Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (32 page)

The work of this powerful and rapidly growing ‘charitable-industrial complex’ has been corroded by the application of ever-tighter principles of capitalist economic rationality. The value of philanthropy is judged, notes Buffett, ‘as if return on investment were the only measure of success’. The application of principles of microfinance to an informal sector reconceptualised as microenterprises endowed with private property rights may sound economically rational. But,
asks Buffett, ‘what is this really about? People will certainly learn to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?’ Indeed it does. And it does so at an opportune moment when the realisation of capital is threatened by flagging effective demand elsewhere and in a way where the practices of accumulation by dispossession through debt encumbrancy and debt peonage (and less legal predatory practices) provide a lucrative supplement to boost the overall rates of return on capital. Sadly, Buffett here hits the wall of his own conditions of repressive tolerance. ‘I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism,’ he weakly concludes, ‘I’m calling for humanism.’ But the practices he is criticising are exactly what capitalist humanism is all about. The only answer, which lies well beyond the bounds of the contemporary version of repressive tolerance, is a revolutionary humanism that confronts the (capitalist) beast that feeds very well thanks to the freedom it has to dominate others with its left hand as it seeks to minister to them with its right.

Marx not only took on the partisan ways in which bourgeois conceptions of liberty and freedom were deployed against the interests of the common people. He probed further into the very depths of what true wealth might mean in a genuinely free society. As he wrote in
Grundrisse
:

When the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of human needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working-out of his creative potentialities … i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a
predetermined
yardstick? Where he does not produce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics – and in the epoch of
production to which it corresponds – this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation.
¹¹

Marx does not avoid in this formulation the question of domination (‘mastery’). He recognised the force of the contradiction between freedom and domination in revolutionary situations. Why is it, he asks in ‘On the Jewish Question’, ‘that the right of man to freedom ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with political life, whereas according to the theory, political life is only the guarantee of the rights of man, the right of individual man, and so must be given up as soon as it contradicts its end, these rights of man’? The example that Marx had in mind was the curbing of press freedoms in the French Revolution. This posed the ‘riddle’ that ‘still remains to be solved of why, in the minds of the political emancipators, the relationship is turned upside down and the end appears as the means and the means as the end’.
¹²
Marx got to the heart of the riddle of how freedom became slavery well before George Orwell.

Marx thought he found the answer in the writings of Rousseau:

He who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a great whole from which in a manner he receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical existence nature has conferred on us all. He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of other men.
¹³

In other words, a fully socialised individual acquires a different political subjectivity, a different conception of what freedom means, from that of the isolated individual.

While this answer in itself is far too glib to bear the historical
weight that it would have to bear, it does point to a fertile direction for inquiry. Is human freedom for all better defended by a regime of exclusionary individual private property rights or by common rights collectively managed by associated individuals? Are we not faced with a stark choice at the end of the day between individual freedoms being mobilised in the cause of capitalist class domination or class struggle being mobilised by the dispossessed in the cause of greater social and collective freedoms?

Notice also something important about Rousseau’s formulation that does double duty in Marx’s thought. Revolutionary transformations involve creative destruction. Something is lost but something is gained. What was lost for Rousseau was isolated individualism (which derived from a state of nature in Rousseau’s theory but which was a political product of the bourgeois revolution for Marx). Isolated individualism had to give way in the face of new but ‘alien’ resources. The bourgeoisie had to be alienated from its individualised past in order for the dispossessed to gain its disalienated future freedoms. This turns Marx’s theory of alienation inside out: the moment of alienation is charged with both positive and negative potential at key moments of revolutionary transition. There is no such thing as a contradiction that does not generate potentially contradictory responses.

Marx does not mince words with regard to the need to overthrow (or ‘dominate’) individualistic bourgeois conceptions of wealth and of value in order to release the potential for creative but collective human flourishing that surrounds us latently at every turn. Curiously, even Margaret Thatcher thought there was a difference somewhere here worth noting, thereby proving that even a viciously conservative grocer’s daughter with an interest in chemistry is capable of transcendental thoughts. ‘It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong,’ she said (though I doubt she explicitly had Marx’s conception of wealth as the full realisation of all individual human capacities and powers in mind), ‘but the love of money for its own sake.’

The world of true freedom is thoroughly unpredictable. ‘Once the shackles on human flourishing have been removed,’ Eagleton
remarks, ‘it is far harder to say what will happen. For men and women are then a lot more free to behave as they wish within the confines of their responsibility for one another. If they are able to spend more of their time in what we now call leisure activities rather than hard at work, their behavior becomes even harder to predict. I say “what we now call leisure” because if we really did use the resources accumulated by capitalism to release large numbers of people from work, then we would not call what they did instead leisure.’ Full advantage could then be taken of automation and artificial intelligence to actually release rather than imprison people in meaningless labours. ‘For Marx,’ says Eagleton, ‘socialism is the point where we begin collectively to determine our own destinies. It is democracy taken with full seriousness rather than democracy as (for the most part) a political charade. And the fact that people are more free means that it will be harder to say what they will be doing at five o’clock on Wednesday.’
¹⁴
But that does not imply there will then be no need for self-discipline, commitment and dedication to those complex tasks we might freely choose to undertake for our own satisfaction as well as for the well-being of others. Freedom attaches, as Aristotle long ago understood, to the good life and the good life is an active life dedicated like all of nature to the perpetual search for novelty. An unalienated version of the dialectic between freedom and domination is possible in the quest for individuals, always in association with others, to reach the summit of their potentialities and powers. But that search for unalienated relations cannot proceed without the prior experience of alienation and its contradictory possibilities.

The moving contradictions evolve differentially and provide much of the dynamic force behind capital’s historical and geographical evolution. In some instances their movement tends to be progressive (though never without reverses here and setbacks there). Technological change has by and large been cumulative, as has the geographical production of space, though in both instances there are strong countercurrents and reversals. Viable technologies get left behind and fade away, spaces and places that were once vigorous centres of capitalist activity become ghost towns or shrinking cities. In other instances the movement is more like a pendulum, as between monopoly and competition or the balance between poverty and wealth. And elsewhere, as in the case of freedom and domination, the movement is more chaotic and random, depending upon the ebb and flow of political forces in struggle with one another, while in still other instances, such as the complex field of social reproduction, the intersections between the historical evolution of capitalism and the specific requirements of capital are so indeterminate and intermingled as to make the direction and strength of movement episodic and rarely consistent. The advances (for such they are) in the rights of women, of the handicapped, of sexual minorities (the LGBT social group), as well as of religious groupings that have strict codes on various facets of social reproduction (such as marriage, family, child-rearing practices and the like), make it hard to calculate exactly how capital and capitalism are or are not working with or against each other in terms of foundational contradictions. And if this is true of the contradictions of social reproduction, it is even more so in the complex case of domination and freedom
.

The patterning of the moving contradictions provides much of the energy and much of the innovative zest in the co-evolution of both capital and capitalism and opens a wealth (and I use that word advisedly as meaning a potential flourishing of human capabilities rather than of mere possessions) of possibilities for new initiatives. These are the contradictions and spaces in which hope for a better society is latent and from which alternative architectures and constructions might emerge
.

As in the case of foundational contradictions, the moving
contradictions intersect, interact and run interference with each other in intriguing ways within the totality of what capital is about. The production of space and the dynamics of uneven geographical development have been strongly impacted by technological changes in both organisational forms (for example, of state apparatuses and territorial forms of organisation) and technologies of transportation and the production of space. It is within the field of uneven geographical development that differentiations in social reproduction and in the balance between freedom and domination flourish to the point where they in themselves become part of the production of space and of uneven development. The creation of heterotopic spaces, where radically different forms of production, social organisation and political power might flourish for a while, implies a terrain of anti-capitalist possibility that is perpetually opening and shutting down. It is here too that questions of monopoly and centralisation of power versus decentralisation and competition play out to influence technological and organisational dynamism and to animate geopolitical competition for economic advantage. And it goes without saying that the balance between poverty and wealth is constantly being modified by interterritorial competition, migratory streams and competitive innovations regarding labour productivities and the creation of new product lines
.

It is within the framework of these interactive and dynamic contradictions that multiple alternative political projects are to be found. Many of these are constituted as distinctive responses of capital to its own contradictions and are therefore primarily directed to facilitate the reproduction of capital under conditions of perpetual risk and uncertainty if not outright crises. But even in these instances there lie innumerable possibilities for the insertion of initiatives that so modify the functioning of capital as to open perspectives on what an anti-capitalist alternative might look like. I believe, as did Marx, that the future is already largely present in the world around us and that political innovation (like technological innovation) is a matter of putting existing but hitherto isolated and separated political possibilities together in a different way. Uneven geographical developments cannot but generate ‘spaces of hope’ and heterotopic situations where new modes
of cooperation might flourish, at least for a while, before they get reabsorbed into the dominant practices of capital. New technologies (like the internet) open up new spaces of potential freedom from domination that can advance the cause of democratic governance. Initiatives in the field of social reproduction can produce new political subjects desirous of revolutionising and humanising social relations more generally and cultivating a more aesthetically satisfying and sensitive approach to our metabolic relation to nature. To point to all these possibilities is not to say they will all bear fruit, but it does suggest that any anti-capitalist politics has to be assiduous in hunting through the contradictions and ferreting out its own path towards the construction of an alternative universe using the resources and ideas already to hand
.

This then brings us to the dangerous, if not potentially fatal, contradictions. Marx is famously supposed to have said that capital would ultimately collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. I cannot actually find where Marx said this, and from my own reading of him I think it extremely unlikely that he would ever have said such a thing. It presupposes a mechanical breakdown of the economic engine of capitalism that will occur without any human agent throwing sand in the machine or militantly setting about halting its progress and replacing it. Marx’s position, and I broadly follow him in this (against certain currents in the Marxist/communist tradition, as well as against the grain of the views his many critics typically attribute to him), is that capital can probably continue to function indefinitely but in a manner that will provoke progressive degradation on the land and mass impoverishment, dramatically increasing social class inequality, along with dehumanisation of most of humanity, which will be held down by an increasingly repressive and autocratic denial of the potential for individual human flourishing (in other words, an intensification of the totalitarian police-state surveillance and militarised control system and the totalitarian democracy we are now largely experiencing)
.