What in the hell …

I’ve always liked this Marx quote a great deal: “Force (…) is itself an economic power.” (Capital v1, p916, Penguin edition.) “Die Gewalt (…) [s]ie selbst ist eine okonomische Potenz.”

I’ve never been particularly fond of this Marx quote:
“Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.”

“Die Gewalt ist der Geburtshelfer jeder alten Gesellschaft, die mit einer neuen schwanger geht. Sie selbst ist eine okonomische Potenz.”

I read this again today and had a thought. I never liked the latter because it struck me as teleological, determinist, all that. But today I was looking up a bit of stuff on child labor and women’s property rights at different times and the history of prostitution, and I started to think about Marx’s vitriolic remarks about child labor and I remembered that the Marxs had lost several children, three of five. I though to myself, perhaps the pregnancy-midwife thing isn’t so teleological after all. I don’t know what miscarriage rates were like in mid 19th century Germany and England (did a quick look and didn’t find much), but I checked elsewhere and found that Jenny Marx miscarried in July 1857. Marx wrote “I can only relate verbally the circumstances that attended my wife’s confinement and unnerved me for some days. I cannot write about such things.” (Marx to Engels, July 14 1857.)

*
Metaphors of birth, miscarriage, and midwifery in Marx would be something interesting to do a bit of a look at.

*

Notes on the term Gewalt in Marx here.

*

For later use on capital/sovereignty, economic/political:

“More graphically than anything else the history of the army demonstrates the rightness of our views as to the connection between the productive forces and social relations. Altogether, the army is of importance in economic development. E.g. it was in the army of Antiquity that the salaire [wages] was first fully developed. Likewise the peculium castrense in Rome, the first legal form according recognition to the movable property of others than fathers of families. Likewise the guild system in the corporation of the fabri. Here too the first use of machinery on a large scale. Even the special value of metals and their use as money would seem to have been based originally — as soon as Grimm’s Stone Age was over — on their significance in war. Again, the division of labour within a branch was first put into practice by armies. All this, moreover, a very striking epitome of the whole history of civil societies. If you ever have the time, you might work the thing out from that point of view.” (Marx to Engels, September 25 1857)