CAPITALISM,
TECHNOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Marxism is often accused
of being blind to capitalism’s ravaging of the natural environment. Marxism is
most often portrayed, both by its critics and by many of its proponents, as
endorsing capitalism’s treatment of, and relationship with nature, and even of
supporting its increased extension or intensification. Ever-increasing
production and development of the technological means of securing it are widely
seen as being ends-in-themselves for Marxism. In fact, this is true of the dominant
varieties of Marxism during the 20th century. However, it is not
true of Marx himself, and thus it is possible to forge a critical form of
Marxism which rejects that perspective. It is towards the latter goal that I
see this text as contributing. While a few Marxologists have undertaken
extensive research in order to establish that Marx was in fact far from being
blind to capitalism’s fundamental antagonism towards nature (see Paul Burkett, Marx
and Nature (1999) and John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (2000)), I
will here, at the outset, content myself with two short quotes from Marx’s
mature writings which clearly illustrate his awareness of this reality.
"It is not the unity
of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of
their metabolic exchange with nature, which require explanation or is the
result of a historical process, but rather the separation between these
inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation
which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and
capital." (Grundrisse, p.489 (Penguin, 1973))
“Capitalist production …
disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth …. [A]ll progress in capitalist agriculture is
progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil;
all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a
progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The
more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its
development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this
process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the
techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by
simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and
the worker." (Capital, vol. 1, p. 638 (Penguin edition, 1976)
1. My
concern here is not to detail the specific inter-relations between the
operation of capital and the natural environment, nor to propose some sort of
eco-Marxist strategy for resisting capital’s threats to people and nature. My
primary concern, rather, is to focus on the basic approach that a new 21st
century Marxism should take in regard to the question of the general
relationship between capitalism and the natural environment, of analyzing its
historical trajectory, and, by implication, of the relationship between a
post-capitalist society and the environment.
This text is conceived as
a contribution to larger effort, which is to establish as fundamental to
a new, critical Marxism appropriate to the 21st century that the
technology developed by capitalism in its historical transition to its real
domination over the whole world possesses an immanent antagonism (tending
towards catastrophe) to nature, just as it possesses an immanent antagonism
(tending towards catastrophe) to living labour and the workers engaged in it.
(In fact, in both cases, it is humanity in general that is ultimately threatened
with catastrophe.) The idea is that over the course of the many years of
capital’s historical development, of its continual ‘revolutionizing of
production’, with modern science at its service, that it has actually built
into its technology this antagonistic orientation, which serves to
facilitate its maximization of opportunities for domination and exploitation of
both living labour and nature. Of course, in capitalist society, especially
where the form of domination at the political level takes the democratic form,
this project is widely seen as ‘civilizing’ and ‘spreading prosperity’, and so
science for the most part willingly supports it.
Fundamental to my whole
approach to capitalism’s relationship to nature is that it is, in the end,
essentially the same as capital’s relationship to wage labour. Without keeping this focus firmly in mind
here in this text, one will indeed wonder why I am going on at such length
(especially in the quotes from Marx) about capitalist technology’s relation to
the worker. Capital dominates both, living labour and nature, in order to
exploit them both. In both cases, capital uses technology as a mediating factor
in order to realize, enforce and reproduce at a higher level these relations of
domination and exploitation. In both cases, the relationships and the processes
involved are linked and analogous. Capital is antagonistic toward the natural
environment just as it is antagonistic to wage labour. Capital’s domination and
exploitation of nature, given the latter’s finite limits and specificities,
leads to destruction, degradation and despoliation of that nature, just as its
domination and exploitation of wage labour, given the physical limits and
specificities of human beings, leads to destruction, degradation and exhaustion
of the working class. Further still, just as the working class fights back
against capital’s depradations, so too does nature in ways we are all too
familiar with today, such as irreversible climate change, widespread industrial
diseases such as cancer, ‘natural disasters’ of all sorts, etc. But in reality,
it is not nature taking revenge on humanity. That would be to personify or
subjectify nature, to ascribe to it intentionality. In fact, all of these
environmental catastrophes, which constitute an expanding environmental
crisis, result from capital’s technological transformation (and mutation
(thus: trans-mutation?)) of natural ecosystems and processes into monstrously
destructive forces for humankind which previously, naturally, they were not.
Highly developed capitalist domination of humanity and nature has intervened in
and transformed the myriad intricate and inter-related natural processes of the
planet to such an extent that the current ‘natural environment’ we live within
cannot be truly said to be natural; it has been adulterated,
contaminated, poisoned and destroyed to such an extent that it is more
accurately described as the capitalistically modified ‘natural’ environment.
Capital’s relationship
with nature has a history of its own; it has a trajectory of development, of
‘advancement’, of ‘progress’. But, we need to ask, an advancement and
progression toward what? Capitalism has transformed nature over the years no
less than it has transformed labour and the working class. Capital has to such
an extreme extent, by today’s advanced stage in its historical development,
interfered with, appropriated, manipulated, in a word, messed with the earth’s
overall natural environment that it is in fact increasingly difficult any
longer to find any feature, any aspect, any part of it that hasn’t been changed
in one way or another as a result. This change, this messing with nature by
capital has by now done such catastrophic damage to the natural, evolving,
inter-connected, highly complex and self-sustaining ecosystems and processes of
the planet that the question of sustainability itself in regard to capitalist
economic processes in interaction with the natural environment has become an
increasingly important concern for the capital class itself (at least at the
political level).
The damage to the natural
environment by capital can be seen on the smallest of scales. However, it is
the overall result of capital’s entire ensemble of processes on a global scale
that should be the primary concern of communists, of internationalist
pro-revolutionaries today. Just as the totality of capitalist production and
circulation, operating on the basis of competition is anarchic, because at that
level capital operates blindly, driven solely by separate, competitive
interests concerned only with value maximization, so too, it seems clear to me,
the overall result of capitalist production, circulation and consumption on the
natural environment is essentially anarchic and blind; which is to say that, in
the context of the transition to real domination, it is inherently and
unavoidably destructive and catastrophic for the environment, and, consequently
also for humankind.
2. How did this
come to be? one might ask. Since the dawn of its existence, humankind has been
subject to the forces of nature. As well as providing humanity with its fruits
and various 'gifts', many of nature's forces and conditions have served as
threats to the survival and welfare of humankind. Technology originates from
the need and the will of human beings to protect themselves from these threats
and to take greater advantage of nature's offerings. These origins are innocent
enough: to meet basic needs of shelter, food, clothing, etc., and to alleviate
discomfort and harm. As technics are devised and then gradually developed over
time to accomplish these tasks, the technics themselves become increasingly
tested in practice, and consequently modified, refined, and made more complex.
The technics are thereby improved in their efficiency, at accomplishing the
same task quicker or with greater ease, in a word, with less living labour. But
the technics are also often made more powerful, capable of greater tasks than
were previously possible. As this process of technical development takes place
over long periods of time, technical means are developed which are increasingly
powerful, which give their possessor power over whatever it is they are capable
of being applied to. From early on, some of the most significant of these means
were both productive and destructive, capable of being used for either material
production or for destruction, whether, e.g. for hunting or killing threatening
predator animals or for fighting (or fighting off) another tribe or group of
humans, whether in defense or in conquest. Thus, from the earliest times,
humankind’s technical implements were capable of being applied to the land and
natural products of it, to other animals, and of course, to other humans. Somewhere
along the way, improvements in technics permitted the production of a
surplus-product, freeing up an elite minority from the necessity of onerous
labour; then, class societies and civilizations arose with small ruling
minorities monopolizing control over the most powerful of these technical means
in order to maintain and, whenever possible, increase their class power and
protect their accumulating wealth. Technology thus has a long history, in both
the economic and political realms, and since the dawn of class-divided
societies, its most highly developed forms have been brought into being in the
service of a project of maintaining and accumulating class power and wealth. Of
course, during all this time most of the technics developed in such socieities
were concerned with material production, with producing the means of life of
the whole society, from raw materials, with technical means, by living labour.
As technology and the
scientific knowledge underlying it gradually developed, there eventually arose
the idea of humankind's (potential) 'conquest' or domination of nature, not
just as a dream as it had previously been for a few, but in reality, in a
future historically linked to their time. This idea only really became popular
with the modern Enlightenment and the concomitant early development of the
bourgeoisie. Without going into dates and details, we know that a number of
technical inventions in the period of the rise of the bourgeoisie within feudal
society gave their masters enormous productive and economic power in comparison
with all that had existed hitherto. Increasing domination over nature in the
economic realm led to increasing domination over the rest of society, and
eventually political supremacy. The process of primitive accumulation
undertaken by the ruling bourgeois class dispossessed the bulk of previously
semi-independent producers from their means and conditions of production,
creating an ever-growing market of "free labourers" renting out their
labour-power to capitalists. The latter, as Marx so well documents, began the
process of socializing the means of production, by putting together in common
work these wage labourers, in a united organized process of production, usually
in a single place of work, the workshop. Initially using the same technical
means as they had previously as independent producers, the workers were soon to
be subjected to technical means and instruments of production, fixed capital,
which were owned and directed by the capitalists, and legally protected by the
capitalist state. From then on was set in motion an historical process of a
constant revolutionizing of the means of production as a result of the
expansion of capital and the development of the law of value. Figuring
centrally in this project of class domination and accumulation of surplus-value
by exploiting living labour in the production process was, and still is, increasingly
so in fact, the harnessing and shaping of science to service these aims.
Thus, prior to capitalism,
because of the relatively under-developed state of the technological productive
forces, with mostly individual producers working independently – even if on a
common project under a single master -- with their own separate tools and other
instruments of production, (a) these producers were still subjects of the
labour process and in of control their instruments, and (b) the natural
environment was degraded or destroyed by human activity only as a result of
either massive over-working by large numbers of producers on a limited natural
resource or by reckless deployment of large concentrations of the most powerful
means of destruction at the disposal of the then ruling class. Human degradation
and destruction of nature did indeed occur, but the scale of it was minute in
comparison with today’s damage. It was only with capital’s historic expansion,
permitting its constant revolutionizing of the means of production (and
of destruction), bringing about the development of massively powerful machinery
and other technical means (chemical processes, forms of combination and
organization, etc.) used in large-scale industry that, on the one hand, the direct
producers lost their role of subjects in the labour process to these machines
(and the science underlying them), and, on the other hand, large-scale
destruction and long-term degradation of the natural environment first appeared
in history, and began to accumulate.
3. I think we can justifiably speak of the degradation
and debasement of humankind, just as we can speak of a comparable degradation
of the environment, as a result of the utilization of the technology that
capital has brought into being, especially during the past 100 years. This is
so, I think, even though much of this technological development has brought
innumerable benefits and improvements in the lives of much of humankind. I
think we can say this generally about the history of capitalism, but certainly
we can just restrict ourselves to the 20th century if we so choose.
And this degradation is not just a matter of the evil or malevolent
or deliberate mis-uses or abuses of the technological means it has
developed or come into control of. The great bulk of this degradation of the
human species, and of course of the whole earth and the atmosphere surrounding
it, has resulted from the ‘proper’, prescribed usage of such technologies. An
obvious example is the development of nuclear power and of nuclear weapons and
the threat of their use. The mass destruction and death of the 20th
century, the inter-imperialist and ‘civil’ wars, the numerous instances of
‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide perpetrated on humanity by the various factions
and gangs of the capitalist class have been facilitated by the great
advancement in technological forces of both production and destruction capital
has made. On the level of consciousness, the triumph of what Marcuse has called
“technological rationality” or what Adorno has called “instrumental reason” – a
rationality that nullifies or marginalizes critical reason -- within the
thought and activity of the population at large in advanced capitalist society
has itself greatly contributed to capital’s increasing domination of labour,
and of the working class’ inability to develop (thus far) a revolutionary
consciousness (on a large scale).
Perhaps the most prosaic
such degradation as a result of capitalist technology is what it does to the
individual worker who must operate it and work in submission to it. One need
only consult certain well-known passages in Capital, vol.1, especially
in the chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry”, for vivid descriptions
of this debasement. Modern automated production of 100+ years later is no less
degrading and mind-numbing, even if it involves less manual labour. And then of
course, there are the innumerable environmental damages inflicted by capital’s
deployment of its technological forces, damages which have debased humankind’s
relationship with nature, thereby diminishing our humanity (or human-ness,
whatever that may be). The point here is that there is a clear parallel between
the fate of the natural environment and the fate of humankind under the transition
to the real domination of capital, central to which is the development and
utilization of an increasingly powerful, specifically capitalist
technology.
4. Sooner or later, the question must arise, namely, why
write about the environment now? The reason is not that the question of
the environment, of capitalism’s relation to it, and of the future possible
relation to it by socialism/communism wasn’t of importance until recently. It
has always been important, but in Marxist revolutionary theory it has indeed
taken a secondary position to the various questions concerning specifically social
relations and events, as distinct from social-natural ones. In fact, Marx and
Engels themselves had contributions to make to a critique of capitalism’s
relations with the natural environment, about which I will return to later. The
reasons why it is imperative for us in the pro-revolutionary milieu to address
these social-natural questions today are (1) a number of threats to the very
survival of both the environment and humankind existing within this
environment, chief among them the recently scientifically demonstrated reality
of human-caused climate change and the prospect for significant increasing of
such change within the next several decades; and (2) just as important, the
rise to close to the top of the list of concerns, worries, fears of the public
at large in most countries around the world about these environmental threats
concomitant with the publicizing of these scientific conclusions through the
mass media. It is for these reasons that the questions about the environment
and an advanced society’s relations with it are now of paramount interest for
all concerned with the future of humankind.
Traditionally, Marxist
revolutionary theory has posited chronic economic crisis and tendencies towards
its collapse as hallmarks of capitalism’s downfall and as precursors of its
political overthrow and economic abolition on the part of its gravediggers.
Now, however, it is easy to see chronic environmental crisis and tendencies
towards ecological collapse, which would, if allowed to run their
course, threaten the very survival of the human species. There is a very
fascinating symmetry here, although the processes involved – economic-social
and social-natural – are clearly different, even if connected, and there is no
possibility of a Marxist environmental crisis theory comparable to Marxist
political-economic crisis theory. Questions concerning capitalist society’s metabolism
(following Marx in using this term) with the natural environment involve both
components of political-economic and social revolutionary theory and components
of natural science. Essentially, the natural science uncovers the natural
processes involved in this metabolism between humanity and nature, its
conditions of functioning, and its results, as humanity ‘progresses’ its means
and practices of interacting with nature. Revolutionary theory then takes those
findings and incorporates them into its comprehension of capital and its
historical tendencies. A perspective for the future, concerning (a)
capitalism’s evolving relationship with the environment and (b) a possible course
of opposition to this process on the part of the proletariat and humankind,
is then developed.
5. As
far as I am concerned, and as was claimed in the previous two points, there can
no longer be any debate about the claim that capitalist society’s relationship
with the natural environment has become catastrophic, not just
for the health and very survival of that environment, but also for humankind
itself, which requires that environment in order to reproduce itself through
history. And it is equally undeniable that capitalist society’s relationship
with the natural environment has been facilitated or mediated by the
technology of that society. For the past 150-200 years, that technology has
primarily been (various forms of) large-scale industrial productive technology.
The question eventually must arise: is it merely the specific usage that
capitalism makes of this (and associated) technology that is the determinant
factor here, or is it rather the technology itself that is determinant owing to
its limited possibilities of use? This question needs to be unpacked, although
it usually isn’t, with the positivist, productivist, traditional Marxist
invariably asserting that it is only the usage
that capitalism makes of this essentially ‘neutral’ technology that is
at fault. (While the technophobic pro-environment opponent of this destruction
lays all of the blame on the technology by itself, as a completely autonomous
force, thereby letting capital off the hook.) Obviously the capitalist’s usage
of the technology is at fault, and an essential part of the problem. But the
question is really whether this technology itself is actually neutral,
capable of an entirely opposing deployment; or, in fact, has not capital itself
already developed and perfected this technology in its own image, with its own
imperatives and aims, its own perspective – which is of course that of the maximum
domination and exploitation of everything that exists – to such an extent that any
possible usage of it (e.g. by associated
producers) will prove damaging (and ultimately destructive) to the people and
the natural environment that it interacts with? This is the real question posed
here.
How one answers this
question determines how one sees humankind’s future relationship with
technology after the emancipation of the proletariat from the dictatorship of
the capitalist class: as either (a) a further and even intensified development
of the technology bequeathed by capitalism in the same direction as was
previously driven by the law of value, or (b) a radical rupture with that
trajectory by means of a primary focus given to further technological
development at the service of qualitative rather than strictly
quantitative criteria and aims, with a principle focus given to the quality
of the relations between the people of the society and between nature and the
people which this technology mediates.
6. Science
during the era of the political-economic domination of capital has been made to
serve the purposes of capital’s historical project. To some this may sound
tendentious or debatable. Marx more or less took it for granted; see especially
his “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse. It really shouldn’t be
open to dispute, but it certainly goes against both the dominant capitalist
ideology and that of traditional or classical Marxism. Science, like
technology, is typically seen as politically ‘neutral’. But science does not
exist in a vacuum, it does not pursue entirely impartial, non-partisan
objectives, and, as everyone should know, it requires significant material
resources and financial support in order to function at all, increasingly so
the more it develops. An old saying has it that ‘he who pays the piper calls
the tune’, and given that science is at all times (in the modern era) of great
potential value to increasing economic productivity or otherwise improving the
efficiency or power of just about any technological device or apparatus or mode
of administration that exists and is of use to the capitalist class, it should
be clear that for the past few hundred years, and on an increasing scale
matching that of capital’s own growth, science has largely been made to serve
capital’s domination of the world, both social and natural.
This science serves as a
means for the continuous development of the technical-organizational forces of
production and administration. All of these forces serve to continuously
increase the wealth and the (political and social) power of the ruling
capitalist class which commands them and assures their development. For they
are not only productive and organizational forces which increase society’s productivity
and efficiency – which are invariably portrayed as socially progressive,
permitting increased output, and potentially consumption, of goods and services
for the general population and improved security and provision of public
services for everyone – they are also forces which in every case permit the
ruling class to increase its domination over, and its exploitation of, both the
whole of society/humanity and the natural world.
Capitalist science – and
surely we can use this term for science under the historical reign of capital –
serves this purpose, this project, by making the whole field of its study, of
its scope, into measurable, quantifiable, manipulable objects and processes of
control and exploitation. And this scope, this field ultimately reaches the
entirety of society and the entirety of nature. It begins with the historically
progressive project of comprehending the world, by developing an accumulating
understanding of the ‘laws of nature’ (physics, astronomy, chemistry). Before
long, it turns to the study of the biological realm, and of the human being
itself, as it differentiates itself from the rest of the animal world. The
human social realm itself becomes the ultimate ‘frontier’, the final mystery
for science. Scientific management of production employing any (and potentially
all) natural resources in existence, together with potentially limitless
administration and social and political control over society are the planned
outcome of this historical project of capital and of the trajectory of the
science which serves it.
Science under the
domination of society by capital has itself been transformed by capital, by its
needs and its aims, but also by its ideological vision of the world itself.
That vision, coming out of Descartes’ isolated subject of consciousness, seeing
the external world as a homogenous res extensa, and then, as Marx so
well described in the opening paragraphs of the Grundrisse, with the
bourgeois viewpoint as that of the isolated, autonomous individual a la
Robinson Crusoe. “In this society of free competition, the individual appears
detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make
him the accessory of a definite and
limited human conglomerate.” And: “Only in the eighteenth century, in
‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the
individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external
necessity.” Bourgeois society “produces this standpoint, that of the isolated
individual”, and in the thought of its leading spokesmen (Smith and Ricardo) “it
appears as an ideal”. Of course, this isolated individual not only confronts
“social” but also natural connectedness in his pursuit of his private
aims.
Following on Lukacs’
insights on this, the isolated individual viewpoint, in which contemplation as opposed
to practice is the mode of orientation, the understanding of the world is
fragmented, fractured, partial. And, correspondingly, the world in the vision
of the bourgeoisie is a fragmented, fractured world. It is a world of
separated, isolated facts and objects, taken out of their concrete
connectedness with each other and with the larger natural and social context in
which they exist. Abstraction and generalization are the means to obtain
knowledge of the world on this basis. Concepts and categories for classifying
the properties of objects and conditions in the world by means of quantifiable
measurement are developed in order to be able make general(izable) predictions
about different kinds of phenomena. Science proceeds on this basis during the
bourgeois epoch to make comprehensible in a quantified format, using
empirically based concepts, the natural and then social world for the purposes
of the bourgeoisie’s, then the capitalist class’ historical project of
controlling and exploiting the world, nature and society, to the greatest
extent that it can. While not true of absolutely all of modern science, the
bulk of all actual scientific research in capitalist society serves this end.
The development of the technological productive forces, as fundamental as it is
to the progress of capitalist society, obviously plays a large role in the
direction taken by such science, of its priorities, of what it chooses to
investigate, and what it either chooses to ignore or is incapable of
comprehending. This approach to understanding the world is perfectly suited to
the law of value and its increasing hegemony over capitalist society
7. Technology, such as it has developed in history thus
far (specifically over the most recent 200 years), is the ideal form for capitalist
reification. The commodity form and capitalist social relations find
their ideal vehicle for transforming and controlling every field of human
activity and even the subjectivity of those involved with the functioning of
technology in its ever expanding varieties. The mediating function that
technology plays in the production process, but also in so many more spheres of
social activity in capitalist society, is the ideal means by which to ensure
the enforcement and reproduction of capitalist social relations. By mediating
between people and between people and nature, specifically capitalist
technology is able to ensure that capitalist relations are dominant in all
specific relationships between said people and between them and the natural
environment they interact with by means of that technology. As Herbert Marcuse
wrote in One-Dimensional Man: “Only in the medium of technology, man and
nature become fungible objects of organization. The universal effectiveness and
productivity of the [technological] apparatus under which they are subsumed
veil the particular interests that organize the apparatus. In other words,
technology has become the great vehicle of reification – reification in
its most mature and effective form.” (pp.168-169) And from Marx: “The development
of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital,
but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of
labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of
skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is then absorbed
into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of
capital, and more generally of fixed capital, in so far as it enters
into the production process as a means of production proper. Machinery
appears, then, as the most adequate form of fixed capital, and fixed
capital, in so far as capital’s relations with itself are concerned, appears as
the most adequate form of capital as such.” (emphases in
original, Grundrisse, p. 694)
And: “Since – within the
process of production – living labour has already been absorbed into capital,
all the social productive forces of labour appear as the productive forces of
capital, as intrinsic attributes of capital, … these social productive forces
of labour, came into being historically only with the advent of the
specifically capitalist mode of production. That is to say, they appeared as
something intrinsic to the relations of capitalism and inseparable from them”
(“Results of the Immediate Process of Production”, in Capital, vol.1
(Penguin, 1976), p.1052). (In both these passages Marx refers to productive
forces as appearing as forces of capital rather than labour under the
real domination of capital; this ‘appearance’, however, is not at all
‘illusory’; said forces really do belong to capital under capitalism,
even though they were originally, in a relatively under-developed state of
becoming, forces belonging to labour (i.e. capital appropriated them from
labour).) This suggests that there is an intimate, “intrinsic” connection
between capitalist relations of production and the forces of production
developed under the specifically capitalist mode of production, that is to say,
that these technological forces of production cannot really be separated from
the relations of production of the social formation which gave rise to them.
8. Internationalist
Perspective (IP) has made the conceptualization and theorization of the process
of the transition from what Marx called the formal to the real subsumption of
labour under capital a cornerstone of our work of theoretical deepening in
attempting to understand, especially, the changes to the capitalist system over
the past 60+ years. Marx used another term as interchangeable with “the real
domination of capital over labour”. That term is “the specifically capitalist
mode of production”, and he claimed that this developed mode of production is,
for all intents and purposes, an entirely new mode of production in relation to
the merely formally capitalist mode of production. (Reference?) But what
exactly did Marx mean by a specifically capitalist mode of production based on
the generalization of the extraction of relative surplus-value as the hegemonic
form of exploitation of the working class? It can’t just be the simple process
of replacing individual tools and other implements held by separate producers
but working together in one workshop (i.e. formal domination) with new
equipment as means of production held by the capitalist – end of story (as so
many in the pro-revolutionary milieu who dismiss or minimize the significance
of the distinction insist). It is
that, in fact, but that actually involves quite a lot, and it implies or leads
to a lot more; and it goes on, over time, as the capitalist class continually
‘revolutionizes’ the production process and the society itself that encompasses
that production.
We are talking about,
first of all, the process of the socialization of production, for the first
time in history on a large scale, spreading throughout (most of) European and
then also (North) American society. Socialization of production under
capitalist social relations, in a situation where the mass of labourers have
been separated from the means and conditions of production, is a very significant
historical process. The means of production are transformed by capital from the
private property of the individual producers into the common machinery or
equipment privately owned by the capitalist or the firm. It should be clear to
all that there are major ramifications resulting from this, both for the wage
labourers and for the entire society whose material production we are concerned
with. The workers clearly lose control over the means of production, as the
capitalist takes control with his more efficient, more productive equipment or
machinery. This is a major loss for the workers’ autonomy in the labour process
and in the workshop itself, so also in the general relationship, in the
struggle itself between wage labour and capital. But it was a previous private
producers’ autonomy and consciousness, with an attitude combining both craft
pride and (an individualistic) productivism.
With socialized
production, the workers are stripped of the autonomy they had under the formal
domination of capital and submitted to the subordinate position of working
(with) the equipment or machinery provided by capital. Obviously we are talking
about a process that occurs over an extended period of time here, not just five
or ten years, even if a given year can be specified as when capitalist
machinery definitively replaced workers’ tools, etc. as the means of production
in a given firm or (more like a 5 to 10 year stretch) a given sector of a given
economy. The process develops over time, as capital continually refines and
perfects its own specific means of production within its own specific mode of
production. This process, a historical process, involves imbuing the specific
technological devices and equipment with specifically capitalist imperatives,
specifically capitalist aims and interests. In order to accomplish this,
capital practically takes a hold of an increasing quantity of scientific
research, funding it and its subjects, and providing it with its direction, its
focus, its aims. (Marx: “Invention then becomes a business, and the application
of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and
solicits it.” Grundrisse, p. 704.)
What we are really talking
about, then, is the development of specifically capitalist means of
production. That is, fixed capital (“the most adequate form of capital as
such”), the technical means by which capital extracts surplus-value from wage
labour. As Marx said, “ … the introduction of machinery into one branch of
industry leads to its introduction into other industries and other branches of
the same industry” (“Results …”, p. 1036). This development of fixed capital,
at a certain technological level of development spreads its tentacles throughout
society and, with increasing production, come increasing markets, and
increasing population; and with these come the modern means of industrial
transportation, of large-scale shipping, of modern industrial ports, of
railways, and eventually of automotive transportation, with its roads and
bridges, and airplanes, which develop and become integrally inter-linked with
this developing fixed capital. And needless to add, these are all developed
under the direction of capital. Along with all of the various buildings capital
produces, the factories, the offices, the schools, the prisons, the hospitals, the
commercial and residential buildings, we are talking here about the entire
technological infrastructure of capitalist society as it evolves towards the real
domination of capital. All of this becomes increasingly specifically capitalist
in both its form and its content. Thus, it is the development of capitalist
productive technology, and its extension into the realms of circulation and
consumption, that is the central driving force of the process of the transition
from the formal domination of capital to its real domination.
9. One of the crucial insights found in the work of
Marx, I think, for helping us today to better understand capital’s inherent and
unalterable antagonism towards the natural environment, leading ultimately to
catastrophic destruction of the latter, to what some have called ecocide,
is his analysis of the phenomenon of ‘production for production’s sake’ in
connection with the transition to the real domination of capital. I allow
myself to take a lengthy quote from the “Results …” which is rich in conceptual
material for our theoretical task today.
“’Production for
production’s sake’ – production as an end in itself – does indeed
come on the scene with the formal subsumption of labour under capital.
It makes its appearance as soon as the immediate purpose of production is to
produce as much surplus-value as possible, as soon as the exchange-value
of the product becomes the deciding factor. But this inherent tendency
of capitalist production does not become adequately realized – it does
not become indispensable, and that also means technologically
indispensable – until the specific mode of capitalist production and
hence the real subsumption of labour under capital has become a reality.
The latter has already
been argued in detail, so that we may be quite brief here. It is a form of
production not bound to a level of needs laid down in advance, and hence it
does not predetermine the course of production itself. (Its contradictory
character includes a barrier to production which it is constantly
striving to overcome. Hence, crises, over-production etc.) This is one side, in
contrast to the former mode of production; if you like, it is the positive
side. On the other hand, there is the negative side, its contradictory
character: production in contradiction, and in indifference, to the producer.
The real producer as a mere means of production, material wealth as an end in
itself. And so the growth of this material wealth is brought about in
contradiction to and at the expense of the individual human being. Productivity
of labour in general = the maximum of profit with the minimum
of work, hence, too, goods constantly become cheaper. This becomes a law,
independent of the will of the individual capitalist. And this law only becomes
reality because instead of the scale of production being controlled by existing
needs, the quantity of products made is determined by the constantly increasing
scale of production dictated by the mode of production itself. Its aim is that
the individual product should contain as much unpaid labour as possible,
and this is achieved only by producing for the sake of production. This
becomes manifest , on the one hand, as a law, since the capitalist who produces
on too small a scale puts more than the socially necessary quantum of labour
into his products. That is to say, it becomes manifest as an adequate
embodiment of the law of value which develops fully only on the
foundation of capitalist production. But, on the other hand, it becomes
manifest as the desire of the individual capitalist who, in his wish to render
this law ineffectual, or to outwit it and turn it to his own advantage,
reduces the individual value of his product to a point where it falls
below its socially determined value.” (Ibid., p. 1037-1038; emphases in
original)
Where Marx speaks of
production “in contradiction and in indifference to” the producer and “at the
expense of the individual human being”, we can, in hindsight, easily substitute
“nature” for “the producer” and “the natural environment” for “the individual
human being”, and recognize equally accurate claims being made. That is yet
another case of the parallel treatment, as subordinate objects – subordinate to
capitalist technology – of labour and nature under the real domination of
capital.
However, there is a
further insight here, concerning ‘production for production’s sake’ with its
concomitant blind and exponentially expanding development of the technological
forces of production under real domination. While Marx doesn’t mention it here,
it is not difficult to see that sooner or later capitalist production, on this
basis, will lead to the exhaustion of the finitely limited resources provided
by nature, and, consequently catastrophe, not only for nature, but also for
humankind. It is exactly this that we are witnessing today, with the exhaustion
of profitably harvestable forests due to extensive over-logging, the exhaustion
or elimination of arable land due to overly intensified agricultural practices (whether
industrial or pre-industrial) and ever-expanding urbanization, the strong
tendency towards depletion of drinkable fresh water sources, and, of course,
the tendency to depletion of global oil reserves (i.e. ‘Peak Oil’). Marx’s
analysis here clearly establishes the basis, and the inherent, unavoidable
tendency, for capitalism in its developed phase of real domination to exhaust
the many resources of nature necessary for human life; that is to say,
capitalism’s inherently catastrophic course in relation to its treatment of
nature.
10. Another striking parallel here, along with those
noted earlier, is between the catastrophic threat capitalism poses to the
planet and the biosphere and the catastrophic threat it poses to racialized
minorities or human groups seen as ‘Other’ and a problem to be ‘eliminated’. It
is the same real domination of capital, with its same specifically capitalist
technology, under the conditions of permanent crisis, historical decline or
decadence, which threatens both humanity with genocide and the planet
with ecocide. In the case of genocide (and of war, when the ‘Other’ is
capable of fighting back), it is the state with its ideological technics and
its means of destruction, rearing its ugly head from time to time here and there;
while in the case of ecocide, it is industrial, productive capital, operating
every day of the year throughout the world on a passive (but passive-aggressive,
as we noted) nature. These processes are distinct, but of course they are very
closely connected, as any look at the history of the development of both
industrial and military technology will attest, and was of course confirmed by
an honest ruling class mouthpiece when he admitted that there had developed, by
the 1950s, at least in the USA and the USSR, a fully intertwined
‘military-industrial complex’.
This double threat posed
by capitalism today is well illustrated in a passage from Enzo Traverso’s book Understanding
the Nazi Genocide: Marxism After Auschwitz (Pluto, 1999), a passage which
reflects clearly the approach to the critique of technology in capitalism in
relation to both the working class and the environment that I am trying to
develop here:
“More and more impregnated
with positivism and evolutionism, Marxist thought [after Marx] conceded a
monopoly of critique of civilization to the romantic, conservative right. This
romantic right found its propagandist in Oswald Spengler and its most profound
philosopher in Martin Heidegger (some of the most original postwar Marxists
were among Heidegger’s students).
Along with the idea of
Progress, Auschwitz disposed once and for all of the conception of socialism as
the natural, automatic and ineluctable outcome of history. Auschwitz’s
challenge to Marxism is twofold. First, history must be rethought through the
category of catastrophe, from the standpoint of the defeated. Second, socialism
must be rethought as a radically different civilization, no longer founded on
the paradigm of the blind development of the forces of production and the
domination of nature by technology. Socialism must be based on a new quality of
life; a new hierarchy of values; a different relationship with nature;
egalitarian relations between sexes, nations and ‘races’; and social relations of sisterhood and
solidarity among peoples and continents.
This means reversing the line of march by the Western world for several
centuries. It means jettisoning the naïve optimism of a way of thinking that
claimed to be the conscious expression of the ‘movement of history’, and of a movement
that believed it was ‘swimming with the tide’. It also means restoring
socialism’s utopian dimension.” (p.22)
11. The reality of irreversible (human-caused) climate
change that we now know faces humankind with catastrophic consequences results
from the same underlying cause that also leads to natural resource depletion.
It is the same drive to separately, competitively exploit all of nature to the
maximum in order to maximize capital valorization. In this process, every
capital unit extracts or appropriates from nature the most that it can.
Human-generated climate change actually results from the accumulated output, in
atmospheric emissions of carbon-based (‘greenhouse’) gases as a byproduct of capitalist industrial
production and transportation. It results from a relentless pursuit of profit,
blind-folded to the reality of its ‘collateral damage’ to ecosystems and the
atmosphere of the earth. This damage is in fact capitalism’s unabashed abuse of
its natural environment by means of its (members’, agents’) operation of its
own specific means of production, transportation and destruction.
Capitalist science remains
largely blind to this damage, as long as it serves profit-maximization and
power consolidation. In its fragmented, specialized form of existence, the
damage largely does not appear. However, more recently we have seen the rise of
a new cross-disciplinary ecological
science, which has emerged only because the accumulated damage to the
natural environment has become so great, and on a global scale, that certain
fractions of capital in whose interest a long-term sustainable environment
figures prominently have seen the need to provide the material resources
necessary for such a new science. Ecological science, being as it is
cross-disciplinary, is in fact unlike most science under capital’s real
domination, since it goes beyond separation by way of specialization (division
of scientific labour), to try to connect various disparate scientific research
results and to employ new categories (such as ‘ecosystem’) of theorization to
establish a broader, more unified, more concrete understanding of what is
really taking place in the world. Capitalism has been forced by the dire
results of its own activities on its own interests to secrete ecological science,
even as the latter is a form of science more in keeping with a post-capitalist
society.
12. While
it was previously pointed out that capitalist ‘production for production’s
sake’ will “sooner or later … lead to the exhaustion of the finitely limited
resources provided by nature”, in reality, capitalism’s own chronic, structural
crisis makes this eventuality more a matter of sooner than later. It is this
sooner that we are now rapidly approaching. And Marx provided us with the bases
for understanding why this is so. As he wrote in the Grundrisse:
“Thus the more developed
capital already is, the more surplus labour it has created, the more terribly
must it develop the productive force in order to realize itself in only smaller
proportion, i.e. to add surplus value – because the barrier always remains the
relation between the fractional part of the day which expresses necessary labour, and the entire working
day. It can move only within these
boundaries. The smaller already the fractional part falling to necessary labour, the greater the surplus labour, the less can any
increase in productive force perceptibly diminish necessary labour; since the
denominator has grown enormously. The self-realization of capital becomes more
difficult to the extent that it has already been realized.”
And, as Mac Intosh in his
text “Marxism and the Holocaust” draws the implications of this most
significant tendency characterizing capitalism’s decadence: “However, this very
contradiction increases the pressure on every capital entity, on every
business, to expand the forces of production, to develop and implement new
technologies, increase its productivity, in a desperate attempt to escape the
downward course in the average rate of profit, and to obtain a surplus-profit
by producing commodities below their
socially average value. Therefore, the faster the rate of profit falls, as a
result of the rising organic composition of capital, i.e. the growth of the
productive forces, the greater the pressure on each capital entity – nation or
firm – to accelerate the development of those self-same productive forces in
the endless quest to get a jump on its competitors, and to grab a
surplus-profit.”
This immanent historical
tendency of capital, which strengthens the more capital develops, the more
capital advances to its real domination over labour and society, and over
nature, the more rapid is the movement of capitalism’s destruction of the
environment towards global ecocide.
13. Traverso has also importantly brought to light the
somewhat misleading nature of the modern communist slogan, made famous by Rosa
Luxemburg nearly 100 years ago, i.e. ‘socialism or barbarism’, often
interpreted as meaning forward into socialism or relapse into
barbarism. The same applies to the concept of ‘retrogression’, used as an
antonym of ‘progress’. For us in IP, barbarism and retrogression are defining
features of capitalist decadence. The problem with the concepts of barbarism
and retrogression is that they suggest a return to humanity’s past, to a
more primitive stage of our evolution. So unless barbarism is defined clearly
as not historically specific, as a phenomenon that can recur in history in its
different eras and phases, it is preferable to see the two opposing poles of
the modern alternative facing humanity as two opposing possible futures, with
numerous conflicting tendencies pushing in one case in one of those directions,
in another case in the other direction. Both outcomes need to be seen as
equally modern, and equally technologically and socially developed. One is
driven by competition in the context of a chronic, structural economic crisis,
and historical decline, together with the most powerful technological forces of
production and of destruction continually being advanced, hell-bent on maximum
domination and exploitation, while the other is driven by association,
co-operation and holding in common. The one is characterized by mass death and
catastrophic destruction, while the other is characterized by harmonious
co-existence and community. These opposing futures and the tendencies moving in
their respective direction represent, alternatively, the negative and the
positive sides of capitalism’s ‘progress’; and the basis of our understanding
of them is to be found in the work of Marx, in both his praise of capitalism’s
making finally possible the full development of the human being and his many
contributions to a ruthless critique of the whole panoply of capitalist
civilization.
14. One of IP’s principal tasks today is to contribute
to a contemporary renewal or renaissance of Marxism, to a new critical
Marxism, in opposition to the ossified traditional or classical Marxism that
dominated the 20th century. For me, the critique of traditional
Marxism – which, while it was embodied principally in the doctrines and
perspectives of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th
Internationals, contaminated also the main currents of the communist left --
encompasses a number of factors. On the strictly theoretical level, the main
factors include economic determinism (often combined with a view of historical
materialism as a ‘science’ which uncovers all of the ‘laws’ governing
capitalist society), the base/superstructure model of social functioning, a
teleological (and linear/progressivist) conception of history, with communism
seen as being the inevitable end result, and what has been called a
‘positivist’ or uncritical stance towards capitalist development. This
positivist orientation involves seeing all development of the base or
infrastructure of capitalist society (as opposed to what occurs at the
‘superstructural’ level of politics, culture, and ideology) as inherently
historically ‘progressive’. It thus also involves a thoroughly productivist
attitude, since it sees all capitalist
infrastructure development as developing the productive forces, seen in a
purely quantitative way, as increasing the overall productivity of society, and
thus as moving us closer, on an objective level, at least, towards communism.
For me, all of these
factors, (1) economic determinism (with historical materialism as a ‘science’
of capitalism), (2) the base/superstructure model, (3) a teleological and
progressivist conception of history, and (4) positivism and productivism, are
inter-linked, and a thorough critique of them should be unified in considering
their various inter-connections. An absolutely fundamental tenet of
positivistic traditional or classical forms of Marxism, regarded as a bedrock
inheritance from Marx, is the following pair of equations concerning mature
capitalism (however defined): the relations of production are reactionary and
negative for humankind, while the forces of production (developed) are
progressive and positive for humankind. Traditional Marxism simplistically
endorses and even lauds capital’s development of the technological productive
forces, while it reserves its opposition only for the specific usage that
is made of them by way of capitalist relations of production; rather than
seeing that it is the possibilities opened up by capital’s development of
technology (and then not necessarily by all of it), the possibility of
going far beyond and in an entirely different direction than that taken
under the direction of capital that is what is truly progressive about
capitalist ‘progress’.
E.R.
February 2008