metaphysical subtleties

I’m most dissatisfied with the fact that, in the interesting comments in my post on circulation work, I squirted a darkness as of squid ink over the issue at hand.

Since the point is important – the place (or not) of productive and unproductive labor in Marx – I’m going to make a brief post that will only make sense to those who’ve read the comments thread.

I think the question is mired, a bit, in another issue. Undoubtedly, capitalism contains a heterogenous mix of incompletely capitalist economic forms. A woman who works as a maid, or a groom in the stable on a rich man’s estate, are not much different than a craftsman who runs his own shop. What Marx calls simple circulation locates a stage in the development of capitalism, in which the valorization process is, as it were, immature. The maid’s service in the house is paid for immediately. If she is exploited, it is not because the people who pay her are using her to create capital – at least directly. As a self employed person, she may use some of her earnings to buy some of her own supplies. Or she may buy a lottery ticket. The thing is, from the point of view of the bourgeois economy, she does not produce value in the full sense of the term.

But what if this maid finds the backing to hire other maids, and starts a maid service?

Here I think is where the controversy starts.

The maids are performing the same service –cleaning. The maid company contracts with customers and pays the maids. At this point, I think, we have three points of view.

1. The maid’s service itself, cleaning, produces no value, because cleaning itself is not a productive activity. It is a non-productive service. Although the maids have commodified their time, this has no bearing on the question at hand. The maid service – that is, the company – produces no value. This seems, at least, to be hinted at in the Grundrisse.
2. The maid service, cleaning, does produce value, and thus we have capitalism with all the trimmings. Productive and unproductive labor refers, then, to stages in the development of capitalist enterprise, not to the output of any particular enterprise. The maid’s service company produces value. In the full sense of the word.
3. The maid service does produce value for the cleaning service, but – this is my position – Marx sometimes uses the category of productive and unproductive value in such a way that he artificially separates the maid’s cleaning service from, say, the toy manufacturer. But, I contend, he is inconsistent about this. In the end, he doesn’t come down with a clear distinction between a maid service company and a toy manufacturer.

My view, of course, is 3. Unproductive versus productive labor – which, as Marx says in the Grundrisse, is, from the bourgeois point of view, correctly separated by Adam Smith – seems to me to unhelpfully intrude on the story of the genesis of the commodity. In the back of my mind, I am thinking of the fetish for industrialism of the communist economies – my suspicion being that they picked up on this distinction, and it became one of the drivers in the process of trying to produce a certain kind of proletariat, one concentrated in heavy industry.

But for all that, there is still something at the bottom of the productive/non-productive distinction which has some hold not only in the economy, but in our social practices. Take Maricopa, Arizona. I’ve mentioned Maricopa before – this NYT article about the place was burned into my brain cells. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/realestate/keymagazine/406ariz-t.html?pagewanted=all Most of the economic activity in Maricopa was building houses for other people to buy – from outside Maricopa. In a sense, the only reason to live in Maricopa was to sell other people on living in Maricopa. This reflexivity, and the lack of endogenous “industry”, seems to cry out for the word, unproductive. Just as circulation work seems to valorize valorization, so, too, certain forms of labor seem ‘parasitic’ on other forms of labor, so that one wants to organize one’s analysis around a hierarchy, going from the productive to the unproductive.

Yet I think, ultimately, this is a reversion to superstition. One must resolutely remember that one’s point of view about the usefulness of a product or service has no bearing on its use-value, which is an objective matter. Thus, one only wants to find mature valorization – not just the exchange of money, but the full circuit that entails surplus value and the reproduction of capital – and say, this is productive labor in a fully developed capitalist system.

Commodities and Reality, or Balzac and a peach

I found a reference to a conversation recorded by Leon Gozlan between Vidocq and Balzac in Robb’s biography of the latter. I went to Gozlan (o, the things you can do on the Internet!) to read it myself. I am not sure what to make of Gozlan, who may well have been heavily fictionalizing himself. In any case, he sets this story about the time that Balzac was trying to cut Les Paysans for its serialization. Readers of LI will remember that Marx chose to illustrate the force of the capitalist system, as it borders older, archaic modes of production, with the story of Les Paysans.

According to Gozlan, the process left Balzac tired and discouraged. Vidocq, who was among the company who had gathered at Balzac’s place one night, saw this, and said:

“I say that you give yourself a lot of pain, Monsieur de Balzac, to create stories of the other world when reality is before your eyes, near your ear, under your hand.”

“Ah, how charming, you believe in reality! I would never have supposed that you were so naïve. Reality! Tell me about it: you have returned from that beautiful land. But go on – it is we who create reality.”

“No, monsieur de Balzac.”

‘Yes, monsieur Vidocq; you see the true reality, it is this beautiful Montreuil peach. The one which you call real, it grows naturally in the forest wild. Very well! That one is worth nothing. It is little, sharp, bitter, impossible to eat. But this one here that I am holding has been cultivated over one hundred year, obtained by trimming it to the left or the right, by transplantation to drier or looser soil, by certain grafts – this one at last, which one eats and which perfumes the mouth and the heart. This exquisite peach, it is we who have made it the only real one. The same procedure occurs with me. I obtain reality in my novels the way Montreuil obtains reality in its peaches. I am a gardener in the realm of books.”

Reality and value – such will be our text, following up my post concerning circulation work. LI’s occasional critic and reader, Mr. Chuckie K., advanced the thesis that I misunderstood Marx, here. Let me recommend the comments thread. And let me advance to an example – a piece of reality that was incorporated in 1820, in Paris, under the title, l'assurance des succès dramatiques. This agency, run by a former wigmaker named Porchon and his partner, a M. Sauton, would hire people to make a play or an opera a success. These claqueurs would be sure to applaud, laugh loudly at the jokes, cry copiously at the sad parts, and in other ways make sure that a playwright’s opening night went well. Porchon would even loan money out to the writer – Alexander Dumas was one of his grateful clients.

We possess a ‘Memoir of a Claqueur” (1828) by one Louis Castel Robert. Robert’s story was of a reality that, like Balzac’s peach, required the intense cultivation of history – the history of France in the 1820s. Having inherited some money, and being of a tender, philosophical disposition, Robert, a young man in Paris, naturally pissed his funds away on drink, women, books and idleness. At the end of this process he confronted an unpleasantness that many of his type encountered, viz, debtors prison. In Sainte Pelagie, he had the good fortune to fall in with a man named Mouchival. Mouchival was a common looking fellow – yet Robert soon learned he was not so common after all. He was only in Sainte Pelagie due to a misunderstanding, practically - having co-signed on a loan for a friend – for Moucival, like Porchon, was always a friend in deed – he found himself being charged with it. The man, however, was quite equal to the situation. As an entrepreneur in the claqueur field, he had simply written to a rich client who fancied himself a dramatist and expressed the need for some cash, for which he would, in the future, supply such services as may be required, yours truly. Thus, he was utterly confident of rescue. Rescue, in the form of francs, eventually did appear, but sent by an actress – through which he, in turn, rescued his promising young acquaintance, Robert. Which is how Robert found a place to fill in the world as a claqueur.

The claqueur was a character type in Paris. The yellow gloves of the claqueur were particularly distinctive, and became a nickname for the claque crowd. – les gants jaunes. Robert writes that Mouchival gave him ‘elementary instructions in the science of cabales, and treated, as an experienced master, all the articles of the tactics proper to making plays succeed or fail.” Robert learned the “circumstances in which it was necessary to applaud or whistle, cry or laugh, be silent or scream, yawn or blow your nose.”

The romantics, particularly Schiller, had invested a utopian hope in the division between work and play; but for the capitalist, for whom every boundary is a living thing, that division promises not the sweetness of life, but an unexploited margin of profit.

As Mouchival soon teaches the young man he has inexplicably taken under his wing, the surface work of the claqueur is just one link in the chain of profit. A more noticeable link is in the work of selling tickets. A certain number of tickets are allotted, free, to the claqueur. He can sell the superfluity himself. But the claqueur is not the only one to scalp tickets. Indeed, a good part of the theater world, from the actor to the usher to the critic, supplements their income on such sales.

Well, more on this subject in the next post.

Haunted by the circulation worker

I was talking to a friend the other day about Marx… do I talk about anything else, lately… and I explained that Marx just can’t be right when he writes that that “circulation” work does not produce value. In fact, as I have discovered, the secondary sources, those offshore oracles, are generally silent about circulation work. David Laibman has a good run down on the topic, concluding: “Of the three significant definitions of unproductive labor – socioeconomic, evaluative and analytic – the first is operational but uninteresting; the second operational but unanchored in value-theoretic categories; the third ambition in the value-theoretic sense, but unoperational, and therefore invalid.” In other words, let’s smack our hands together and say, enough of this nonsense!

Unfortunately, mine is a life of few experiences, and simple pleasures. Wordsworth, a man of independent means who wanted a life of few experiences and simple pleasures, had the rentier income that allowed him to go tromping through hill and dale until he came upon a waterfall in the wild, and later to make a poem about how the sound of it haunted him. Myself, I bike through gas fume haunted streets to libraries, grocery stores and coffee shops, listening to mp3 music that blots out the aural chaos around me, and so I am haunted by more inward tending concerns – for instance, circulation work. Like Laibman, I find Marx’s notion that it creates no value to be puzzlingly wrong; and because Marx starts his analysis this way, the category has been rather thrown away. But if one considers that the entire solution to the problem posed by the reserve army of the unemployed since the Great Depression has been to absorb it either into work for the state or circulation work, surely there are characteristics proper to it that have impressed themselves mightily on the wax tablets of our collective unconsciousness (along with archetypes of caves and the fear of hot hairy mouth of some predator eating your ass).

For, although Marx makes a distinction here that is overridden by the general bias of labor theory of value – that makes a surprisingly regressive turn back to the material object, as though we had never escaped the artisan’s artifice, and the tailors of the Federation of the Just had finally gotten the better of him – at the same time, Marx’s conclusion fits with a certain social emotion that ‘things are better.’ A large subsection of modern literature is devoted, in one way or another, to the melancholy of circulation work, the perception that, day after day, what one does is “shuffle paper around”. In Studs Terkel’s Working, he sets his interview with a stone mason in the very preface of the work – which makes a lot of aesthetic sense. “Stone’s my life. I daydream all the time, most of the time it’s on stone. Oh, I’m gonna build me a stone cabin down on Green River. I’m gonna build stone cabinets in the kitchen. That stone door’s gonna be awful heavy and I don’t know how to attach the hinges.” This is the pure poetry of life. So that one feels a distinct comedown when the man says: “One of my sons is an accountant and the other two are bankers.”

All of these things, in a manner of speaking, passed before my eyes when my friend said that she was teaching Bartleby the Scrivener to her class next week. For Bartleby’s archetypal power has only increased as the circulation worker has become the dominant prole in the Western world.

Hmm, I want to add more to this, but I will have to do that later.

Mythology and revolution

There is a beautiful sister and an ugly sister. We know such tales from childhood.

There is the allure of the beautiful female face that seems to summon us. And there are the hissing snakes for hair and the gorgon features of the face that repulses us.

In his 1848 article for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung about the June revolution of 1848, Marx gives us a story of the beautiful sister and the ugly sister in terms of revolutions. The part played by the beautiful sister is the universal revolution that overthrows the signs of the old order. This revolution is conducted under the sign of the universal family – except it is no longer a family with a father at the head of it. No, this is the family of brothers, of fraternity. But this revolution conceals within it an undermining fact. Just as Cinderella does all the chores that allow her sisters to appear beautiful, so, too, does the proletariat do all the chores that allow for the beautiful overflow of fraternal feelings. When the proletariat gets tired of playing this role, it rises up. This is the revolution of the ugly – the ugly sister of the beautiful revolution. The story shifts, at this point. Cinderella’s godmother does not turn her into the beautiful woman she secretly is. Rather, the godmother – a chthonic which – takes Cinderella’s place.

“The February revolution was the beautiful [schöne] revolution, the revolution of universal sympathies, because the contradictions which erupted in it against the monarchy were still undeveloped and harmoniously slept next to one another, because the social struggle which formed their background had only achieved an airy existence, an existence in phrases, in words. The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive [abstoßende] revolution, because the phrases have given place to the real thing, because the republic itself has bared the head of the monster by knocking off the crown which shielded and concealed it.”

The repulsive face of the monster - who does it belong to? The phrase about the repulsive revolution suggests that the monster is the working class – a monster concealed by the old order. But it is more than the working class. The proletariat is the product of the bourgeois system. Thus, in the house of the father, the monster is concealed – and when the brothers rise up to destroy the father – a story of Freud’s, remember – what do they find? Father was a bluebeard. But they, the brothers, far from being innocent, have merely used the crown to conceal their own work.

The monster’s head comes back in the preface to the first, German edition of Capital. Here, the same unveiling takes place. Again, what the monster is, and who is responsible for it, becomes cloudy – is the monster the system or the product of the system?

Where capitalist production has been completely assimilated by us, for example, in the actual factories, the conditions are much worse than in England, as the counterweight of factory regulations is missing. In all other spheres as, besides, in the whole of continental Europe, not only the development of capitalist production hurts us, but the lack of its development as well. Next to modern distresses, a whole series of inherited distresses also oppress us, springing from the vegetative continuation of archaic, obsolete modes of production, with their train of obsolte social and political relations. We not only suffer from the living, but the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!

In comparison to England, social statistics in Germany and elsewhere on the continent are in a miserable state. Yet they lift the veil just enough in order to allow us to see the Medusa head behind them.”

Who would want to see the Medusa head? Here, there is – or there is supposed to be - a crack between the mythological and the revolutionary. To lift the veil and gaze upon the repulsive medusa is the first step, for the revolutionary, in the long process of sezing control of the social conditions that produced the Medusa.
And yet, is the mythological so easily tossed aside? Reading the history of the socialist movement, it is impressive, to me, that the greatest actors in that movement seem to come up with the worst readings of Marx. Instead of emancipating themselves by way of the ugly sister’s strategy, they stand, rooted to the spot, by the sheer power of the system, and find ways to deal with it.

Meanwhile, those, like Lenin, who did understand that the system was ineradicably rotten, end up instituting capitalism by way of the state. Lenin’s NEP is the only live fact in communism – its heir is the policy of the Chinese communist party.

“Perseus needed a cap of invisibility to pursue the monster. We pull the cap of invisibility deep over our eyes and ears, in oder to be able to deny the existence of the monster.”

Every day, the newspaper bring us evidence of the existence of the monster, and every day, we pull our cap more deeply over our eyes and ears. Today, in the business section of the NYT, there is a story marveling over the docility with which the people of Lithuania have allowed the government, on purpose, to slash spending and sink the Gross Domestic Product by 15 percent. Why did the government do this?

“But Mr. Kubilius and his team [the president of Lithuania]say that with a budget deficit of 9 percent of G.D.P., a currency fixed to the euro and international bond markets unwilling to lend to Lithuania, the government had no choice but to show the world it could impose its own internal devaluation by cutting public spending, restoring competitiveness and reclaiming the good will of the bond markets.”

Restoring competitiveness, as one finds later in the article, has a correlation with the booming business of suicide:

“The psychological toll has been immense. Suicides have increased in a country where the suicide rate of 35 per 100,000 is already one of the world’s highest, local experts say.

According to figures collected by the Youth Psychological Aid Center, telephone calls to its hot line from people who said they were on the verge of committing suicide nearly doubled last year to 1,400, from 750.”

Meanwhile, the electorate awaits… for something.

In the reception area of the bank’s headquarters, bankers laughed and drank beer from a well-stocked bar as rock music played in the background.
It is a far remove from the soup kitchen at St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church in Vilnius, where 500 people a day line up for a free meal of soup and Lithuanian pancakes.

Mecislovas Zukauskas, 88, a retired electrician, has lived through the devastations of World War II, the Soviet occupation and, most recently, the death of his wife. He is taking his pension cut in stride.
“The government does what it wants to do,” he said. “We can do nothing.”

Can we really do nothing? And if we agree to that, what was the beautiful revolution for, anyway? Questions that no NYT reporter asks. A former New York Herald reporter, however, would remember that the point of revolution is not, finally, to end up in the good graces of the bond market.

Dixi et salvavi animam meam.

But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands.
9Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?
10And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.”

Marx’s God was entirely higher order of divine beast, who had in his hand a bill of indictment linking the thread counts of every yard of sack cloth to the bloody fingers of its blind seamstress.

As I have indicated, Marx’s well known doctrine according to which the contradictions of capitalism vow it to a perpectual cycle of crisis became a polemical weapon to move socialism to an accomodationist position, one in which the governing class, periodically repenting its evils and reforming its regulations, would thus turn away the evil that otherwise would be done to them by the proletariat.

It was over this issue that the lion roared his last great roar – which, as is well known, discomforted the lion’s supposed heirs. One of the costs of inheriting holy writ from a man who is still alive is that the author can unexpectedly round on the adorers. When Marx received the Gotha program, around which the Socialist Democratic Worker’s Party was to be organized, he recognized the imprint of his old antagonist, Lassalle. Old antagonist, and yet co-worker –for it was through Lassalle that Marx’s name became known in Germany. After Marx’s death, Engels, who was, now, the revered elder, found that nevertheless, times had moved on, and Marx’s intemperate remarks (had the prophet gone senile?) were not the kind of things to be published for everybody to read. Marx’s glosses are scathing - about the rhetoric of the program, about the nationalism, about the idolatry of the state, about the peace and democracy platitudes that disguised the police state, about the sentimentalizing of work, about the desire to chase women – witches once again! - out of the public sphere, and seemingly willing to pick nits concerning labor and labor power.

But Marx never made a mountain out of a molehill that did not, to his eye, contain a Himalayan potential. Lassalle’s men, Marx saw, had moved communism backwards: back to a theory about distribution. Back to the pre-scientific socialists.

Marx never wrote a book entitled “Distribution”. The point of Capital was not that the system of distribution was unjust – rather the point of Capital was that the system of production was inhuman, a contradiction at every point of what the definition of the human that had emerged in the great revolutions that had founded our modernity.

Lassalle, of course, won. At least he has up until now. Marx’s demand is so total – involving as it does the dissolution of classes as the result of the overthrow of capitalism – that the reader, even today, instinctively flinches. Leon Bloy, Marx’s Catholic antithesis, has the same fierce sense of demand, which, for him, is the essence of divinity. God demands that you eat his flesh and drink his blood. And all of civilized Christianity, and every truism about family, and every attempt to make that demand the equivalent of being good, is an absolute falling away from the divine. The absolute, in the fallen world, always takes on the mask of the banal.

… In the Grundrisse, Marx clearly sets out the contradictions inherent in capitalism, the sum total of which expresses itself in crisis.

"First of all, there is a limit, not inherent to production generally, but to production founded on capital. This limit is double, or rather the same regarded from two directions. It is enough here to demonstrate that capital contains a particular restriction of production -- which contradicts its general tendency to drive beyond every barrier to production -- in order to have uncovered the foundation of overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capital; in order to have uncovered, more generally, the fact that capital is not, as the economists believe, the absolute form for the development of the forces of production -- not the absolute form for that, nor the form of wealth which absolutely coincides with the development of the forces of production. The stages of production which precede capital appear, regarded from its standpoint, as so many fetters upon the productive forces. It itself, however, correctly understood, appears as the condition of the development of the forces of production as long as they require an external spur, which appears at the same time as their bridle. … These immanent limits have to coincide with the nature of capital, with the essential character of its very concept. These necessary limits are:

(1)Necessary labor as the limit of the exchange value of the potential of living labor, or of the wage of the industrial population;
2) Surplus value as limit on surplus labour time; and, in regard to relative surplus labour time, as barrier to the development of the forces of production;
(3) What is the same, the transformation into money, exchange value as such, as limit of production; or exchange founded on value, or value founded on exchange, as limit of production. This is:
(4) again the same as restriction of the production of use values by exchange value; or that real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, a form not absolutely identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all.
However, these limits come up against the general tendency of capital (which showed itself in simple circulation, where money as medium of circulation appeared as merely an evanescent thing, without independent necessity, and hence not as limit and barrier) to forget and abstract from:
(1) necessary labour as limit of the exchange value of living labour capacity; (2) surplus value as the limit of surplus labour and development of the forces of production; (3) money as the limit of production; (4) the restriction of the production of use values by exchange value."

These internal limits of capitalism are the key to the surface problem of distribution. Because production is tied indirectly to use value – on the one hand, the use value, to the capitalist, of the working time he buys, and on the other hand, the use value to the potential consumer of the commodity – there is no direct connection between the use value of the product and the quantity in which it is manufactured. It is, as it were, manufactured blindly. But in as much as the more the capitalist can exploit the laborer, the more surplus value he gains, the tendency is weighted towards overproduction. This is rooted not directly in the conditions of the marketplace, but more fundamentally to the conditions of production under capitalism. In as much as circulation work is subject to the same logic, it, too, will be overproduced. Every time we pick out a region of commodification in capitalist society, we will find the tendency to overproduction. Thus, to use Arlie Hochschild’s example of the emotional labor of the airline hostess – it, too, will be subject to overproduction. If the smile is your asset, you will find – as Hochschild’s interviewees affirm – that you never stop smiling. Emotional labor consists in producing, after all, the signs of emotion. Whether these signs are ‘real’ or not is as immaterial to the enterprise as the advertising slogans on the juice can are immaterial to the grocery store that sells it.
Thus, production is both limited by the incentive system that draws it forth to continually misalign itself with total use value – giving us, for instance, more pills for male pattern baldness, and less research into malaria – and is compelled to offer ever more commodities and ‘choices’, ultimately driving down the level of the realization of the value of these things for the capitalist.
…
At the end of the Gotha program, Marx signs off with the latin sentence we are quoting as the title of this post. It means, I have spoken and saved my soul. This must be the last sentence in my little book on Marx. As the critique of the Gotha Program might be Marx’s last roar, it is important to note that he was a lion to the very end.
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crisis two

According to Marx, capitalism as a subordinate economic system already appears in feudal Europe by the sixteenth century. Braudel and Polanyi would agree with that assessment – others would look at proto-capitalist enterprises in Northern Italy in the 14th century. Still, the full development of capitalism – wage labor as the predominant form of labor, the circulation of the commodity to money to commodity circle, the development of a world market and a credit market, an industrial technostructure, all really come together in the ‘advanced’ nations of Western Europe in the 19th century, and in North America, in the U.S. and Canada.

One could add that, since Marx, we have evidence for a demographic shift in households in the sixteenth century, as the paterfamilias household, in which sons and their wifes lived in the household complex with their parents, becomes much rarer, compared to the nuclear family type, in which the sons and their wives start new households – at a cost that forces up the age of marriage for both sexes. In a study of the Shipibo, an Indian group in Peru, Clifford Behrens discovered that the advent of a market economy in the sixties and seventies was marked by a similar shift to nuclear households, where before a matrilinear household pattern – husbands and wives living with the wife’s mother, which Behrens calls “uxorilocal’ – had held before, and in fact been the prevailing ethos in economic activity (a man had to provide for his wife’s mother). [Human Ecology 1992, 20: 4]

Since Marx’s death, we’ve seen two world wars and one cold war; we have seen the rise and fall of a communism that, at least, operated in Marx’s name, even if not in Marx’s spirit.

Capitalism is, of course, still here.

It has survived crisis after crisis. The capitalist class has managed to either physically exterminate revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow them or coopt the working class into arrangements that continued the process of valorization by which the capitalist accumulates surplus value from surplus labor.

At some point after Marx’s death, the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism due to its inherent crises became, as Karl Korsch pointed out in 1933, a point of entrance for reformist socialists into the system. If both crises and revolution pointed to the end of the capitalist system, then perhaps, from the point of view of crises, one could bargain with the system and fix it – in return for the worker’s receiving a higher share of the product.

Korsch was certainly not the only one to question the viability of this strategy.

Undoubtedly, we could look at the developed countries and say, Marx was wrong. The position of the working class was on the upswing, and as less variable capital was needed, the reserve industrial army was comfortably shoved into circulation work.

However, if we broaden our view, we might notice that the productive process, relocating in ever cheaper locales, is still actually mired in 19th century conditions. Meanwhile, the social cost of development has become global. While the U.S.S.R. might be remembered best, in the end, for having created the greatest human caused environmental disasters in history – this is surely true of the assassination of the Aral Sea – the acidification of the ocean and the unstoppable increase in CO2 in the atomosphere, which is leading to a global disaster such as homo sapiens have never faced, is surely equally condemnatory of the system we now live under.

It is in this broad overview that I want to locate crisis in Marx. Historically, I’d contend that the crisis doctrine has allured Western intellectuals into Marx’s teaching more than revolution. It has given Marxism the cast of a doctrine that preaches the historical inevitability of the collapse of capitalism due to contradictions in its immanent laws.

My presentation of Marx, on the contrary, is based on revolution – which hypothesizes that history is not, like nature, ruled by inevitable laws. However, a system may be constituted by relationships that derive, inevitably, from its fundamental structures. It can and does generate a second level of necessity, that is coordinate with its predominate mode of production. Revolution, which is itself dependent on a level of un-endurability, or alienation, does not emerge as some similar inevitability in the system. A system can collapse without causing a revolution, or without its collapse being caused by a revolution.

Such, at least, is the way I take Marx’s idea of revolution, which distinguishes it from the crisis of capitalism.

The questions is, then: what causes the crisis? And how does capitalism recuperate, or reproduce itself, given crises?

Let’s start with the contradiction between the classes. If the worker is dependent on the capitalist to the extent that he needs to sell his labor in order to survive, the capitalist is dependent on the workers to the extent that the purpose of his enterprise is to make a profit. The capitalist could care less about the efficient allocation of capital – the latter has never bought a yacht or merged two corporations in a deal paying off handsomely for the management. The capitalist only cares about profit. “The contradiction between production and valorization [Verwertung – realization in the standard translation] – the unity of which is capital, according to its concept – must be grasped still more immanently than simply as the indifferent, seemingly independent appearance of the individual moments of the process, or that the totality of the processes against each other.”

Marx projected an interesting scenario to explain crises as something that originates not in the circulation of money, but in the sphere of production. The scenario begins by distinguishing between two types of capitals – constant, which is all the dead labor in durables, instruments, machines, etc. – and variable – which is live, human labor. It is from that live human labor that the capitalist derives his profit – that is, the surplus labor objectified in the commodity. However, there is a tendency that the capitalist can’t avoid – the increase in constant capital in relation to variable capital. Competition, working on the surface, More dynamite, more meat, more Barbie dolls. More kinds of Barbie, more flavors and cuts of meat, more sophisticated explosives.

Marx makes a controversial move here – he claims that this general tendency – more constant capital, less variable – expresses itself in the fall of the rate of profit. Or at least that is one interpretation of the fall of the rate of profit.

There is, of course, another Marxian interpretation which claims that the working class makes the rate of profit fall when they become strong enough to bargain for higher wages, or another words, they cut into the surplus value of the capitalist.

Gunpowder and Money

George Bernard Shaw’s play, Major Barbara, came out in the year 1905. In that year, the industries of Europe and the United States were humming, and none more so than the Nobel Dynamite trust. Alfred Nobel not only invented safe explosives, but – in his search for strategic partners – he helped invent a new, multi-national corporate form. Munitions industries were peculiar things in the Europe of the time. Many of them were state run, on the premise that the state alone should be trusted with management of weapons manufacture and the secrets of weapon improvement.

Nobel, of course, was not manufacturing for the state. His dynamite built the railroads – or at least blasted out the tunnels through which track was laid – and opened up new passages in mines. Through complicated contracts with Dupont and various German chemical companies, Nobel and associates pretty much dominated the world explosives market. And given the need for ever new markets, the cartel also developed explosives for military use. Thus it came about that in the years before WWI, there was a lively interchange of chemical formulas for blowing things up in ever new and creative ways between Imperial Britain and Imperial Germany.

Shaw’s play is a paen to money, from the point of view of a man who called himself a socialist. The millionaire Undershaft confesses his deepest belief in a conversation with his potential son in law, the Greek scholar Cusins:

“CUSINS. You know, I do not admit that I am imposing on Barbara. I am quite genuinely interested in the views of the Salvation Army. The fact is, I am a sort of collector of religions; and the curious thing is that I find I can believe them all. By the way, have you any religion?
UNDERSHAFT. Yes.
CUSINS. Anything out of the common?
UNDERSHAFT. Only that there are two things necessary to Salvation.
CUSINS [disappointed, but polite] Ah, the Church Catechism. …
UNDERSHAFT. The two things are--
CUSINS. Baptism and--
UNDERSHAFT. No. Money and gunpowder.”

Shaw’s relish of paradoxes has not always worn so well. For instance, the ‘paradox’ that a courted woman also does the courting is not exactly a shocking state of affairs for anybody outside the narrow circle of the Irish Protestant society in which Shaw grew up. Henry James is infinitely more subtle about such things. But in announcing the gospel of money and gunpowder, Shaw found an enduring paradox, one that still digs into us if only because it is a paradox that has unfolded at the cost of tens of millions of lives in the 20th century. The wealthiest nations have also all been the most savage nations. Their wealth stinks of gunpowder. And even those countries that have not, themselves, been great aggressors, as for instance Nobel’s Sweden, have accumulated great wealth by selling weapons to those who want to, and will, use them. In the U.S., the military has long been an economic mainstay, the sector from which all good things flow – such as computers and the internet.

While I have been working out the pattern of Marx’s central thoughts, I have been interested in projecting them against our current circumstances, and the historical circumstances that lie between us and Marx. In the developed world, those circumstances have led to a post-industrial political economy – that is, a shift of the great mass of workers from manufacturing work to circulation work. Just as the agricultural sector was ruthlessly shrunk in the developed economies and is being ruthlessly shrunk in the second wave of development in China and India, so, too, was manufacturing.

These developments came about, partly, as a result of the 20th centuries numerous crises and wars, which seem to cycle between money and gunpowder. Yet, the record of crisis seems to offer us another paradox on the Shavian scale: the crises have strengthened, rather than weakened, the hold of capitalism in general upon us. If we define capitalism solely as ‘free enterprise’, of the ‘private sector’, this may not seem to be the case. Every economy of any size has adopted the mixed economy model, with a considerable part allotted to the state.

But if we define capitalism according to Marx’s standards, viz, a system of production dependent on wage labor, in which value is determined by the abstract labor time embodied in goods and services, then certainly we are still in the belly of the beast.

Looking at the crisis of 2008-2009, we see that it, too, falls into the pattern of crises that strengthen, rather than weaken, the hold of the capitalist oligarchs. There is, however, a difference between this crisis and those of the first half of the twentieth century. In the latter, the working class as a whole came out better than it went in. This time – or perhaps I should say, in the crises that have erupted over the last thirty years – the working class will be considerably weaker than when they came into it. Among the developed economies, the conviction in the oligarchic circles is that competition will demand the takedown of working class perks, and the reversal of working class salaries. The position of the working class had already deteriorated during the boom years, and it is evident that, given one of the unquestioned structures of our society – the increasing appropriation of surplus value by the capitalist oligarchs – capitalism can no longer afford a huge ‘middle class.’ Or I should say, it can’t afford it unless growth is of such a size that the bigger bite taken out by the investor class still allows the fortunes of the middle class to grow. In the Anglosphere, where the concentration of wealth at the top is the greatest, the mix of policies aimed at squeezing middle class salaries while pumping up middle class consumption has bumped up against the limit formed by that proportionality. In other words, the limit is the class composition of the ‘national’ wealth itself. The symptoms of this underlying malaise are everywhere: in the vacant house with the foreclosed sign, in the development of housing in the flood plains around Sacremento and the hurricane vulnerable Florida coast, in the two worker family that lives on income coming in and is in no position to buffer any sudden shocks with savings, and in the curious death of military Keynesianism as a tool that would give a big bang to an otherwise slow business cycle. In the 00s, the government threw trillions into the military, with no appreciable effect on employment numbers. Although the crisis struck, we are told, in 2008, that really means simply that the richest fortunes were imperiled in 2008. The median income household has been going through a crisis since 2000. The machine in the bowels of our noosphere has stopped.

So, let’s look at what the Grundrisse has to say.