Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (3 page)

The contradiction between reality and appearance which all this produces is by far the most general and pervasive contradiction that we have to confront in trying to unravel the more specific contradictions of capital. The fetish understood in this way is not a crazy belief, a mere illusion or a hall of mirrors (though it will sometimes seem that way). It really is the case that money can be used to buy commodities and that we can live out our lives without much concern about anything other than how much money we have and how much that money will buy in the supermarket. And the money in my savings account really does grow. But ask the question ‘What is money?’ and the answer is usually a baffled silence. Mystifications and masks surround us at every turn, though occasionally, of course, we get shocked when we read that the thousand or so workers who died when a factory building collapsed in Bangladesh were making the shirts we are wearing. For the most part we know nothing about the people who produce the goods that support our daily life.

We can live perfectly well within a fetish world of surface signals, signs and appearances without needing to know all that much about how it works (in much the same way that we can turn on a switch and have light without knowing anything about electricity generation). It is only when something dramatic happens – the supermarket shelves are bare, the prices in the supermarket go haywire, the money in our pocket suddenly becomes worthless (or the light does not go on) – that we typically ask the bigger and broader questions as to why and how things are happening ‘out there’, beyond the doors and
unloading bays of the supermarket, that can so dramatically affect daily life and sustenance.

In this book I will try to get behind the fetishism and identify the contradictory forces that beset the economic engine that powers capitalism. I do so because I believe that most of the accounts of what is happening currently available to us are profoundly misleading: they replicate the fetishism and do nothing to disperse the fog of misunderstanding.

I here make, however, a clear distinction between
capitalism
and
capital
. This investigation focuses on capital and not on capitalism. So what does this distinction entail? By capitalism I mean any social formation in which processes of capital circulation and accumulation are hegemonic and dominant in providing and shaping the material, social and intellectual bases for social life. Capitalism is rife with innumerable contradictions, many of which, though, have nothing in particular to do directly with capital accumulation. These contradictions transcend the specificities of capitalist social formations. For example, gender relations such as patriarchy underpin contradictions to be found in ancient Greece and Rome, in ancient China, in Inner Mongolia or in Ruanda. The same applies to racial distinctions, understood as any claim to biological superiority on the part of some subgroup in the population vis-à-vis the rest (race is not, therefore, defined in terms of phenotype: the working and peasant classes in France in the mid-nineteenth century were openly and widely regarded as biologically inferior beings – a view that was perpetuated in many of Zola’s novels). Racialisation and gender discriminations have been around for a very long time and there is no question that the history of capitalism is an intensely racialised and gendered history. The question then arises: why do I not include the contradictions of race and gender (along with many others, such as nationalism, ethnicity and religion) as foundational in this study of the contradictions of capital?

The short answer is that I exclude them because although they are omnipresent within capitalism they are not specific to the form of circulation and accumulation that constitutes the economic engine
of capitalism. This in no way implies that they have no impact on capital accumulation or that capital accumulation does not equally affect (‘infect’ might be a better word) or make active use of them. Capitalism clearly has in various times and places pushed racialisation, for example, to extremes (including the horrors of genocide and holocausts). Contemporary capitalism plainly feeds off gender discriminations and violence as well as upon the frequent dehumanisation of people of colour. The intersections and interactions between racialisation and capital accumulation are both highly visible and powerfully present. But an examination of these tells me nothing particular about how the economic engine of capital works, even as it identifies one source from where it plainly draws its energy.

The longer answer requires a better understanding of my purpose and of the method I have chosen to pursue. In the same way that a biologist might isolate a distinctive ecosystem whose dynamics (and contradictions!) need to be analysed as if it is isolated from the rest of the world, so I seek to isolate capital circulation and accumulation from everything else that is going on. I treat it as a ‘closed system’ in order to identify its major internal contradictions. I use, in short, the power of abstraction to build a model of how the economic engine of capitalism works. I use this model to explore why and how periodic crises occur and whether, in the long run, there are certain contradictions that may prove fatal to the perpetuation of capitalism as we now know it.

In the same way that the biologist will readily admit that external forces and disruptions (hurricanes, global warming and sea-level rise, noxious pollutants in the air or contamination of the water) will often overwhelm the ‘normal’ dynamics of ecological reproduction in the area she has isolated for study, so the same is true in my case: wars, nationalism, geopolitical struggles, disasters of various kinds all enter into the dynamics of capitalism, along with hefty doses of racism and gender, sexual, religious and ethnic hatreds and discriminations. It would take only one nuclear holocaust to end it all well before any potentially fatal internal contradictions of capital have done their work.

I am not saying, therefore, that everything that happens under capitalism is driven by the contradictions of capital. But I do want to identify those internal contradictions of capital that have produced the recent crises and made it seem as if there is no clear exit without destroying the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world.

Let me use a different metaphor to explain my method. A vast cruise ship sailing the ocean is a particular and complicated physical site for divergent activities, social relations and interactions. Different classes, genders, ethnicities and races will interact in sometimes friendly and at other times violently oppositional ways as the cruise progresses. The employees, from the captain on down, will be hierarchically organised and some strata (for example, the cabin stewards) may be at loggerheads with their overseers as well as with the demanding people they are required to serve. We could aspire to describe in detail what happens on the decks and in the cabins of this cruise ship and why. Revolutions may break out between decks. The ultra rich may isolate themselves on the upper decks, playing an infinite game of poker which redistributes wealth among them, while paying no mind whatsoever to what transpires below. But it is not my interest here to get into all of this. In the bowels of this ship there is an economic engine that pounds away day and night supplying energy to it and powering it across the ocean. Everything that happens on this ship is contingent on this engine continuing to function. If it breaks down or blows up, then the ship is dysfunctional.

Plainly, the engine we have has been stuttering and grumbling of late. It appears peculiarly vulnerable. In this inquiry I shall try to establish why. If it does break down and the ship lies listless and powerless in the water, then we will all be in deep trouble. The engine will have to be either repaired or replaced with an engine of a different design. If the latter, then this poses the question of how to redesign the economic engine and to what specifications. In so doing it is helpful to know what did or did not work well in the old engine so we can emulate its qualities without replicating its faults.

There are, however, a number of key points where the contradictions
of capitalism affect the economic engine of capital with potentially disruptive force. If the engine gets flooded because of external events (such as a nuclear war, a global infectious disease pandemic that halts all trade, a revolutionary movement from above that attacks the engineers below or a negligent captain who steers the boat on to the rocks), then plainly the engine of capital stops for reasons other than its own internal contradictions. I will, in what follows, duly note the primary points where the engine of capital accumulation might be particularly vulnerable to such external influences. But I shall not pursue their consequences in any detail, for, as I began by insisting, my aim here is to isolate and analyse the
internal
contradictions of capital rather than the contradictions of capitalism taken as a whole.

In certain circles it is fashionable to derogatorily dismiss studies such as this as ‘capitalo-centric’. Not only do I see nothing wrong with such studies, provided, of course, that the interpretive claims that arise from them are not pressed too far and in the wrong direction, but I also think it imperative that we have much more sophisticated and profound capitalo-centric studies to hand to facilitate a better understanding of the recent problems that capital accumulation has encountered. How else can we interpret the persistent contemporary problems of mass unemployment, the downward spiral of economic development in Europe and Japan, the unstable lurches forward of China, India and the other so-called BRIC countries? Without a ready guide to the contradictions underpinning such phenomena we will be lost. It is surely myopic, if not dangerous and ridiculous, to dismiss as ‘capitalo-centric’ interpretations and theories of how the economic engine of capital accumulation works in relation to the present conjuncture. Without such studies we will likely misread and misinterpret the events that are occurring around us. Erroneous interpretations will almost certainly lead to erroneous politics whose likely outcome will be to deepen rather than to alleviate crises of accumulation and the social misery that derives from them. This is, I believe, a serious problem throughout much of the contemporary capitalist world: erroneous policies based in erroneous theorising are compounding the economic difficulties and exacerbating the social
disruption and misery that result. For the putative ‘anti-capitalist’ movement now in formation it is even more crucial not only to better understand what exactly it is that it might be opposed to, but also to articulate a clear argument as to why an anti-capitalist movement makes sense in our times and why such a movement is so imperative if the mass of humanity is to live a decent life in the difficult years to come.

So what I am seeking here is a better understanding of the contradictions of
capital
, not of
capitalism
. I want to know how the economic engine of
capitalism
works the way it does, and why it might stutter and stall and sometimes appear to be on the verge of collapse. I also want to show why this economic engine should be replaced and with what.

The first seven contradictions are foundational because capital simply could not function without them. Furthermore, they all hang together in such a way as to make it impossible to substantially modify, let alone abolish, any one of them without seriously modifying or abolishing the others. Challenging the dominant role of exchange value in the provision of a use value like housing, for example, implies changes in the form and role of money and modifying, if not abolishing, the private property rights regime with which we are all too familiar. The search for an anti-capitalist alternative consequently appears a rather tall order. Simultaneous transformations would have to occur on many fronts. Difficulties on one front have also often been contained by strong resistances elsewhere such that general crises are avoided. But the interlinkages between the contradictions on occasion turn toxic. An intensification of a contradiction of one sort can become contagious. When contagions multiply and magnify (as clearly happened in 2007–9), then a general crisis ensues. This is dangerous for capital and creates opportunities for systemic anti-capitalist struggle. This is why an analysis of the contradictions that produce such general crises is so important. If oppositional and anti-capitalist movements in particular know what broadly to expect as the contradictions unfold, then they will be better positioned to take advantage of, rather than being surprised and stymied by, the way the contradictions move around and deepen (both geographically and sectorally) in the course of crisis formation and resolution. If crises are transitional and disruptive phases in which capital is reconstituted in a new form, then they are also phases in which deep questions can be posed and acted upon by those social movements seeking to remake the world in a different image
.

Nothing could be simpler. I walk into a supermarket with money in my pocket and exchange it for some food items. I cannot eat the money but I can eat the food. So the food is useful to me in ways that the money is not. The food is shortly thereafter used up and consumed away, while the bits of paper and coins that are accepted as money continue to circulate. Some of the money taken in by the supermarket is paid out in the form of wages to a cashier who uses the money to buy more food. Some of the earnings go to owners in the form of profit and they spend it on all sorts of things. Some of it goes to the middlemen and eventually to the direct producers of the food, who all also spend it. And so it goes on and on. In a capitalist society millions of transactions of this sort take place every day. Commodities like food, clothing and cellphones come and go, while the money just keeps on circulating through people’s (or institutions’) pockets. This is how daily life is currently lived by much of the world’s population.