267). But Marx transforms the traditional problematic, for he does not treat
usury as its own final term, but inscribes it within capital. No longer is usury
an inexplicable or unholy breeding of money; instead it is revealed to be a
derivative form of the “tanning” of the workers.
Marx is slow to reveal this. He plays out the theme of the productivity of
capital until “the voice of the worker” pipes up in his discussion of the work-
ing day (1976:342), and it returns once again in the first chapters of Part Four,
when Marx begins to discuss relative surplus value. The productivity of cap-
ital is not unreal for Marx. The subsumption of labor actually does render
capital productive. The monstrous (ungeheuere) collection of commodities that
greeted our eyes at the entrance to political economy has become the animated
monster (beseeltes Ungeheuer) (1976:302). The problem of incontinence – the
going beyond measure of bourgeois wealth – has been found to conceal within
it, as a more fundamental moment, a measureless and measure-destroying
productivity.
In both Inferno and Capital, this confrontation with monstrous productiv-
ity leads the pilgrim to fraud. The usurers provide Dante the transition from
the circles of violence to the circles of fraud; the two-pronged examination
of the subsumption of labor allows Marx to reveal that capital’s productivity
rests upon the capitalist’s fraudulent extraction of surplus-labor.^16 Exploitation
is mentioned for the first time only in Chapter Nine, and it is only then that
Marx begins to use the language of “tricks, artifices, temptations, threats and
falsifications” to characterize capital (1976:337). Precisely where Dante enters
into the greatest detail – crossing the circle of fraud takes thirteen cantos –
Marx begins the fine-grained historical treatment of the struggle between the
working class and capital, the details of which occupy the long middle of
Capital.
As in Dante’s Hell, each level of Marx’s critique is conditioned by the lev-
els that come after it. There could be no monstrous collection of commodi-
ties without the animated monster of capital, and no capital without the
fraudulent exploitation of the workers’ labor-power. But what underlies the
possibility of exploitation? In order to buy labor-power on the market, I must
already have accumulated some capital; I must have a surplus on hand, over
and above what I need for my life, with which I can purchase the means and
The Origin of Political Economy and the Descent of Marx • 47(^16) There is, therefore, a doubling back in Marx’s descent; Part Three descends from
violence into fraud, and then Part Four retraces this same movement.