Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (14 page)

These activities are, moreover, active and not passive. The actual or attempted expulsion of low-income and vulnerable populations from high-value land and locations through gentrification, displacement and sometimes violent clearances has been a long-standing practice within the history of capitalism. It unites those residents of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas subject to evictions, the former occupants of self-built housing in Seoul, those moved through eminent domain procedures in the United States and the shack-dwellers in South
Africa. Production here means the production of space, and realisation takes the form of capital gains on land rents and property values, thus generally empowering the developers and the rentiers as opposed to other factions of capital.

The contradictory unity between production and realisation therefore applies as much to the fate of the workers as it does to capital. The logical conclusion, which by and large the left has tended to sideline if not ignore, is that there is necessarily a contradictory unity in class conflict and class struggle across the spheres of working and living.

The political ambition that derives from this contradiction is to reverse the relation between production and realisation. Realisation should be replaced by the discovery and statement of the use values needed by the population at large and production should then be orchestrated to meet these social needs. Such a reversal might be difficult to accomplish overnight, but the gradual decommodification of basic needs provision is a feasible long-term project, which fits neatly with the idea that use values and not the perpetual search for augmenting exchange values should become the basic driver of economic activity. If this seems a very tall order, it is useful to remember that the social democratic states in Europe (particularly those of Scandinavia) reoriented their economies to demand-side management from the 1960s onwards as a way to stabilise capitalism. In so doing, they partially accomplished – albeit in a somewhat halfhearted way – that reversal of the production–realisation relation that the passage to an anti-capitalist economy would demand.

The foundational contradictions of capital do not stand in isolation from each other. They interlock in a variety of ways to provide a basic architecture for capital accumulation. The contradiction between use value and exchange value (1) depends on the existence of money, which lies in a contradictory relation to value as social labour (2). Exchange value and its measure, money, presume a certain juridical relation between those engaging in exchange: hence the existence of private property rights vested in individuals and a legal or customary framework to protect those rights. This grounds a contradiction between individualised private property and the collectivity of the capitalist state (3). The state has a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence as well as over the issue of fiat money, the primary means of exchange. A profound connection exists between the perpetuity of the money form and the perpetuity of private property rights (both imply the other). Private individuals can legally and freely appropriate the fruits of social labour (the common wealth) for themselves through exchange (4). This constitutes a monetary basis for the formation of capitalist class power. But capital can systematically reproduce itself only through the commodification of labour power, which solves the problem of how to produce the inequality of profit out of a market exchange system based on equality. This solution entails converting social labour – the labour we do for others – into alienated social labour – the labour that is dedicated solely to the production and reproduction of capital. The result is a foundational contradiction between capital and labour (5). Put in motion, these contradictions define a continuous process of capital circulation that passes through different material forms, which in turn implies an ever-deepening tension between fixity and motion in the landscape of capital (6). Within the circulation of capital a contradictory unity necessarily exists between production and realisation of capital (7)
.

These contradictions define a political terrain upon which an alternative to the world that capital creates can be defined. The political orientation must be towards use values rather than exchange values, towards a money form that inhibits private accumulation of wealth and power and the dissolution of the state–private property nexus into multiple overlapping regimes of collectively managed common property
rights. The ability of private persons to appropriate the common wealth must be checked and the monetary basis for class power must be undermined. The contradiction between capital and labour has to be displaced by emphasising the power of associated labour to engage in unalienated labour, to determine its own labour process while producing needed use values for others. The relation between fixity and motion (which can never be abolished since it is a universal condition of human existence) must be managed in such a way as to counteract the powers of the rentier and to facilitate the continuous and secure fulfilment of basic needs for all. Finally, instead of production for production’s sake leading the way to a forced world of manic and alienated consumerism, production should be rationally organised to provide the use values necessary to achieve an adequate material standard of living for all. Realisation should be converted into a wants-and-needs-based demand to which production responds
.

These are general orientations for long-term political thinking as to how an alternative to capital might be constituted. It is against the background of these orientations that specific strategies and proposals should be evaluated
.

The foundational contradictions are constant features of capital in any place and time. The only thing constant about the contradictions we will next consider is that they are unstable and constantly changing. This makes for an understanding of political economy that departs radically from the model of the natural sciences, where it can broadly be assumed that the principles being elucidated are true for all space and time. As Brian Arthur puts it in his perceptive and instructive book
The Nature of Technology,
the means by which the ‘base laws’ (or in my language ‘the foundational contradictions’) are expressed ‘change over time, and the patterns they form change and re-form over time. Each new pattern, each new set of arrangements, then, yields a new structure for the economy and the old one passes, but the underlying components that form it – the base laws – remain always the same.’
¹

In the case of moving contradictions, the basic nature of the contradiction has first to be described, before going on to provide a general assessment of the form it now assumes. By understanding something
of its evolutionary trajectory, we can then say something about future prospects and possibilities. This evolution is not predetermined. Nor is it random or accidental. But since the pace of evolutionary change tends to be relatively slow – a matter of decades rather than years (though there is evidence it is accelerating) – it is then possible to say something about future prospects as well as present dilemmas
.

To capture the sense of movement is politically vital, for the instability and the movement provide political opportunities at the same time as they pose critical problems. Political ideas and strategies that make sense in one place and time do not necessarily apply at another. Many a political movement has failed because it sought to appeal to ideas and ambitions that were well past their sell-by date. We cannot shape our current political strategies and carve out our contemporary political ambitions to fit the defunct ideas of some long-dead political theorist. This does not mean there is nothing to be learned from a study of the past or that no advantage is to be had from drawing upon past memories and traditions for inspiration in the present. What it does imply is an obligation to write the poetry of our own future against the background of the rapidly evolving contradictions of capital’s present
.

The central contradiction that the traditional Marxist conception of socialism/communism is supposed to resolve is that between the incredible increase in the productive forces (broadly understood as technological capacities and powers) and capital’s incapacity to utilise that productivity for the common welfare because of its commitment to the prevailing class relations and their associated mechanisms of class reproduction, class domination and class rule. Left to itself, the argument goes, capital is bound to produce an increasingly vulnerable oligarchic and plutocratic class structure under which the mass of the world’s population is left to hustle a living or starve to death. Frustrated by this ever-increasing inequality in the midst of plenty, a self-consciously organised anti-capitalist revolutionary movement (led, in Leninist accounts, by a vanguard party) will arise among the masses to dismantle class rule before going on to reorganise the global economy to deliver the benefits promised by capital’s amazing productivity to everyone on planet earth.

While there is more than a grain of truth in this analysis – we seem well on the way these days to producing a global plutocracy, for example – coupled with more than a whiff of hopeful revolutionary fervour concerning the transitional mechanism, it has always seemed to me that this formulation is too simplistic, if not fundamentally deficient. But what is clear is that the dramatic increases in productivity achieved by capital form one side of a contradictory movement that is always in danger of erupting into crises. It is not entirely clear,
though, what its antithesis might rightly be. It is to this question that we now turn.

Technology can be defined as the use of natural processes and things to make products for human purposes. At its base, technology defines a specific relation to nature that is dynamic and contradictory. We will return to this all-important contradiction in depth later (see
Contradiction 16
). All that matters here is to recognise its existence and its fluidity and dynamism. The immediate and distinctive purpose of
capital
(as opposed, say, to the military, the state apparatus and various other institutions in civil society) is
profit
, which translates socially into the perpetual accumulation of capital and the reproduction of capitalist class power. This is capital’s consuming aim. To this end, capitalists adapt and reshape the hardware of technology (the machines and computers), the software (the programming of machine uses) and their organisational forms (command and control structures over labour usage in particular). Capital’s immediate purpose is to increase productivity, efficiency and profit rates, and to create new and, if possible, ever more profitable product lines.

When considering the trajectories of technological change, it is vital to remember that the software and the organisational forms are every bit as important as the hardware. Organisational forms, like the control structures of the contemporary corporation, the credit system, just-in-time delivery systems, along with the software incorporated into robotics, data management, artificial intelligence and electronic banking, are just as crucial to profitability as the hardware embodied in machines. To take a contemporary example, cloud computing is the organisational form, Word is the software and this Mac, upon which I write, the hardware. All three elements – hardware, software and organisational form – are combined in computer technology. Under this definition, money, banking, the credit system and the market are all technologies. This definition may appear unduly broad but I think it absolutely essential to keep it so.

Capital’s technology was initially subject to internal transformation through competition between individual producers (at least,
that was the theory). Capitalist firms, in competition with each other, sought to raise their individual efficiency and productivity so as to gain excess profits relative to their competitors. Those that succeeded flourished, while others were left behind. But competitive advantages (higher profits) from superior organisational forms, machines or, for example, tighter inventory control were usually short-lived. Competing firms could quickly adopt the new methods (unless, of course, the technologies were patented or protected by monopoly power). The outcome would be leapfrogging innovations in technologies across sectors.

I sound a note of scepticism here because the history of capital demonstrates a penchant for monopoly rather than competition and this would not be so favourable for innovation. Instead, we find a strong collective generic preference – a culture as it were – emerging among capitalists for increasing efficiency and productivity across all capitalist enterprises with or without the driving force of competition. Innovations at one point in a supply chain – for example, power loom cotton fabric production – required innovations elsewhere – for example, the cotton gin – if overall productivity was to be improved. But it sometimes took and still takes a while for a whole domain of economic activity to be reorganised on a new technological basis. Last, but by no means least, individual capitalists and corporations came to recognise the importance of product innovation as a way to earn, if only for a while, monopoly profits and, when protected by patent law, a monopoly rent.

Capital was not and is not the only agent involved in the pursuit of technological advantages. Different branches of the state apparatus have always been deeply involved. Most prominent, of course, has been the military in search of superior weaponry and organisational forms. War and threats of war (arms races) have been strongly associated with waves of technological innovation. In the early history of capitalism this source of innovation probably played a dominant role. But various other facets of state administration concerned with the levying and payment of taxes, the definition of land and property rights and legal forms of contract, along with the construction of the
technologies of governance, money management, mapping, surveillance, policing and other procedures for the control of whole populations, have all along been just as if not more significantly involved as capitalist firms and corporations in developing new technological forms. Collaborations on research and development between the state and private sectors with respect to military, medical, public health and energy technologies have been widespread. The spillover benefits of innovations in the public sphere on capital’s practices and vice versa have been too numerous to count.