Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2 page)

It is not only the capitalist elites and their intellectual and academic acolytes who seem incapable of making any radical break with their past or defining a viable exit from the grumbling crisis of low growth, stagnation, high unemployment and the loss of state sovereignty to the power of bondholders. The forces of the traditional left (political parties and trade unions) are plainly incapable of mounting any solid opposition to the power of capital. They have been beaten down by thirty years of ideological and political assault from the right, while democratic socialism has been discredited. The stigmatised collapse of actually existing communism and the ‘death of Marxism’ after 1989 made matters worse. What remains of the radical left now operates largely outside of any institutional or organised oppositional channels, in the hope that small-scale actions
and local activism can ultimately add up to some kind of satisfactory macro alternative. This left, which strangely echoes a libertarian and even neoliberal ethic of anti-statism, is nurtured intellectually by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and all those who have reassembled postmodern fragmentations under the banner of a largely incomprehensible post-structuralism that favours identity politics and eschews class analysis. Autonomist, anarchist and localist perspectives and actions are everywhere in evidence. But to the degree that this left seeks to change the world without taking power, so an increasingly consolidated plutocratic capitalist class remains unchallenged in its ability to dominate the world without constraint. This new ruling class is aided by a security and surveillance state that is by no means loath to use its police powers to quell all forms of dissent in the name of anti-terrorism.

It is in this context that I have written this book. The mode of approach I have adopted is somewhat unconventional in that it follows Marx’s method but not necessarily his prescriptions and it is to be feared that readers will be deterred by this from assiduously taking up the arguments here laid out. But something different in the way of investigative methods and mental conceptions is plainly needed in these barren intellectual times if we are to escape the current hiatus in economic thinking, policies and politics. After all, the economic engine of capitalism is plainly in much difficulty. It lurches between just sputtering along and threatening to grind to a halt or exploding episodically hither and thither without warning. Signs of danger abound at every turn in the midst of prospects of a plentiful life for everyone somewhere down the road. Nobody seems to have a coherent understanding of how, let alone why, capitalism is so troubled. But it has always been so. World crises have always been, as Marx once put it, ‘the real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy’.
¹
Unravelling those contradictions should reveal a great deal about the economic problems that so ail us. Surely that is worth a serious try.

It also seemed right to sketch in the likely outcomes and possible political consequences that flow from the application of this
distinctive mode of thought to an understanding of capitalism’s political economy. These consequences may not seem, at first blush, to be likely, let alone practicable or politically palatable. But it is vital that alternatives be broached, however foreign they may seem, and, if necessary, seized upon if conditions so dictate. In this way a window can be opened on to a whole field of untapped and unconsidered possibilities. We need an open forum – a global assembly, as it were – to consider where capital is, where it might be going and what should be done about it. I hope that this brief book will contribute something to the debate.

New York City,
January 2014

‘There must be a way of scanning or X-raying the present which shows up a certain future as a potential within it. Otherwise, you will simply succeed in making people desire fruitlessly …’

Terry Eagleton,
Why Marx Was Right
, p. 69

‘In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed. Instead of investigating the nature of the conflicting elements which erupt in the catastrophe, the apologists content themselves with denying the catastrophe itself and insisting, in the face of their regular and periodic recurrence, that if production were carried on according to the textbooks, crises would never occur.’

Karl Marx,
Theories of Surplus Value
, Part 2, p. 500

There are two basic ways in which the concept of contradiction is used in the English language. The commonest and most obvious derives from Aristotle’s logic, in which two statements are held to be so totally at odds that both cannot possibly be true. The statement ‘All blackbirds are black’ contradicts the statement that ‘All blackbirds are white.’ If one statement is true, then the other is not.

The other mode of usage arises when two seemingly opposed forces are simultaneously present within a particular situation, an entity, a process or an event. Many of us experience, for example, a tension between the demands of working at a job and constructing a satisfying personal life at home. Women in particular are perpetually being advised on how they might better balance career objectives
with family obligations. We are surrounded with such tensions at every turn. For the most part we manage them on a daily basis so that we don’t get too stressed out and frazzled by them. We may even dream of eliminating them by internalising them. In the case of living and working, for example, we may locate these two competing activities in the same space and not segregate them in time. But this does not necessarily help, as someone glued to their computer screen struggling to meet a deadline while the kids are playing with matches in the kitchen soon enough has to recognise (for this reason it often turns out to be easier to clearly separate living and working spaces and times).

Tensions between the competing demands of organised production and the need to reproduce daily life have always existed. But they are often latent rather than overt and as such remain unnoticed as people go about their daily business. Furthermore, the oppositions are not always starkly defined. They can be porous and bleed into each other. The distinction between working and living, for example, often gets blurred (I have this problem a lot). In much the same way that the distinction between inside and outside rests on clear borders and boundaries when there may be none, so there are many situations where clear oppositions are hard to identify.

Situations arise, however, in which the contradictions become more obvious. They sharpen and then get to the point where the stress between opposing desires feels unbearable. In the case of career objectives and a satisfying family life, external circumstances can change and turn what was once a manageable tension into a crisis: the demands of the job may shift (change of hours or location). Circumstances on the home front may be disrupted (a sudden illness, the mother-in-law who took care of the kids after school retires to Florida). People’s feelings on the inside can change also: someone experiences an epiphany, concludes ‘this is no way to live a life’ and throws up their job in disgust. Newly acquired ethical or religious principles may demand a different mode of being in the world. Different groups in a population (for example, men and women) or different individuals may feel and react to similar
contradictions in very different ways. There is a powerful subjective element in defining and feeling the power of contradictions. What is unmanageable for one may mean nothing special for another. While the reasons may vary and conditions may differ, latent contradictions may suddenly intensify to create violent crises. Once resolved, then the contradictions can just as suddenly subside (though rarely without leaving marks and sometimes scars from their passage). The genie is, as it were, temporarily stuffed back into the bottle, usually by way of some radical readjustment between the opposing forces that lie at the root of the contradiction.

Contradictions are by no means all bad and I certainly don’t mean to imply any automatic negative connotation. They can be a fecund source of both personal and social change from which people emerge far better off than before. We do not always succumb to and get lost in them. We can use them creatively. One of the ways out of a contradiction is innovation. We can adapt our ideas and practices to new circumstances and learn to be a far better and more tolerant person from the experience. Partners who had drifted apart may rediscover each other’s virtues as they get together to manage a crisis between work and family. Or they may find a solution through forming new and enduring bonds of mutual support and caring with others in the neighbourhood where they live. This kind of adaptation can happen at a macroeconomic scale as well as to individuals. Britain, for example, found itself in a contradictory situation in the early eighteenth century. The land was needed for biofuels (charcoal in particular) and for food production, and, at a time when the capacity for international trade in energy and foodstuffs was limited, the development of capitalism in Britain threatened to grind to a halt because of intensifying competition on the land between the two uses. The answer lay in going underground to mine coal as a source of energy so the land could be used to grow food alone. Later on, the invention of the steam engine helped revolutionise what capitalism was about as fossil fuel sources became general. A contradiction can often be the ‘mother of invention’. But notice something important here: resort to fossil fuels relieved one contradiction but now, centuries
later, it anchors another contradiction between fossil fuel use and climate change. Contradictions have the nasty habit of not being resolved but merely moved around. Mark this principle well, for we will come back to it many times in what follows.

The contradictions of capital have often spawned innovations, many of which have improved the qualities of daily life. Contradictions when they erupt into a crisis of capital generate moments of ‘creative destruction’. Rarely is it the case that what is created and what is destroyed is predetermined and rarely is it the case that everything that is created is bad and everything that was good was destroyed. And rarely are the contradictions totally resolved. Crises are moments of transformation in which capital typically reinvents itself and morphs into something else. And the ‘something else’ may be better or worse for the people even as it stabilises the reproduction of capital. But crises are also moments of danger when the reproduction of capital is threatened by the underlying contradictions.

In this study I rely on the dialectical rather than the logical Aristotelian conception of contradiction.
¹
I do not mean to imply by this that the Aristotelian definition is wrong. The two definitions – seemingly in contradiction – are autonomous and compatible. It is just that they refer to very different circumstances. I find that the dialectical conception is rich in possibilities and not at all difficult to work with.

At the outset, however, I must first open up what is perhaps the most important contradiction of all: that between reality and appearance in the world in which we live.

Marx famously advised that our task should be to change the world rather than to understand it. But when I look at the corpus of his writings I have to say that he spent an inordinate amount of time seated in the library of the British Museum seeking to understand the world. This was so, I think, for one very simple reason. That reason is best captured by the term ‘fetishism’. By fetishism, Marx was referring to the various masks, disguises and distortions of what is really going on around us. ‘If everything were as it appeared on the surface,’ he wrote, ‘there would be no need for science.’ We need to
get behind the surface appearances if we are to act coherently in the world. Otherwise, acting in response to misleading surface signals typically produces disastrous outcomes. Scientists long ago taught us, for example, that the sun does not actually go around the earth, as it appears to do (though in a recent survey in the USA it seems 20 per cent of the population still believe it does!). Medical practitioners likewise recognise that there is a big difference between symptoms and underlying causes. At their best, they have transformed their understanding of the differences between appearances and realities into a fine art of medical diagnosis. I had a sharp pain in my chest and was convinced it was a heart problem, but it turned out to be referred pain from a pinched nerve in my neck and a few physical exercises put it right. Marx wanted to generate the same sorts of insights when it came to understanding the circulation and accumulation of capital. There are, he argued, surface appearances that disguise underlying realities. Whether or not we agree with his specific diagnoses does not matter at this point (though it would be foolish not to take note of his findings). What matters is that we recognise the general possibility that we are often encountering symptoms rather than underlying causes and that we need to unmask what is truly happening underneath a welter of often mystifying surface appearances.

Let me give some examples. I put $100 in a savings account at a 3 per cent annual compound rate of interest and after twenty years it has grown to $180.61. Money seems to have the magical power to increase itself at a compounding rate. I do nothing but my savings account grows. Money seems to have the magical capacity to lay its own golden eggs. But where does the increase of money (the interest) really come from?

This is not the only kind of fetish around. The supermarket is riddled with fetishistic signs and disguises. The lettuce costs half as much as half a pound of tomatoes. But where did the lettuce and the tomatoes come from and who was it that worked to produce them and who brought them to the supermarket? And why does one item cost so much more than another? Moreover, who has the right to attach some kabbalistic sign like $ or € or £ over the items for sale and
who puts a number on them, like $1 a pound or €2 a kilo? Commodities magically appear in the supermarkets with a price tag attached such that customers with money can satisfy their wants and needs depending upon how much money they have in their pockets. We get used to all this, but we don’t notice that we have no idea where most of the items come from, how they were produced, by whom and under what conditions, or why, exactly, they exchange in the ratios they do and what the money we use is really all about (particularly when we read that the Federal Reserve has just created another $1 trillion of it at the drop of a hat!).