There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Mr. Burns goes to the doctor to get a physical. Upon running tests on Mr. Burns, the doctor informs him that he is the “sickest man in the United States”, and the only reason he is still alive is because all his diseases exist in precarious equilibrium with one another. You can view the clip here.
Reading about capitalism fills me with the same incredulity at the fact that it continues to exist.
Think about what the capital power relation consists in. One class—the capitalist class—forces the bulk of the population to sell its labor power in order to survive and enjoy any access to the fruits of social wealth. People are forced to work to create social wealth. That social wealth is stolen from them, and then it is sold back to them as though it is the capitalist’s private wealth.
Pitched this way, capitalism is the world’s most elaborate confidence game. The first thing you do is force people to work. That’s nothing new. As a form of social control, forced work has existed in many societies. But no slave or serf is under the illusion that anything he is doing is forced work. The lord comes down from his castle, he takes a portion of what you’ve produced, and he lets you keep some for yourself.
Capital isn’t about half-measures, though. The capitalist takes the whole thing. Unless you’re stealing from the office or warehouse—which people spontaneously do as a primitive form of class struggle—you don’t keep anything you make. Instead you get a wage. You get a paycheck at the end of the week or every two weeks. And then you take that paycheck to the store and you decide what you’re going to spend the money on. For the vast majority of working families in the United States, what you spend the money on is determined in large part on what you can spend the money on. That is determined by the price of commodities, which in large part is determined by mere chance.
It’s sort of crazy when you think about it. The capitalist steals what you make. That’s not crazy, that’s just violent. But then he tells you he’s giving you the privilege of getting back some of what he and the other capitalists have stolen with credits earned through the labor which the capitalist forced you to do in the first place. It’s like winning the right to buy back your stolen goods from the trunk of a car on the side of the street two weeks after your house was robbed. If that happened, you wouldn’t feel privileged to buy your stuff back. You’d be pissed and call the police. But no one polices the capitalists but themselves.
You might wonder why people would ever stand for something so simultaneously unnatural and idiotic. The truth is that they don’t, and they never have. In any social organism where one class pumps surplus out of another class (i.e., steals what they make), the overriding and perennial problem is to maintain control over the class from which the surplus labor is pumped. In a sense, that’s exactly what the history of any class society is about: the changes undergone so that one class can continue to pump surplus out of another class. But the history of all societies is equally the history of resistance to this imposition of work and the various measures the ruling classes take to adjust to that resistance and keep the extraction going. When the extracting class runs out of options to meet these challenges, or when the challenges become so formidable they overwhelm all attempts to contain the contradictions, the pump stops moving surplus from one side to the other, and the history of that social organism is at an end.
Capitalism’s difficulty in this sense is twofold. Not only does it have to keep the condition of forced work in place, but it also has to keep the illusion going that it is somehow doing people a favor by allowing them access to anything less than 100% of the vast social wealth produced by our labor and ingenuity. In some places in the world, so much of the surplus is stolen from the workers and so little is given back that people are starving. Their access to social wealth is almost nonexistent. This is a necessary consequence of having the distribution of the surplus determined by the arbitrary averages of the price form. It is rife with contradiction, and we’ll quickly see the point where the contradiction explodes the system—just as it has done in every other form of slavery known to man.
Young people nowadays who never saw the upheavals of the 60s or 70s think the earth is more likely to be hit by a comet which eradicates all life than that capitalism will end. As if it will take a miracle for enough people to wake up and put a stop to this. In fact the real miracle is that this idiotic, counterintuitive, contradictory system of bald theft and violence continues at all.
It’s the capitalist who is the sickest man in the world, and the slightest breeze coming for him will be a hurricane.
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June 28, 2008 at 5:34 pm
JCD
I have the opposite perspective. Sure, our economic system is counterintuitive, idiotic, stupid, destructive, etc. But that doesn’t mean that it is fragile or weak. It’s highly adaptive, it seems, absorbs what it can and squashes the rest. But maybe that is only pessimism.
July 10, 2008 at 9:42 am
Jim
I don’t think the capital social relation is idiotic or stupid exactly. (Though I do think it is counterintuitive and destructive.) It has a rationality to it, and understanding capitalism is equivalent to understanding that rationality. But to my mind there has been no comprehension of the essence of the capital social relation that was more fundamental than that provided by Karl Marx in Volume 1 of Capital. And what Marx shows in Capital is that the rationality of capital is inherently contradictory. It leads – not to “crisis” per se – but to perpetual class struggle.
The difficulty lies in understanding how something can be both contradictory and rational. We tend to think that a contradiction in something (particularly an argument) is an indication of its irrationality. But the sorts of contradictions Marx speaks of when he talks about “immanent contradiction” and “absolute contradiction” in the Contribution and in Capital are ontological contradictions, not propositional ones. The rationality of capital does not lie in its being “valid” in the sense of an argument. That wouldn’t make any sense. Nor does it lie in the fact that is an efficient organization of production (or one that matches “nature”). The rationality of capital lies in the fact that it is a social process that behaves in accordance with an essence. That essence consists in the imposition of the commodity-form on labor-power. It is a fusion of form (commodity-form) and content (actual labor power). It is the fusion of these two things that is contradictory, but this is indeed the “nature” of the capital social relation. That’s what it is at all places and times. What’s different at different places and times is the degree to which this form is being imposed (and therefore the efficiency of the extraction of surplus) as well as the degree of resistance of the working class to this imposition.
This brings me to your second claim: “It’s highly adaptive, it seems, absorbs what it can and squashes the rest.” It absorbs what it can and crushes resistance where it can, but it’s also important to notice that it cannot crush or co-opt all resistance. Resistance to the imposition of the commodity-form on labor is just as essential to the capital social relation as is the imposition itself. This follows from Marx’s analysis, but it is also visible in reality at all times and all places. Resistance not only took place through the party politics of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It took place with equal force in the space between the wars. It took place in the “developing world” since the 50s up to today. It was visible in the struggles of the unwaged: students, blacks, prisoners, Native Americans, women, and houseworkers. It’s still taking place in the movement in Argentina to take over factories and in Chiapas. It took place in Cuba – sometimes with the cooperation of the state, sometimes without – during the “Special Period” when workers had to come up with innovative ways to deal with the first wave of Peak Oil in the 90s. And so on.
To ignore the actual struggles by the working class produces the sorts of one-sided theories of Marxist political economists like Baran and Sweezy as well as the equally one-sided “cultural” or “hegemonic” interpretations of the Frankfurt School. We want to reject theories which treat capitalism as something “irrational” just as much as we want to reject theories that treat it as something “hegemonic” which co-opts all resistance. What we want to accept are theoretically grounded (“scientific”), strategic accounts of capitalism, beginning not just from what the capitalist class is doing but also taking into account the new and novel forms of resistance to the imposition of the commodity-form on labor.