I initially wrote this as a reply to Jake off my previous post about capital being “diseased”. I’m trying to apply some of the ideas I’ve been picking up from reading Harry Cleaver’s Reading Capital Politically. I’m also trying to put them together with the more philosophical readings of Marx (which Cleaver would probably reject). But I thought the ideas in my reply were important and controversial enough to reproduce them in their own post.
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 there is that the rationality of capital is inherently contradictory. This contradiction is more often than not understood as the inevitability of “crisis” in capitalism. It is less often understood as the inevitability of resistance to capitalism by the working class.
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 contradictions belong to things, not to theories or arguments about things. 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 or a real nature. 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 and techniques of production). 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 theft of surplus from the workers) as well as the degree of resistance of the working class to this imposition and exploitation.
This brings me to your [Jake's] second claim: “It’s highly adaptive, it seems, absorbs what it can and squashes the rest.” It absorbs what it can and squashes resistance where it can, but it’s also important to notice that it cannot crush or co-opt all resistance, and the degree to which it is successful at doing this is not the result of the spontaneity of the capitalist class and their degree of social technology; rather, it is correlated with the degree of working class resistance to the imposition of the commodity-form on labor. Resistance to this imposition 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 (the workers’ councils in Europe). It took place in the “developing world” since the 50s up to today. It was and is 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 instead 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. We want to take stock not only of the enemy, but of our own forces on the battlefield as well. We need to understand where we are, because that is in large part determining what they are doing.
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July 15, 2008 at 10:43 am
Dave
Can elaborate on what you mean by “one-sided” Marxist theory in reference to Baran and Sweezy?
July 15, 2008 at 11:19 am
Jim
Baran and Sweezy themselves aren’t one-sided. They were clearly trying to use Keynesianism to come up with a theoretical framework to make sense of not only imperialism but the resistance to it. Their reading of Marx is one-sided in the sense that they see the post-war working class as having been bought off by capital. This is why they see the hope for resistance against imperialism only in the Third World and in non-working class groups like blacks and students in the developed world. So they don’t see anything in Marx other than political economy – a theory of the “irrationality” of the system – but they don’t have any strategic reading of Capital that would make it useful for resistance to that order. (You can find more in the “Introduction” to Cleaver’s Reading Capital Politically.)
July 15, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Chuckie K
“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 contradictions belong to things, not to theories or arguments about things.”
I ‘d like to suggest that you will come closer to the logic of contradiction in Capital if you view it’s object as ‘processes’ rather than ‘things’ and approach processes as the interaction of multiple forces rather than ‘ontological contradictions.’
But I’m just an old devotee of ‘dialectical’ ‘historical’ ‘materialism.’
July 17, 2008 at 9:10 am
Jim
The “things” I was referencing weren’t static objects but rather social relations, in particular the capital social relation in which one class imposes the commodity-form on the labor of another class in order to pump surplus out of it. This imposition is itself the contradiction I spoke of, the one Marx argues throughout his entire corpus that generates class struggle.
I did not use the term “ontological” to indicate that I was talking about static things like tables and chairs rather than social processes. Again, the main point of contrast I was trying to indicate was that between propositions and things out in the world. The language was vague, but I meant to include under “things” anything that wasn’t a proposition, including social relations (which is the specific thing I meant but didn’t directly indicate).