Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (10 page)

How the commodification of labour, land and money was historically accomplished is in itself a long and painful story, as Marx’s brief history of so-called ‘primitive accumulation’ in
Capital
outlines. The transformation of labour, land and money into commodities rested on violence, cheating, robbery, swindling and the like. The common lands were enclosed, divided up and put up for sale as private property. The gold and silver that formed the initial money commodities were stolen from the Americas. The labour was forced off the land into the status of a ‘free’ wage labourer who could be freely exploited by capital when not outright enslaved or indentured. Such forms of dispossession were foundational to the creation of capital. But even more importantly, they never disappeared. Not only were they central to the more dastardly aspects of colonialism, but to this very day the politics and policies of dispossession (administered for the most part by an unholy alliance of corporate and state
power) of access to land, water and natural resources are underpinning massive movements of global unrest. The so-called ‘land grabs’ throughout Africa, Latin America and much of Asia (including the massive dispossessions occurring currently in China) are just the most obvious symptom of a politics of accumulation by dispossession run riot in ways that even Polanyi could not have imagined. In the United States, tactics of eminent domain, along with the brutal foreclosure wave that led to massive losses not only of use values (millions rendered homeless) but also of hard-won savings and asset values embedded in housing markets, to say nothing of the loss of pension, health care and educational rights and benefits, all indicate that the political economy of outright dispossession is alive and well in the very heart of the capitalist world. The irony of course is that these forms of dispossession are now increasingly administered under the virtuous disguise of a politics of the austerity required to bring an ailing capitalism back into a supposedly healthy state.

To isolate nature ‘and form a market out of it was perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors,’ Polanyi remarks, while ‘to separate labor from other activities of life and subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and replace them by a different type of organization, an atomist and individualistic one’.
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This last consequence has been crucial to how the structure of contradictions we are here examining works. Plainly, the contradictory unity between state and private property that constitutes the third foundational contradiction of capital became significant
not
as a foundational tool to facilitate accumulation by dispossession, but as a post facto legitimation and institutional rationalisation of the results of that violence of dispossession. Once land, labour and money had been objectified, pulverised and broken away from their embeddedness in the broader flows of cultural life and of living matter, then they could be resutured together under the umbrella of constitutional rights and laws founded on principles of individual rights to private property guaranteed by the state.

Land, for example, is not a commodity produced by social labour. But it was at the heart of the enclosure movement in Britain
and colonising practices everywhere to divide it up, privatise and commodify it so that the land market could become a primary field for capital accumulation and wealth extraction on the part of an increasingly powerful rentier class. So-called ‘natural’ resources can likewise be bought up even though they are not in themselves a product of social labour. The commodification of nature has certain limits because some things (like the atmosphere and the restless oceans) are not easily privatised and enclosed. While the fish extracted from the oceans can easily be commodified, the waters in which they swim pose a different problem. Markets can, however, be created around usufructuary rights to, say, pollution of the atmosphere and the oceans or to exclusive leasing rights to fishing in certain zones (such that Spanish trawlers fish exclusively in that part of the southern Atlantic Ocean over which Argentina claims rights).

The enclosure and parcelling up of land, of labour (through extensions of both the detailed and social divisions of labour) and money power (fictitious money and credit money capital in particular) all as commodities were crucial to this transition to the system of private property rights that gives a legal basis for the operations of capital. The state–private property contradiction thus displaces a fluid and alive conception of the relation to nature, with the idea that nature is to be construed, as Heidegger once complained, as ‘one vast gasoline station’.
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It likewise displaced all those cultural assumptions that attached to common property regimes and customary rights that were more characteristic of preceding modes of production (this does not, I want to stress, warrant waxing nostalgic for the social order within which such rights and practices were embedded). It puts in place of all of this variety of being and living in the world a doctrine of the universal, self-evident and individualised ‘rights of man’, dedicated to the production of value, that effectively masks in universalistic and naturalised legal doctrine the lurid trail of violence that accompanied the dispossession of indigenous populations. To this day, however, opponents and dissenters to all of this – increasingly viewed as terrorists – are more likely to inhabit the prisons than live in the mini-utopia of the bourgeois suburb.

In this constructed world certain truths stand out as self-evident, chief of which is that everything under the sun must be in principle and wherever technically possible subject to commodification, monetisation and privatisation. We have already had cause to comment on how housing, education, health care and public utilities have trended in this direction and we can now add to these the activities of war-making and even government itself as more and more of these sectors get subcontracted to private companies. Those blessed with sufficient money power can then buy up (or steal) almost anything and everything to the exclusion of the mass of the population that is lacking in sufficient money power, subversive guile or political/military influence to compete. But the fact that it is now possible to buy up proprietary rights to gene sequences, pollution credits and weather futures should surely, in the light of Polanyi’s warnings, give us pause. The trouble, however, it that all of this seems to be so embedded in the ‘natural’ and unshakeable bourgeois order of things that it seems not only understandable but inevitable that business as usual should be able to dominate social life in spheres of social and cultural activity where it has absolutely no business to be. Exchange value is everywhere the master and use value the slave. It is in this context that the revolt of the mass of the people in the name of inadequate access to fundamental use values becomes imperative.

That imperative then couples with a systematic critique and revolt against the ongoing politics of appropriation and accumulation by dispossession. That politics sits in a puzzling and plainly contradictory relation to universal legal doctrines of private property rights that supposedly regulate state–individual relations in such a way that coercive dispossessions, thievery, robbery and chicanery ought to have no place. Capitalist constitutionality and legality, it seems, are based on a lie or at best upon confusing fictions, if events in financial and housing markets these last few years are anything to go by. Yet we lack a common sense of exactly what the nature of that lie might be. As a result, we typically reduce the problem of accumulation by dispossession to one of the inability to apply, implement and regulate market behaviours sufficiently.

There are two other insights to be taken from this formulation. First, what guarantees that the individuals who so pillage and raid the common wealth will act collectively in such a way as to ensure the reproduction of that common wealth? Private individuals or corporations acting in their own short-term self-interest often undermine, if not destroy, the conditions for their own reproduction. Farmers exhaust the fertility of their land and employers have been known to work their labourers to death or to a point of such exhaustion that they function inefficiently. This difficulty is particularly severe on the terrain of environmental damage and degradation, as the example of British Petroleum’s part in the Gulf Oil Spill of 2010 suggests. Second, what incentive do individuals have to abide by the rules of good market behaviour when the profits attached to so doing are low and the rate of return on illegality, predation, thievery and cheating is very high, even after taking into account the enormous fines that might be levied for misbehaviour? The huge fines levied on financial institutions such as HSBC, Wells Fargo, CitiBank, JPMorgan and the like in recent years and the evidence of continued malfeasance in the realms of finance suggest that this too is an ongoing problem for the reproduction of the common wealth.

It is only when it is clearly understood how the ‘objective’ but totally fictional mediations of monetisation, commodification and privatisation of non-commodities such as land, labour and capital (all wrought and often sustained by extra-legal and coercive means) lie at the root of the hypocrisy of capitalist constitutionality that we see how that constitutionality (and its legal codes) can incorporate illegality at its very base. The fact that these fictions and fetishisms systematically advantage some individuals rather than others and so constitute the basis for the construction of capitalist class power is no longer purely incidental: it is the foundational raison d’être for the whole political and economic edifice that capital constructs. The inner relation between capitalist class power and these fictions and fetishisms is nowhere more evident than in the crucial commodification, monetisation and privatisation of labour power and it is to this that we must now turn.

That some human beings have appropriated and exploited the labour power of others has been a long-standing feature of human organisation. The exercise of the power to do so has entailed the construction of different social relations, from the coercions of slavery, serfdom and the trading of women (and sometimes children) as mere chattels to the willing consent of worshippers to do God’s or the gods’ work in theocratic societies or the submissive fealty of loyal subjects to go to war or to mobilise to build, say, pyramids, in the name of a revered leader, patriarch, monarch or local lord. That such social relations of domination, appropriation and exploitation could be racialised, ethnicised, gendered and targeted at culturally, religiously affiliated or supposedly biologically inferior beings has also been a long-standing practice. That they could be monetised and commodified is obvious. Slaves could be bought and sold directly, dowries (measured in key commodities like cattle or money) were attached to the trade in women, and mercenary armies displaced those in which religious beliefs and personal loyalties were what counted. In addition, being mired in escalating debts (debt peonage or some parallel form such as share-cropping) was, and continues to be, one of the more insidious ways in which either the labour or the products of the labour of others get appropriated by those with social, political and money power.

But what capital deals in, and this is what makes this mode of production distinctive, is labour power as a commodity. The labourer is the bearer of that commodity and sells it to the capitalist in a supposedly ‘free’ labour market. Trading in labour services preceded the rise of capitalism, of course, and it is entirely possible
that such trading will continue long after capital has ceased to exist as a viable way to produce and consume. But what capital learned was that it could create the basis for its own reproduction – hopefully on a permanent basis – through the systemic and continuous use of labour power to produce a surplus over that which the labourer needed to survive at a given standard of living. This surplus lies at the root of monetary profit.

The remarkable thing about this system is that it does not appear to rely on cheating, theft, robbery or dispossession because labourers can be paid their ‘fair’ market value (the ‘going rate’) at the same time as they can be put to work to generate the surplus value that capital needs to survive. This ‘fairness’ rests on the conceit that labourers have an individualised private property right over the labour power they are capable of furnishing to capital as a commodity (a commodity which has the use value to capital of being able to produce value and surplus value) and that they are ‘free’ to dispose of that labour power to whomsoever they like. It is most convenient for capital, of course, that labourers be ‘freed’ of any access to the land or even to any means of production. They then have no option except to sell their labour power in order to live. When put to work, capitalists can see to it that labourers produce more in commodity values than the market value of their labour power. Labourers, in short, must add more value than they get if capital is to be created and reproduced. Capital pockets the added value as profit and can store that added value as an ever-increasing concentration of money power.

The commodification of labour power is the only way to solve a seemingly intractable contradiction within the circulation of capital. In a properly functioning market system, where coercion, cheating and robbery are ruled out, the exchanges should be based on a principle of equality – we exchange use values with each other and the value of those use values should be roughly the same. This contradicts the presumption that there will be more value for all capitalists because in a well-functioning capitalist system all capitalists should earn a profit. So where does the extra value come from to assure a profit when the market system in principle depends on equality of
exchanges? There must exist a commodity that has the capacity to create more value than it itself has. And that commodity is labour power. And that is what capital relies upon for its own reproduction.