LBW: It seems to me that that Marx because
he was addressing various processes that
were generating the conditions that were
in today that even though he wasn't I
would say I don't think he was
spiritual or religious in any if you
want to use the word spiritual but he
doesn't seem to have any sort of you
know belief in some sort of spiritual or
realm that is not very that does not
that cannot be perceived
outside of just material conditions I
guess he acknowledges certain things and
you point this out and it's actually
pretty interesting because like I said
most of my understanding of Marx has
been through a very through a lens of
like we need to overthrow religion and
we need to overthrow these these
oppressive structures and you know I
think of like Mao's China you know like
let's get rid of all of the old ways or
something like that or you know no
religion of any kind but you tease out
certain passages Marx wrote that have a
really strong animist quality to them
it's really really interesting
RHYD WILDERMUTH:
I think the one place where you know I
could kind of go on about this for a
long time and one day if I'd ever have
the time and the resources for this I
would love to just you know write out
something about all of the alchemical
references that Marx uses in
Das Kapital but you know there are there
are multiple places where he talks about
the crystallization of value and the way
that labor transmutes value you know
both of those are direct references to
alchemical language so that would that
would mean and it wouldn't be surprising
because of course in the 1800's
you know almost all intellectuals
had a passing knowledge of alchemy
because a lot of the scholars and
philosophers from the century before
had themselves been alchemists so even if
you didn't believe alchemy was a thing
even if you didn't
there's any magic or any any real
science to the whole thing you would
have been familiar with the language so
yeah you can't immediately say that
because Marx uses that language he had
you know any sort of esoteric beliefs
but the point that the point where
he gets shockingly animist is when he
talks about the organic composition of
labour it's kind of a complicated
concept but actually you know I can
find the quote while we're doing it I
almost have it memorized but it's when
he talks about dead labor and he
for some reason you know and he doesn't
do this elsewhere but he
talks about vampires and it was one of
the places where it's like wait a minute
what are you doing you're not
as atheist as you're letting everybody on to or letting everyone
else think but the I'm sorry I'm
trying to find it her but basically
he says capital is dead labor that
vampire like sucks the life
of living labor and lives the more the
more it sucks so in that passage he's
talking about how he's talking about a primitive accumulation which
is the way that capital was gotten from
slaves from colonial pillaging and
conquest from enclosure and other just
seizures of wealth that wealth is what
became the capital that the capitalist
class now and in the beginning of
capital used to build factories to buy
large spots of land in order to grow
cotton to buy more
slaves to pick that cotton to then send
it to some mills that would comb it and
then change it into clothing etc so
he's talking about that wealth that
they started out with as being dead
labor which is to say that that it came
from living people who worked the land
who worked in the factories etc and
created wealth that wealth is what the
the capitalist takes and then you know
like vampires it continues living by
sucking more off of living labor so
you know the the best thing is there a
good way to look at this is let's look
at all of the money that was gotten from
slavery from the transatlantic slave
trade etc you know that money didn't
go away when when the slaves were freed
the the people who had accumulated all
of that wealth then needed to invest it
somewhere else they couldn't keep
using slaves anymore so a lot of them
opened up factories or they opened up
banks so they bought lots of property
etc and then they hired more people to
work in those now they had to hire them
they could have just forced people to do
it any longer and then those people who
were working for them increased the
wealth of the rich person of the
capitalist and so therefore made that
original accumulation and that primitive
accumulation of slave capital become
bigger like and that's how it continues
existing but you know when he talks
about dead labor when he talks about
the way that capital is composed
organically yeah if you were to look at most animist traditions from South
America from Africa you would see that
you know this isn't a concept that's
weird to them at all they're like no of
course like he's talking about
ancestors like he's talking about the
way that we continue to live the
lives of our ancestors that
everything around us was built by the
dead and we are composed of the dead
you know like we we eat dead things and
we continue to live and then we
will die and
feed more life you know like
out of nowhere supposedly this
complete atheist who hates religion and
all of that
hits on a deeply animist concept and
uses that to explain how the capitalists
are constantly exploiting not just us in
the present but continue to exploit our
ancestors and the wealth that they got
from those ancestors
LBW: Yeah it's yeah
that's you know you bring up
something which is I think people
who defend or yeah defend
capitalism I guess or believe it's sort
of based on this sort of idea freedom of
entrepreneurship and all these things
like that capitalism is the best version
of human nature right that this comes
from our impulse to I don't know to
make something of ourselves
whatever that means right and in what
really blew my mind and you go over
this in your book and it it seems to be
in direct reference to what Sylvia
Federici brings up in her book Caliban
and the Witch and other writings she has
written which is you know through the
enclosures through the witch hunts that
was that's the big part of it right it's
the sort of getting rid of those
that stand in even just in the way they
live and exist in the world stand in
opposition to the new order that was
emerging after feudalism was kind of
seen to be not really relevant any
longer and they were moving into a new
way of of doing things and all of
these things had to be passed and this
was all done through the state right you
have powerful governments that were kind
of imposing these new things on people
and you know you mentioned the
enclosures which literally is like to
close off land that was once the Commons
that the peasants basically would share
and that was not available to them any
longer or was really really restricted
and this was happening all over Europe
right and we can kind of see how that
gave rise to you know the privatization
of nature and and practically everything
else in order for this system to even
exist at all there had to be slavery
there had to be the enclosures the
witch hunts like the level of violence
that had to be thrown at people over
hundreds of years to create the
conditions required for capitalism to
function at all it's like completely
forgotten almost like it's not in it's
not present in the awareness or
consciousness of many people anymore
