this is the mainstay of modern economics. Marx takes pains to show that economics never asks where that profit comes from. It never investigates how a boss gets more from workers than he pays them in wages. But this is the basis of capitalism: the extraction of surplus value from the labour of the worker. It

rests on a natural basis, but only in the very general sense that there is no natural obstacle absolutely preventing one man from lifting from himself the burden of the labour necessary to maintain his own existence, and imposing it on another, just as there is no unconquerable natural obstacle to the consumption of the flesh of one man by another.

The analogy is deliberate. Marx shows how the profit of the ruling class can come only at the expense of the working class - the labour they produce is stolen. In the process, their labour power - their living, vital force - is consumed. They are eaten alive.

Too gory? Last month, The Guardian revealed that Chinese cosmetic companies are harvesting collagen from executed political prisoners and selling it to European consumers. Your new puffy lips could come from the skin of someone shot for promoting separatism.

More efficient than the firing squad, and tastier too - the police of Soylent Green harvest the new crop

The Chinese capitalists involved are shocked, not at the practice but at people's responses to it:

He [the sales agent] suggested that the use of skin and other tissues harvested from executed prisoners was not uncommon. "In China it is considered very normal and I was very shocked that western countries can make such a big fuss about this," he said.

Why raise ethical concerns when the price is so good?

clients from abroad are quite surprised that China can manufacture the same human collagen for less than 5% of what it costs in the west." Skin from prisoners used to be even less expensive, he said. "Nowadays there is a certain fee that has to be paid to the court."

This is the logic of capitalism laid bare. Humans have no value except for the labour power they can sell. If they interfere with the process of profit accumulation, they can be disposed of i.e. shot. But capitalism is too maniacal to let the dead rest: their bodies can be processed to beautify the idle rich. Marx is not rolling in his grave: he's nodding.