Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (17 page)

Marx, on the other hand, saw a number of possible antidotes to the tendency of profit rates to fall as the result of labour-saving innovations: the opening up of entirely new product lines that were labour-intensive; a pattern of innovation that was devoted as much to capital saving as to labour saving; a rising rate of exploitation on the labour forces still employed; the prior existence or formation of a class of consumers who produced nothing; a phenomenal rate of growth in the total labour force which would augment the mass of capital being produced even though the individual rate of return was falling. Whether Marx thought these countervailing forces were sufficient to stave off the falling value of production and falling profits indefinitely is not clear.

Developmental paths of this sort have effectively held off falling profits for some time now. The absorption of the peasantries of China, India and much of South-East Asia (along with Turkey and Egypt and some Latin American countries, with Africa still the continent with massive untapped labour reserves) into the global labour force since 1980 or so, along with the integration of what was the Soviet Bloc, has meant a huge increase (rather than decrease) in the global wage labour force over and beyond that supplied by population
growth. The rising rates of exploitation with the creation of horrific labour conditions in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and elsewhere are also palpable, while the demand problem has largely been taken care of by way of a vast expansion of credit.

So there appears to be no immediate cause for panic from the standpoint of either production or realisation. But from the standpoint of the long-term future of capital, it does seem as if we exist at a ‘last frontier’ for labour absorption throughout global capitalism. In the advanced capitalist countries there has been a massive movement of women into the labour force over the last fifty years and internationally there are few areas left (mainly in Africa and South and Inner Asia) where massive reserves of labour power are to be found. Nothing on the scale of the recent huge expansion of the global labour force will ever be possible again. Meanwhile, the accelerating speed-up over the last few years of automation and the application of artificial intelligence to routine services (like airline check-ins and supermarket checkouts) appears, on the other hand, to be just the beginning. Automation is now identifiable in fields such as higher educational instruction and medical diagnostics and the airlines are already experimenting with pilotless planes. The contradiction between value production on the one hand and runaway labour-saving technological innovation on the other is headed into more and more dangerous territory. This danger confronts not only an increasingly disposable population facing no foreseeable employment opportunities but also (as even Ford clearly sees) the reproduction of capital itself.

The last three recessions in the United States, for example, beginning in the early 1990s, have been followed by what are euphemistically referred to as ‘jobless recoveries’. The most recent deep recession has led to the creation of long-term unemployment on a scale not seen in the USA since the 1930s. Similar phenomena are observable in Europe and the capacity for labour absorption in China – a key Communist Party policy orientation – appears to be limited. Both the evidence of recent trends and the evaluation of future prospects point in one direction: massive surpluses of potentially restive redundant populations.

This has some serious implications, both theoretical and political, that require elaboration. Money (see
Contradiction 2
) is a representation of the value of social labour (the latter being understood as the quantity of that labour which we supply to others via the exchange value market system). If we are moving towards a world in which social labour of this sort disappears, then there is no value to be represented. The historical representation of value – the money form – is then entirely free from its obligation to represent anything other than itself. The neoclassical economists argued (when they bothered at all with the question) that Marx’s labour theory of value is irrelevant because capital responds only to money signals and not to value relations. There was, they argued, no point bothering with the idea of value even if it was a plausible concept (which most felt it was not). They were, I believe, wrong in this judgement. But if the developments outlined above do occur, then the neoclassical argument
contra
the value theory will become more and more correct, to the point where even the most orthodox Marxists will have to give up the value theory. Conventional economists will doubtless crow with delight at this. What they do not realise is that this means the demise of the one restraint that has prevented the descent of capital into total lawlessness. The recent evidence of a contagious predatory lawlessness within capitalism is a sign of the weakening regulatory role of social labour. This weakening has been occurring for some time. One crucial break occurred with the abandonment of a metallic base to the world’s monetary system in the early 1970s: thereafter the relation of the world’s money to social labour became at best tangential and we have the long chain of financial and commercial crises around the world after the mid-1970s to prove it.

The money form has acquired a good deal of autonomy over the last forty years. Fiat and fictitious values created by the world’s central banks have taken over. This leads us back to some reflections on the relation between the path of technological evolution we have here described and the evolution of monetary technologies. The rise of cyber moneys, like Bitcoin, in some instances seemingly constructed for purposes of money-laundering around illegal activities, is just
the beginning of an inexorable descent of the monetary system into chaos.

The political problem posed by the question of technology for anti-capitalist struggle is perhaps the most difficult to confront. On the one hand we know all too well that the evolution of technologies, marked as it is by a good deal of autonomous ‘combinatorial’ logic of the sort that Arthur describes, is a form of big business in which class struggle and inter-capitalist and interstate competition have played leading roles for the ‘human purpose’ of sustaining military dominance, class power and perpetual accumulation of capital. We also see that capital’s actions are steering closer and closer to the abyss of the loss of social labour as an underlying regulatory principle that prevents the descent of capital into lawlessness. On the other hand we also know that any struggle to combat worldwide environmental degradation, social inequalities and impoverishment, perverse population dynamics, deficits in global health, education and nutrition, and military and geopolitical tensions will entail the mobilisation of many of our currently available technologies to achieve non-capitalistic social, ecological and political ends. The existing bundle of technologies, saturated as they are in the mentalities and practices of capital’s search for class domination, contains emancipatory potentialities that somehow have to be mobilised in anti-capitalist struggle.

In the short term, of course, the left is bound to defend jobs and skills under threat. But, as the miserable history of the noble rearguard action fought against deindustrialisation in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrates, this will likely be a losing battle against a newly emerging technological configuration from the very beginning. An anti-capitalist movement has in the current conjuncture to reorganise its thinking around the idea that social labour is becoming less and less significant to how the economic engine of capitalism functions. Many of the service, administrative and professional jobs the left currently seeks to defend are on the way out. Most of the world’s population is becoming disposable and irrelevant from the standpoint of capital, which will increasingly rely upon the circulation of
fictitious forms of capital and fetishistic constructs of value centred on the money form and within the credit system. As is to be expected, some populations are held to be more disposable than others, with the result that women and people of colour bear most of the current burden and will probably do so even more in the foreseeable future.
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Martin Ford correctly poses the question: how will the resultant disposable and redundant population live (let alone provide a market) under such conditions? A viable long-term and imaginative answer to this question has to be devised by any anti-capitalist movement. Commensurate organised action and planning to meet the new eventualities and the provision of sufficient use values must be thought through and gradually implemented. This has to be done at the same time as the left has also to mount a rearguard action against the technologies of increasingly predatory practices of accumulation by dispossession, further bouts of deskilling, the advent of permanent joblessness, ever-increasing social inequality and accelerating environmental degradation. The contradiction that faces capital morphs into a contradiction that necessarily gets internalised within anti-capitalist politics.

The division of labour should, by rights, be positioned as one of the foundational features of what capital is all about. It refers to the human capacity to disaggregate complex productive and reproductive activities into specific but simpler tasks that can be undertaken by different individuals on a temporary or permanent basis. The specialised work of the many individuals is reunited into a working whole by way of organised cooperation. Throughout history, divisions of labour have been changing and evolving depending on both the internal and the external conditions affecting a particular society. The central problem the division of labour poses is the relation between the parts and the whole and who (if anyone) takes responsibility for the evolution of the whole.

Capital has seized upon the division of labour and reshaped it dramatically to its own purposes throughout its history. It is for this reason that I include this contradiction under the heading of ‘moving’, since it is perpetually in the course of being revolutionised in the world that capital commands. The division of labour now in place is radically different to the point of being almost unrecognisable from that which prevailed in, say, 1850. The evolution in the division of labour under capital has, however, a very special character since, as with everything else, it is oriented primarily towards sustaining competitive advantage and profitability, which have nothing necessarily to do – except coincidentally – with improving the qualities of working and living or even enhancing human welfare more generally. If fundamental improvements to living and working occur, as indeed they clearly do, then this is either a collateral effect or a consequence of political demands and pressures emanating from
restive and discontented populations. After all, the vast increase in ever-cheaper physical output that more efficient divisions of labour produce has to be consumed somehow and somewhere if the value produced is to be realised. On the other hand there are plenty of collateral damages (for example, in environmental conditions) to be taken into account also.

Contradictions within the division of labour are a dime a dozen. There is, however, a general and important distinction between the technical and the social division of labour. By the former I mean a separate task within a complex series of operations that anyone in principle can do, like minding a machine or mopping the floor, while by the latter I mean a specialised task that only a person with adequate training or social standing can do, like a doctor, software programmer or hostess at a five-star restaurant. I cite this last example to emphasise that the divisions and definitions that exist often depend as much on social, cultural and interpersonal skills and the presentation of self as they do on technical expertise.

There are all sorts of other distinctions of note, such as those due to nature (for example, childbearing) or to culture (for example, the position of women in society); between city (urban) and country (rural); mental and manual; social (throughout society in general) and detail divisions (within a firm or corporation); blue collar and white collar; skilled and unskilled; productive and unproductive; domestic (household) versus wage-based; symbolic versus material and so on. There are then sectoral classifications between primary (agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining), secondary (industry and manufacturing), tertiary (services and the finance, insurance and real estate – FIRE – sectors that have surged to prominence in recent times) and what some like to refer to as a fourth sector made up of increasingly important cultural and knowledge-based industries. As if this is not enough, the classification of different industries and occupations in censuses typically run to more than 100 items.

To the degree that such distinctions and oppositions can be a source of tension and antagonism, they can become embroiled in and heightened into contradictions that play some sort of role in crisis
formation and resolution. Certainly, when we consider movements of revolt it would be rare indeed not to find the causes as well as the active participants rooted in one or other of these oppositions or based in certain sectors. In socialist theory, of course, it has traditionally been the industrial proletariat (the ‘productive’ labourers) within the overall division of labour that has been favoured as the vanguard of revolutionary transformation. Bank clerks, domestic workers and street cleaners have never been thought of as revolutionary agents whereas miners, car workers, steelworkers and even schoolteachers have.

Most of these dualisms turn out to be crude distinctions that have limited purchase in helping us to understand an increasingly complex and intricate world that is constantly subject to revolutionary transformation. It is, however, both useful and important at the outset to register how the technical and social bases of these distinctions intersect, since the categories involved in the definition of the division of labour have always intermingled technical and social considerations in ways that are often confusing and misleading. There has been a long history, for example, of defining skilled labour in gendered terms such that any task that women could perform – no matter how difficult or complex – was classified as unskilled simply because women could do it. Worse still, women were often allocated these tasks for so-called ‘natural’ reasons (everything from nimble fingers to a supposedly naturally submissive and patient temperament). For this reason, men in the workshops of Second Empire Paris strongly resisted the employment of women since they knew that this would lead to the reclassification of their work as unskilled and worthy only of a lower rate of remuneration. While the issue at that time was very specific, this is almost certainly a key factor in determining differential rates of remuneration in the contemporary global labour market. The fact that there has been an extensive feminisation both of low-wage labour and of poverty worldwide testifies clearly to the importance of these sorts of judgements, for which there is no technical basis whatsoever. The question of gender has also entered into extensive debates over the proper role to be assigned
to housework versus wage labour. While this is an important issue within capitalism and is doubtless implicated in many personal crises within households, it has had very little direct impact on the development of capital, except for a long-standing general trend to broaden the market by commodifying more and more domestic tasks (such as cooking, cleaning, washing one’s hair and getting nails clipped and manicured). The campaign over wages for housework would, in any case, seem to be seriously askew from an anti-capitalist perspective because it merely deepens the penetration of monetisation and commodification into the intimacies of daily life rather than using household work as a lever to try to decommodify as many forms of social provision as possible.