On “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” by Karl Marx ***

Das Kapital isn't available in English on Project Gutenberg and is actually a three-volume work that I was kind of dreading reading on my economics reading list, given its length. I've read that it is actually at points enjoyable, with humor and anecdotes, but my guess is that it's similar to Smith's Wealth of Nations, insofar as the anecdotes were obviously of their time and so not necessarily easily referenced to things occurring in our day and also full of responses to economic writing of the day. So I settled on this shorter work, which is available for free at Project Gutenberg and is, in some ways, apparently, a kind of distillation of Marx's economic thinking. My fear that on some level its density would prove daunting proved to be somewhat true. I'd have had to spend a lot more time with it to really comprehend what Marx was saying, and I likely would have had to review Smith's work as well as read up on the work of a few other theorists.

The book begins with a basic premise, which is that at base all compensation/money/production is based on labor. When we swap goods, we are swapping man hours. It takes person X 6 hours to buld a book shelf; it takes person Y 3 hours to put a new fuel injector system into a vehicle. I swap two fuel injector system installations for one book shelf. Of course, this sort of direct swap isn't really workable, so money gets involved as an intermediary. Most often this has been gold or silver, because these are stable production units, as opposed to, say, a bag of flour, which eventually goes bad. So then the commodity is swapped for money, which is then swapped for another commodity (C > M > C). As silver or gold become more rare or abundant, the amount needed to swap also goes up and down, just as with commodities, creating changes in prices. In time, rather than carrying gold or silver, paper began to be used as a stand-in for the gold or silver (after all, even gold and silver wears down with time, so it's safer to lock away an ounce of gold than to carry it around). (Interestingly, I hadn't thought of it before, but British money has terms like pound and sterling, which likely refer to the weight of the metal originally serving as money.) Theoretically, the paper can be turned in for the gold and silver. But of course, sometimes, with the rise or fall of the value of that gold or silver, the paper might end up being worth more than the actual gold or silver as a commodity (or even the coin); when that happens, it woud be tempting to melt down the silver dime, for example, and recoup the value of the silver rather than use the coin itself. Paper, as such, Marx seems to kind of frown on as essentially useless/pointless. (Another book, which I'll read later but which I have read a few chapters of previously, called Debt makes the point that there never really was a barter economy, that we've always had money of a sort, and that money is really a form of IOU. In that case, paper with a number on it is as workable as a monetary unit as anything else. You pay me 6 hours for the book shelf; I pay you 3 hours for the fuel injector installation, and I pay Jay, down the street, 3 hours for trimming my trees.)

Near the end of the work, Marx shows how commodities, distribution, exchange, and production are actually all just forms of production. I'm not quite sure I buy this argument. It's true, insofar as to produce something one has to distribute it and exchange it, and also as Marx notes, any given commodity is also often the source of production. That is, the book shelf is made from other commodities—the tree one planted and then cut down, the lumber that was manufactured from that tree, as well as the nails, paint, etc., that went into the shelf. But I could as easily say that production is just a form of commodity. In fact, as far as public economy goes, I'd be more inclined to say the latter. Why? Marx, of course, wants to come back to labor, which is production. But that puts the emphasis on the amount of time spent making something. Whereas, all that labor, to me, seems pointless if in the end no one wants the commodity. If we produce six book shelves but can only sell two, then we have excess production. We might as well just burn the extra book shelves, which means there as good as never existing. If we fail to distribute the shelves, we have production without commodification. Really, the labor is only worth something outside of the home if/when that labor is distributed and commodified via exchange. I can produce a lot of spittle, but I can't commodify it. As such, does the time spent producing spittle amount to any kind of applicable labor unit?

In a final appendix, Marx argues that the greatest artistic works come from baser societies—that is, ones in which production is more rooted in humans than in the machines they have created. He uses Greek literature as his example, saying that those were the greatest works of all, better than Shakespeare or anything since. In an age in which labor rests within a steam engine, it is harder to write about the real essence of life, than, say, when one is wrestling against so-called gods of the elements. It's another argument I don't buy.

On “An Essay on the Principle of Population” by Thomas R. Malthus ***

This famous work essentially espoused the idea that there was an upper limit to the degree to which the earth could sustain human population, one that Malthus felt was, even in his life around 1800, substantially already at the brink of being reached. That's the popular understanding of it, at least, that I'd always gleaned. And to some extent, the book is about that sort of thing, but to me it seemed really the musings of a consumant pessimist.

The basic theory/idea that starts off and informs everything else in the work is one in which Malthus claims that population increases at a faster than the ability of humans to find ways to supply food for that population. If we were to graph the two items, one could imagine the food supply increasing as a constant rate—a straight line going slowly upward; meanwhile, the population line would go up at an accelerating rate—a line like the right half of a parabola. This is because, essentially, people love sex. We just can't help ourselves. So whether there's food or not, we're going to keep making more people. (The issue, of course, is that when the two lines meet, that parabola will come to an end: population wouldn't keep going up; rather, a lot of folks will die of hunger. In a sense, overpopulation takes care of itself. Malthus never really addresses this.)

Beyond that, Malthus argues against various other writers who espouse various rosy ideas about humanity. We won't ever put off our reproductive desire or our wish to have more. We will continue toward greed and avarice. Society is ever headed toward a bad end. If and when things do improve (temporarily), that will just encourage more population and more desire. That is, even as we increase our resources, it's inevitable that our desires and our population will always outstrip capacity. Efforts to alleviate suffering of less fortunate only further the problem by encouraging more population among the less fortunate and thus more suffering. Is there a solution? Malthus doesn't really propose much that's workable. The essay seemed more a head exercise and set of opinions than anything substantiated in statistical anaysis.

On “The Antichrist” by Ernest Renan ***

I came across mention of this old book in Paul Trebilco's history of the church in Ephesus. He noted Renan as one of the few who heavily prognasticated the eventual move of much of the first-century Jerusalem church to Ephesus. Since that was a subject of interest to me, I figured I should read it. The connection between churches was something of a disappointment; Renan sort of asserts that, but there isn't a lot of concrete evidence, as really all there is anyway are implications (otherwise, there'd be more written about this subject).

This is actually volume 4 of 7 of Renan's huge work on the early history of Christianity. This is the one that focuses most on the time period I figured would be more applicable: the destruction of the Jersusalem and the work of John in Ephesus. There's good info here, but alas, one often doesn't know where Renan pulls it from, given that there are no notes attached. Furthermore, this work is old, and it shows, insofar as Renan wrote at a time when it was considered good form to wax poetic on subjects. As such, he often takes thirty words to say what could be said in ten, which can be irritating. There are quite a few comparisons to Europeans dynamics at the time he was writing in the nineteenth century, which can be interesting but usually aren't, and while no doubt such comparisons probably were of value to his contemporaries, they didn't serve much use to this reader more than a hundred years later.

Renan's work is apparently somewhat controversial. He was a proponent of Jesus being just a man, not divine. (And Wikipedia notes various antisemetic tropes and racism in his larger work.) But surprisingly, as this volume brings out, he did mostly accept the traditional authorship of the New Testament. He was a big proponent of the idea that the Apostle John wrote Revelation—and likely the other items attributed to him. He didn't stand much for the John the Presbyter idea. All this makes for an interesting contrast, since so many modern critics espouse ideas that much of the New Testament (sometimes as little as seven letters of Paul) was written decades after its supposed authorship by pseudonymous authors. Such makes it much easier to dismiss the facts of the New Testament and make whatever claims one wishes with regard to early Christianity and Jesus. Renan doesn't do so much of that, and yet still managed to reach the conclusions he did regarding Jesus.

Much of this volume is given over to Renan's explication of Revelation, which he sees as being written in response to events in the Roman Empire, and especially with regard to Nero's persecution of Christians in Rome. Reading Revelation “historically” rather than as prophecy gives it quite a different spin.