Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (11 page)

The effect is to transform social labour – the labour we do for others – into
alienated
social labour. Work and labour are exclusively organised around the production of commodity exchange values that yield the monetary return upon which capital builds its social powers of class domination. Workers, in short, are put in a position where they can do nothing other than reproduce through their work the conditions of their own domination. This is what freedom under the rule of capital means for them.

While the relation between the labourer and the capitalist is always an individual contractual relation (by virtue of the private property character of labour power), it is not hard to see how in both the labour market and the labour process there will arise a general class relation between capital and labour that will inevitably – like all private property relations – involve the state and the law as arbiter, regulator or enforcer. This is so by virtue of the systemic contradiction between individual private property rights and state power. Nothing stops the labourers individually or collectively agitating and fighting for more and nothing stops the capitalists from striving (also individually or collectively) to either pay the labourer less than their fair market value or reduce the value of labour power (by either trimming the market basket of goods deemed necessary to the labourer’s survival or reducing the cost of the existing market basket). Both capital and labour are within their rights to struggle over these issues and, as Marx famously put it, ‘between equal rights, force decides’.
¹

The more that capital is successful in the struggle against labour, the greater its profits. The more the labourers succeed, the higher their standard of living and the more options they have in the labour market. The capitalist likewise typically struggles to increase the intensity, productivity and/or length of time of the labour rendered to it in the labour process, while labourers strive to diminish both the hours and the intensity as well as the physical hazards implicit
in the activity of labouring. The regulatory power of the state – for example, legislation to limit the length of the working day or to limit exposure to hazardous working conditions and materials – is often involved in these relations.

The forms and effectiveness of the contradictory relation between capital and labour have been much studied and have long played a critical part in defining the necessity of revolutionary as well as reformist political struggles. I can therefore be mercifully brief here, since I presume most of my readers are broadly familiar with what is entailed. For some analysts of a left-wing persuasion (Marxists in particular), it is this contradiction between capital and labour that constitutes the primary contradiction of capital. For that reason, it is often regarded as the fulcrum of all meaningful political struggles and the seedbed for all anti-capitalist revolutionary organisation and movement. It is also cited by some as the sole underlying source of all forms of crises. There have certainly been places and times when what is called the ‘profit squeeze’ theory of crisis formation seems to have been prominently at work. When workers become very powerful relative to capital, then they are likely to push wage levels up to the point where they reduce profits to capital. Under these conditions capital’s typical response is to go on strike, to refuse to invest or reinvest, and deliberately create unemployment as a means to discipline labour. An argument of this kind would fit the situation in North America, Britain and Europe from the late 1960s into the 1970s.
²
But capital also just as often gets into difficulty when it dominates too easily over labour, as the unfolding situation after the crash of 2008 demonstrates.

But the capital–labour contradiction cannot stand alone as an explanation of crises either analytically or even, in the final analysis, politically. It is both embedded in and dependent upon its relation to the other contradictions of capital (even, for example, the contradiction between use and exchange values). Viewed in this light, both the nature and conception of the political task in any anti-capitalist movement have to change, because the surrounding constraints – such as the vast concentrations of money power that capital typically
amasses to pursue its agenda and secure its interests – often place limits on the conditions of possibility of radical transformations in the capital–labour relation in the workplace. Even if the eventual suppression of the capital–labour contradiction and the drive to establish the conditions for unalienated (as opposed to alienated) labour are the be-all and end-all of an alternative political ambition, these objectives cannot be accomplished without addressing the other contradictions, such as that of the money form and the private capacity to appropriate social wealth, with which they are associated.

Consideration of the capital–labour contradiction certainly points to the political ambition to supersede capital’s domination over labour in both the labour market and the workplace by forms of organisation in which associated labourers collectively control their own time, their own labour processes and their own product. Social labour for others does not disappear but alienated social labour does. The long history of attempts to create some such alternative (by way of worker cooperatives, autogestion, worker control and more latterly solidarity economies) suggests that this strategy can meet with only limited success for the reasons already stated. State-organised alternatives derived from the nationalisation of the means of production and centralised planning have likewise turned out to be equally problematic if not misleadingly utopian. The difficulty of successfully implementing either of these strategies derives, I believe, from the way the capital–labour contradiction is linked to and embedded in the other contradictions of capital. If the aim of these non-capitalistic forms of labour organisation is still the production of exchange values, for example, and if the capacity for private persons to appropriate the social power of money remains unchecked, then the associated workers, the solidarity economies and the centrally planned production regimes ultimately either fail or become complicit in their own self-exploitation. The drive to establish the conditions for unalienated labour falls short.

There are also some unfortunate misunderstandings of the complex terrain upon which the contradiction between capital and labour is fought out. The tendency in left thinking is to privilege the
labour market and the workplace as the twin central domains of class struggle. These are therefore the privileged sites for the construction of alternatives to capitalist forms of organisation. This is where the proletarian vanguard supposedly fashions itself to lead the way to a socialist revolution. As we will see shortly, when we come to examine the contradictory unity between production and realisation in the circulation of capital, there are other terrains of struggle that can be of equal if not more compelling significance.

For example, working people in the United States typically spend about a third of their income on housing. Housing provision, as we have seen, is typically driven by increasingly speculative exchange value operations and is a site for the extraction of rents (on both land and property), of interest (largely in the form of mortgage payments) and of taxes on property, as well as profit on the industrial capital deployed in housing construction. It is also a market characterised by a great deal of predatory activity (for example, extraction of legal fees and charges). Labour, which may have won significant concessions on wages through struggles fought out in labour markets and at the point of production, may have to give back almost all of its gains to procure housing as a use value under speculatively driven housing market conditions and after unavoidable encounters with predatory practices. What labour wins in the domain of production is stolen back by the landlords, the merchants (for example, the telephone companies), the bankers (for example, credit card charges), the lawyers and commission agents, while a large chunk of what is left also goes to the taxman. As with the case of housing, the privatisation and commodity provision of medical care, education, water and sewage, and other basic services, diminish the discretionary income available to labour and recapture value for capital.

But this is not the full story. All of these practices form a collective site where the politics of accumulation by dispossession takes over as a primary means for the extraction of income and wealth from vulnerable populations, including the working classes (however defined). The stealing back of privileges once acquired (such as pension rights, health care, free education and adequate services that underpin a
satisfactory social wage) has become a blatant form of dispossession rationalised under neoliberalism and now reinforced through a politics of austerity ministered in the name of fiscal rectitude. Organising against this accumulation by dispossession (the formation of an anti-austerity movement, for example) and the pursuit of demands for cheaper and more effective housing, education, health care and social services are, therefore, just as important to the class struggle as is the fight against exploitation in the labour market and in the workplace. But the left, obsessed with the figure of the factory worker as the bearer of class consciousness and as the avatar of socialist ambition, fails largely to incorporate this other world of class practices into its thinking and its political strategies.

It is also here that the complex interactions between the contradictions of
capital
and those of
capitalism
come more fully into view. I will take up this question in more detail later. But here it would be foolish as well as tactically unwise to conclude any discussion of the capital–labour contradiction without noting not only its embedded relation to the other contradictions of capital but also its clear entanglement with the contradictions of
capitalism
, particularly those associated with racialisation, gender and other forms of discrimination. Labour and housing-market segmentation and segregation along racial, ethnic or other lines, for example, are notoriously pervasive features of all capitalist social formations.

While the capital–labour contradiction is unquestionably a central and foundational contradiction of capital, it is not – even from the standpoint of
capital
alone – a primary contradiction to which all other contradictions are in some sense subservient. From the standpoint of
capitalism
, this central and foundational contradiction within the economic engine constituted by capital clearly has a vital role to play, but its tangible manifestations are mediated and tangled up through the filters of other forms of social distinction, such as race, ethnicity, gender and religious affiliation so as to make the actual politics of struggle within capitalism a far more complicated affair than would appear to be the case from the standpoint of the labour–capital relation alone.

I do not say all of this to diminish the significance of the capital–labour contradiction within the panoply of capital’s contradictions, for it is indeed a key contradiction of singular character and importance. It is, after all, in the workplace and through the labour market that the force of capital impinges directly upon the body of the labourer as well as upon all those dependent on the labourer for their life chances and their well-being. The alienating and coruscating nature of that experience for many people (the often savage treatment in the labour process and the experience of raw hunger in the workers’ household) is always a primary locus of mass alienation and, consequently, a flashpoint for outbreaks of revolutionary anger. But its overemphasis and its treatment as if it operates autonomously and independently of the other contradictions of capital have, I believe, been damaging to a full-blooded revolutionary search for an alternative to capital and, hence, to capitalism.

In years gone by physicists endlessly debated whether light should best be conceptualised in terms of particles or waves. In the seventeenth century Isaac Newton developed a corpuscular theory of light at the same time as Christiaan Huygens advocated his wave theory. Opinion thereafter fluctuated between one or other determination until Niels Bohr, the daddy of quantum mechanics, resolved the so-called ‘wave–particle duality’ by appeal to a principle of complementarity. Light is, under this interpretation, both a particle and a wave. Both descriptions are needed to complete our understanding, but we do not need to use both descriptions at the same time. Some physicists, however, regarded the duality as simultaneous rather than complementary. And there was considerable debate over whether the duality was inherent in nature or reflected the limitations of the observer. Whatever the case, it is clear that dualities of this sort are now accepted as foundational for theory building in many areas of the natural sciences. The mind–brain duality, to take another example, lies at the root of thinking in the contemporary neurosciences. So let it not be said that the natural sciences are inherently hostile to some kind of dialectical reasoning or immune to the idea of contradiction (though, I hasten to add, the nature of their dialectical reasoning is very different from the wooden and stultifying version of dialectics that Engels and later Stalin favoured). What a pity that conventional economics, which aspires to the status of a science, has not followed suit!

Should capital be viewed as a process or as a thing? It has to be viewed, I shall argue, as both, and I favour a simultaneous rather than a complementary interpretation of how this duality works, even
though, for purposes of exposition, it is often necessary to favour one standpoint over another. The unity of the capital circulating continuously as a process and a flow on the one hand and the different material forms it assumes (primarily money, production activities and commodities) on the other make for a contradictory unity. The focus of our inquiry has to be, therefore, upon the nature of this contradiction and how it can be the locus of creativity and change as well as of instabilities and crises.