Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (29 page)

In partial answer to this dilemma, there has been a long-standing trend within the history of capital for household labour to be supplanted by market-based transactions (everything from haircuts to takeaway or frozen meals, fast foods, to dry-cleaning, entertainment and child and old-age care). The privatisation of personal household labours into the market sphere, along with increasing capital intensity of household technologies (everything from washing machines and vacuum cleaners to microwaves and, of course, houses and cars) that have to be purchased with a considerable outlay (often debt-financed), has not only radically transformed the nature of household economies but also revolutionised processes of realisation of capital values in the market. The commodifications in the housing markets of the world have opened up a vast field of capital accumulation through the consumption of space for social reproduction. Capital has long been concerned, as we have seen, with promoting ‘rational consumption’, understood as that form of household consumerism that fuels capital accumulation irrespective of whether it meets real human wants and needs (whatever these might be) or not. Social reproduction has increasingly been infected and in some cases totally transformed by such considerations.

This elementary fact has prompted much reflection on the increasing role of capital in dominating what Jürgen Habermas calls (following the German philosopher Edmund Husserl) our ‘lifeworld’ or what Henri Lefebvre analyses under the rubric of ‘everyday life’.
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The systemic penetration of almost all aspects of our lifeworld by capital and its products in one form or another has, of course, provoked resistance, but for most of the world’s population it has proved a losing battle, even when it was not actively welcomed. Arguments have been advanced on the progressive left (socialist feminists in particular) that wages should be paid for housework. Given that so much of that labour is performed disproportionately by women, the political reasoning is clear, but it unfortunately succeeds only in furthering the total monetisation of everything,
which ultimately plays into the hands of capital. Apart from the sheer difficulty of monetisation of household tasks, it is unlikely that such a measure would benefit the people, least of all women, who will most likely continue to be excessively exploited even as they are paid for their household labours.

Whereas it was perfectly reasonable, therefore, for the eminent French historian Fernand Braudel to take the sphere of material life and material reproduction of the common people in the late medieval period as having little or nothing to do with capital or even with the market, this formulation has no relevance to our own times except in those increasingly remote areas of the world (for example, indigenous societies or remote peasant populations) where capital has yet to exert its dominant influence.
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The commodification of daily life and social reproduction has proceeded apace and created a complex space for anti-capitalist struggle.

The sphere of social reproduction has in fact almost everywhere become the site of highly intrusive capitalist activities. The tentacles of the state’s and capital’s influence and power now proliferate within the spheres of social reproduction in many parts of the world in myriad ways. Not all of these interventions are pernicious, of course. Social reproduction is the site where the oppression of and violence against women flourishes in many parts of the world, where educational opportunities for women are denied, where violence and abuse of children all too frequently occur, where intolerance breeds contempt for others, where labour all too often transfers its own bitter experience of violence and oppression in the labour process back on to others in the household, where drink and drugs take their toll. It is for this reason that a modicum of social regulation and even, perhaps, state interventionism in the world of social reproduction become so necessary. But this then constitutes a bureaucratic framing of daily life and of social reproduction that leaves very little room for autonomous development. Furthermore, the deeper material embedding of all processes of production, exchange, distribution and consumption in the web of social and biological life has produced a world where a contradiction between a potentially alienating
household consumerism of excess and the consumption necessary for adequate social reproduction becomes every bit as salient as the contradiction between the social reproduction of the labour force and the reproduction of capital. How much of contemporary social reproduction in, say, the United States is given over to training as many people as possible in the insane arts of conspicuous consumption and speculative finance as opposed to training them to be good and well-educated workers?

What Randy Martin calls ‘the financialization of daily life’ has become a conspicuous insertion into social reproduction over the last generation.
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If we ask the elementary questions: how much social reproduction is debt-financed and what are the implications of that fact?, the answers are quite stunning. In many parts of the world the usurious moneylender has always been a significant figure and continues to be so up to this day. Social reproduction takes place in much of India under the shadow of the looming power of the usurer. This is not relieved by the arrival of the institutions of microcredit and microfinance (which in some instances have driven people – mostly women – to suicide as the only relief from their collective indebtedness). But personal indebtedness associated with social reproduction has now become a calamitous problem in one form or another almost everywhere. The huge indebtedness of students in the United States is now being mimicked in Britain, Chile and China, while borrowings to finance the conduct of everyday life have been mounting at astonishing rates. In just a few years personal debt in China has soared way beyond incomes from a base of close to zero in, say, 1980.

This generalisation is cut across, however, by the uneven geographical development of these contradictions. Some parts of the world (such as the United States, where consumption accounts for more than 70 per cent of GDP) seem to be more about furnishing the effective demand through an alien consumerism that corrupts reasonable forms of social reproduction, while others are focused more on the social reproduction of a labour force that can churn out value without cease (for example, China, where consumerism accounts for
around 35 per cent of GDP). In divided cities like Lagos, São Paulo and, yes, even New York, one part of the city is given over to conspicuous consumption and the other to the reproduction of an easily exploited but largely redundant because surplus labour force. The study of social reproduction in these different environments reveals a huge gap in both the qualities and meaning of household activities, with hardly any commonalities between them. These divisions produce some curious manifestations in the realm of bourgeois morality. While moral opprobrium is cast upon the practices first in Pakistan and later in India of having young children working for pennies on a ten- or twelve-hour-day schedule to produce footballs to be kicked around by players who earn millions, these very same moralists are totally blind to the exploitation by capital of their own children as consumers in the marketplace, even as those children are also being inculcated into the dark arts of the deal, as well as stock market manipulations (money for nothing) by pushing buttons on their keyboards. Google the case of Jonathan Lebed to see what I mean. By the time he was fifteen years old he had gained several million dollars from trading in penny stocks, setting up chat rooms to promote stocks he had just bought and selling at the higher price that his favourable ratings in the chat room created. Prosecuted by the Securities and Exchange Commission, he simply maintained that this was all that Wall Street did anyway; the SEC fined him a small amount and dropped the whole project of prosecution like a hot potato because Lebed was quite right.

The contradictions of social reproduction cannot be understood outside of these geographically differentiated circumstances, even as they have also dramatically changed their general character over time. The contingencies of material activity, of cultural forms and local ways of living, are of great import in many parts of the world. As Katz notes, social reproduction ‘necessarily remains mainly place-bound’ in a context where capital is highly mobile. The result is that ‘all sorts of disjunctures occur across space, across boundaries, and across scale, which are as likely to draw upon sedimented inequalities in social relations as to provoke new ones’. Agricultural
labourers are reproduced in Mexico but end up working in the fields of California, women workers raised in the Philippines play a large part in furnishing domestic labour in New York City, mathematical engineers trained under communism in what was once the Soviet Union end up in Cape Canaveral, while software engineers educated in India go to Seattle.

Social reproduction is not only about labour skills and the organisation of consumer habits. ‘The reproduction of the labour force calls forth a range of cultural forms and practices that are also geographically and historically specific,’ says Katz, and this includes all those associated with knowledge and learning, mental conceptions of the world, ethical and aesthetic judgements, relations to nature, cultural mores and values, as well as the sense of belonging that underpins loyalties to place, region and nation. Social reproduction also inculcates ‘the practices that maintain and reinforce class and other categories of difference’ and ‘a set of cultural forms and practices that works to reinforce and naturalize the dominant social relations of production and reproduction’. Through these social practices ‘social actors become members of a culture they simultaneously help to create and construct their identities within and against’.

‘The questions of social reproduction are,’ concludes Katz, ‘vexed and slippery, but the arena of social reproduction is where much of the toll of globalized capitalist production can be witnessed.’
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It is the field where the creative destruction of capital is at its most insidious, promoting, as it does, an alien consumerism and individualistic ways of life conducive to what amounts to little more than crass and competitive selfish greed, while pinning responsibility on its victims for their own plight when they fail (as they inevitably must) to build up their own supposedly human capital. It is the sphere where the reproduction of inequality begins and, lacking any powerful subsequent counterforce, ends. In the United States, for example, social mobility is almost at a standstill, so everything rests on a social reproduction process that is highly unequal and tightly channelled, if not outright discriminatory. Where once upon a time the populace at large fended for itself to reproduce itself without one
iota of assistance from capital or the state, the populace now has to reproduce itself in the midst of massive corruptions and interventions of both state and capital in the construction of a daily life oriented not only to fill the highly differentiated slots (including that of ne’er-do-well) in a particular kind of labour force but also to being a sink for a wide range of unnecessary and unwanted products that capital produces and markets with such flair.

There are those, of course, who see the contradiction and seek ways around it. Some long for a return to indigenous ways of thinking and of living, or at least see some hope of mounting a challenge to the crass forms of contemporary social reproduction under fully organised consumerist capitalism by building alternative communities on the basis of networked households and workers’ associations. But capital’s strategy to infect social reproduction with consumerism has been both persistent and long-standing, as well as generously financed by an advertising and promotional industry that will stop at nothing to get products sold. ‘Get the women’ was the slogan of the new department store owners in Second Empire Paris as they sought to acquire more market power. More recently it has been ‘Get the kids and the younger the better’ that has dominated much consumerist advertising. If children are raised sitting in front of a TV or playing computer games or with an i-Pad, then this has far-reaching implications for their psychological and cultural attitudes, their mental conceptions of the world and their possible future political subjectivities. Reproduction is a vexed problem, says Katz, in part because it is so highly focused on the reproduction of ‘the very social relations and material forms that are so problematic’. For this reason, social reproduction is unlikely to be a source of revolutionary sentiments. Yet so much rests upon it, including oppositional politics.

The ubiquity of social reproduction makes it a central standpoint from which to construct a critique of capital in one of its most insidious forms. This was precisely Henri Lefebvre’s project in writing his multi-volume
Critique of Everyday Life
.
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He here set out to provide a critique of individuality (the ‘private’ consciousness and individualism); a critique of money (which he understood in terms of
fetishism and economic alienation); a critique of needs (psychological and moral alienation from consumerism though not, of course, from necessary consumption); a critique of work (alienation of the worker); and, last but not least, a critique of the concept and ideology of freedom (the power over nature and over human nature).

This points us towards a political form of anti-capitalist responses to what has happened to daily life under capitalism and what has so transformed social reproduction. The negation of multiple alienations must be the cutting edge in any collective political response to the degradations of daily life and the loss of autonomy in social reproduction at the hands of capital and the capitalist state. This does not imply that the only response to this situation is the isolated individual household doing whatever it will. The alternative is the embedding of households in a social network for purposes of managing and advancing a common life replete with ‘civilised’ values. We will take up this alternative in the conclusion. Meanwhile, Lefebvre’s last point – the critique of freedom – also calls for careful attention, for it lies at the crux of yet another of capital’s major contradictions, as we shall see in the study of
Contradiction 14
.