Abstract
Marx’s approach to capitalism is politically critical and philosophically ‘complexifying’. This is because his work is concerned with meaning, linking everyday categories and with the ‘technical’ ones of economic science. Moreover his philosophizing focuses on the symbolic dimensions of the ‘economic categories’ in this experiential discourse and their relationship to inequalities of power at every level. This concern with meaning requires historicization as a matter of principle, since meaning is cumulative in language and culture, and as a matter of detailed ‘de-naturalization’, in order to loosen the supposed conceptual constraints on political possibility. Marx seldom uses the terms Kapitalismus or even kapitalistische Produktionsweise, using bürgerliche Gesellschaft or Produktionsweise more generally. His use of bürgerliche Gesellschaft generates some confusion in his own work, and the common translations make matters even worse for English readers. His concept of capital as a ‘mainspring’ promoting class conflict and thus facilitating revolutionization in the social relations of production and exchange is crucially flawed. Nonetheless his work still stands as an exemplar in method, and to some extent in content, because it takes a constructive, constitutive and performative approach to the ‘language of real life’ in class-divided society.
Marx and Philosophy
Marx is still undoubtedly the best critical theorist of capitalism that we have. His theory is profoundly philosophical, by which I mean that it is concerned with experience in the widest sense, questioning everything back to first presuppositions, and it is determinedly critical from a standpoint over and beyond the present political situation. Looked at that way, it is hard to see any points of contact between ‘modern economics’ and Marx’s work, culminating in Das Kapital, Erster Band, Zweite Aufgabe, 1872, but including his voluminous works, manuscript studies and notebooks, virtually all of which have an overt connection with his philosophical approach and critical concern. By comparison, the presuppositions and development of modern economics, from early marginalism in the 1870s to the latest method-driven mathematical-modelling econometrics, looks an entirely different sort of science.
While there are some philosophical studies of this modern discipline, they are of necessity at least somewhat indebted to Marx in terms of approach, and sometimes content. While there are certainly economists who are highly critical of capitalist practice, and indeed have overtly socialist, ‘welfare-ist’ or other social democratic or ‘cooperative’ agendas, there is little evidence that their work is as determinedly philosophical as Marx’s. Basically even critical economists work from presuppositions that mostly reflect, rather than thoroughly critique, the institutions and practices that we characteristically associate with capitalism, namely monetary exchange, personal and corporate accumulation, consumerism, disregard of ‘externalities’, decentralized (albeit governmentally regulated and politically manipulated) decision-making in terms of investment and disinvestment, and much the same with respect to the markets in consumer-goods and employable labour. All of these are areas where Marx put his enquiring mind and caustic wit to work.
Moreover Marx’s philosophical work stands out for its historicization of philosophical questions, and therefore his rejection of philosophizing when it is presumed to be a matter of timeless truths. Perhaps today Marx’s determined practice of historicization may seem like standard or even unremarkable contextualization for a philosophical and political message, but in fact it is possible to see Marx’s philosophical method as essentially at one with the historical viewpoint. That is, even in (and especially in) his most ‘economic’ studies Marx is concerned with meaning, with ‘the tradition of all the dead generations that weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’, as he said in his pamphlet work the Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte.
Meaning is necessarily cumulative and historical (though not necessarily ‘smoothly’ so by any means), and it is through those meanings that human experience takes place at all. This is as much a matter of day-to-day experience for anyone in the modern world (i.e. Marx’s world in his time, and ours currently) as of anything more specialized in terms of discursive communities (e.g. technical terminology in economic science) or anything more deeply informed by philosophical enquiry (and the necessary historical study). Despite its reputation as formidably abstract, Das Kapital is strikingly experiential not just in its historical and contemporary citations and examples but in its focus on the categories of everyday life, namely value, money, capital, commodity, profit, price, etc. As Marx said in 1857, he was writing a ‘Kritik der Kategorien der politischen Ökonomie’.
What makes Marx’s Wissenschaft seem at odds with modern science (and more in line with philosophical enquiry, as I am claiming here) is that it deliberately ‘complexifies’ these categories, rather than simplifies them into concepts that will – ultimately and ideally – merely stand as place-holders for mathematical reductions of empirical phenomena. Even his occasional forays into mathematics are philosophically ‘complexifying’ rather than reductionist. Even the equalities of value asserted in the opening chapters of Das Kapital are not equations abstracting from real-world ‘numbers’ but are rather abstract yet verbal examplars through which meaning is derived by philosophical analysis and judgement. Marx’s work is far more like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen than it is like that of T.H. Marshall or even Paul Sweezey. The exposition of Das Kapital could very easily be parodied in the manner of the later Wittgenstein:
‘Suppose we say that two commodities, perhaps a coat and a pair of shoes, are of equal value. What do we mean when we say that? Where does this value come from? What creates the equality that we are talking about? From childhood we are taught to make exchanges with money. But money is also a “thing”. We seem to be travelling in a circle.’
In some respects Marx’s work is even more philosophical than Wittgenstein’s ruminations on very small slices of life. This is because Marx was rather more interested in the symbolic dimensions of ‘real life’ in class-divided societies, that is, aspects of meaning that are even more complex and difficult to specify than the clash between philosophical ‘problems’ and the commonplace and politically unproblematic vignettes that concerned Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of words lies in their use in practical contexts (not in rarefied and overly sceptical philosophical questioning). While hardly reductionist, his philosophical investigations were deliberately simplified and certainly not historical in approach, as were Marx’s. As philosophy, Wittgenstein’s ruminations were cast as quotidian rather than timeless.
Marx’s exposition of value as a term in everyday use is complexified both through his analysis (relying, I think, on a misplaced notion of ‘equality’, contra Aristotle) and through his general theory of fetishism, showing how the symbolic dimension of meaning comes to have ‘a life of its own’ in human institutions where these meanings are enacted as matters of everyday practice. In his account, everyday ‘realities’ of commercial exchange are presented as a form of religious ritual, just differently denominated and moreover defined as a ‘worldly other’ to religious ‘other worldliness’. Clearly Marx aimed to collapse the supposed distinction between the ‘other worldly’ and the ‘worldly wise’ in his discussion. Both the ‘other worldly’ and the ‘worldly wise’ are simply the operationalizing in ‘real life’ of certain concepts replete with meaning and invested with a symbolic dimension of significance. This significance appears because we cite these concepts repetitiously when we perform the rituals of monetary exchange through which capitalism is constituted – by us. Both these realms – the ‘other worldly’ and the ‘worldly wise’ – have institutionalized power-structures to maintain and increase that investment of significance through which power accumulates. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marx angrily observed people rushing ‘headlong for their chains’. On Marx’s analysis, belief in God and practical participation in his church are – in principle and ultimately in practice – quite as unnecessary (for a philosophical rationalist, anyway) as belief in value and practical participation in banks. As a savage indictment of Christianity’s moral individualism and of the economic individualism of commercial practice, and as a damning collapse of the two-into-one, Marx’s ‘Der Fetischcharakter der Ware und sein Geheimnis’ is quite superb, and persuasive – philosophically.
Exactly how this book, Das Kapital, or even any of Marx’s more obviously programmatic and polemical pieces, such as Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, was supposed to persuade anyone (or a class en masse) to take exactly what action under what circumstances for what result is a rather more mysterious question. He commented that he wrote Das Kapital ‘for the professors’, possibly to argue from what appeared to be their own (and thus undeniable) premises. He used impeccably logical reasoning and historical argument from evidence to get to an unwelcome but rigorously derived conclusion revealed quite late in the book, namely the political victory of the proletariat in a class struggle, and the concomitant establishment of economic practice derived from quite different principles. Or possibly his reader-strategy was less self-conscious than this, or simply something else. We do not know for sure, the commonplace characterizations of most Marxisms to the contrary.
Marx and Capitalism
While the above comments may or may not be familiar ones, and may or may not ring true, I am concerned here with a somewhat more specific question. What actually is capitalism? Kapitalismus is a word that Marx hardly ever used, and possibly he was one of the first (at least in German) to do so. But it is evidently not a word he particularly needed, or particularly highlighted, when it did come up. Yet it is very much the common currency of economic description among Marxists (and probably has been since the 1890s), but not so much amongst modern economists themselves. Possibly this is because of the Marxist-critical tinge to the term, and possibly because an identification of the modern economy as a singular system (and a mere ‘ism’) might imply that there was some alternative ‘constitutive outside’ to it. As Marx rightly noted in his examination of the political economists (from Aristotle onwards to François Quesnay, Sir James Steuart, Adam Smith and David Ricardo etc.) their tendency was to naturalize certain human motivations and certain patterns of behaviour. What is ‘natural’ is presumed to be timeless, ‘wired-in’, the product perhaps of some ‘inevitable’ development of biological or spiritual evolution, and immune to serious challenge or practical alteration – except by those who are ‘unnatural’, misguided or mad.
Naturalization is thus a protean and potent political strategy because it names as fact that which is itself created through discourses of naturalization, backed up by social discipline and deployment of symbolic resources. It constitutes ‘what it purports to be’; it does not name some ‘thing’ that is already ‘there’. In short naturalization is a performative practice that is anti-philosophical, anti-political and anti-critical. In so far as modern economics arises from ‘given’ assumptions about ‘human nature’ (whether stated or unstated), rather than from ever questioning those assumptions, it naturalizes, even without bothering to address the psychological questions of ‘human nature’, or the historical questions of its own conceptual genealogy, or the sociological questions of the institutions through which those assumptions evolved to the point where they are now uncritically ‘given’ as ‘facts’ of modern economic life. Histories of economic thought and practice, written from within the frame of modern economics, tend to be teleological and Whiggish, i.e. the modern discipline is viewed as both inevitable and triumphant, with no little scorn for supposed alternatives (utopian or misguided) and ‘paths not taken’ (evidently with good reason).
Capitalism is thus a somewhat Marxist-tinged term, but for all that commonly used and readily understood – but as what? And if Marx was not using the term, what then was he talking about? I am posing this question in the context of developing our theoretical understanding of capitalism and also scholarly commentary on Marxist and other critical studies of it. There are also methodological implications, bearing in mind that specifying the object will certainly rule some methods in and others out. Marx’s preferred terms for his object of study and critique were bürgerliche Produktionsweise (bourgeois mode of production) or bürgerliche Gesellschaft (bourgeois, or civil or commercial society), and later in the famous opening lines of Das Kapital he uses the term kapitalistische Produktionsweise.
Classical and scholarly exposition of Marx, particularly in English, has dwelt at some length on what the term bürgerliche Gesellschaft did and did not mean to Marx and his presumed readership in the 1840s and then later on into his career, as intellectual and political developments unfolded, particularly after the revolutions of 1848. By the 1860s and 1870s there was a recognizable world of ‘mass industrial society’ in some urban sectors of Western Europe and perhaps a few other ‘emerging economies’. By comparison the 1840s seem almost hermetic, quaintly reactionary, preoccupied with the trappings of religion and kingship (usually practised without any form of constitution or at least with minimal concessions to popular sovereignty). As the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei presciently noted, the forces of commercial industrialization were battering all this down, more or less rapidly, on a global scale, radiating from Western Europe outwards both west and east. Given that Das Kapital is a work rooted in Marx’s ‘self-clarifications’ of the 1840s, rather than in any superficial accommodation to the shallower and less revolutionary intellectual life of the decade or so following the upheavals of ’48, what precisely did he see as his object of study (for which das Kapital was the title synecdoche)? What can we learn from detaching the detail of his discussion from the catch-all category ‘capitalism’? What could this tell us about the present situation, and how to study it?
Marx is of course the prime ethnographer of commercial society, concerned to explicate the precise terms, linguistic and particularly symbolic, through which humans interact and understand one another (as much as they do). In Das Kapital he explicates not just the language but also the psychological and emotional terms that define the buyer-seller encounter on the market, or in other words, the self- and mutual-understandings that must be in place, and cannot be otherwise in these circumstances, for the interchange to make sense. That is, there must be a certain emotional distance in each person towards the other, and a motivating degree of selfishness:
In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must, therefore, mutually recognise in each other the rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses itself in a contract … is a relation between two wills, and is but the reflux of the real economic relation between the two … The persons exist for one another merely as representatives of, and, therefore, as owners of, commodities.
The implicit contrast is of course with non-commercial encounters in other contemporary and historical contexts (e.g. mentioned sometimes by Marx in terms of love, heterosexual relations, the family, etc.). Famously he saw something quite other than the Smith’s ‘propensity to truck and barter’ shining in the workers’ faces at a clandestine meeting, and he occasionally expatiated on the mind-set involved, in heavy contrast to that of commercial exchange.
Bürgerliche Gesellschaft is itself a highly problematic term in Marx’s lexicon, since he uses it at times, notably in the (so-called) Die deutsche Ideologie, to mean any and all human activities relating to the production and reproduction of life in some social setting, and also (even in the same manuscript discussions) to mean the historically specific way that European commercial society has been organised since the late Middle Ages (in contrast to the activities and categories of feudalism). The term ‘bourgeois society’ in English conveys little to any reader outside the circle of those familiar with Marx-in-translation, and is effectively a Marxist ‘term of art’. My own preference would be to get rid of it, and go for ‘commercial society’, for the second, historically specific sense mentioned below (and similarly with ‘commercial classes’ rather than ‘bourgeoisie’). The historical confusion and ambiguity mounts up, though, as Bürger or bourgeois became, from the late Middle Ages, a kind of Stand or état in society, distinct from the feudal nobility, clergy and peasantry, precisely through their nascent commercial activities, and thus of civil or citizen status, as opposed to the older three-fold orders of society. By the early modern period there is thus something of a confusion between ‘anyone as citizen’ and commerçant or homme d’affaires or Geschäftsmann as such. English seems to lack these nuanced transitions, possibly owing to a more decentralized and thus loosely organized (hence less economically restrictive) form of feudalism than in France, Germany or Spain, and perhaps therefore a more crucial part (along with the Low Countries) in the development of trans-national commercial society. My point is not a historical one, but one of definition for Marx and his presumed readership and translation for the rest of us, particularly into English. What precisely was Marx talking about? And in what terms would it make the most sense to talk today and engage analytically?
‘Civil society’ as an English term has very little history, except perhaps as a rather literal translation of société civile, which has connotations that are distinctly more egalitarian than commercial, referring to members or citizens of a civil order separate from an ecclesiastical one, and thus from an order relying on ‘divine right’. In the later twentieth century, outside Marxist discourse, the term has come to mean (ambiguously and contradictorily) both (a) a ‘voluntary’ realm of activities undertaken by citizens outside formal state institutions and outside the ‘for-profit’ realm of commercial activities, and (b) a non-commercial realm of activities, thus including ‘voluntary’ activities and the state. The latter definition is perhaps somewhat tilted towards Marxism in a Gramsci-esque mode, in that it isolates commercial activities in a way that could still mesh with a ‘mode of production’ reading of social and political formations, without undue reductionism. The former is a rather more Americanized concept, deriving from a reading of Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique, which highlights the non-state, non-commercial, ‘voluntary’ activities of the citizenry as a virtue (and one which his contemporary French readers might emulate to the good of their country – though not all Tocqueville’s comparisons were so flattering to the culture and practices of the fledgling United States). There is thus no solution here in simply opting for ‘civil society’ in English for either of Marx’s meanings.
The way forward, then, is to get to grips with the detail of what Marx is claiming about human activities, both as a matter of the generalities of the production and reproduction of life (rehearsed again in Das Kapital, and not therefore confined to the sketchy – and rather more Engelsian – ruminations of the ‘German Ideology’ manuscripts of 1845-46), and of the specifics as to what constitutes and therefore distinguishes die kapitalistische Produktionsweise, as we have it in the later so-called ‘economic’ works. Marx’s concern with ‘timeless’ historical generalities is notably slight, and very minimal in execution, for example, the passage on ‘the worst of architects’ and ‘the best of bees’ in the chapter in Das Kapital on the labour process. Possibly he was all too suspicious of the temptation to naturalize in that kind of discourse, i.e. to project into one’s generalizations the current practices and sensibilities of one’s own present-day experience and language, and thus to give them a timeless quality and inalterable character (Rousseau notably accused Thomas Hobbes of doing that in Leviathan). Or he may have also have had his suspicions about the creation of quasi-historical narratives about pre-history that produce some spuriously primitive ‘other’ to our ‘modern’ sophistication, thus succumbing to both teleology and Whiggishness (much as Engels produced in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats – Marx’s so-called anthropological notebooks show far fewer signs of this, Engels’s claims notwithstanding). Given what I detect as an admirable restraint with respect to both these factual-sounding discourses (which are of course features that define much of modern social studies as ‘scientific’), how then does Marx constitute in detail the features that distinguish mere commercial society (such as can be documented among ‘the ancients’ or in the ‘interstices’ of feudal societies) from the Produktionsweise that is the eponymous subject of his book?
This is quite a famous problem, not least for Marx himself, and I can only sketch the solution here. My focus is not on whether the distinction between the generalities of human life, and the historical specifics of ‘capitalism’ as Marx put it, is ‘correct’ in some sense, or whether it can be analytically, historically and sociologically sustained against criticism (probably not! given the different scientific communities and political projects involved). Rather my point is a methodological one, namely that some conceptual account is required here, that is, abstract specification of discourse, logical analysis and empirical illustration, defence of one’s position and possibly critique of Marx’s work, while still pursuing the question that he posed. Most writers in the Marxist tradition have been stronger on exposition and prior presumption, i.e. the narrative terms of Marx’s account of value, commodity, money and capital are to be taken as read, and so is their coherence into the concept of capital through which capitalism simply manifests itself in economic and political terms, QED. I think that few, if any, writers within the purview of modern economics can even conceive of the question as one worth pursuing, other than in some historical manner relating mainly to Marx and the political economists he concerned himself with (e.g. presenting Marx as an eccentric critic of the dead-end – and rightly killed-off – school of political economy).
Marx’s ‘dialectical’ derivation of capital from money has been Hegelianized (not least by himself in his Nachwort of 1872), de-Hegelianized (both by ‘scientific’ Marxist theoreticians and by Marxist economists wanting deductive ‘models’), and re-Hegelianized again by Gramscians and more recently a scattering of English-language scholars. My personal view is that this rather distracts from what Marx was trying to say, word-by-word, in his text (quite heavily revised in various drafts between 1857 and 1872). Appealing to Hegel introduces too much determinism, teleology and ambiguity at the outset, or at least it raises those issues and then they have to be dealt with. It also sets up the whole discussion as an easy target for charges of mysticism and snide dismissal by social scientists and philosophers such as Jon Elster and G.A. Cohen. In my view the strength of Marx’s method here is precisely that he links the everyday and experiential meaning of words (e.g. value, money) with the ‘technical’ exposition of these concepts in ‘scientific’ works (e.g. Smith, Ricardo et al.), using both of these as raw material for his critique and thus deriving something new – and politically significant.
I stress political significance because I don’t think that Marx’s discussion was ever meant to stand or fall on proof or refutation within some scientific community, whether by empirical verification (as in Marx’s day) or by discursive tests of falsifiability (as in ours). This is not to say that Marx had no interest in empirical persuasiveness or logical consistency in constructing his text – he did. But his view of linguistic and therefore social interaction is profoundly recursive – ultimately we make true, what we perform in practice, precisely because our practice makes meanings, about which we reflect. Through these reflections, we can then alter what we do, etc. etc. I see this in Marx’s work from his earliest ‘economic and philosophical’ writings onwards, and obviously don’t see any great ‘rupture’ or ‘breakthrough’ from this outlook into some other form of ‘science’, derived (allegedly) from the (supposed) accuracy of the physical sciences. (Marx’s comments and comparisons concerning the physical sciences are thus, in my view, much overrated and specifically misinterpreted.) What is ‘unscientific’ about viewing the relationship between language and ‘real life’ as constitutive, constructive and performative? (rather than reflective or descriptive?)
Towards a Critical Analysis of the Lifeworld in Class-divided Society
On this basis, then, what does the ‘capitalism’ problem look like? Marx has framed his account with a number of defining presumptions, in particular a view that the categories of real-life have a systematic quality or structure that can be discovered, not through mere observation but through critical analysis. This critical analysis, begun by the political economists, is necessarily political in their hands, given their personal, structural and ultimately uncritical relationship with the commercial activities and political powers of their lives and times. Much of Marx’s work is simply a gleeful and sardonic recounting of numerous facts, values and experiences that they have chosen to romanticize, put into the background, or ignore altogether. Helpfully Marx himself picked out the three main contributions of his own thought very much in political terms (class struggle, victory of the proletariat, and the concept and properties of labour-power), and here it is his conceptual innovation in the analysis of value that comes to the fore. Setting the politics of the political economists aside, and substituting his own (a tactic, to which, in a post-Kuhnian age, we are rather more sympathetic than in former times, which were more attuned to scientific and logical positivisms), Marx constructed a logically consistent ‘system’ through which capital was identified as self-expanding value as a categorial phenomenon, through which the activities of capitalists, workers and consumers can all ‘make sense’ in everyday terms. To him this seemed a satisfying description and exposition of a historical phenomenon that he was determined to make problematic, precisely because it was a solution to the logical problem of profit (how does it arrive out of apparent value-equalities?), and hence a statement of the defining terms of capital (an ever increasing accumulation of money and the means to make more and more of it – and so on to infinity).
It continues to strike me as plausible that for Marx economic categories in his philosophical account were never intended to be, or to be reducible to, ‘real prices’ or other such empirical phenomena, and thus to stand or fall on such ‘scientific’ testing, even as a matter of principle. Marx’s whole apparatus is insulated from such a reading at the outset, and even in the ‘later’ volumes of Das Kapital, devoted to expositions that are sometimes less obviously abstract than the opening discussions, the strategy still seems to me unchanged – the ‘later’ materials merely trace out in detail what has already been argumentatively established as inherent in the initial specification of the founding categories themselves. The detailed work on Engels’s editorial practice in these ‘later’ volumes has only just been (very largely) completed, and the indications are that (a) we are not really reading in the published versions Marx’s discussions as they were set down, and (b) we are looking to some extent at content that reflects Engels’s views on natural science and its methods, ‘materialist dialectic’ and Marx’s place, as Engels saw it, in the world’s pantheon of scientists.
My own view is that Marx’s analysis is itself let down by the implausible and indefensible empirical statements through which he explicates his concept of labour-power (i.e. it produces more of some ‘substance’, viz. ‘congealed labour’, as output, than it consumes as input), and also that human labour-power is somehow different in this respect from the labour-power of animals, or the powers that machines put into the labour process. It is also let down by an apparent presumption that categories have some internal logic of their own through which human possibilities are both enabled and constrained. In this case, it is Marx’s ultimate but consistent argument that profits for reinvestment fall (in terms of labour-time) as the proportion of fixed capital (as opposed to ‘variable capital’, i.e. ‘congealed’ human labour-power) rises within the system as a whole. If the propositions concerning labour-power are not true – even as constructive, constitutive or performative practices (which I think they cannot be anyway) – then the deductive argument (which has obvious and for Marx very welcome political ramifications) must in some sense fail as well. If people as proletarians want to make a revolution such as Marx had in mind, then constructively, constitutively and performatively there really isn’t any insuperable obstacle, given the malleable character of human practices and institutions. However, I don’t think anyone can count on the process being assisted, as a matter of circumstances, and consciousness about circumstances, in quite the way that Marx outlined in Das Kapital.
What then is capitalism? And why then is Marx still the greatest critical theorist of it? The constitutive, constructive, performative perspective on both the everyday activities we term economic, and on the concepts and categories (including those of modern economics) through which we make these activities ‘real’, is valuable both intellectually and politically, and indeed the two go together. In so far as the discourses of everyday life are framed as ‘scientific’ and descriptive, true or false, with respect to some naturalized realm of putatively timeless or historyless ‘fact’, then power will accumulate around those who presume this and operate ‘technically’ within this frame. Quietism will then reign amongst those in less elite positions (trusting in science and mistrusting their own instincts and judgements), and the ‘space’ within which to construct, constitute and perform any kind of large-scale or lasting change will shrink to nil. However, in so far as the discourses of ordinary life are framed as historical and therefore malleable, and power is relocated within what we do as a matter of principle (rather than in a realm of ‘scientific’ expertise), then political ‘space’ opens up, as does democratic and democratizing discourse.
As Marx himself noted, the critique of what’s wrong (e.g. value, money, exploitation, profit, capital etc.) does not in itself alter anything in terms of everyday practice and institutions. Nor in his view, do ‘utopian’, small-scale enterprises, or moralistic critiques of greed, naturalized in some way into ‘human nature’ (but appearing in some individuals more than others – always a problem with naturalizing generalities in ‘the species’). Without the mainspring in the mechanism – i.e. the scissors function that operates between the declining rate of profit and reinvestment in fixed capital, and the resulting crises of consumption – what chance is there for the practical, everyday construction, constitution and performance of processes of production and consumption that don’t rely on monetary exchange at all? Or is it possible to construct a monetary system that undercuts the tendency for capital to accumulate in the hands of a few? (Marx thought not, but maybe he was wrong, as market-socialists have argued. ) Given the globalized world market, and its self-publicizing dynamics (backed up with brute force, as Marx noted), where and how could anyone even start?
Current arguments concerning global warming might have, in some versions, the mainspring quality that Marx was looking for – a systemic tendency to cause the system of monetary exchange (known as capitalism, either on its own definition, or on Marx’s – I think flawed – exposition) to collapse more or less of itself, i.e. through human activity, which could be otherwise (as opposed to asteroid collisions and suchlike). However, nothing guarantees human collective action at all, or that collective action would produce something like a solution for humanity, or that the solution would be non-monetary in Marx’s terms (or others), or that a monetary solution or even a ‘work-around’ is impossible. The distinct advantage in Marx’s analysis, and his legacy – in my view – is that it looks for perspectives and problems within the constructive, constitutive and performative concepts of everyday life (and their recursive reflections in ‘scientific’ discourses), rather than in fate, ‘human nature’, instinct, ‘socio-biology’, the ‘spiritual world’ or suchlike realms that are in some way supposedly ‘outside’ us, rather than actually and practically within our own grasp as language-using, hence social individuals.
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