How Capital’s Progress Became
Society’s Retrogression
IP was first constituted (1985) as
an “external faction” of the ICC, with the aim of defending the platform of
that organization in the face of its own degeneration. It quickly became
apparent, however, that the degeneration of he ICC was not just organizational,
but programmatic; that its capacity to grasp the trajectory of capital, both
current and throughout what it designated as capitalism’s phase of decadence
(beginning in 1914) was woefully deficient.
While the ICC had the merit of
clearly drawing the class line, based on the contributions of both the
pre-war Italian (Bilan) and German-Dutch left, and that of the Gauche
Communiste de France (1945-1952), its clarity in that respect was not
matched by a comparable theoretical grasp of the development of
capitalism as a mode of production and civilization in the period inaugurated
by the cataclysm of World War I. Indeed, it became clear over the course of
time, and as a result of much discussion, that the very theoretical bases upon
which the platform of the ICC rested was, and had always been, inadequate to
the task of grasping the trajectory of capital. Thus, in the course of its own
evolution, IP came to reject core elements of the platform of the ICC, and its
theoretical underpinnings: its vision of the accumulation process and its
contradictions based on the theory of Rosa Luxemburg and the role of the
disappearance of pre-capitalist markets as the veritable basis of capitalism’s
crisis tendencies; its concept of the decadence of capitalism as a halt, or at
least a dramatic slackening, of the growth of the productive forces; its
concomitant vision that capitalism in its phase of decadence precluded an
increase in the standard of living of the working class; its vision of state
capitalism based on the model of Stalinist Russia (seen as the mirror in which
the whole of the capitalist world could view its own future); its insistence
that aside from very short periods of reconstruction, decadent capitalism, in
the absence of proletarian revolution, was condemned to live through a cycle of
crisis/world war/crisis/world war.
Even a cursory glance at the period
since 1945 will reveal the vacuity of the ICC’s claims to grasp the trajectory
of capitalism. Despite the evident fact that pre-capitalist markets cannot have
provided the effective demand to absorb the capitalizable portion of the
surplus-value produced by global capital (or even an appreciable portion
thereof), capitalism has not experienced the catastrophic global crisis that
according to Luxemburgist theory should
have befallen it. Nor can the deus
ex machina of reconstruction or state capitalism rescue the “theory,”
inasmuch as according to the ICC the phase of reconstruction following World
War II was complete by 1968 (quite apart from the fact that on the strict basis
of Luxemburg’s theory any phase of reconstruction is precluded), and no real
explanation of how the state could substitute for the effective demand lacking
on the part of pre-capitalist markets has been proffered by the ICC. Moreover,
the ICC’s claim that there has been a dramatic slackening in the growth of the
productive forces since 1914 is contradicted by all the indices that measure
the growth or diminution of the productive forces. Indeed, there have been few
periods in the development of capitalism where the growth of the productive
forces has been so prodigious over so long a period as that which we have seen
since 1950. Linked to that very development there has also been a significant
increase in the standard of living of the working class in the advanced
capitalist societies, at least into the 1980’s and the end of the Fordist
epoch. The vision of Stalinist Russia as the model for state capitalism has
been dramatically refuted by the collapse of that regime and the repudiation of
that model of capitalism even where Stalinist parties still rule. Finally the imminence
of a third World War as capitalism’s sole recourse once reconstruction is
complete, and in the absence of massive class struggle or proletarian revolution,
which has been the gospel of the ICC, has also been refuted by the actual
trajectory of capitalism. Despite periods of open economic crisis over the past
fifty years, global capital thus far has been able to continue the accumulation
process without recourse to world war.
Confronted by such theoretical and
programmatic failings, IP has sought to grasp the realities of capitalist
development, and its perspectives, in a series of texts that preserve the class
lines that separate Marxist revolutionaries from their class enemies, and that,
at the same time, provide a development of Marxist theory that is adequate to
grasp the enormous transformation that capitalism has undergone in the
twentieth century, and, in particular, over the period since the end of World
War II. A Marxist theory adequate to the demands of the present time must, in
our view, acknowledge and grasp both the progress of capitalism
in the present epoch, its capacity and imperious drive to develop the
productive forces as a condition for its own survival as a mode of production,
and it social retrogression, its devastating consequences for the human
species and the very real danger that its continued existence represents for
the world. What the ICC denied, the possibility that capitalism could progress
even in an epoch of social retrogression (decadence), is the reality in which
we today live. And if we are to politically confront the capitalist Moloch, it
is vital for Marxists to theoretically grasp the transformations, the
reshaping of the social, political, cultural, and class, landscape that it has
wrought.
The theoretical glue that links
together the various positions that we are in the course of elaborating, and
that gives it its coherence, is provided by the vision of capital as undergoing
a transition from the formal to the real domination over society.
What that means, is that the operation of the capitalist law of value penetrates
society as a totality; that every pore of society is invaded and
transformed by the operation of the law of value; that all the domains of
social existence are tendentially reshaped by the law of value. What prevents
such a totality shaped by the law of value being a totalization from which
there is no escape is that the law of value has its own internal
contradictions; contradictions that provide the bases for its own overcoming.
Politically, that means that concomitant with its domination of society, the
law of value also generates the possibility of resistance and struggle against
it; the prospect of revolution, then, is no less real than the social
retrogression wrought by capital, which is why the theoretical project that we
are engaged in is also a political project. However, it is the elucidation of
the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital over society,
and its significance, which we want to undertake in this text.
The concepts of the formal and real
domination of capital, of the formal and the real submission of labor to
capital, were first formulated by Marx in “The Results of the Immediate Process
of Production,” the sixth, unpublished (until the 1960’s), chapter of Capital,
and it was then elaborated upon by a number of militants linked to Bordigism.
Marx himself had linked the formal submission of labor to capital to the
extraction of absolute surplus-value, and the real submission of labor to
capital to the extraction of relative surplus-value, confining the concepts of
formal and real domination to the immediate process of production; at any rate
to the economic domain. A number of thinkers who originally encountered
the concepts of formal and real domination on the fringes of the Bordigist
movement, have contended that the transition from formal to real domination was
completed by the 1850’s (Robin Goodfellow), a view echoed by the ICC in
its critique of IP’s use of the concept. Others coming from Bordigism who have
utilized the concepts of formal and real domination (Communisme ou
Civilisation), while insisting on its significance for an understanding of
the trajectory of capital in the twentieth century, have nonetheless continued
to limit it to the economic domain in the narrow sense of the term. Still
others, like Jacques Camatte (also coming from Bordigism) have expanded the
scope of the real domination of capital beyond the economic domain, but have
insisted that: “When capital achieves real domination over society, it becomes
a material community, overcoming value and the law of value, which survive only
as something ‘overcome.’” Camatte thereby extends the real domination of
capital to society as a whole, as do we, but completely detaches it from
the law of value, whose expression we believe the real domination of capital to
be.
This view of the transition from the
formal to the real domination of capital, then, rests not just on Marx’s
distinction between the extraction of absolute surplus-value and the extraction
of relative surplus-value, but on its expansion from the economy to society as
a totality; from the process of production to the processes of reproduction
– the reproduction of the capitalist social relations, the core of which is the
value form. This reproduction, therefore, involves demography, technology,
science, the modes of subjectivation of the human being, the political and
cultural domains, as well as the economic, and the vast realm of ideology,
understood not simply as false consciousness, illusion, or mystification, but
rather as consciousness, beliefs, actions endowed with a material
existence, and inextricably linked to the no less material existence of a
determinate mode of subjectivation of the human beings, and the classes, that
inhabit that civilization. Thus, in contrast to the formal domination of
capital over society, in which only the immediate process of production is
subject to the capitalist law of value, and the other domains of social
existence still retain a considerable degree of autonomy from it, the real
domination of capital over society entails the penetration of the law of value
into every segment of social existence. Thus, from its original locus at the
point of production, the law of value has systematically spread its tentacles
to incorporate not just the actual production of commodities, but their circulation
and consumption too. Moreover, the law of value progresses and comes to preside
over the spheres of the political and ideological, including science and
technology. Thus, with respect to state capitalism, where the ideological
progenitors of the ICC saw a restriction of the field of application of
the law of value, at least within the borders of the regime itself, we see a
vast expansion of the operation of the law of value into every pore of
society. Indeed, we agree here with Bordiga, for whom: “State capitalism is not
a subjugation of capitalism to the state, but a firmer subjugation of the state
to capital.” (Proprietá e capitale) With respect to science and
technology, the penetration of the law of value occurs not just through the
transformation of scientific and technological research (and the institutions
in which it takes place) into commodities, but especially through the
infiltration of the value form, and its concomitant quantification, into reason
itself (the triumph of a purely instrumental reason), and the reduction
of all beings, nature and humans, to mere objects of manipulation and control.
While the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital over
society began in the industrial metropoles in the nineteenth century, its
triumph, consolidation, and global spread, has been a twentieth century
phenomenon, one that has transfigured the social landscape particularly over
the past half-century and that continues now into the twenty-first century.
The transition from the formal
to the real domination of capital over society constitutes the progress of
capital since 1914. Yet that progress has been bought at the price of a
horrifying social retrogression, such that the continued existence of
capitalist civilization and a mode of production based on the operation of the
law of value risks leading the human species to devastation on a scale never
before seen in history; a devastation so great that it could extinguish the
material and cultural progress inaugurated by the Renaissance, the Reformation,
the Enlightenment, and the critical attitude that has been the positive
and revolutionary side of capitalist modernity; an outcome that could destroy
the very possibility of communism, of the creation of a human Gemeinwesen.
While the transition from the formal
to the real submission of labor to capital entails an increasing reliance on
the fruits of science and technology, and a concomitant recomposition of the
working class that transforms the very meaning and nature of productive and
unproductive labor, no matter how many changes occur in the forms and
techniques of production, according to Marx, capitalism remains a mode of
production whose “presupposition is – and remains – the mass of direct labour
time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the
production of wealth.” (Grundrisse, Penguin Books, p.704) However, the
historical trajectory of capitalism produces a growing contradiction between
its unsurpassable basis in the expenditure of living labor to produce
exchange-value, on the one hand, and the actual results of its own
developmental tendencies on the other: “But to the degree that large industry
develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour
time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set
in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn
out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production ….
[a]s soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring
of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence
exchange-value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus
labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of
general wealth …. (Grundrisse, pp. 704-705) In short, when the
production of real wealth is no longer dependent on the extraction of
surplus-value (absolute or relative), no longer inextricably bound to the
expenditure of living labor, capitalism ceases to be a necessary condition for
the progress of the human species; ceases to be a progressive mode of
production. Moreover, the perpetuation of value production, its continued
progress in the form of the transition from the formal to the real domination
of capital over society, then constitutes not just an obstacle to the progress
of the human species, but a form of social retrogression! The more capital
progresses, as it has since 1914, and especially after 1945, the more that
progress reveals itself to be retrogressive or regressive; a
mortal threat to the continued existence of human kind. The creation of a vast
surplus population, the exploitation of which by capital is no longer necessary
or profitable (at any wage), has sown the seeds of new and more devastating
orgies of mass murder, deliberately orchestrated by the capitalist state.
The prospect of a re-division of
global spheres of influence, the formation of new continental imperialist
blocs, in the coming decades, of which today’s murderous local wars are but
portents, awaits only the outbreak of a global economic crisis and the collapse
of the current neo-liberal regimes, and the hegemony of the Anglo-American
world market upon which today’s globalization of the economy is based, to make
nuclear war a danger that stalks humanity once again. The technologies
unleashed by capital, and inextricably bound to it, in its unending quest for
surplus-value, portend ecological destruction on a scale that may interrupt the
very metabolism between “man” and nature that has been the veritable basis of
human existence since the birth of our species.
Capitalism has progressed, has
continued to transform the world. The first task of revolutionaries today, the
necessary basis for their intervention, is to grasp the nature and direction of
that progress, of those transformations; to comprehend the implications and
ramifications of the transition from the formal to the real domination of
capital over society.
Mac Intosh
[from Internationalist
Perspective #42, spring 2004]