Violence is when you hurt people to get them to do what you want.

An ideology is when you convince people to want the wrong thing.

This opposition, between two fundamentally distinct kinds of power, has often been seen

to exhaust the forms of power that capital exerts over us.

But argue certain mal, a young communist philosopher from Denmark, to grasp some of the fundamental

questions of our era, why his capitalism not collapsed, why can we not escape it, and

how does it seem to strengthen itself through crisis?

We must understand a third form of power.

That form is what Marx called the mute compulsion of capitalism, and what's certain calls

the economic power of capital.

This power can often seem abstract, delusive, and yet its basic idea is extremely simple

to grasp.

We are compelled, always, to return to the market for our survival, because capitalism

does not let us grasp the means through which we might live without it.

Surnand's work is similarly abstract, dealing as it does with capitalism in its ideal average,

rather than in its specific instances, that his account starts very concrete, with what

he says all humans have in common, their vulnerability, their capacity for surplus production,

and their use of tools.

It's from these very practical beginnings, rooted in what we do every day, that Surnand

builds his systematic account.

My name is Richard Hames, and on this episode of Navarro FM, I spoke to Surnand about the

role of anthropology in Marxism.

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