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.