The Object: Money
19 Hope is a movement of the subject against an object: a breaking against a binding.
Hope is a movement-against. If we do not have an idea of what we are against, then hope dissolves into diffuse generalities. Paradoxically, the enemy becomes crucial to thinking hope. The concept of capital, at first sight a description of domination, is central to thinking hope. More strongly: without a concept of capital, there is no way to think hope.
The Zapatistas, we have seen, speak of the enemy as the capitalist hydra, a wonderful way of describing the difficulty of defeating capital and creating a society based on the mutual recognition of human dignity. The hydra in Greek mythology is a multi-headed monster of poisonous breath: each time one of its heads is cut off, two or three new ones sprout in its place. So it is with capital: each time a struggle against it is successful, the monster reappears in new forms. If a community wins a battle to stop the opening of a mine in its territory, for example, the mining company just finds somewhere else to invest. The struggle seems endless, unwinnable, hopeless. How can we slay the monster and realise our hope of creating a different world?
Perhaps the apparently endlessly self-regenerating nature of capital is best expressed in money, that evil-smelling, poisonous breath that penetrates every corner of our lives and seems to be infinitely flexible. We try to break the rule of money and it flows into us and around us and fills every crack of our rebellion. Or so it seems. But let us look more closely.
The enemy is a binding. Hope lies in the breaking of the binding.
To speak of the enemy as an object suggests something static. But the urgency of hope lies in the fact that the enemy, capital, is an attacking, a dynamic of destruction. The enemy is a verb that presents itself as a noun.
Let us think of it as a binding, a binding of our activity and, increasingly, a binding of all human activity. We humans relate to one another in a way that shapes what we do. We have an apparently infinite number of ways of relating to one another: loving, hating, disdaining, supporting, sharing, cooperating, exploiting, desiring, killing, mating and so on. Apparently infinite, but it is in fact finite. Finite not in the sense that there is an end to the list, but in the sense that there is a limiting, a binding of our relatings to one another within a certain logic. The logic is the logic of money, the binding is a money-binding. Money is a binding of our actions and our relations, a pushing of them into certain patterns, murderous-suicidal patterns, patterns that are killing us.
We can think of this binding-by-money as a particular (and murderous) form of social cohering. Any society is based on a social cohering, on the establishment of a social cohesion or social synthesis
necessary for human survival, on the social weaving of an enormous richness of human activity. We are surrounded by the most amazing expressions of human richness, whether beautiful paintings, creative buildings, traditions of community sharing, storytelling, dancing, the colourful buzz of a busy street, the glorious calm of a shepherd with her dogs, the cooking of a delicious meal and so forth. In any society all these richnesses are in some way either loosely or tightly woven together.
This coming together in some way, this cohering, is all-important for the way in which the richnesses develop. The coming together of the richnesses of human activity in a system based on slavery, for example, will shape the movement of the richnesses. For most people the ‘absolute movement of becoming’ will be limited by the orders of their owners. For the owners, there will be a liberating of creativity from many routine activities, but the social context will affect the way in which that creativity is exercised. Think of the Egyptian pyramids, for example, or think of the marvels of ancient Greek philosophy or sculpture. It is not that the context of social weaving kills the richnesses, but inevitably it gives them a certain shape, a certain grammar of development. If the social weaving is an antagonistic one, as it obviously is in a society based on slavery, the richnesses will move through and be affected by this antagonism. The same will be true of, say, a traditional patriarchal rural community: again there will be a constant moving of becoming in and through and against the social weaving.
We can perhaps make a distinction between two different types of social cohering: communising and binding. A communising (or commoning) would be a free, voluntary enriching of richnesses. We would bring our different richnesses (my cooking skills, your cultivation of vegetables, her computer programming skills) together voluntarily and share the products of our activities. This sort of social cohering is an important part of our lives even in this society: we share things with members of our family, with friends, with companions from work or from our neighbourhood and we have all sorts of names for this non-coerced sharing of richnesses: love, friendship, community, commons, comradeship. And because the core of the communising is its voluntary character, we can choose not to participate or to shift into a different set of communal relations.
The notion of communising points towards a multicoloured patchwork of communisings, what the Zapatistas call ‘a world of many worlds’, a world of great diversity in which different groups determine the manner of social cohering which they find most adjusted to their needs and desires.
The problem is that in present society we have another type of social cohering super-imposed on these communisings or voluntary social weavings, a coercive social cohering that we do not control, which we might call a ‘binding’ or ‘tying’. We are bound together by an apparently external force. This binding gives to our social interrelations a certain character and a certain dynamic. This binding we call money. Money is such an enormous force in our lives, so omnipresent that often we do not even see it.
Money increasingly invades all our coherings, monetising all social relations. Money determines our access or lack of access to the products of human activity but, more than that, it shapes what is produced and in what way. Money shapes the way in which we get up in the morning and what we do during the day, and the next day, and the next, until we have no more days. Money shapes the way in which we educate our children and educate ourselves. Money shapes our health and our access to health care and the way in which we conceive of health care. Money shapes obscene social inequality and violence. And so on and on. We all recognise the way in which money shapes our lives. There seems to be no escape, no way of opting out. Money is a totalising force
which draws us all deeper and deeper into a totality of social relations. The last thirty or forty years have seen an enormous advance of this totalising, this monetising of every aspect of social existence in all parts of the world.
Money is the most public face of a complex of social forms.
Traditionally, the most common way of speaking of the enemy of hope is to speak of capital. We have already said that capital is the enemy and that without a concept of capital, there is no way to think hope. But in order to understand the nature of the challenge that confronts hope and the depth to which the enemy penetrates us, I prefer to start from money. ‘Capital’ easily suggests an external relation: a group of people (the capitalist class) who must be defeated. The capitalist class must indeed be defeated, but the central issue is how our social relations are currently organised, the binding that forces us into the patterns of behaviour that create capital and generate the existence of the capitalist class.
Rather than start with characterising the enemy as capital, we begin, as Marx did, by looking at the binding of our activity in terms of commodity – value – abstract labour – money. Marx did not start Capital with capital but with the commodity. Or rather he began, as we have seen, by pointing out that in capitalist society richness exists in the form of the commodity. This is the core of Marx’s argument: the potentially free social cohering of richness exists as a binding, that is, it exists in the form of the commodity. From this simple but terrifying starting point, Marx derives the destructive dynamic that now threatens us with extinction.
The murderous binding of our activity is rooted in commodity exchange, in the fact that our products are produced not for sharing freely, but for sale and purchase on the market. The free flowing of our richnesses, the richness of richnesses that could exist, is blocked, yoked, harnessed, bound into the production of commodities, things to be bought and sold. From this simple, apparently obvious and apparently harmless yoking of human activity there follows a whole chain of destruction, which Marx traces through a series of derivations: if commodity, then value; if value, then labour; if value and labour, then money; if money, then capital; if capital, then exploitation; if exploitation, then the constant, uncontrolled, uncontrollable drive towards accumulation: ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!’ And it is this frenzied drive to accumulate, unstoppable within the capitalist system, that leads to the destruction of lives, the destruction of communities, the destruction of the natural environment, towards the destruction of human life altogether.
More slowly, please, for this is the logic of damnation.
Capital is the logic of damnation. Hope lies in the breaking of this logic.
The logic is the structure of the death train. It is the mechanics of the machine that ensures that the pursuit of profit shapes the development of human society. Capital is the chain of containment which forces our doings and our thinkings into certain patterns, patterns which cause great destruction and are very possibly leading us towards extinction. This containment is a totalising force, increasingly sucking all human activity into the same logic. The radical and frightening challenge that Marx poses is to say that the only way that we can break the dynamic of this chain of destruction is to break its source: the containment of richness within the commodity form.
Marx develops this logic through a relentless process of derivation: if x, then y; if y, then z. X and y and z are forms of social relations, the procrustean forms into which our activities, our richnesses, are fitted. It is a conceptual chain, a chain of identities. And yet each form/ concept/ identity/ containment is challenged by its own immanent negation, its own misfitting or overflowing, its own moving in-against-and-beyond.
In what follows, we try first to follow this logic, the logic of death, of despair. Subsequently we shall discuss how the logic can be broken and look at the misfittings, the immanent negations.
The process of logical derivation is not just a method chosen arbitrarily. It is an attempt to follow the real social cohering of the world. It is a reflection of the tight, totalising dynamic of social relations that flows from the fact that we relate to one another through commodity exchange. Derivation would not help us to understand a ‘world of many worlds’, nor a much more loosely cohering pre-capitalist world. It is the way in which the exchange of commodities, and therefore money, creates a totalising dynamic that is difficult to escape: it is this that makes it possible and necessary to try to make sense of this dynamic in the dry language of if x, then y.
In this part of the argument, the work of Marx, especially in Capital, plays an important part, not because what Marx says is necessarily correct, but because the idea of a docta spes or reasoned hope has led us to the conclusion that, if we are to talk seriously about hope, then we must see it as hope-against, hope-against a logic of destruction that is driving us towards annihilation. Marx’s critique of this logic (his critique of political economy in Capital) is an essential part of thinking about how we can break it.
What follows is an abstract presentation of the capitalist logic, the logic of money, because it is above all this logic that straps us to our seats in the train of destruction. Of course, it is also related to the fear of police brutality and state violence, but more than anything else it is the logic of money that keeps us in our place, that makes us complicit in the day-to-day reproduction of terror. It is the gathering force of this dynamic that constitutes the hopeless times against which our hope is directed.
a) If commodity, then value.
The commodity has an innocent face. I have hens. They lay eggs. I need to buy their feed, so I sell the eggs and, with the money I receive, I buy the feed. Everybody seems happy with this arrangement.
Yet Marx sees the commodity relation as the keystone of the dynamic of capital. Of course, he is not concerned with my hens and their eggs so much as with the general commodification of social relations, and this only happens when labour power itself is commodified. It is only when labour power itself is a commodity, when people live through the sale of their labour power for a wage and the labour that that imposes, it is then that they have no time to produce their own food and clothing, so that everything needed for survival must be bought as a commodity. The generalisation of the commodity presupposes the violent, bloody separation of people from the means of production and survival. But we leave that aside for the moment, as did Marx, and start with the apparent innocence of the commodity.
The innocence of the commodity is destroyed by the fact that it has a dynamic. Its dynamic is expressed in the concept of value.
Richness, to be accepted as socially valid by this society, must exist as a commodity. If I cook a wonderful meal for my friends, that is my private affair; if I cook a perhaps-not-so-wonderful meal for sale, then, if I succeed in selling it, my cooking receives a social validation, it produces a social value. There is in fact a clash of values here. In the first case, my wonderful meal, my friends validate my efforts by saying ‘what a wonderful cook you are!’ (they are my friends, after all); in the second case, the validation is expressed by the amount of money I receive in return for my meal-commodity. We can express this clash of values by saying that in the first case the meal has a use value, it has the utility of feeding my friends and making them happy. In the second case, the meal still has a use value because it can feed someone, but the use value is subordinated to its validation through exchange: its value or social validation manifests itself through exchange as exchange value. If the meal does not receive that validation, then, quite literally, it will be thrown into the rubbish. From the point of view of the society in which we live, it is only the second validation, the second concept of value, that matters. This is the value studied by the political economists and criticised by Marx. This is the value that dominates our social lives. This is the value that is hurtling us towards destruction.
The value expressed in commodity exchange is quantified, measured. I exchange the meal I have prepared for a certain quantity of a different commodity, possibly twenty kilos of flour (much more likely to be expressed now in terms of money, but we leave that to one side for the moment). The proportion in which the two commodities exchange, other things being equal, will be determined by the amount of labour required to produce each, or, more precisely, by the amount of labour socially necessary to produce each. If we bear in mind that there is a constant development of our creative capacities, this is likely to mean that the time required to produce the flour and also the time required to produce the meal will be constantly reduced. The interaction between the commodities, the relation of exchange between them, expresses itself in a pressure to produce faster and faster. If I produce my meal at the same speed as always, while the producer of flour produces much faster than before, I will find that the value of my meal falls: from having a value of twenty kilos of flour, it will fall to fifteen, to ten, to five and I will no longer be able to buy the ingredients necessary for my cooking. In order to be able to maintain the value of my product, I have to work faster, faster, faster.
This does not apply to my cooking-for-friends: there I cook at the same rhythm as always and my kind friends continue to say ‘what a wonderful cook you are!’ The commodity relation does just the opposite: if I continue to cook at the same rhythm as always, the market will tell me that my meal has no value, I will be unable to sell it, to receive the social validation of my labour.
To say that richness exists as a commodity and that the commodity has a value is to say that we live in a society based on a constant aggression-and-resistance that shapes every aspect of the way we live. It is not just that richness is channelled into the commodity form, but that the commodity has a dynamic of faster-faster-faster, a constant pressure to produce more quickly. In the context of capital, this constant pressure translates into a constant pursuit of profit by the capitalists and greater exploitation of workers, but it is already present in the value form itself, in the apparently innocent existence of richness as commodities.
b) If commodity-value, then labour.
The way that we work, the way that we do things: that is the centre of everything. The commodity contains-and-channels richness, value contains-and-channels use value, but at their core is the process by which the commodity-value and richness-use value are produced. The dual character of labour, says Marx, ‘is the pivot on which a clear understanding of Political Economy turns’ (1867/1965, 41; 1867/1990, 132).
The dual character of labour refers to the distinction that Marx makes between abstract and concrete or useful labour. ‘Concrete labour’ refers to the sort of activity that might exist in any society: I make a table; I cook a meal. These are particular activities considered without reference to their social or historical context. They produce richness, they produce use values. ‘Abstract labour’ refers to these activities seen in a commodity-producing or capitalist context. The table will be sold as a commodity, turned into money, and if it is not sold it will have no value, no matter how many people without money may want it; and the commodity character of the table will rebound on the process of making it, forcing the worker to work faster and probably to specialise in one small aspect of the process. The same with the meal, as we have seen. In each case there is an abstraction from the particular intention or pleasure or skill behind the concrete labour: what matters is the way in which the activity is integrated into the general process of commodity production, into the general cohesion of a society based on exchange of commodities with all that that entails. Our activity is abstracted away from its particularities into a quantified world in which all that matters is how much money it will attract.
The abstraction of labour is the very core of the binding that is destroying us. The activity Marx calls ‘concrete labour’, and which I have suggested elsewhere
we should think of as just ‘doing’, can be part of different, and possibly very loose, forms of social cohering. When I make a table, I may be doing it just for my own use, or perhaps for the use of my friends, or possibly just for the use of anyone who passes by and wants a table. It may be used by someone who lives in the same street or, less likely, someone who lives on the other side of the world. I may make it on my own, or perhaps with my friends or fellow carpentry enthusiasts. There is a social cohering but no binding here, no compulsion to force me to produce in a certain way or at a certain speed. But if my activity becomes abstract labour (or simply ‘labour’, as it is usually called), then all that matters is the value produced, all that matters is the saleability of my table-commodity. If the table does not sell, then I will be forced to produce more quickly or using other materials, or to produce chairs instead of tables, or I will be pushed out of carpentry altogether and forced to drive a taxi or beg at the traffic lights. Our activity is bound or tied or determined in a way that is beyond our control: determined by market forces, the flow of sale and purchase, over which neither we nor anyone else has conscious control. In so far as our humanity is related to conscious determination of our activity (a fundamental element of Marx’s view), then labour dehumanises. And at the same time, it is this process of dehumanisation or abstraction that brings about the social binding that constitutes society. The binding-abstraction channels our activity into certain patterns every day, patterns that dehumanise us and constitute a society that is destroying us. Labour (understood not as freely determined activity but as abstract, alienated labour driven by value, by the pursuit of profit) is the core of the binding that holds us in our place in the train of destruction.
c) If commodity-value-labour, then money.
It is through our need for money that most of us are forced into activities that we do not control. Money is the most palpable form of the binding complex commodity–value–labour–money. Money is the slavemaster’s whip that drives us to work in the morning or in the night and forces us to work faster.
In Capital, Marx devotes considerable time in the first chapter to deriving money from the commodity form.
Once the regular exchange of commodities becomes a feature of society, then one particular commodity (gold) comes to be singled out as a universal equivalent that can be exchanged for all other commodities. Money develops as a distinct social form, particularised from the commodity form. It is generated by the exchange of commodities, but its existence as a particular form of social relations means that it develops its own dynamic. ‘We see then, commodities are in love with money, but “the course of true love never did run smooth”’ (Marx 1867/1965, 107). In particular, the fact that the exchange of commodities (C–C) is mediated through money (thus becoming C–M–C) makes it possible for the transaction to break into two parts, sale (C–M) and purchase (M–C). Money can (and does) acquire a separate existence, becoming more than a means of exchange. Money is not just a question of Bill buying tomatoes from Tom and Tom using it to buy eggs from Sarah: the very fact that the money is separated from the tomatoes and eggs gives it an autonomy. It is already inscribed in the existence of money that Sarah may use her money not to buy cheese but to instead try and get back more money. Money becomes the starting point of a new dynamic, purchasing commodities in order to sell them (M–C–M) or indeed, dispensing with commodities altogether, lending money in order for it to be returned (M–M). But these last two transactions (M–C–M and M–M) make sense only if the money at the end of the process is greater in quantity than the money at the beginning: M–C–M’ and M–M’. The particular existence of money as a form distinct from the commodity form generates a new dynamic: the dynamic of self-expansion. The driving force of money is its own self-expansion. Put differently, commodity and money are distinct forms of value, the product of abstract labour, but it is the money-form that reveals the self-expansion of value as the driving force of social development. The self-expansion of money is capital.
With the transition from money to capital, it becomes clear that we are talking about the way in which domination is woven as a tight meshing of social forms that stands against the hope for a radically different society. The next step in this weaving is just as important but is rarely emphasised.
d) If commodity-value-labour-money, then identity.
The critique of commodity, labour, value and money is generally seen as central to the critique of political economy. The critique of identity is normally not included in this context, although it is very much a theme in Marx’s Capital.
Exchange shapes the exchanger. The act of exchange defines both parties to the transaction. It separates each from the other in the very process of establishing the relation. The exchangers are established as independent individuals:
In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, to agree tacitly to treat each other as the private owner of those alienable things, and, precisely for that reason, as persons who are independent of each other. But this relationship of reciprocal isolation and foreignness does not exist for the members of a primitive community of natural origin . . . (1867/1990,182; 1867/1965, 87).
In other words, exchange breaks the communal.
In the act of exchange, each of the exchangers becomes a representative of the commodity being exchanged:
Here the persons exist for one another merely as representatives and hence owners, of commodities. As we proceed to develop our investigation, we shall find, in general that the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other (1867/1990,179; 1867/1965, 85).
A slightly more accurate, but less elegant translation of the original would be: ‘that the economic character masks of the persons are just the personifications of the economic relations, as whose bearers they come into contact with each other’.
The exchange relation imposes character masks on people, transforms them into personifications or bearers of economic relations.
Through the act of commodity exchange (and all that derives from it), we are pushed into roles, character masks are put on our faces. The mask is a prison (one is reminded of Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask) that shuts us into a role. The exchanger no longer counts as a person with loves and memories and passions but simply as a role, a seller or buyer of a commodity. Our latent becoming is subordinated to a fixed identity. It is on this basis that social identities are constructed, as roles, as a flow of becoming that is blocked into is-nesses. I am a car salesperson, I am a professor, I am Mexican. We are the working class. We are women. We are indigenous. All of these affirmations purport to tell a truth, all project a role or a position in society, all negate our overflowing, our social becoming in-against-and-beyond. All statements of identity present a positive that denies the negativity, the movement-against that constitutes us as human. Identification defines, encloses, binds.
e) If money, then capital and exploitation.
This is one of the most radical links in Marx’s argument. It is sometimes thought that it is possible to unhinge money from capital, that it is possible to restrict money to its function as a means of exchange, as represented in the formula C–M–C, commodity-money-commodity. This assumption is common for many radical movements today. Marx’s argument is to the contrary: once money exists as a form distinct from other commodities, once the exchange of commodities is mediated through money, C–M–C, then it is inevitable that the opposite movement, M–C–M, will take place, that is, that owners of money will enter into the process of exchange with the aim of ending up not just with the same amount of money but an increased amount: M–C–M’. On a social level, this increment can be explained only by the fact that the owner of money finds in the market a special commodity that has the capacity of producing an excess or surplus over and above its own value: this special commodity is the labour power of the workers and the increment of value received by the owner of the money is the result of the exploitation of the workers.
The existence of the commodity and money is thus inseparable from exploitation.
Commodity relations become generalised in society only when the commodification of labour power becomes established, when wage labour becomes the dominant form of abstract labour. If labour power is not converted into a commodity, then money and indeed commodity exchange will play a marginal role in people’s lives. The chain of logical connections that we have been analysing depends on the generalisation of commodity relations and of wage labour.
It is clear that it is neither the product of chance nor of nature that the owner of money finds in the market workers forced to sell their labour power:
Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. The relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production (Marx 1867/1965, 169; 1867/1990, 273).
The basis for the good fortune (in both senses) of Moneybags is that the workers have been separated from the means of production, generally by violence.
Once money has become capital (once commodity production and wage labour have become generalised), then the pursuit of the increment of value (M’) becomes the driving force of society. Capital is the self-expansion of value: the self-expansion that is only superficially a self-expansion, since the real expansion of value takes place in the ‘hidden abode of production’ (Marx 1867/1965, 176; 1867/1990, 279) through the exploitation of the workers. The expansion of capital becomes the dominant force in society: ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!’ (Marx 1867/1965, 595; 1867/1990, 742). The accumulation of capital is Moses and the Prophets, the law that shapes capitalist society.
Accumulate, accumulate: the frenetic pursuit of the ‘self-expansion’ of value destroys nature, destroys the conditions of human existence. But first:
f) If capital, then state.
Marx did not get around to including the state in Capital. He did not ‘derive’ the state from the other social relations of capitalism. This derivation was first attempted by Evgeny Pashukanis in the early 1920s, and the theme was taken up again in the 1960s and 1970s by the so-called ‘state derivation debate’.
There are perhaps two legs to the argument. The first is that capital cannot exist without a state. More precisely, the existence of capital necessitates the particularisation of the state from the social and the economic spheres. Capital necessitates the constitution of an instance to exercise physical coercion that is separate from the immediate process of exploitation. Why so? There are two different emphases in the answers given. The first is that commodity exchange involves the establishment of weights and measures and a process of regulation by some instance that stands outside the exchange process. The other approach emphasises rather the process of exploitation. Exploitation is mediated through a contract, the sale and purchase of labour power. To enforce this contract, there must be an instance separate from the contracting parties: the state. This is unlike feudalism, for example, where exploitation is not based on a contract between apparently equal parties, but is simply part of the hierarchy of domination. In feudalism there is no separation of the political and the economic, no particularisation of the state, no clear separation between the king as a person and the king as a ruler. This particularisation of the state is of enormous political importance because it gives to the state an appearance of neutrality or potential neutrality in relation to the interests of capital. This apparent potential neutrality is the core of progressive or reformist politics.
The particularisation is, however, no more than that: a particularisation, not a separation. The state exists as a particular form of the capital relation and its existence depends on the reproduction of that relation. Its existence as a particular instance separated from the immediate process of exploitation means that it depends for its income on the exploitation performed by the capitalists. In order to reproduce itself it must do all it can to promote the accumulation of capital. Its appearance of neutrality in this respect is mere appearance. It may well go against the interests of particular capitalists or indeed against the wishes of capitalist organisations, but will do so only in the interests of promoting capital accumulation as a whole. Roosevelt’s New Deal, much discussed at the moment, is a good example: Roosevelt withstood the opposition of many capitalists and capitalist organisations in order to secure the reproduction of capital as a whole. Another example would be the state’s reduction of the working day in the Factory Acts, discussed by Marx in Capital. If a state acts in serious detriment to the interests of capital, then capital will flee to other territories, the government will almost certainly be regarded by its own supporters as having failed and it will itself lose its source of income. It is this structural constraint, rather than personal betrayals (though they may also play a role) that explains the repeated failure of left governments to fulfil their promises.
It follows that it makes little sense to see the state as a vehicle for radical hope. A government may well be able to make improvements in people’s lives within a capitalist framework, although it is also true that even the most ‘left’ governments are so overwhelmed by the force of the movement of capital that they often end up doing precisely the opposite of what they promised (the Syriza government in Greece is an obvious example). In any case, however radical their intentions, a state cannot break the logic of capital: it is structurally constrained to enforce that logic.
In the context of a discussion of hope, it is important to emphasise this point because, by virtue of its particularisation from capital, the state is often seen as the locus of hope. Especially in the case of states that hold democratic elections, hope is almost inseparable from the existence of the state. Hope is the basis of elections: the hope that next time will be better. But the existence of the state as a form of the capital relation, the incrustation of the state in the totality of capitalist social relations, means that the state cannot open the way to a different type of society. To see the struggle for a different society as the struggle for democracy is nonsense: understandable nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless.
All this is made more intense by the fact that each state is one of many, while the movement of capital is one. Capital flows through the world in pursuit of the best conditions for attracting profit, whereas states are territorially bound (though of course they may invade formally or informally the territory of other states). This means that each state is compelled not only to provide good conditions for the accumulation of what might be called ‘national capital’ but that it is in competition with all other states to attract capital to its territory. It is competing to provide the most attractive conditions possible for capital accumulation. If it does not succeed in doing this, capital will simply go somewhere else. The notion of capital being attached to some ‘nationality’ has very little meaning.
g) If commodity–value–labour–money–identity–capital–state, then destruction of nature–pandemics–global warming–extinction.
Or in a shortened form: if commodity, then extinction.
This is the terrifying logic we face at this moment. If social relations are built around commodity exchange, then there develops a whole dynamic that is pushing us towards extinction. The centre of this is capital accumulation. The unbridled drive for profit impels capital to destroy the natural preconditions of human existence. This has become especially clear in two respects in recent years. On the one hand, the drive for profit leads to the industrialisation of agriculture, the elimination of biodiversity, the instrumentalisation of all forms of life for the purpose of gain, in short, all the ecological destruction that creates the bases for pandemics such as COVID-19. On the other (or really the same) hand, the drive for profit leads to the use of fossil fuels, the growth of big cities with heavy traffic, all the conditions that are producing climate change and the rise in the temperature of the planet. In both cases, there have been state actions to limit the degree of damage caused to the environment, but the fact that all states are competing to promote the most favourable conditions possible for capital accumulation means that the measures taken have not been very effective.
As long as the commodity remains the dominant form of relating people’s activities, then the world will continue to be ruled by the law of capital accumulation: Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets! And as long as capital accumulation rules the earth, we are threatened with extinction. That is the obvious lesson of the pandemic.
Capital is the name of the train of destruction.
The binding that holds us in place and pushes us towards destruction is a logical weaving, a web that we can call ‘capital.’ The train of damnation has a name: capital. On the side of the engine is written in bold letters: Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!
The two most striking struggles of 2020 were the struggles of women displayed most clearly in the huge demonstrations on March 8 (8M) and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, especially following the murder of George Floyd. The notion of capital does not play a major part in either struggle: capitalism, if it is mentioned at all, is a rather vague unifying reference point, as in ‘capitalist patriarchy’ or ‘racial capitalism’. So why insist, then, that capital (or money) rather than race or patriarchy is the name of the destruction that we confront?
There are three reasons. The first is to underline the dreadful urgency of the situation in which we are living. There is a dynamic inscribed in the concept of capital, that runs from the commodity to the terrifying ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!’ and from there to the intensifying exploitation of people and destruction of nature. That snowballing dynamic is not obviously present in the concept of patriarchy, for example.
The second reason is that the concept of capital is inseparable from the notion of crisis, that is to say, of its own fragility. We shall come to this shortly.
The third reason is that we are looking for a unifying concept of oppression that provides the basis for the radical hope of being able to create a society that would not be structured on the basis of any sort of oppression. We experience a multitude of oppressions, oppressions that we suffer, oppressions that spoil our lives, oppressions that we resist: oppressions of women, of Black and LGBT people, of foreigners, of children, of the mentally or physically different, and so on and on. There seems to be no end to it. It is as if we are flies caught in a seemingly endless series of spiderwebs of oppression. We take out our swords and hack at one and then another and then another. Sometimes we succeed in breaking through the strands of one or another, sometimes we do not, sometimes we do only to find new webs holding us in place. To insist on the importance of capital is therefore to suggest that there is a unity between these different oppressions, that the link between, say, the struggles of Black people and of women is not a link of elective affinity, but rather that they are both struggles against the same totality of social relations.
We return to the Zapatista metaphor of the hydra of capital and suggest that racism and sexism are just two heads of the many-headed hydra that is capital. The body is shrouded in mist. It can be discerned only by reflection and, even then, we cannot be sure if it is a single body or better understood as a loose constellation of bodies. What, apart from the question of the urgent dynamic and the perspective of crisis, justifies us in suggesting that capital is the body that holds the heads together?
The answer, if it exists, has to be sought in the concept of identity and the way in which the commodity generates identity. All of the oppressions that we mentioned above are based on discrimination against particular identities. People are identified on the basis of certain characteristics and then mistreated or even killed for that reason: the killings of women, LGBT people and foreigners just because they are identified as such, are daily occurrences, daily horrors.
To identify someone is to label them, to classify them, to put them into a certain box. You are a woman and therefore you must do as I, a man, say. You are a woman and must realise there are certain things that you can do and certain things that you cannot. You are Black and therefore . . . You are a foreigner and therefore . . . In each case being trumps doing. The definition of who you are determines what you can do. Identity locks you into a box. Identification is the negation of the overflowing that makes us human.
Certainly, the language of identity may be, and is, used to contest such identification. I am gay, so what? I am a woman and will join with other women to defy the limitations imposed on us by men. I am Black and will sit in whatever part of the bus that I choose. In all of these cases, there is an identitarian response to oppression that challenges the limits of that oppression: an identitarian response that, paradoxically, overflows the limits of the identity. The danger in each case is that the response ceases to overflow and settles into or imposes a new identity. I am a woman and I do not behave like the women of fifty years ago: I am the new, emancipated woman who follows different rules of behaviour. In any overflowing, there are always the seeds of a possible new enclosure.
The point can be made in terms of fitting. Identification is a Procrustean fitting: the person identified is forced to fit in a box. An identitarian response can easily end up redefining the box, redefining, for example, what it means to be a woman. An anti-identitarian response is a misfitting, an overflowing: we may or may not be a woman, or gay, or indigenous, but we are more than that. We do not fit in to any category because we are a movement of becoming.
The different heads of the hydra can be understood as so many identifyings, so many forcings of becomings into beings. To suggest that capital is at the centre of this multiplicity of heads is to point to the way in which the commodity generates identity. The very act of exchange separates the exchangers as embodiments of the two distinct commodities that are being exchanged. It breaks with any understanding of the two people as being mutually interpenetrating parts of a community. The separation of the commodity from its production (what Marx calls commodity fetishism) converts the social producers-doers into individual owners-beings. Once doers are redefined as beings, they lose the inevitable and undefined sociality of their doing and can be classified into different groups of beings, different identities, abstracted from their doing.
Crudely: the different heads of the hydra are processes of identification: racism, sexism, nationalism and so on. These identifying processes are generated by a central generator which is shrouded in the mist, but which can be discerned as commodity exchange. The entrapment of richness, that absolute movement of becoming, in the commodity form, generates an identitarian world. Richness is forced to fit in to the commodity and our becomings are constrained within beings. Struggles are inevitably and properly directed against the identifying heads of the hydra, but if they do not overflow and attack the very process that is generating identities, then the slaying of one identity-head may well give rise to the sprouting of others.
This is not to suggest that there should be some hierarchy of struggles, that the struggle against capital is somehow prior to the struggle against sexism or racism. On the contrary, it is the heads of the hydra that attack us most directly. The fight against particular oppressions can lead to major transformations in people’s lives – think of the lives of very many gay people now compared with just fifty years ago, for example. And yet, there is always a danger of being locked into the definitions imposed by the attack, in which case we simply reproduce a possibly altered identification: instead of Germans against Jews, Jews against Arabs. But perhaps there is no way to attack the body of the hydra directly, perhaps the only way is by overflowing against-and-beyond identitarian struggles. Perhaps the only way of thinking about revolutionary struggle is as overflowings from more limited struggles. Perhaps, within any struggle there is a tension or indeed an open conflict between identitarian and anti-identitarian tendencies, between a containment within established categories and a push to overflow these categories. Among the supporters of the Zapatistas, for example, there is a difference between those who see it as an indigenous struggle and those who see it rather as a struggle to make the world anew. In the Kurdish movement too, there are tensions between those who understand it as a nationalist struggle and those who emphasise the push to recreate society.
The insistence on seeing capital (or the commodity, or money) as the unifying identifier, the body of the hydra that is key to the unity of the different struggles, is not uncontroversial. What of the identification of women subjected to patriarchal domination in pre-capitalist societies? What of all those women who were locked into certain roles at a time when commodity exchange played a very limited role in social relations? Is there a different identifier, a different role-definer, at work in those societies? Is capitalism best seen as just a phase in patriarchal development, as such admirable authors as Abdullah Öcalan, Murray Bookchin or David Graeber suggest? Or are we to accept that there are different sorts of oppression with no internal connection? If we slay the hydra of the commodity, will we then be confronted by a whole lot of other hydras (of patriarchy, racism and so on) or will the killing of the commodity be a mortal wound to all forms of identification? Will the liberation of richness from the commodity form be an emancipation of the absolute movement of becoming in all its fullness? Or are there separate ways in which richness is entrapped?
The answer will be clearer when we have succeeded in killing the hydra or hydras. It is not a question of saying that one form of oppression is more noxious than another. What we can say is that in commodity exchange we have a generator of identities and that the more visible forms of oppression are based on identitarian differentiations. We can also suggest that the universalisation of commodity relations has brought about a transformation of other forms of oppression. If capital is seen as a particular phase of patriarchy, for example, the force of this ‘particular phase’ is such that it redefines the meaning and especially the dynamic of patriarchal domination.
Patriarchy and racism become caught up in the dynamic of destruction that is generated by commodity–money–capital.
In what follows, we shall continue to focus on commodity–money–capital as the body that defines the dynamic of the different heads of oppression. The Zapatistas, in the First Part of their recent series of communiqués,
express the point with their usual simplicity and profundity. What unites us in spite of all our differences is:
That we make the pains of the earth our own: violence against women; persecution and contempt of those who are different in their affective, emotional, and sexual identity; annihilation of childhood; genocide against the native peoples; racism; militarism; exploitation; dispossession; the destruction of nature.
The understanding that a system is responsible for these pains. The executioner is an exploitative, patriarchal, pyramidal, racist, thievish and criminal system: capitalism.
20 The links in the chain of destruction are difficult to break.
We are living in a world in which our social relations are woven in a way that causes enormous distress in the present and seems to be taking us towards ever greater disaster in the future. The dynamic inherent in this weaving is difficult to break. Not even the pandemic, which has shaken so much in the world, has shaken the disastrous dominance of money. How can we break it?
Money is a historical process of weaving a totality of social relations. There is probably a much tighter global weave now than there ever has been before. In pre-capitalist societies, a change in the social organisation of a town in Mexico, say, would have had little or no impact on the living conditions of people in China. Even in Marx’s time, the penetration of money as a social relation into large parts of the earth was probably minimal. Today the tightness of the weave has been dramatically illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, not only in terms of the spread of the disease but also in terms of the immediate global impact of decisions on the rate of interest in Washington or the movement of shares on the stock exchange in Hong Kong, not to mention the impact of mobile tracking and tracing applications. The logic of capital, the logic of money, reaches deeper and deeper into our lives.
There is never a totality of social relations, but there is certainly a growing totalisation of social relations. The binding is growing tighter, more all-encompassing. It is this tightening binding that we need to break. This is an important issue because the dominant conception of communism in the last century was in terms of the replacement of one binding by another, one totality by another. This is certainly present in Lukács, with his development of totality not just as a critical but also as a positive concept.
This notion of creating a different totality in so-called ‘communist’ societies was reflected in their characterisation as ‘totalitarian’ societies by their critics. The emphasis here on hope as a breaking of the totalising binding points in the opposite direction, towards a looser structuring of social relations.
The totalisation is a process, a process of imposing the logic of capital upon other social relations which are often recalcitrant, which often resist. The logic is a process of struggle. It is not an automatic, mathematical logic: the logic is rather one of internal coherence, a logic of tendency but nevertheless a very effective one.
There are perhaps two ways of thinking about how to break this logical chain of destruction which we have characterised in terms of a connected series of categories: commodity–value–labour–money–identity–capital– state–destruction of nature–pandemics–global warming–extinction. The more obvious one is to focus on breaking the dashes, or the links in the chain: if the sequence is an if x, then y; if y, then z, in that case we must try to break the then in each step. The other approach, to be developed in the following section, is to say that this will not work because the then is too strong in each case: what we must seek is rather to blow open and blow apart the if x, the if y, and so on. The two approaches lead to different types of anti-capitalist politics. We will look first at the approach that tries to break the then.
Each step in our logical chain is contested, often very consciously. Barter movements are an example. In Argentina in 2002 there was a very strong barter movement involving millions of people, partly because people did not have money, but partly also as a protest against the power of money and an attempt to develop alternative social relations. This can be seen as an attempt to break the logical chain between commodity-value on the one hand and money on the other: if commodity, then not necessarily money. Money is seen as the enemy but separated from the commodity. Barter can certainly be important in a moment of financial crisis and as a dramatic protest against the rule of money, but it remains within the framework of commodity exchange and value,
and it is difficult to see how barter could function effectively over time without the development of money.
The link between commodity–value–labour–money, on the one hand, and capital, on the other, is also very often questioned. A society of small commodity producers is seen as an ideal to be defended against the incursion of capital, especially of big capitals. ‘No to Walmart, we want to keep our small shops’. Or ‘no to big factories, we want to preserve small friendly units of production’. This is a constantly recurring theme in capitalist development, but it comes up against the operation of the law of value, against capital’s constant drive to produce and distribute more and more cheaply in order to attract profits. Normally, the small units cannot produce as cheaply as the big capitals and small shops are unable to sell as cheaply as the supermarket chains. The logic does not impose itself automatically, but there is a strong tendency arising from the internal coherence of the way in which capitalist society is structured.
Another example of the proposed delinking of the logical chain is the proposal that capitals should follow a moral code in their investment decisions rather than seeking to maximise their profit. This idea seems to lie behind much of the discourse around ecology and degrowth. Perhaps because the idea of abolishing capital or abolishing money is taboo or has fallen beyond the bounds of imagination or of civilised conversation, many proposals for reform coming from ecological movements simply abstract from the capitalist context of destruction, abstract from capital’s drive to accumulate through pursuing the maximisation of profits. It is certainly true that the conditions in which profit maximisation takes place can be affected by legislation to deter certain practices, but the drive to accumulate is inseparable from the existence of capital. Advocates of urgent change to halt the destruction of the environment who see no connection between this and the critique of capitalism
are in effect de-linking capital from the drive to accumulate in a quite unrealistic manner.
Perhaps the principal way in which the logical chain is attacked is in the connection between state and capital. Every reiteration of democracy is a statement that this connection does not or should not exist, every disillusion is the reaffirmation that it does exist. Over and over again. Vote for Tsipras, vote for AMLO, vote for Sanders, vote for Corbyn, vote for Mélenchon: the constant hope that things could be different, the repeated disappointment that follows. Again and again, the state is presented as a counterweight, or at least a potential counterweight, to the destruction wrought by capital. But experience suggests that it is not so: governments that proclaim themselves to be ‘left’ or ‘progressive’ may in some cases (but certainly not all) achieve some degree of income redistribution or impose some restrictions on the depredations of capital, but they never fulfil their promises or do anything to significantly oppose the rule of money. This, as we have seen, is not because of particular ‘betrayals’ of the cause by individual politicians (though these obviously occur) but because the state depends for its existence on promoting the accumulation of capital.
In each step in the logical chain, there is a fetishization. Each form of social relations is particularised. It presents itself as separate, when in fact it is not so: it is merely a particular form of the totality. Thus, labour appears to be separate from the whole (hence the constant talk of the humanisation or democratisation of work), money appears to be separate from the whole (hence the idea that money could be just a means of exchange), and then the state appears to be separate from the totality of social relations when it is not. So many generators of disillusion, so many hopes entrusted to these apparent separations and then dashed on the ground. And so much tiredness, so much cynicism as a result, so much acceptance of the unacceptable.
The logic of capital, then, is a logic of struggle, a logic that must be imposed and re-imposed over and over again, but it is a very powerful, internally cohesive logic. Perhaps it is never fully imposed, never fully accepted, for it is always backed by force, by brute violence, but it is, nevertheless, a very powerful logic that defeats opposition repeatedly and pushes us forward towards destruction. It is a logic that derives its force from the internal strength of its cohesion.
Reformism is the attempt to deny the existence or the force of the logic of capital: it leads to disillusion and the reproduction of the dynamic of death. Liberal thought in general is a refusal to see or give weight to the linking of the logical chain. Each form of social relations (money, state and so on) is abstracted from the totality and its character as form denied: it is seen in abstraction from its historical specificity and also from its place in the totalising dynamic of social relations. Thus, for example, we are assured that the states will be able to control global warming, without any consideration of the link between states and capital accumulation on the one hand, and between capital accumulation and global warming on the other.
This refusal to see the logical (and real) connections, to see the force of the social cohering in which we are all immersed, is a recurrent theme in struggles for a better world, one not restricted to the electoral hope of better governments. It is present in debates about degrowth and about the commons,
for example. There is often a reluctance to see, or indeed mention, the totalising force of capital. ‘Capital’ has almost become a taboo word: mention it and it is assumed that you are repeating old and empty mantras, instead of drawing attention to the real force of the totalising of social relations. Suggest that we need to abolish money and you are seen to be mad.
The logic of capital can be seen as the force of the existing pattern of social cohesion. In this society, social cohesion is not established through a free flow of loving and doing and sharing and singing and dancing, as it might be in a different world. In capitalist society, the flow of social relations is clotted, coagulated into what Marx criticises as forms of social relations. The logic of capital is the dynamic cohesion between these forms. It is a social cohesion that is based on exploitation, that condemns a very large part of the world’s population to miserable living conditions and that is driving us all towards destruction. It is a logic that reproduces itself through unceasing aggression, aggression against resistances, revolts, pushings towards a different way of living.
21 The weakness of the binding lies not in the links between the forms but in their internal antagonisms.
If if x, then y is the logic of capital, then we must open if x,
The logical structure of capital binds us in our place, sitting tightly secured in the train towards destruction. This logic is a constant aggression against us and is constantly at issue. In the last section we saw some of the ways in which resistance to the rule of capital seeks to cut the links between the different forms of social relations, between commodity and money, money and capital, capital and state. In each case we saw how each of these attempts confronts the tremendous, cohering, systematising logic of capital.
The other way in which we can think of breaking the binding is by focussing not on the connections between the forms but on the antagonisms within each form. The logic presented has been a sequential logic, what might be seen as an identitarian logic. It takes the form of if x, then y: if commodity, then value. It is a logic of derivation in which one form is derived from the other. The logic invites us to attack the sequential link, the then. Presented with the if x, then y, we try to find a way out by attacking the then and saying if x, then not necessarily y. But perhaps we should focus not on the then y, but on the first part of the affirmation, the if x. The if x presents us with a closed identity, something that is taken for granted as the starting point of a sequence. But what if, presented with the if x, then y, we respond by asking ‘How do you mean if x? x is a closure that we do not accept, we need to open it up and see the antagonisms that the identitarian closure if x conceals’.
We go back then to if commodity, then value, and we say ‘yes, the sequence is correct, but we need to open up the if commodity to see the antagonism it conceals. Perhaps that is where hope is to be found’. And perhaps we need to open up all the other forms of social relations and see if that will help us.
How do we open up the commodity? Marx suggests an answer, but, as we have seen, there are problems with his presentation of that answer. In the opening sentence of Capital, he says ‘The wealth/ richness of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity’ (Marx 1867/1965, 35; 1867/1990, 125). The problem comes with the sentence that immediately follows: ‘Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity’ (35; 125). And then from the commodity he goes on to derive the other forms that we have already seen: value, abstract labour, money and so on. Marxist analysis, almost without exception, follows Marx’s second sentence and takes the commodity as its starting point.
This is problematic because Marx in the second sentence is saying if x, then . . . and opening the way to all that follows: if commodity, then. . . . But this already effects a closure of what was opened in the first sentence. The first sentence is almost completely ignored in the vast literature on Marx’s Capital
and this has important theoretical and political implications. The neglect of the first sentence is part of a theoretical-political constellation that has separated Marxist theory from anti-capitalist struggle.
The second sentence is patently untrue. Marx says that he is beginning his analysis with the commodity when in fact he has already begun it with a different category, wealth, or richness: ‘The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities’. The second sentence suggests there is an identity between wealth/richness and commodities, at least in capitalist societies, whereas the first sentence makes it clear that this is not an identity: wealth presents itself as commodities. This is a clear statement of non-identity, of distance. The first sentence starts from wealth/richness and makes it clear that it is not identical with commodities but that it does exist in the form of commodities or present itself as commodities.
If we take the richness that exists or could exist beyond the commodity form to mean the absolute movement of becoming, as Marx suggests in the Grundrisse, then it is clear that there is a fierce antagonism between richness, as it would be if stripped of its commodity form, and wealth as it exists in the form of a commodity.
What are we to make of this antagonism? Is it just Marx daydreaming: oh, wouldn’t it be nice if wealth/richness could be the absolute movement of becoming? Or is he referring to some imagined golden age in the past? Or to something that is dead and buried? For Marx to have a concept of richness like this, there must be some sort of leakage, some sort of overflowing. In some way, richness is not entirely subsumed into the commodity form. There is an overflow, a misfitting. The object does not fit into its concept without a remainder. In the first sentence, Marx invites us to think of richness as an immanent-overflowing negation of the commodity form, but then in the second sentence he seems to close that invitation as he continues with if x, then . . . , if commodity, then . . . Or again: the first sentence suggests that richness exists in-against-and-beyond the commodity form, whereas the second assumes that it exists (at least for the moment) only in the commodity form.
It is not that the logical sequence if x, then y is incorrect. It really does capture the force of the social cohesion or social synthesis in capitalist society. But that logic of social cohesion is a suppression, a theoretical and practical suppression. Adorno (1966/1990, 39) expresses it beautifully: ‘the science of logic is abstract in the simplest sense of the word: the reduction to general concepts is an advance elimination of the counter-agent to those concepts, of that concrete element which idealistic dialectics boasts of harbouring and unfolding’. The if x, then y: if commodity, then value is in this case the advance elimination of the counter-agent to these concepts. The counter-agent eliminated by the logic of if commodity, then value is richness. To the extent that the Marxist tradition ignores the first sentence and builds upon the second sentence and the series of logical derivations that follow therefrom, it takes part in this elimination of the counter-agent. The challenge for us, the challenge being opened by the movement of struggle, is to recover the strength of this counter-agent in its struggle against the overwhelming force of the logic of the if x, then y: if commodity, then value and so on to Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets with the possible extinction that follows.
Richness pushes in-against-and-beyond the commodity.
Is it a merely conceptual overflowing, a conceptual counter-agent? It could be that in fact all richness exists in the commodity form, but that Marx imagined for some reason that it might be different. This seems unlikely. It is more probable that the concept of a richness that does not fit entirely into the commodity form has an experiential or material basis. In other words, it was not just that Marx was a clever or very imaginative man, but that there was something in his social experience that led him to the idea of a richness that is not entirely subsumed into the commodity form. Once we get to this point in the argument, it becomes clear that we all have experience of a richness that goes beyond the commodity form: the dinner that I cooked for my friends last week, the flower that I picked by the side of the road, the song that I sang in the shower this morning, and so on. It is clear that not all richness is subsumed into the commodity form. What justifies Marx in claiming that he is starting from the commodity, and what provides the basis for the logical chain of domination that we discussed, is the fact that the commodity form is, ever increasingly, the dominant form of wealth. This paragraph that I am writing now is not written for the purposes of commodity exchange (though it will become a commodity once it is in your hands as a book), but my desk is full of commodities: the computer on which I am writing, the cup that holds my tea, the tea itself, my cell phone, my copy of Capital, a notebook. All that, even without mentioning that my own reproduction depends on the fact that I sell my labour power to the university as a commodity. Not all richness fits in to the commodity form, but the commodity is the dominant form of existence of richness. Not only is it the dominant form of richness, but it is increasingly dominant. Richness is much more commodified now than it was, say, twenty or fifty years ago: education or the food we eat, to take just two examples. The commodity is in fact a process of commodification, a process of commodifying richness.
It is not that there is a richness that stands outside the commodity form. In modern capitalism, the commodity form is so pervasive that it is difficult to imagine a richness that stands entirely outside the commodity form. There is no purity. Richness exists in, but also against-and-beyond the commodity form. There is an antagonism here. Richness is both captured by, but at the same time pushing against and reaching beyond the commodity form. The commodity form, like all forms, is a process, a form-process or a process of forming, a process of forming richness, subordinating richness to its constraints. The commodity is a struggle to contain richness, while richness is the resistance-revolt that reaches for its own emancipation from the commodity form.
Richness is flow, the absolute movement of becoming. The flow of becoming is frozen or rigidified into the commodity form, but not entirely so. There is always a latent undercurrent that pushes against-and-beyond the commodity form, visible at moments, quite hidden at others, but always with this subversive thrust against-and-beyond. The flow of richness is the movement of hope.
It is not a question of ontologising richness, of attributing to it some sort of trans-historical character. It is always richness-against, or, more accurately, richness-in-against-and-beyond. For the past few hundred years, it has been richness-in-against-and-beyond commodification, before that it was richness-in-against-and-beyond the limits imposed on becoming by the rigidities of feudal or slave society.
Richness is richness-in-against-and-beyond, negative, antagonistic. The absolute movement of becoming does not exist positively but only as a thrust in-against-and-beyond the fetishised, institutionalised, rigidified isnesses that negate it. It exists in the mode of its own negation and therefore as movement against its own negation. The richness stripped of its bourgeois form, as described by Marx in the Grundrisse, is a Not-Yet, to use Bloch’s term, but it is a Not-Yet that exists now not just as promise; as something towards which we strive, but also as the present pole of an antagonism. We strive towards the richness of our own becoming not because it is absent but because it exists in the form of its negation, negated by the commodity form. Our hope is not a hope-towards but a hope in-against-and-beyond. We sit in the train carrying us to our destruction and our hope says NO as we try to break the windows, find the emergency brake, open the doors and jump, as we rage against this world and thrust beyond it.
Richness exists then as a latency, a negative, antagonistic latency, subterranean and subversive, volcanic. The contrast that Marx makes in the paragraph from the Grundrisse between richness as it could be (the absolute working-out of our creative potentialities) and its present existence in capitalist society (a complete emptying-out) makes no sense at all unless it is understood not as a lament but as a live antagonism. Similarly, the first sentence of Capital, which tells us that in capitalist society richness presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities makes no sense at all unless we understand the relation between richness and commodity not as an identitarian enclosure but as a live antagonism. The sentence could not have been written unless richness not only fitted into the commodity but also actively and simultaneously misfitted.
Break the if x: richness against the commodity form.
Richness against wealth.
The commodity is a binding of richness, a fastening with numerous knots or nodes, fetishised forms of social relations. At each point of the binding, there is a tugging at the leash, a pushing in-against-and-beyond, a resistance, at least a reluctance. The challenge for capital is to ensure that the binding is a harmonious harnessing, like the harnessing of two horses or oxen that pull the plough up and down, up and down. There is no doubt that in many ways capital is an extremely effective harnessing of human labour. The harnessing is disastrous for the labourers, for human life and for the planet, but it is hard to deny that it is effective. And yet. At each knot in the harness, there is a constant strain, visible or invisible. An open rebellion, a latent rebellion or perhaps just the constant wear-and-tear of a resistance that gradually weakens the binding.
Both sides are important: the effective harnessing and the constant straining at the leash. Traditional Marxism has emphasised the effective harnessing. This harnessing leads to an enormous increase in productive power and also to the formation of the harnessed working class. The harnessed working class will, it is assumed, have the force to break through the perverted, destructive character of capital, to liberate the harnessing from its capitalist perversion. If x, then y; if y, then z: if commodity, then Accumulate! Accumulate!; if Accumulate, Accumulate!, with all the terrible destruction that it causes, then the formation of a revolutionary working class. The if x, then y is terrible, but hope lies in the then z: the formation of the revolutionary working class. Now, 150 years after the writing of Capital, the if x, then y continues to be terrible, probably much worse than anything Marx could have imagined, but we have lost the then z. We have certainly not lost the working class. What we have lost is confidence in the idea that the harnessing will lead to revolution. We have lost confidence in the idea that the logic of the system will carry us through to the other side. On the contrary, this logic seems to be taking us to the abyss. History itself pushes us to turn our attention from the harnessing to the straining at the leash. This is not to deny the effectiveness of the harnessing, but hope lies in the opposite direction, in unharnessing, unbinding, detotalising.
Marx himself is not clear in this respect. In Chapter 10 of Capital (Chapter 8 in languages other than English), he discusses the emergence of the working class in terms of a class that fully accepts the commodification of labour power and fights for its rights on that basis.
In the later discussion of manufacture and the transition to modern industry, it is rather the insubordination of the workers that plays the leading role.
More important for our discussion is the undercurrent of counter-categories that is developed in Capital, but that plays relatively little part in subsequent Marxist discussion: richness, use value, concrete labour, cooperation, productive forces of social labour. These can be understood in two ways: either as being effectively harnessed or subsumed to the dominant forms of commodity, value, abstract labour, industry, capitalist development, or as existing in constant tension or resistance or rebellion against those forms. In the first case, the emphasis is on subordination. The counter-categories are effectively subordinated: they are not of political interest for thinking revolution and they do not have a distinctive grammar. In the second view, which shapes the argument here, these apparently subordinate categories acquire an importance because they never fit neatly into the form of domination: richness overflows or misfits or strains against the dominant commodity form, use value strains against value, concrete labour (or doing, as I call it in this book’s mother and grandmother) strains against abstract labour, cooperation overflows industrial discipline, the thrust of creativity is never completely contained within the capitalist development of the productive forces. In this approach, the grammar of the counter-categories is inherently negative, a grammar of in-against-and-beyond, an anti-identitarian grammar in which the content overflows its form. Both politically and theoretically, this is a grammar of refusal, of revolt. Hope lies not in the harnessing but in the insubordination and non-subordination that either break the harness or lead, through incessant wear and tear, to the weakening of the harness to a point at which it is increasingly fragile.
Richness against wealth. Not just richness against the commodity, but richness against wealth, against its alter ego, its own form. More accurately: richness in-against-and-beyond wealth. The commodification of richness is not just a quantitative redefinition of richness – the fact that things will be produced only if they can be sold as commodities. More important is the qualitative transformation of richness. The richness that goes into the process of commodification comes out as something else: as wealth. The richness, the absolute movement of becoming, is transformed into wealth, a material, quantifiable wealth of things. Wealth is the impoverishment of richness, its reduction to something definable. Wealth is the positivisation of the negative grammar of richness, the suppression of its absolute movement of becoming. The wealth-ification of richness has enormous consequences. The danger is that commodification makes us blind to the distinction. We read that which is subjected to commodification, richness, back through the lens of commodification and see only wealth. Richness disappears from sight. The antagonism between richness and the commodity is transformed into an antagonism between wealth and the commodity. The struggle becomes a struggle for a world of material plenty unhemmed by the restraints of value production rather than a struggle for the emancipation of richness. Self-determination is an aspect of richness, but not of wealth.
Marx can be read in two ways, either from an identitarian or an anti-identitarian approach. Which reading Marx himself would have preferred is of secondary importance. He had a different historical experience and could not have conceived how his ideas would be used to justify a ‘communist’ oppression. Perhaps we need to read Marx (and indeed any author) in-against-and-beyond himself.
Beyond the question of the correctness of how we read Marx, there is another, more substantial question of correctness. The more traditional view, we have seen, assumes that human labour is effectively harnessed, effectively subordinated to the goal of expanding capitalist profit, while the view proposed here is that this effectiveness is always at issue, that there is always a straining at the leash that puts the effective command over labour in question. To some extent this must be an empirical question. There are clearly times at which the insubordination of workers is very obvious: the car factories of northern Italy in the 1960s and 1970s that inspired the Italian operaisti is clearly a case in point.
But it is also clear that there are other situations in which any manifestation of insubordination can have disastrous consequences for the workers involved. And yet there is something else that makes the insubordination or non-subordination an inevitable presence in capital’s command of labour. If we think of value as the harnessing of human labour for capital, there is a crucial element that makes it different from the harnessing of horses or oxen to a plough that was mentioned above. That difference lies in the dynamic of value as a relation of command. The fact that value is measured by socially necessary labour time means that it is based on a constant intensification or acceleration of what it means to produce value. Value, inevitably, is a faster-faster-faster. This is quite different from the bucolic image of the harnessed horses or oxen going up and down, up and down as they plough the field, at the same peaceful rhythm as always. The faster-faster-faster that is inscribed in the rule of value inevitably signifies a straining of the harness that binds human activity. This strain may express itself in an overt or covert insubordination, or perhaps just in a non-subordination, or often just in the fact that the worker does not have the mental or physical capacity to satisfy the intensifying exigencies of capital.
Labour is at the centre of the argument. Labour is the name we give to the harnessing of human activity in the service of capital. This harnessing leads to the formation of a working class and the building of a labour movement, which fights for the interests of the harnessed labourers and to which the hope of revolutionary transformation has been ascribed. If x, then y, then z: if capital, then labour, then revolution. Revolutionary hope lies with the struggle of labour against capital. This is what has failed, and not because the working class has failed in its mission, in its ability to accomplish z, but because the if x, then y is flawed. If commodity, then labour: that is a closure. In reality it should be: if commodity, then a constant struggle by capital to convert human activity into labour and a constant resistance-and-rebellion against this process. The struggle is not the struggle of labour against capital (although that does exist to the extent that human activity is enclosed in labour), but the struggle of human doing against labour–capital, the struggle to emancipate our activity from labour.
The operaisti or autonomist tradition emphasises that capitalist rule is always at issue by focusing on the question of capitalist command over labour.
This is very helpful, but two comments are necessary. First, ‘command over labour’ is a tautology, since only activity that is effectively commanded is labour: uncommanded labour is something else, an activity that has not been successfully converted into labour. The other comment is that the idea of command over labour keeps our attention focused on surplus value production, rather than the prior question of value production. When we sell our labour power, we are indeed under the command of our employer, the buyer of that labour power, a command which we may or may not obey. But there is a prior step, the force that makes us sell our labour power, and this can be understood only in terms of the commodification of richness. In other words, the question of the ‘command over labour’ is the centrepiece of a wider binding of all social activity, all richness, all becoming, into the commodity form. The challenge, therefore, is not just for labourers to revolt against the capitalist command (something that happens all the time) but also for all of us to break the binding of richness into the commodity imposed through money (something that also happens all the time).
The revolts against the basic elements of the capitalist binding have been growing in recent years, although often in contradictory ways. This includes crucially the rejection of labour expressed by many different groups involved in struggle as also in both the work of the autonomist tradition and of those associated with the Krisis and Exit groups in Germany and Moishe Postone. Beyond that, there is a multitude of refusals to play by the ‘rules of the game’. These are movements that start not from some notion of ‘we shall show you what a strong force we can be within the defined rules of social cohesion’ (as in the workers in Marx’s analysis of the Factory Acts) but from a ‘we won’t play according to your rules, your social cohesion stinks’. And perhaps ‘we do not accept your logic, your grammar. We are playing other games, we have different ways of cohering socially, with our own anti-logics, anti-grammars. Our games are richnesses pitted against your wealth’. This refusal of the whole dominant grammar of social cohering has been a major element of the women’s movement, of indigenous movements, of movements against racism, among many others. These refusals of the basic rules, of the if x, have released a surge of confidence and creativity in many different struggles.
22 Unbinding the binding: Revolutionising revolution.
Hope is revolutionary. We hope to create a society that is not shaped by the drive to expand value, but a society based upon a communising self-determination that strives towards the mutual recognition of dignities.
But revolution is both frightening and difficult to imagine. The great communist revolutions of the twentieth century (the Russian and the Chinese, especially) did not create societies that many of us would like to live in. Was all the pain and the passion and the suffering of those revolutions worth it? Surely not. And anyway, even if today we were to dream of revolution, where is the revolutionary force that could bring it about? So why carry on talking about it? Is it not better just to forget the whole idea?
There are two reasons to continue to insist on revolutionary hope. The first is that we are caught in a social dynamic that causes enormous hardship and destruction in the present and that seems to be driving us towards a disastrous future or simply the no-future of extinction. And the other, arising from the ruins that surround us,
is an unquenchable thirst, an insatiable hunger, to create a world that could be, a world of social relations based on mutual support and mutual recognition. A storm that pushes us forward, a not-yet that resonates deep inside us and draws us on.
How we think of revolutionary hope has much to do with how we understand the enemy. Capital has been presented here as a binding; a binding most visible in the form of money. Money binds us into a logic, the logic of profit, of the expansion of value. Capitalism is a class society based on exploitation, but that is not what we have emphasised in this discussion. Capitalist exploitation is mediated through the sale and purchase of labour power as a commodity and that means through money. The fact that we need money in order to survive and enjoy the products of human activity forces us to convert our activity into labour. Once our activity is transformed into labour, it becomes possible to exploit it, to compel it to produce a surplus that is appropriated by capital.
There are two antagonistic processes involved here. The first is the conversion of our daily activity or doing into labour (abstract or alienated labour), a disciplined activity determined by the need to produce (or support the production of) value. The second is the exploitation of this labour in order to maximise the surplus value available for accumulation as capital.
Traditional Marxist analysis has laid emphasis on surplus value production, to the neglect of value production. Labour is assumed as a pre-existing category and no attention is paid to Marx’s insistence on the centrality of the dual nature of labour. The only antagonism that is seen is between labour and capital: that is what is understood as class struggle. Revolution is seen as the struggle by labour to overthrow capital, and its subject is the labour movement, the movement organised on the basis of labour.
The argument here shifts the emphasis to value production and hence to the transformation of human activity into labour. This too is an antagonistic process, although less obviously so than in the case of surplus value production. The antagonism of surplus value production is visible in wage struggles, struggles over working conditions and the length of the working day. The antagonism of converting human activity into labour is less easily seen: it is the battle of the alarm clock in the morning, the years-long schooling of children to accept clock time, to subordinate their play to their homework-duty, the poverty that results from the lack of money and so on. The antagonism is no less real for being less easily perceived.
There are two levels of class struggle here. The antagonism of surplus value production is class struggle, working class against capitalist class, labour against capital. The process of value production is also class struggle, but it is the struggle of class-ification, the struggle that pushes us into classes. Here class struggle is the struggle to classify and the struggle against being classified. The dynamic that is capital pushes our activity into labour, our struggle is against labour. At the first level, that of surplus value production, the struggle of labour against capital is a struggle within a world already constituted by labour. At the level of value production, the struggle against labour is a struggle against the constitution of that world. Whereas the traditional approach that focuses on surplus value production assumes that the world of labour–capital was constituted at the origins of capitalism (primitive accumulation), the shift to value-production-as-struggle sees the constitution and re-constitution of that world as being constantly at issue, a continuing process.
To focus on capital as a process of binding shifts the emphasis from surplus value to value and brings with it a rethinking of the meaning of revolution. The traditional approach presents revolution in terms of class against class, labour against capital, a struggle for power. The great problem with this approach is that labour is constituted within the system it is supposed to challenge: the vanguard party as solution to this conundrum is no solution. When we shift to value production, the centre of revolutionary thought becomes not class-against-class but class struggle in the deeper sense of struggle against class, struggle against class-ification, the struggle of doing/activity against its conversion into labour. It is a struggle to escape from the binding: to un-bind, to de-totalise.
There is a constant overflow from one type of class struggle into the other. A strike, for example, is a classic example of class-against-class, the working class showing its power to force capital to accede to its demands. It is also usually a rejection of labour as such, a celebration of meaningful activity against labour. The distinction between struggle against value and struggle over surplus value is not a personal distinction: the struggles, for example, of factory workers within the labour movement will constantly overflow into sabotage, absenteeism, foot-dragging and all the daily struggles against labour itself. The boundaries are not always clear, but the distinction between struggles within the context of labour and struggles against labour remains an important one.
The emphasis on capital as binding and on anti-capitalism as the push to unbind or detotalise is related to a number of theoretical trends within Marxist debate. It has already been noted that the understanding of capital as constant struggle is influenced by the autonomist or operaista inversion, but the argument here differs from that tradition in that the latter remains within the class-against-class framework, even while pushing it to its limits. The notion of self-valorisation developed by this current is close to the idea of richness developed here, but the opening of all categories to discover their internal antagonism is not one that that approach develops.
The shift from the stress on surplus value to an emphasis on value is related to broader discussions of value critique associated in particular with the so-called New Reading of Marx (Neue Marx-Lektüre), but these discussions have not in general dwelt on the political implications of their reading.
A further connection that has been made since the opening lines of this book is with Benjamin’s idea that the task of revolution is to pull the emergency brake on the train of history. This enormously suggestive metaphor breaks completely with the tradition of historical materialism and leads us to think of revolutionary change as an escape from a disastrous confinement. Even if we cannot reach the emergency brake, is there some way that we can jump from the train before it crashes?
The presentation of capital as a binding and the suggestion that we must think of revolution as an unbinding is thus part of a much more general rethinking in recent years of what capital means and how we can imagine revolutionary change. This rethinking in turn is, directly or indirectly, part of the shift in the nature of anti-capitalist struggle after the fall of the Soviet Union and the decline of political parties claiming to be revolutionary. There has been, perhaps, a shift from struggles for power to struggles that seek to break from power, to put up obstacles to the exercise of capitalist power: struggles that assert other values in opposition to the rule of value in the capitalist sense. With the collapse and disappearance of the communist parties, struggle has become centrifugal rather than centripetal. We want out. Stop the world, we want to get off.
There is, however, an enormous danger here. The ‘we want out’ can easily become an identitarian fragmenting that does nothing to challenge the rule of money. Brexit: we want out of this authoritarian bureaucracy tied to big capital; we want to recover our British identity. Make America great again: the flight from capital becomes a flight into the nastiest, most authoritarian forms of capital, as happened with the fascism of the 1930s. Unbinding, if it is to help us, has to be understood not as an identitarian but as an anti-identitarian unbinding.
Revolution as unbinding. That is a rephrasing of revolution, but does it help? Does it make it easier to visualise revolutionary transformation? Always the spectre of Wishful Thinking stands at our side, watching every sentence, every paragraph, mockery in his critical eye. ‘Very interesting, very clever, but do you really think it is possible? Can you really see this unbinding happening? I can see that there are millions of attempts, millions of cracks. But can you really see them defeating the Great Binder, Money?’
Be silent, spectre, and let me continue with the argument.
23 Richness against the commodity: the world faces two ways.
All of this takes us back to hope-against-hope, to January-thinking, to dialectics.
On the one hand we have seen the logic of capital, a powerful logic of harnessing without which the development of society cannot be understood. This logic is a strongly cohesive tendency, a constant struggle which generally works so smoothly that it is not even perceived as struggle. This logic however has disastrous consequences here and now in terms of frustration, misery and destruction and it is also pushing us in the direction of extinction. It is the train that we described in the preface to this book. It is the train for which we need to find an emergency brake.
The logic of capital is the horror story so often recounted, rightly, by the left. The way in which society is organised has disastrous results. In the last century it has cost the lives of countless millions of people, brutally and needlessly. And there, more often than not, the storyteller comes to a stop: she used to say ‘and therefore we need to make a revolution’, but since that has become difficult to imagine, the story usually stops there, with no ending. Common left discourse is a constant critique of capitalism that goes no further.
The logic of capital is the refutation of all those everyday expressions of ‘why worry, we’ll muddle through, we’ll vote in a better government next time’. Probably we all think that way or want to think that way, but it doesn’t happen like that. The forces generated by the global drive for profit, the winds and the floods and the storms created by the movement of money, are far too great for any state to resist, even if they wanted to. The destruction of nature that led to the COVID-19 pandemic came from the drive for profit, rather than from any particular government’s decision. The logic of capital describes a structural tendency of social forces that goes far beyond any individual’s conscious decisions.
The logic of capital is the train of progress, of development, of realism. It is the argument constantly repeated against all resistance. It is the argument made over and over again by those who espouse progress: pity about the miners (in the great miners’ strike in Britain, for example) but they must bow to progress; pity about the indigenous communities in the south of Mexico, but they must realise that progress will win in the end. It is a totalising movement that pulls all social relations, all feelings, all dreams, all resistances into a global, logical cohesion, a rational cohesion, for it is the totality that defines reason and dismisses all overflowings, all misfittings as irrational.
When we speak of the force of the latent undercurrents in all the interconnected forms of capital, it does nothing to weaken the overwhelming force of that logic. It is not a question of saying ‘there is capital and there is anti-capital, and sometimes one predominates and sometimes the other’. No, we live in a capitalist society and the logic of capital has an overwhelming weight in shaping how this society develops. There is constant resistance to this murderous logic, and it certainly has a profound effect on the implementation of the logic, but the logic does not thereby cease to shape the development of society. There have been struggles in all parts of the world against extractivism, for example, against the opening of mines that often threaten the existence of communities, and often these struggles have been successful, but then capital just moves on and looks for somewhere else to open its mines or extract profits in some other way. The monster is still there.
All the capitalist forms of social relations are struggles to contain the push towards other ways of doing things, other ways of living. Each step in the logical chain, each form of capitalist relations, contains (or seeks to contain) a latent force moving in the opposite direction, a latency that sometimes explodes volcanically and unpredictably, but that is always there. It is dignity, pushing against and beyond the capitalist forms: richness against the commodity, use value against value, doing against abstract labour, gift against money, mutual recognition against identitarian personification and classification. At every step, there is a misfitting, an overflowing, an in-against-and-beyond.
Not enough! Not enough! Not enough! Always this dialectical, restless cry of Not Enough as the train takes us closer to extinction. In some way we have to show that these latencies, these anti-forms, these refusals and misfittings and overflowings: we have to show that these constitute the crisis of capital, the crisis-fragility-weakness of the logic that is killing us.
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