| Chris West |
| Copyright 2007 Red Pulp Underground |
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Red Pulp Underground
Young Karl Marx On the day he passed her the note, the number of spindles increased by 1,612,541. She looked at him with eyes like the autocracy of capital and merely nodded. That night, at the boarding house, he wondered what she would make of the first line: Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit is cotton wasted. And he wondered, would she give her royal assent? Despite the Ten Hours’ Act, he had trouble sleeping that night. The would-be capitalist tossed and turned like money and commodities in circulation. He counted jumping English cotton, woolen, silk and flax mills in his head, but to no avail. The life process of society, the Poverty of Philosophy, even Smith and Ricardo, would hold no joy for him until he knew her quantitative determination of his relative value. That night he finally understood why it is said that the product of individual consumption is the consumer himself. The next morning, when he got to University, he faced her with eyes like smelting furnaces. She looked at him with the steadiness of constant capital, and handed him a note back. He kept the leveler in his pocket all day, treasuring it as if it contained the text of the Factory Acts Extension. That night, back at the boarding house, he opened it with shaking hands. Steady, he told himself. Remember: Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. The moment he read it, 338 cotton factories disappeared. It contained only a single line: Out of nothing, nothing can be created. |