What is Breakfast?
Chapter 1 of Capital revisited
I had settled in Montreal with all the possessions I could fit into my VW Golf. It was as close as I could get to starting a new life. My home was the second floor of a triplex, shared with two other renters, situated on Rue Galt in Verdun, adjacent to La Belle Province restaurant. Waking up for my first full day in my new city, I had nothing to eat, so I got dressed and walked next door. La Belle Province was what is called a “greasy spoon.” I ordered breakfast and got talking to the proprietor of the restaurant and the cook, both of whom were slightly surprised to find out that I had moved from prosperous Alberta to the economic backwater of Quebec. That week, engineers had discovered a giant crack in the concrete of McGill metro station. These two city experts, whose local knowledge was infinitely greater than mine, told me all about it. “This whole fucking city is falling apart,” said the cook, visibly quite disgusted.
From the beginning to the end, thirteen years later at the peak of covid, my experience of Montreal was to a large degree mediated by the knowledge and opinions I was exposed to while eating at cafes or restaurants—or while trying on shoes or renewing my car insurance or buying milk at the corner epicerie. Through fleeting or recurring encounters with people in the service industry, I obtained a layer of knowledge and opinions about the city and the broader world, supplementing whatever I had been exposed to through the news or by reading books.
There is no other word quite appropriate for these encounters except relationships. In Pointe St-Charles, the neighbourhood where my wife and I lived together for nine years, we had a relationship with the head chef as well as the owner of our local restaurant, Machiavelli. That restaurant exerted an ever stronger emotional pull on us the longer we lived in the vicinity. It was where we celebrated birthdays, two baby showers (one for us, one for a friend) and almost every other notable event, big and small. One evening, Machiavelli’s owner gave us an abridged yet detailed history of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). He was so animated and passionate, enthusiastically gesticulating as he stood there between the small dining tables, almost as if he was about to re-enact some of the crazy fights he’d seen.
In one of the last monologues Matt Christman delivered on his Cushvlog, he spoke briefly about the experience of driving around Los Angeles, his adopted city, in a car. Viewed from the screen that is formed by the windshield, other motorists had become mere obstacles, impediments or, worse, threats. Driving teaches people—slowly, and over many decades—to dehumanize others. I’ll often say to my wife before embarking on a car journey through the city: “The best thing that can happen is nothing.” I leave the house to pick up my daughter from school, and the streets are icy, and yet I drive there and back without a single unpleasant encounter with another human. Nothing happens. Success!
It’s my argument here, as I slowly turn my attention to Chapter 1 of Capital by Karl Marx, that this nothingness constitutes the invisible dome over the capitalist society we live in. The more we identify with a commodity, the more we are numbed out to the world. When we’re in a particularly pathological relationship with a material product—be it a car, a drug, pornography, jelly donuts—the more futile the attempt at satiation becomes, until we feel almost completely hollowed out. We feel the commodity stealing our lives. There is not a single $100K truck on the market that can make up for the fact that you’re still stuck in a tailback at Edmonton’s 51st Avenue and 99th Street, waiting for the damn freight train, over a kilometre in length, to go past. In moments like these, surrounded by dozens of other people—all of them trapped, just like you—the feeling of nothingness and total futility can become almost overwhelming.
The structure of our society is designed to funnel an ever greater share of wealth upwards to the top one percent. This is a misery-inducing and ultimately futile and destructive endeavour. Yet we continue. We are perennially deluded into thinking that funneling wealth upwards is not the purpose of our lives. We allow ourselves to think that the purpose is, in fact, something more meaningful or rewarding. Some people, with their property investments and shares and entrepreneurial side-hustles have convinced themselves that they are the capitalists! But the greatest obfuscating force is the one that is perhaps best represented by the car windshield. There is always a barrier between us and our fellow humans—the commodity. As one of the pre-eminent Marxist scholars of our era, David Harvey, explains in his online introduction to Chapter 1 of Capital: “People under capitalism do not relate to each other directly as human beings; they relate to each other through the myriad products which they encounter in the market."
A lot has changed for me since I first read Capital in 2009 (with help from Harvey). The most important change as far as my politics goes is that I have become convinced that it’s just as important to read the Bible as it is to read Marx. The old version of me is now quietly scoffing: you fool! You got hooked on the opium of the people! The Marxist worldview is commonly thought to fit poorly, to say the least, with a Christian approach to life. And yet there is a way out of this apparent impasse, I now believe.
A sanity-saving digression
Metaphysics is the study of “the first causes of things and the nature of being.” Arguably metaphysics raises the most important questions the human mind can conceive. Yet there is no room for metaphysics in contemporary society, which, the more you reflect on it, is decidedly weird, not to mention alienating. If you go around asking questions about where humans come from or whether we’re alone in the universe or how did life begin you’re basically seen as a time-waster. Boring! How can such questions even be answered? It is now a given that there was a Big Bang, all the rocks that eventually became planets had been been blasted outwards from a high density core, and on one of the rocks, ours, primordial life-forms started crawling around in the ooze, and after many millennia, through the process of evolution, these life forms became humans—that’s it! Now you can play Monopoly while wearing only boxer shorts made in Bangladesh while eating Cheetos made in Alberta while swigging Pinot Noir from Burgundy, France—and nobody can judge you for it.
If indeed the emergence of human life on this planet is all a matter of sheer coincidence and luck, and there is not a “prime mover” behind even the Big Bang, then there is no one to thank for our existence and there are also no sources of ethics and morality outside of the rules that various societies devise for themselves. If this is the case then we can simply keep going in our current direction. However, if you’re even slightly skeptical about this version of events and if you believe that more than mere happenstance is responsible for human life, then it is quite possible that the total rejection of any metaphysical questions by contemporary society will leave you feeling somewhat empty and purposeless—drifting along in a vast, uncaring void. If everything is random and there is no justice, your life doesn’t matter and your death will hardly matter either.
There was a time when metaphysics was one of the primary concerns of philosophy, but then philosophy itself—at least any philosophy to exert significant social influence—went through a major change. I have not done the hard intellectual labour required to wrap my head around all this. Instead I’ve taken a shortcut through a wonderful essay by Stan Goff called “The Battle of Woke Hill,” which does a fantastic job of explaining how western society, especially the United States, ended up so polarized between right-wing and left-wing (the “woke”) while also illuminating what happened to philosophy and metaphysics along the way.
A significant milestone in this history is the declaration by Karl Marx, later published in “Theses on Feuerbach,” that “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways... The point, however, is to change it.” Prior to this, argues Goff, philosophy could be chiefly contemplative. This is to say that philosophy, which by no means excluded what we call religion (Aquinas had, for example, synthesized Platonic and Aristotelian thought with the teachings of Jesus) offered a pathway through which all humans could search for the truth. It was of great importance that in this searching the truth be given and received—not imposed. "What is given can only be truly received if received freely," says Goff.
But when philosophy became instrumentalized—when the highest good was changing the world—it swept along everything with it and wielded the tools of science and rationality while ignoring truths that did not have their origin in either. In time, this meant that everything became politics. This was just as true for the left (under the influence of Marx) as it was for the right. If you’re seeking to change the world, contemplating our relationship to the stars seems like a total waste of time. Far more important to launch a thousand satellites, to dim the light of the stars, and to monetize the new frontier that capitalism has opened up in the night sky. So it is, writes Goff, that “philosophy’s contemplative character (which Marx and Engels rejected) has been ‘consigned to the dustbin of history.’”
Goff calls this a war on transcendence. The very notion of redemption through Christ becomes unthinkable in a world gripped by scientism. Redemption is only possible by changing the world—either through a socialist revolution or the violent, totalitarian state dreamed of by Hitler. In contemporary society, only human effort can redeem humans. “Taken to its logical conclusion,” writes Goff, “in a disenchanted world, ethics now has to be enclosed by politics.”
People of previous eras were guided by myths that conveyed truths about the human experience, and we haven’t exactly discarded myths in our current era. Not at all. We have myths such as the myth of progress or the ascendancy of technology that has come to save us all from lives of drudgery and boredom. We have the new priests of Silicon Valley. We have the myth of infinite wealth accumulation. We have the myth of a world with no boundaries or constraints. We are just as obedient to myths as the ancients were, with the difference being that our myths have very little to say about how we are to treat each other or what constitutes a good life. When Republicans declare Democrats to be a threat to the very existence of the United States of America, you know we’ve traveled very far from myths that nourish a polis and instead towards an all-encompassing ideology that seeks to vanquish all other competing ideologies.
A few months ago, when I was on a local politics show discussing an article I had written about K-12 education, I declared myself to be relatively untroubled about using whatever pronouns—him/her/they/them whatever— a kid in class tells me to use. After my throwaway comment on the show, I saw several people on Twitter praising me for being an ally of trans rights and of trans youth.
No, no, you’ve got me all wrong, I wanted to retort, but I didn’t, because Twitter is the last place you would go to build understanding between people. So I remained silent. But I want to be quite clear here: I am not an ally. Why? Because to be an ally assumes an enemy, and I don’t have an enemy. On the issue of trans rights, my opinion does not and should not matter. I am not taking a side.
I believe this is the declaration of a free individual, of someone who gets the choice of stepping outside of political instrumentalism, to spend a few blessed moments somewhere more vast—just me and the stars. But I’ve spent more than enough time on Twitter and YouTube to know that the majority of people believe the realm of politics constitutes an entire moral universe. I don’t think anything good can come of this state of affairs. It will lead only to widespread insanity, zealotry, violence and disillusionment.
Arriving at the conclusion that Marxism is only for the material world and that there are worlds bigger than this one—encompassing this one—has been my way out of what had seemed to be a dead end. Ethics is bigger than politics. Philosophy is for more than the battles of the moment. God doesn’t care who you are, or appear to be, on Twitter. Winning battles against your fellow humans is ultimately futile. If you’ve chosen to be obedient to a faith, of far greater importance than winning is communion with your fellow humans.
Relationships all the way down
Chapter 1 of Capital starts with an exploration of the commodity. A commodity is the building block of capitalism. The commodities Marx seems most fond of in his discussion are linen, corn and coats. If he’d written it today, he might have discussed gasoline, iPads and Cheetos. A commodity is whatever satisfies a human desire or need. That said, not everything that meets a human desire or need is a commodity. If I had the land required (and the skill) to grow myself some tasty tomatoes, the fruits of my labour, if consumed by me and my immediate circle, are not commodities. They’re simply tasty homegrown tomatoes. A tasty tomato, grown by me and devoured by me, has only use-value. A tomato becomes a commodity when it enters the marketplace to be exchanged with other commodities. As a commodity, therefore, it has an exchange-value.
Marx goes on to observe that each and every commodity is exchangeable with every other commodity. He supposes that this is possible because each and every commodity must have something in common with each and every other commodity. Since I could, in theory, trade an iPad for a cocker spaniel, there must be something in common between the two commodities to make such a trade possible. That “something” is a third quality of a commodity that Marx calls value.
What then, exactly, is value? If commodities have a use-value, which is quite tangible (I can drink it, eat it, take it for a walk and have it lick my face) as well as an exchange-value, which is also fairly tangible (I can trade it for something else) then what is this third quality of commodities, this mysterious thing called value? Value seems to be an abstraction, since it is not something that I can actually see in the commodity. But whatever this value is would appear to be very important, since it is what makes all commodities exchangeable with each other. It turns out that value is socially necessary labour time. This is to say that what gives a commodity value is the labour that went into it. But of course, that labour must be “socially necessary.” Your labour must create a use-value for somebody else.
There are, of course, competing theories to the labour theory of value. While it’s a key component of Marxist theory, as well as for the scholarship of David Ricardo and Adam Smith, contemporary economists consider it a mere relic of history. The dismissal of the labour theory of value from modern-day economics textbooks has had the effect of reversing our perspective about where value comes from. Value does not inhere in commodities because of the labour time required to make them, goes the argument. Value is the subjective judgment of a consumer who needs or wants a particular good or service at a particular point in time and is therefore prepared to pay for the labour time required to get what he or she wants.
However, even if the labour theory of value has fallen out of favour, this doesn’t mean that the core of Marx’s argument crumbles. “The key point is that workers are the source of the products that have value and capitalism systematically forces them to surrender some of that value to the boss,” writes Ben Burgis for Jacobin.
Socially necessary labour time is the labour time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent at that time and place. Marx differentiates between concrete labour and abstract labour. The first, concrete labour, creates use-values. If I make a coat out of linen, I have applied my concrete labour into something with a use-value: I can wear it! Marx goes on to generalize about concrete labour in a way to encompass nothing short of the entirety of human history. Concrete labour is a condition of human existence. We interact with nature, and have done so since time immemorial, by making use-values out of the material things we find around us. So concrete labour, as a creator of use-value, is not limited to a capitalist mode of production. But when the objects of our labour, commodities, enter into exchange with each other, our labour-power is being abstracted. Our labour becomes the equivalent of somebody else's labour, as objectified in the commodity which is going to be exchanged. It is abstract labour, no longer merely tied to one particular use-value, but abstracted to a system of exchange with a potentially infinite number of other products of labour.
You cannot find the value of a commodity within the commodity itself. You cannot take a table, dissect it, and thereby calculate its value. "Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values," writes Marx. As David Harvey notes in his lecture, a similar dynamic is at play when we consider gravity. You can't calculate a gravitational pull on a stone by dissecting the stone. Gravity only appears when the stone is in relation to other things. Commodities only have value by virtue of their relationships with other commodities. Marx says that these relationships are, by definition, social. There is no inherent value to a commodity outside of the value that is actualized once it enters the marketplace.
In the final part of this section, Marx explains the impracticality of commodities being traded with other commodities—for example, of trading an iPad for a cocker spaniel. We know that while barter systems exist, under capitalism they would be an absurd distraction from the main event, MONEY. Within a system of exchange of increasing complexity, the place of an iPad in the very simple example above is taken instead by some other commodity. This commodity is what is called the universal equivalent. What we have all gotten used to over time is the idea of gold as the universal equivalent. But for the sake of the argument Marx builds here, the universal equivalent—the money commodity—is serving the exact same function as an iPad in the example above. Money is the agreed-upon commodity against which all other commodities will be compared for the sake of discussing value.
The last section of Chapter 1 is called "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret," and is perhaps the most interesting. Fetishism is used in this section by Marx to describe the way in which commodities appear to take on a life of their own. Insofar as a commodity is useful (it has a use-value) it is not all that mysterious, but just as soon as it is exchanged, something very strange indeed happens: “it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”
We are encouraged within a capitalist mode of production to personify commodities to the degree that I will say "I love Camembert," and "I love my new cell phone," but discouraged from thinking about how we might feel about the labourers who created the Camembert or cell phone in question. Indeed, these things cannot matter too much to us, because while it is fairly straightforward to have a relationship with the limited number of commodities that make up our daily lives, it is downright impossible to have a relationship with the millions of people responsible for making and distributing those same commodities.
In his lecture, David Harvey asks us to consider the following: where does your breakfast come from? If I contemplate the food that I might serve up on a Saturday morning, mangoes and cherry jam and croissants and coffee and milk and so on, it quickly becomes apparent that answering Harvey's question is almost impossible, or would be the result of a good week or more of in-depth investigation. Traceability is one of the most fraught questions in sustainability. How exactly can you be sure you’re buying a product that was produced under sustainable and ethical conditions? You have to go all the way through the supply chain, which will typically take you to many different places in the world, to examine the provenance of each and every component part of your breakfast. Was child labour used to harvest the coffee beans? Did a labourer get injured or killed in the warehouse because of unsafe working conditions?
Capitalism, Marx argues, has concealed the human relationships behind commodities, whether those commodities are the food items on my table or anything else I need or want throughout the day. When it comes to commodities, we generally hold goods such as coffee in very high esteem, but the labourer who brought it to our home? Not so much. Although less a concern for Marx and in the 19th century generally, capitalism has also concealed the relationship between humans and the planet. This is something we have grown to appreciate in recent decades.
I began here in Montreal, talking of my relationships with people in the service industry, in a nostalgic frame of mind. These kinds of relationships are becoming more tenuous and contingent for me, especially in a city like Edmonton, where car dependency compels the majority, more often than not, to drive past storefronts at sixty kilometres an hour, merely parking for the sake of entering a store, making a purchase, and hurrying out again. And this is to say nothing of ordering from Amazon and bypassing human relationships altogether.
In the millions of interactions that constitute world-traversing supply chains, it’s almost exclusively relationships in the service industry that are visible to us. They are the relationships that put a human face to capitalism, a reminder that someone is working to produce something of value. Since the advent of our extreme cost-of-living crisis, I see a lot of people complaining that the practice of tipping has become egregious—with suggested tips starting at 15% and going up well beyond 25%. Customers are feeling pressured and angry. But everything that is expensive for you—the rent, the mortgage, car insurance, property tax, and so on—is also expensive for a service industry worker, and tipping is making the difference between a very mediocre wage and a slightly less mediocre wage. Denying the server who brought the eggs benedict to the table a healthy 20% gratuity deflects from what should be the true zone of conflict. The landlord who owns the restaurant is pocketing thousands every month while hardly lifting a finger.
But beyond any of this, breakfast is also something else entirely. The material conditions that give rise to exploitation at every step of the supply chain—from the harried barista in your neighbourhood cafe to the tenant farmer in Ethiopia who got twenty cents for the bag of beans that is sold to you for over $20—are so unsustainable they call out for a revolution, and yet there is another, even more important perspective on breakfast. Arriving at the cafe, having endured the traffic without incident, I feel, once again, the preciousness of life—a life that can only be properly appreciated, especially in the extended crisis of these times, if viewed as a gift. It took me a very long time to have any appreciation for a good or service that I didn’t ask for or pay for with my hard-earned money, and yet here I am, very sentimentally saying that life—which is bestowed from a store of infinite abundance—is the gift with a value that surpasses all others. With this in mind, I sit down at the table, smile at an old friend, ready to receive the food that, while on one level is a product of labour, is on another level a treasure from the store of infinite abundance. This planet is still the only one we know of with arable land that can feed a population of eight billion. There’s no other planet like it—not even a planet with a primitive sea slug or two-inch shrub. Thank labour, thank God, for breakfast!
Notes
For today’s Substack I revisited a blog I wrote in 2009, which was a direct response to the first chapter of Capital and David Harvey’s lecture on it. I’ve included some of that work here, while revising it for length and clarity.
And just as I was wrapping up, I came across a fantastic excerpt of an interview with the late author, Kurt Vonnegut.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: There's a little sweet moment, I've got to say, in a very intense book—your latest—in which you're heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say—I'm getting—I'm going to buy an envelope.
KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then?
KURT VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know... And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
It was so in tune with what I was writing at the outset of this post—proof there is nothing new under the sun—that I felt compelled to include it.
Book
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Karl Marx, Penguin Classics; Illustrated edition (May 5 1992)
Essays, Substack, lecture, etc.
“Metaphysics”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/metaphysics
“The Battle of Woke Hill,” Stan Goff
Class 01 Reading Marx's Capital Vol I with David Harvey
“Adam Smith of the Labour Theory of Value.”
https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/steven-horwitz-adam-smith-on-the-labor-theory-of-value
(Explains succinctly how labour theory of value was replaced in modern economic theory by the marginal theory of value)
"Karl Marx Was Right: Workers Are Systematically Exploited Under Capitalism," Ben Burgin, Jacobin.
https://jacobin.com/2022/06/karl-marx-labor-theory-of-value-ga-cohen-economics
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Breakfast