Approaching abstract labor I

Halbwachs, in his study of the life conditions of the worker (published in 1912), shrewdly pointed to the fuzzy boundary between agriculture and industry. Agriculture, we usually assume, deals directly with nature – but as Halbwachs points out, there is hardly a bit of nature in agriculture as we actually know it – from the soil that has been changed in its chemical and geological composition over generations of work, to the organic products that are themselves constantly being changed and adapted by human ingenuity, to finally finished products like cheese and bread, the making of which takes place in buildings, and through gestures that are essentially no different from those employed in making glue. [See Halbwachs 1913, Vol. 1, 26]

Halbwachs’ emphasis on the “gestes” of labor is a welcome attempt to uncover what is partially mystified in Marx’s ‘materialism’. When Marx speaks of labor, he begins with a direct relationship with nature – although this is, in a sense, a fiction, as he tacitly concedes. What he is really writing about is a regime of routines. Although in some vague sense there is a connection, here, with the materialist tradition running from Epicurus through La Mettrie, in my opinion there is nothing in Marx that is as metaphysically musty as his ‘materialism’, which arose as a counter to an ‘idealism’ that has few real correlates outside of philosophy departments. Marx’s ideas could well be agreed to by, say, a Buddhist who could nevertheless insist that all of life is an illusion. Whether it is an illusion or not does not really affect Marx’s articulation of the capitalist system.

Here, in any case, is Marx on the primary labor scene:

“Labor is firstly a process between persons and nature, a process wherein the person mediates, regulates and controls his metabolic exchange with nature through his own act. He encounters natural matter as a natural force. The natural forces inhering in his embodiment, arms and legs, head and hand, he puts in motion, in ordr to assimilate natural matter in a form useable for his own life. When he effects the nature outside of him through this movement and changes it, he changes, at the same time, his own nature. He develops the powers slumbering within it and submits the play of their forces to his own purposiveness. We have to do, here, not with the first animal instinctive forms of labor. Lost in the circumstances of the primeval background in which human labor had not yet completely discarded its first instinctive forms is the moment when the laborer appears as the seller of his own labor power on the commodity market. We are assuming labor in a form, wherein it is exclusively appropriate to human beings.”

That appropriateness, famously, excludes the labor of animals as labor. Their routines – just like the routines of machines – lack purposiveness – although I don’t want to be too philosophisch here – since when Marx fills out this purposiveness, he is evidently talking about the imagination: “A spider commits operations that are like a weaver’s, and a bee, through the building of its wax cells, shames many a human architect [Baumeister]. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best bees is that he builds the cells in his head before he builds them in wax.”

There are a couple of things to note about this passage. Of course, it maintains an old Western hierarchy of thought over action – but this is not really important for me here. It could, of course, be claimed that the omnibus drivers of Paris, who, in the 19th century, were forced to work 14-18 hours driving their buses were working horses who, similarly, were being worn out – and who similarly assimilated the design of the routes in Paris through which they pulled the buses. Or could claim that if one designs a machine to weave the drapery, the product of that weaving, the drapery, will go to market in the same circumstances as the human weaved drapery. It will still be valorized. This claim has been made to show that the living human labor upon which Marx is basing claims about valorization is a secondary distinction, rather than a primary one.

But this is to conflate Capital and the Robinsonaids he mocks. The weaver who uses a shuttle is already using a machine. Or the ditch digger using a shovel. At some point in the process of production, the machine was actually built from real materials – carbon, steel, etc. – that did not hop out of the ground of themselves – and even in the finest robotic factories in Japan, it is subject to human monitoring. Furthermore – to flip the terms around – the notion of mechanization falls, peculiarly, on the working class. Few economists ask whether, in fact, the capitalist could be a machine. There is, obviously, a lag at the moment in the computerization of upper management services because the upper management has guild like features that fight against the obvious rationality of the move. And it would be an odd economist who would suggest that an expert system computer be granted stock options. Why not?

Work is never going to go beyond its social recognition as such, in Marx. The one tie to a transhistorical property is to the imagination. I will take that reference to the imagination as both the starting point for the distinctly human – which may or may not be shared by animals and machines, but which is recognized, in human society, solely with relation to humans - and the moment against which the capitalist system, in its de-skilling or routinizing tendency, works against. A routine is both an act of the imagination and contains within itself the antithesis to the imagination. And once we have down the fact that the act of recognizing human work is tied to the imaginative capacity of the human, one is equipped with the critical tools to sniff out self-interested social contradictions having to do with how humans are treated in different economic regimes - for instance, in the denial that housework is work. Etc.

Now, let's build on this...

A confusing post about monopoly rents and the level of exploitation

I hear the sounds of the city and dispossessed
Get down and get undressed.

Since the 1970s in America, the radical economists have used the model of monopoly rents to critique capitalism – inheriting the progressive tradition of battling against the giant trusts and restoring competition as a way of cutting down the accumulated economic and political advantages of the capitalist class. This way of thinking cuts across the grain of the (intentionally) naïve Manicheanism of the conservative economists, who like to pit the private sector (which is productive) against the government sector (which is parasitic). The notion that production – say, of education – magically turns into its opposite when done by the state is one of the stranger tics of the economic school that comes out of Chicago. But, as the radical economists like to point out, their liberal opponents, too, hold on to some less mystical version of this story, and ultimately believe that the market is the most efficient way to allocate capital – while worrying about distribution effects. The radicals, though, simply don’t believe in the private market at all – that is, they find that the state and the players in the private sector are always intertwined in some way.

One of the radical ploys, then, is to press on the idea of competition. In today’s NYT, for instance, there is an article by Yochai Benkler that asks the question: why has the U.S. fallen so far behind the rest of the developed world in the number of users of broadband, and in the expensiveness of broadband. The answer is that the government has coddled monopolies:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21Benkler.html?scp=3&sq=monopoly%20&st=cse

“IMAGINE that for $33 a month you could buy Internet service twice as fast as what you get from Verizon or Comcast, bundled with digital high-definition television, unlimited long distance and international calling to 70 countries and wireless Internet connectivity for your laptop or smartphone throughout much of the country.
That’s what you can buy in France, and similar speeds and prices are available in other countries with competitive markets. But not in the United States. Prices here are three to five times that much for the fastest speeds — the highest prices among advanced economies.
…

Affordability is the hard part — because there is no competition pushing down prices. The plan acknowledges that only 15 percent of homes will have a choice in providers, and then only between Verizon’s FiOS fiber-optic network and the local cable company. (AT&T’s “fiber” offering is merely souped-up DSL transmitted partly over its old copper wires, which can’t compete at these higher speeds.) The remaining 85 percent will have no choice at all.
Last year my colleagues and I did a study for the Federal Communications Commissionshowing that a significant reason that other countries had managed to both expand access and lower rates over the last decade was a commitment to open-access policies, requiring companies that build networks to sell access to rivals that then invest in, and compete on, the network.”
Among those disposed to Marxist analysis, monopoly rents operate beyond the unpaid labor of the workers embodied in profit. If competition can work on the surface to lower prices, then, the thought is, monopoly can work on the surface to raise them – or preserve prices from the “cheapening of the commodity” which, according to Marx, is one of the responses to competition between individual capitalists.



Marx was always corrosive about the idea that reform, rather than revolution, would remove the fundamental social conditions that immiserated the working class. This is from the Grundrisse:


“As the division of labor produces agglomeration, combination, cooperation, the opposite of private interests, class interests, competition produces concentration of capital, monopoly, stock companies [Aktiengesellschaften] – purely antithetical forms of the unity that the antithesis itself evokes – so private exchange produces world trade, private independence the most complete dependence on the so called world market, and, with the splittered act of exchange, a bank and credit sector, whose accounting books record the smallest equivalences of private exchange. The private interests of each nation divide it multitudinously into just so many nations as it possesses full grown individuals; the interests of the exporters and importers of the same nation stand here opposed to one another; and the national trade contains merely a semblance of existence, etc. in the rate of exchange Nobody should believe because of this that he might be able to abolish the foundations of domestic or foreign private trade through a reform of the Borse. But so many relations of trade and production are generated within the bourgeois society that depends on exchange value that they are even like so many mines, set to explode it (a mass of antithetical forms of social unity, whose opposed character is never to be exploded through quiet metamorphosis. On the other hand, if we did not find veiled, in society as it is, the material conditions of production and their corresponding relations of intercourse [Verkehrsvehältnisse] for a classless society, all efforts to explode it would be quixotic.)” – Grundrisse, 93-94


The interesting reference, here, is to those salvageable relations of intercourse, or commerce – which, in the standard translation of the Grundrisse, are rendered as relations of exchange. Here, I think, Marx is making a stab at what would later be called relations of reciprocity. Given the idea that there are features within the current nature of capitalism that are proleptic of the post-revolutionary state of society, one has to ask whether this or that feature of reform is a step in that direction or away from it. In any case, the accumulation that makes the capitalists as a class stronger is, as Marx saw, composed of unpaid labor that has the effect of making the working class more and more dependent on the capitalist class.

Marx does see that at any point in time, there are positions within the spectrum of ownership that would cause the capitalists to internally oppose one another – for instance, on the question of export and import. These antitheses can have enormous consequences that can be mapped out in various branches of industry. A very rough overview of the American economy since WWII could be made using two simple variables – the rate at which monopoly rents are exhausted, and the rate at which the working class successfully lowered the rate of exploitation – and you would get a picture of a sort of conjunction in the 1970s. At that point, there was a certain flip as the American capitalist class as a whole saw its interest in raising the rate of exploitation for the reason that the supplement of monopoly rents – in the world economy – had shrunk. In such pacts, the importers and exporters can agree.

Three Sun Kil Moon songs for North

Exit

Salvador sanchez

Carry Me Ohio

Competition: chose your level and make your bets

We don’t know what is preferable for us: to defeat them or to be defeated. The sons of Dhritarashtra are in front of us. In killing them, we will lose the will to live. – 6th verse, 2nd chapter of the Bhagavad-gita, from the French translation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

“Within the social circumstances prevailing by way of capitalist production, even the not capitalistic are dominated by capitalist notions [Vorstellung]. In his last novel, the Peasants, Balzac, through a deep comprehension of real relationships, strikingly represents in general the small farmer who, in order to remain in the good graces of his moneylender, performs all kinds of labor gratuitously, not thinking that he is giving him anything, because his own labor doesn’t cost himself any ready money. The moneylender on his side thus kills two flies with one blow. He is spared spending money himself in wages and entangles the farmer, for whom the lack of working on his own field is more and more ruinous, deeper and deeper in the toils of the web of usury.” Capital, 1904 Book 3, 14 [My translation]

Adam Smith’s theory gave a robust place to competition in the changing but stable composition of the ‘natural order’ of the economy. Partly, this role was dictated by Smith’s polemic against monopolies - they disturb the economy, that ‘disturbance’ being underlined by their deviation from the natural order of competition. Of course, for Smith, monopoly is a state intrusion into the private sphere – and indeed, one could say that is still so, insofar as the frontier of intellectual property has replaced the frontier of ‘fresh’ territories. But that polemic is partly based on the idea that competition will make for the social good, as it would lower the price of goods. This is obviously good for conumsers. For the capitalists, as competitors, this will create an incentive to the most efficient operation of the enterprise, and make any technological innovation welcome, in as much as it displaces rivals.

Now, as I have pointed out, the ideological work of the capitalist system is seen at its most successful in creating the character mask of the competitor for the laborer. In our time, the workers work against each other not only in terms of the price they put, or can put, on their work, but also in as much as they must partake of the treadmill of skilling and de-skilling, which has advanced beyond what it was in the first industrial era - much as Marx predicted. The capitalist system seeks the maximum level of interchangeability among all the members of what I’d broadly call the working class – that is, the class who do not own the means of production. Thus, as members of that class strive to attain a higher price for their skills – investing in education and training – the organizations that hire them strive to devalue those skills by breaking down the peculiarities inherent in their routines. That is, the system strives to make them purely quantifiable. Consequently, we see such things as this: in the white collar world – say, of academia – the ‘uniqueness’ of the academic skill set is continually confronted (and the academic anguished by) the quantitative protocols by which the organization not only judges it, but by which it shapes an interchangeable work force. This is true everywhere there is R and D – the single inventor is replaced with the laboratory worker, the engineer is continually forced to market his labor inside the organization, etc. In the eighties, it became faddish – and still is – to speak of the worker’s “owning” their projects. Now, of course, the workers know that the projects are owned by the company. But the false ownership relation does its ideological work by turning the workers into small entrepreneurs, engaged in rivalry one with the other, or in temporary alliances. In this way, the workers never face the organization as an associated whole. To call the project workers the ‘owners’ of the project is an interesting instance of what Althusser meant by interpellation – that the first ideological act is the identification implicit in greeting, so to speak.

This is almost all I want to say, at the moment, about competition on the level of the relations of the workers among each other.

Competition as the system wide entrance of the capitalist system into world history has a history in Marx that we have been following too. One way of thinking about it –as per Marx’s example, taken from Balzac – is this: wherever the full force of capitalism confronts non-capitalist economic formations, capitalism devises strategies to exploit that formation. Capitalism, in other words, plays to win. The non-capitalist formation – or at least, those formations that might be considered ‘pre-capitalistic’, with different bonds and obligations that shape what can and cannot be exchanged, what the worker is aiming to achieve, how ‘property’ is owned, and in general, what rules govern the reciprocities that make up the non-capitalist economic order – does not, similarly, play to win. It may resist with military force, but it does not expand – that is, it does not expand against the capitalist system. The Apaches may seize the territory of the Navajos, or the Comanches may raid San Antonio, but their sense of purpose does not have any correspondent to the capitalist desire for new markets.

There are 20th century anthropologists who would disagree with this to some extent. Yet I will hold this out as a general rule over the last three centuries. Although within the capitalist system, as I have insisted, there are strong subsystems structured by reciprocities that capitalism has never been able to overturn, and which it even depends on – the transactional order, to use Maurice Bloch’s term, of the non-capitalist French peasant will never win in its contest with capitalism. It will never even become fully conscious that it is competing until the competition is over – hence, the strong nostalgic impulse in the literature of whatever culture in which this competition has been staged.

But how about the Smithian level of the capitalist class itself? How can we rely on the solidarity of that class, as Marx does, to understand the essential features of capitalism, if that solidarity yields, so easily, to competition among the capitalists?

In fact, there is a certain folk believe that this is where Marx was wrong. The story goes like this: although in the first stage of capitalism, it was to the interest of the great industrialists to lengthen the work day and diminish wages to the greatest extent possible, at the same time a sector was emerging that depended on the sale of consumer goods – and thus, allied with the workers to pass government imposed reforms that made mitigated the plight of the workers and made them a market. These consumer goods were peculiar in that they increased return on investment, instead of decreasing it. The basic design of an automobile, for instance, allowed for numerous kinds of automobiles to be made, and through marketing and further design, for the conumer to be continually in the market for a new automobile. Thus, competition of various kinds – between branches of production, and between capitalists in the same branch of production – produced an incentive that, firstly, set the standard level of living above the subsistence level, which meant that the workers were not only able to replenish their life functions and become consumers upon whom capitalists depended, but also actually accumulate assets. Keynes once speculated that rentier capitalism would die in the future, as there was less and less need for the rentier. Instead, it widened to include a considerable portion of the working class.

A variant of this folk story has been the legend under which we have lived for the past thirty years.

More in my next post.

the face of necessity: competition

“The true mystificator seeks not to appear to be one, but to be one. On the contrary, Mallarmé is paradoxically conscientious about appearing to be a mystificator in order not to be one. One has already seen this in relation to his obscurity. Imbued with that truth that the highest art is accessible only to the very few, he did as he wanted to by intentionally emphasizing the hermetic side of his genius, sparing the public the pretention to understand him, the error to suppose that they did understand him.” – Thibaudet on Mallerme

But the affair here has yet another background. With insight into the nexus collapes, long before the practical collective collapse, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions. Thus, it is in the absolute interest of the ruling classses to eternalize thoughtless confusion. And why otherwise would the sycophantic pundits (Schwätzer – enthusiasts) be paid, that are able to play no other scientific trumpcard, as that one ought not to think at all in political economics!

Yet satissu perque. In any case it is shown how very much these pastors of the bourgeoisie are mistaken, that workers and business people understand a book and you yourself have found your bearings in it, while these scribes (!) complain, that it is quite an indecent thing to put their understanding at a loss.“
- Marx, letter to Kugelmann over Capital, July 7th 1868.


Irony has many sins on its conscience, even if it is the most useful of all tropes – one of which is that, ironically, what is labeled as ironic is often simply unexpected or paradoxical. We live in the era in which the irony of the masters has become the irony of circumstances. Hardy’s phrase is correct.

And thus, the question of understanding. Mallarme wrote with the full expectation that he would be understood by the few; Marx wrote with the full expectation that he would be understood by the many. Yet, as he was fully aware (as expressed in the letter to Kugelmann), understanding so often depends on what you desire to understand. Malllarme, of course, treats the desire to understand as, primarily, a desire, which requires teasing, flights and returns, follies and almost unspeakable unions. Understanding presents itself as the lab coat and the icy fingers, but to the eye of the poet, these are mere emblems of play. To the eyes of Marx, on the other hand, there is also a strong desire not to understand. In fact, today, it is rather easy to see, looking at the productions of the economists, that the split Marx pointed to between the understanding of the scribes and of the lay people is broad enough that one could say, the economics of the economists are recognized as such only by students in economics classes, while the economics of everyday life are recognized as such by a mere handful of economists, all shunted to the sidelines. Marxism, put into broad outlines, has a history of lighting people’s minds on fire. It seems to align itself much better with the vernacular understanding of capitalism than any theory based on maximizing utility. Hence, the cordial hatred it has always received from the scribes.

And yet… as I pointed out in my last post, there is a tendency to chisel out of Marx’s work the Marx one wants to embrace. The Marx, for instance, who objected to the idea that the historical sketch he had worked out in Capital was a universal solvent was dismissed almost effortlessly by twentieth century Marxist who were sure that Marx had given them the key to all inevitable economic development. In the collapse of Communism, the wheel has turned – and one tends to underestimate the strong, strong tug of the universal history tradition in Marx. But the Marx who sang the World Market in the Communist Manifesto can’t simply be ignored as a babbler, some confidence man pose. He returns to his problems because they are the problems of everyday life in the modern era. He may well be the man of the document and blue book, but he is not weaving the system together in his head. What he is doing – his fundamental move, a move that brings us to the revolutionary core of Marx’s entire work after 1843 – is pointing to the historical conditions that brought about capitalism. It is a move that snaps the bond to ananke – necessity (which, etymologically, is rooted in the Greek term for yoke, fetters, bonds), but poses the problem of the ‘law”.

If Marx were tracing the rise of the ancient system of slavery, he would be dealing with a system that limits itself. Its self understanding is invested in the merging of conquest and growth – an empire grows, but the forces of production depend on purely predatory relations that are, at most, concerned with a systematic need to raid – not to market.

Marx, however, is dealing with a system that exists on a different basis altogether. If, from the revolutionary point of view, the capitalist system is not necessary, from within the system, secondary necessities are created. In the same way, unexpected social features are also created.

One of those features is the advent of a new social identification: the competitor.

Early in the Grundrisse, the idea of competition as a means of breaking free from the bonds of tradition makes an appearance:

“In this society of free competition the individual appears freed from the bonds of nature, etc., that made him in earlier historical epochs the factotum [Zubehör] of a specific, limited human conglomerate. In the prophets of the 18th century, upon whose shoulders Smith and Ricardo still entirely stand, this individual of the eighteenth century makes his transitory appearance – the product on the one side of the dissolution of feudal social forms, and on the other side, of the newly developed forces of production since the 16th century – as the ideal, whose existence is of the past.”

This passage is correlated with others in Marx’s work – he did like Newton’s phrase about standing on the shoulders of giants. When the bourgeois economists try to explain prices in the market, they often turn to the idea of competition (binding it with the idea of freedom) to explain the central nucleus of capitalism, that which makes it freeing and a creator of affluence for all.

Marx deals with the notion of competition as it appears and has effects on several levels in the capitalist system. In the Communist manifesto, of course, Marx is subsuming the whole system to its broadest outlines, with the consequence that competition – which frees the businessman to enter the market – produces a level of necessity – the need to realize the value of his commodities in the market – that creates the expansionistic tendency of the capitalist economy. Under the guise of imperialism, the state, responding to the needs of the bourgeoisie, captures markets and cheap labor – and in as much as imperialism is a state, rather than a private affair (which it evolved into in the 17th century), state economies compete in this way.

However, let’s bracket out this higher level of competition, and turn to something different: the identification of the worker with the competitor – his economic character mask in capitalism. It is at the level of creating the successful synthesis between the person and his or her character mask – on the level of identification - that ideology does its most important work. After all, the point is always to make a given population pliable to the domination of the dominant classes.

That identification is mediated by the fact that, as Marx recognized, ‘the mean of work changes from Land to Land; here it is greater, there it is smaller.” [Kapital, I, Chapter 20] These differences all relate to the world market, of course, which gives us a universal standard of measure. In the considerations on wage labor published in the sixties, Marx considers the ‘small wars” conducted by labor to keep Capital from forcing the wages down to the minimum level necessary to the reproduction of the labor’s life. Of course, this is just one of several strategies involving lengthening work time, or otherwise making more profitable use of the labor power the laborer has sold him. The essential thing here is that the labor power is commodified – and all commodities eventually are priced in the world market. Marx, of course, finds those small wars understandable, but they are still waged under the ‘conservative slogan: an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work.” Whereas Marx has his eye on the revolutionary slogan, abolish wage labor.

The history of the trivilization of the revolutionary impulse is the history of the domination of the conservative slogan over the revolutionary one. The necessary function of ideology in capitalist society is to intervene, in a sense, between those two slogans by making the worker adhere to – identify with – the logic of capitalism. One aspect of that is to make him embrace his true identity as a competitor in the labor marketplace. The whole social value put on competition refers, in one way, to a social reality – but its real effect is to leave that social reality protected from any serious questioning. The impress of necessity in capitalist society is expressed in the vocabulary of competition.

If there were such a thing as Marxist social psychology, this would be a good place for it to start. As Marx has pointed out, under capitalism, there exists a double process of de-skilling and specialization. The worker becomes ever more interchangeable as the ‘human capital’ he acquires is subject to processes that strip it of its skill aspect. This is easy to see in the history of many branches of labor. Secretary work is a well known example – partly because the de-skilling was accompanied by the feminization of the labor force, which all in all had the effect of driving down the cost of the secretary to the firm.

But the de-skilling is resisted both because it leads to lower wages, and because the very freedom from the bonds of natural relationships has relied on a virtue ethic that puts an equal value on every human being. To be valued as a unique human being is the equivalent of a lack of interchangeability – and that feeling penetrates all the way through the work life.

The compromise solution, on the social psychological level, is to embrace the idea of competition that preserves one’s uniqueness at the same time that it turns the interchangeability that the system requires into a personal fault.

Now, let me go up a level.

Necessity in History II

That's the way it's done up here yeah,
the boss, the boys, the fight up here
that's the way it's done up here.

In 1877, Marx wrote a letter to the editor of the journal, Otechestvennye Zapiski in response to an article about him by Nikolai Mikhailovski. Marx didn’t like Mikhailovski’s praise – which he felt was based on a misunderstanding. Marx himself compressed his work in the chapter on primitive accumulation in Capital to that of delineating an episode in the history of Western European society in which “the capitalist economic order had emerged from the entrails of the feudal economic order.” He did not think that the same process would necessarily occur in the same way in Russia. And he was moved to remark about the whole notion of historical ‘necessity”

“Now, what application to Russia could my critique make of this historical sketch? Only this: if Russia tends to become a capitalist nation in the wake of the nations of Western Europe – and during the last few years she has definitely given herself a lot of trouble trying to do this – she won’t succeed without having first transformed a good part of the peasantry into proletarians; and, after this, once led to the lap of the capitalist regime, she will be subject to ist pitiless laws like other profane peoples. This is it! But it is too little for my critic. He absolutely needs to transform my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general march, fatally imposed on all peoples, for arriving at last at this economic formation, which assures with the greatest push of the productive powers of social labor the most integral development of each individual producer. (This is at the same time too much honor and too much shame). Let’s take an example. In different parts of Capital I have made allusion to the destiny that the plebians of ancient Rome attained. They were originally free farming peasants, each working for himself on their own smallholdings (parcelles). In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which separated them from their means of production and substance implied not only the formation of great landowners, but of great monetary capitals. Thus, one pretty morning (there was) on one side free men, denuded of everything except the force of their labor, and on the other, to exploit their labor, the holders of all the wealth so acquired. What happened? The Roman proletarians didn’t become wage laborers, but an idle mob, more abject even than the so called ‘poor whites’ of the Southern United States, and by there side was deployed a mode of non-capitalist production, but rather slave-centered. Thus events with a striking analogy, but occurring in different historical milieux, lead to completely disparate results. In studying each of these evolutions one will easily find the key to this phenomenon, but one will never get there with a skeleton key of a general historico-philosophical theory of which the supreme virtue consists in its being suprahistorical.”

Marx tended, after the Paris Commune, to react more and more with these cautions as his works began to circulate in revolutionary and socialist circles. This period coincided with his re-thinking of what he had written earlier about Indian village communes and the Russian peasant commune. Amie has pointed me to the sketches of the letter that Marx wrote to Vera Véra Zassoulitch in 1881. In this letter Marx retreats from his former certainty about the future of the peasant commune, and its irrelevance to a future communist society. In fact, he now writes that “ In order to save the Russian commune, there must be a Russian Revolution. Otherwise, the guardians of political and social forces will do their best in order to prepare the masses for such a catastrophe” – the catastrophe being the ‘conspiracy’ against the commune mounted by the proto-capitalists, who long to give it the boot.

Interestingly, this letter is treated, by Zassoulitch’s biographer, Jay Bergman, as a document that might have impeded Zassoulitch’s conversion to Marxism. Whey? Because, Bergman writes, “In this letter, Marx stated, in effect, that the general laws of economic development set forth in the first volume of Capital need not necessarily apply to Russia and that institutions peculiar to Russian society could lead it in a direction different from that of every other nation.” Such is the power of the idea that Marx’s Capital outlines what Marx believes to be the ‘laws’ of all economic development that Marx’s own disagreement is considered a lapse on his part, if not a denial of the clear message of Capital.

However, in Bergman’s defense – and in defense of the countless Marxists who have defended just that idea – Marx does have a powerful sense of universal history. The bourgeoisie, as Marx describes them in the Communist Manifesto, seem to face the option of succumbing to economic crises brought about by overproduction of finding new markets – and in so doing, creating a global economy, a world market.

Which I will plunge into in my next post.

The end of the story part 1

Continuing from my post last night.

I resist the teleological interpretation of Marx – that all of Marx is there in every text, and if a text seems to say something that contradicts all-of-Marx, then we just have to either categorize Marx’s works to shunt it to the side – it was polemical! – or decide that it was an unfortunate collateral gesture. On the other hand, I’m not sure that my idea of Marx as constructing his all-of-Marx-ness in his text really purges the teleological impulse completely. Take the issue of the notebook, or the draft. We have these things. They were preserved. But the facile notion that Marx, too, having these things, goes back over them suffers both from lack of proof and automatic assumptions about research and writing that I have found, both in my personal experience and as an editor of others, to be false. I have found, instead, that one’s vital discoveries tend to fade and change and be renewed – that old intentions get submerged by new ones. Yet characteristic themes and inclinations will assert themselves, and the repressed will return.

This is why I favor the problem-based approach to reading monumental texts. For any theme or thesis carries with it both the problems it responds to and the new problems it creates. A problem is as much a token of memory as a thesis. Stripping a writer of his problems – translating his text into something like a list of answers such as you can find in the back of the math textbook - trivializes him.

This returns us to the thesis of necessity and revolution, a combo with a high visibility career in Marxism and twentieth century communism.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx gives the impression that the proletariat will inevitably overthrow the capitalist social order. In a letter to Joseph Weydemeyer dated March 5, 1852, Marx seems to affirm that interpretation:

“Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [dass der Klassenkampf notwendig zur Diktatur des Proletariats fuehrt] 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition [Aufhebung] of all classes and to a classless society. Ignorant louts such as Heinzen, who deny not only the struggle but the very existence of classes, only demonstrate that, for all their bloodthirsty, mock-humanist yelping, they regard the social conditions in which the bourgeoisie is dominant as the final product, the non plus ultra of history, and that they themselves are simply the servants of the bourgeoisie, a servitude which is the more revolting, the less capable are the louts of grasping the very greatness and transient necessity of the bourgeois regime itself.”[Translation from MECW Volume 39, p. 58]

The dictatorship of the proletariat has, of course, a different coloration for readers in 2010, who are distant both from the experience of the 19th century and who are conscious that Stalinism and Maoism were formed under that slogan, among others. In Marx’s time, he could look around the world and see no society that allowed women to vote, no society in which blacks were allowed to vote, and few societies in which there was anything close to democracy in any real sense. Until 1913, in the U.S., the Senate consisted of white men appointed by state legislators. In the UK, the percentage of eligible voters out of the total population put the country on the level of a free medieval German town. According to Frank Thackeray, only about 15 percent of British males were eligible to vote up until the reforms of 1867, after which only one in three males - and all women - were excluded from the vote.In France, before 1848, suffrage was limited to about a quarter of a million voters - out of a population of 34 million. I am, of course, outlining democracy according to its thinnest definition. In the U.S., as is well known, anti-democratic measures were inscribed in the constitution - some of which, like the electoral college, are sill valid. Suffrage was more extensive for white males there, though. Never, until the dissolution of the empire, did Britain’s colonial subjects have any right to vote in Britain’s elections. In 1852, of course, the four hundred million people of India were held, by main force, in the clutches of an old British monopoly, the East India company, which existed as a quite open Mafia, a protection racket. Given this reality, the projection back into the England of Marx’s time of ‘representative institutions’ – such as delight the late Cold Warriors and those who, like Francois Furet, represented some kind of new "anti-Marxist left' in France – will always turn out to be the purest charlatanism, projecting the hard won virtues - such as they are - of the modern state back through its history - as though the Civil Rights marches of 1965-1968 are a good description of the state of ‘civil rights” of Dixie in 1848. Here one sees ideology at its most pathetic. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was the literal truth of Marx's time; of course, Marx and the worker's movements had a lot to do with destroying that state of affairs. That the Western "democracies" owe this to Marx does make the ideologues grumble and moan, since, essentially, they are the ardent workers for bourgeois dictatorship.

Given these cardinal points, the dictatorship of the proletariat would, of course, have been more democratic, even in the 2 percent milk sense of ‘democratic’, than the political arrangements of Marx’s day. If there was a specter haunting Europe in 1852, it was not that the dictatorship of the proletariat would lead to totalitarianism, but that it would upset the system of monarchs, upper bourgoisie and great landowners whose power was woven out of a complex of rotten boroughs, slavery, a bribed press, a servile judiciary operating as an instrument of the executive, and the hocus pocus system of colonial administrators oppressing the great mass of mankind on the ‘periphery’. Capitalism would not have survived real democracy – a point that was clear to all observers, who tended to call real democracy ‘anarchy’ or ‘communism’.

However, I am more interested in necessity as it appears in the Weydemeyer letter. What is ‘necessary’ in history? And what is the relation between revolution – the overthrow of the current system in response to its level of unbearability – and historical necessity? As we know, these questions found their political correlate in the 1880s, as the Socialist party in Bismark’s Germany organized itself as a parliamentary party. Doesn’t necessity find its own instruments? If the new society choses the path of reform to overturn the old society, do we need revolution? Isn’t revolution an outmoded cult, worshipping the past – particularly the French revolution – with the same pathetic vigor Marx skewers in the 18th Brumaire, when he observes that revolutionaries in the past donned the masks of some chosen predecessor and its dead language in order to perform their work?

Guizot, one of the French historians Marx read attentively, produced a theory of civilization based on a primitive bi-polar dialectic. This dialectic captured the positivist sense of what was meant by ‘progress’ in the first half of the 19th century. In the lectures collected in ‘The history of civilization in France”, (1828-1830) Guizot writes:

“I researched what ideas attached to this word [civilization] in the good common sense of people. It appeared to me that in the general opinion, civilization consisted essentially in two facts: the development of the social state (l’état social) and of the intellectual state (l’état intellectuel); the development of exterior conditions in general, and that of the interior, personal development of man; in a word, the perfectioning of society and humanity.”

Perfectioning was still the preferred verb among the liberals in 1828, like some last unexploded bomb from the French revolution. Progress – that ameliorating word, that half and half word that the God of Revelations would surely have spewed from his mouth – just as Marx spewed it from his – had not replaced the icy utopian glitter of the perfect with the tradesman’s bonhomie of profits accrued, year by year.