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Death and Life in Marx’s Capital: an Ethical Investigation

In this talk I seek to reclaim Karl Marx’s distinction in Volume I of Capital between what, following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, we might call the “conceptual personae” of living and dead labor. For example, in chapter ten on “The Working Day,” Marx memorably and hauntingly observes that “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” My aim is to make visible an important implied feature of Marx’s ethics (as opposed to his moral philosophy) of flourishing. Along the way, I draw on, as well as propose an ethical supplement to, William Clare Roberts’s recent reconstruction of Marx’s political theory in Capital . Moreover, I argue that such a supplement ought to be grounded in the human and nonhuman life-values that, as John McMurtry and Jeff Noonan have compellingly argued, are ceaselessly undermined by the capitalist mode of production. To be precise, in the concluding words of chapter fifteen on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” Marx insists that “capitalist production … only develops the techniques and the degree of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.” In the twenty-first century, I suggest, we should expand on Marx’s point and speak of the capitalist assault on both humanity and the Earth System. As an ethical alternative to G. A. Cohen’s call for an “egalitarian ethos,” I conclude my talk by urging socialists to embrace and cultivate an “ethos of non-domination” in everyday life.