Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (43 page)

I do not raise the question of violence here, any more than did Fanon, because I am or he was in favour of it. He highlighted it because the logic of human situations so often deteriorates to a point
where there is no other option. Even Gandhi acknowledged that. But the option has potentially dangerous consequences. Revolutionary humanism has to offer some kind of philosophical answer to this difficulty, some solace in the face of incipient tragedies. While the ultimate humanist task may be, as Aeschylus put it 2,500 years ago, ‘to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world’, this cannot be done without confronting and dealing with the immense violence that underpins the colonial and neocolonial order. This is what Mao and Ho Chi Minh had to confront, what Che Guevara sought to achieve, and what a host of political leaders and thinkers in post-colonial struggles, including Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Aimé Césaire, Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James and many others, have acted against with such conviction in both words and deeds.

But is the social order of capital any different in essence from its colonial manifestations? That order has certainly sought to distance itself at home from the callous calculus of colonial violence (depicting it as something that must necessarily be visited on uncivilised others ‘over there’ for their own good). It had to disguise at home the far too blatant inhumanity it demonstrated abroad. ‘Over there’ things could be put out of sight and hearing. Only now, for example, is the vicious violence of the British suppression of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya in the 1960s being acknowledged in full. When capital drifts close to such inhumanity at home it typically elicits a similar response to that of the colonised. To the degree that it embraced racialised violence at home, as it did in the United States, it produced movements like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam along with leaders like Malcolm X and, in his final days, Martin Luther King, who saw the connectivity between race and class and suffered the consequences thereof. But capital learned a lesson. The more race and class get woven seamlessly together, then the faster the fuse for revolution burns. But what Marx makes so clear in
Capital
is the daily violence constituted in the domination of capital over labour in the marketplace and in the act of production as well as on
the terrain of daily life. How easy it is to take descriptions of contemporary labour conditions in, for example, the electronics factories of Shenzhen, the clothing factories of Bangladesh or the sweatshops of Los Angeles and insert them into Marx’s classic chapter on ‘the working day’ in
Capital
and not notice the difference. How shockingly easy it is to take the living conditions of the working classes, the marginalised and the unemployed in Lisbon, São Paulo and Jakarta and put them next to Engels’s classic 1844 description of
The Condition of the Working Class in England
and find little substantive difference.
¹¹

Oligarchic capitalist class privilege and power are taking the world in a similar direction almost everywhere. Political power backed by intensifying surveillance, policing and militarised violence is being used to attack the well-being of whole populations deemed expendable and disposable. We are daily witnessing the systematic dehumanisation of disposable people. Ruthless oligarchic power is now being exercised through a totalitarian democracy directed to immediately disrupt, fragment and suppress any coherent anti-wealth political movement (such as Occupy). The arrogance and disdain with which the affluent now view those less fortunate than themselves, even when (particularly when) vying with each other behind closed doors to prove who can be the most charitable of them all, are notable facts of our present condition. The ‘empathy gap’ between the oligarchy and the rest is immense and increasing. The oligarchs mistake superior income for superior human worth and their economic success as evidence of their superior knowledge of the world (rather than their superior command over accounting tricks and legal niceties). They do not know how to listen to the plight of the world because they cannot and wilfully will not confront their role in the construction of that plight. They do not and cannot see their own contradictions. The billionaire Koch brothers give charitably to a university like MIT even to the point of building a beautiful day-care centre for the deserving faculty there while simultaneously lavishing untold millions in financial support for a political movement (headed by the Tea Party faction) in the US Congress that cuts food stamps and
denies welfare, nutritional supplements and day care for millions living in or close to absolute poverty.

It is in a political climate such as this that the violent and unpredictable eruptions that are occurring all around the world on an episodic basis (from Turkey and Egypt to Brazil and Sweden in 2013 alone) look more and more like the prior tremors for a coming earthquake that will make the post-colonial revolutionary struggles of the 1960s look like child’s play. If there is an end to capital, then this is surely from where it will come and its immediate consequences are unlikely to prove happy for anyone. This is what Fanon so clearly teaches.

The only hope is that the mass of humanity will see the danger before the rot goes too far and the human and environmental damage becomes too great to repair. In the face of what Pope Francis rightly dubs ‘the globalisation of indifference’, the global masses must, as Fanon so neatly puts it, ‘first decide to wake up, put on their thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty’.
¹²
If Sleeping Beauty awakes in time, then we might be in for a more fairy-tale-like ending. The ‘absolute humanism of human history,’ wrote Gramsci, ‘does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society but rather is the very theory of these contradictions’. Hope is latent in them, said Bertolt Brecht. There are, as we have seen, enough compelling contradictions within capital’s domain to foster many grounds for hope.

What does this X-ray into the contradictions of capital tell us about anti-capitalist political praxis? It cannot, of course, tell us exactly what to do in the midst of fierce and always complicated struggles on this or that issue on the ground. But it does help frame an overall direction to anti-capitalist struggle even as it makes and strengthens the case for anti-capitalist politics. When pollsters ask their favourite question, ‘Do you think the country is headed in the right direction?’ that presumes that people have some sense as to what the right direction might be. So what do those of us who believe capital is headed in the wrong direction consider a right direction and how might we evaluate our progress towards realising those goals? And how might we present those goals as modest and sensible proposals – for such they really are, relative to the absurd arguments put forward to deepen the powers of capital as an answer to humanity’s crying needs? Here are some mandates – derived from the seventeen contradictions – to frame and hopefully animate political praxis. We should strive for a world in which:

1. The direct provision of adequate use values for all (housing, education, food security etc.) takes precedence over their provision through a profit-maximising market system that concentrates exchange values in a few private hands and allocates goods on the basis of ability to pay.

2. A means of exchange is created that facilitates the circulation of goods and services but limits or excludes the capacity of private individuals to accumulate money as a form of social power.

3. The opposition between private property and state power is
displaced as far as possible by common rights regimes – with particular emphasis upon human knowledge and the land as the most crucial commons we have – the creation, management and protection of which lie in the hands of popular assemblies and associations.

4. The appropriation of social power by private persons is not only inhibited by economic and social barriers but becomes universally frowned upon as a pathological deviancy.

5. The class opposition between capital and labour is dissolved into associated producers freely deciding on what, how and when they will produce in collaboration with other associations regarding the fulfilment of common social needs.

6. Daily life is slowed down – locomotion shall be leisurely and slow – to maximise time for free activities conducted in a stable and well-maintained environment protected from dramatic episodes of creative destruction.

7. Associated populations assess and communicate their mutual social needs to each other to furnish the basis for their production decisions (in the short run, realisation considerations dominate production decisions).

8. New technologies and organisational forms are created that lighten the load of all forms of social labour, dissolve unnecessary distinctions in technical divisions of labour, liberate time for free individual and collective activities, and diminish the ecological footprint of human activities.

9. Technical divisions of labour are reduced through the use of automation, robotisation and artificial intelligence. Those residual technical divisions of labour deemed essential are dissociated from social divisions of labour as far as possible. Administrative, leadership and policing functions should be rotated among individuals within the population at large. We are liberated from the rule of experts.

10. Monopoly and centralised power over the use of the means of production is vested in popular associations through which the decentralised competitive capacities of individuals and social
groups are mobilised to produce differentiations in technical, social, cultural and lifestyle innovations.

11. The greatest possible diversification exists in ways of living and being, of social relations and relations to nature, and of cultural habits and beliefs within territorial associations, communes and collectives. Free and uninhibited but orderly geographical movement of individuals within territories and between communes is guaranteed. Representatives of the associations regularly come together to assess, plan and undertake common tasks and deal with common problems at different scales: bioregional, continental and global.

12. All inequalities in material provision are abolished other than those entailed in the principle of from each according to his, her or their capacities and to each according to his, her, or their needs.

13. The distinction between necessary labour done for distant others and work undertaken in the reproduction of self, household and commune is gradually erased such that social labour becomes embedded in household and communal work and household and communal work becomes the primary form of unalienated and non-monetised social labour.

14. Everyone should have equal entitlements to education, health care, housing, food security, basic goods and open access to transportation to ensure the material basis for freedom from want and for freedom of action and movement.

15. The economy converges on zero growth (though with room for uneven geographical developments) in a world in which the greatest possible development of both individual and collective human capacities and powers and the perpetual search for novelty prevail as social norms to displace the mania for perpetual compound growth.

16. The appropriation and production of natural forces for human needs should proceed apace but with the maximum regard for the protection of ecosystems, maximum attention paid to the recycling of nutrients, energy and physical matter to the
sites from whence they came, and an overwhelming sense of re-enchantment with the beauty of the natural world, of which we are a part and to which we can and do contribute through our works.

17. Unalienated human beings and unalienated creative personas emerge armed with a new and confident sense of self and collective being. Born out of the experience of freely contracted intimate social relations and empathy for different modes of living and producing, a world will emerge where everyone is considered equally worthy of dignity and respect, even as conflict rages over the appropriate definition of the good life. This social world will continuously evolve through permanent and ongoing revolutions in human capacities and powers. The perpetual search for novelty continues.

None of these mandates, it goes without saying, transcends or supersedes the importance of waging war against all other forms of discrimination, oppression and violent repression within capitalism as a whole. By the same token, none of these other struggles should transcend or supersede that against capital and its contradictions. Alliances of interests are clearly needed.

Prologue: The Crisis of Capitalism This Time Around

1.
Karl Marx,
Theories of Surplus Value
, Part 2, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1969, p. 540.

Introduction: On Contradiction

1.
Bertell Ollman,
The Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method
, Champagne, IL, University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Contradiction 1: Use Value and Exchange Value

1.
For a brief overview see David Harvey,
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
, London, Verso, 2013.

2.
Michael Lewis,
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
, New York, Norton, 2010, p. 34.

Contradiction 2: The Social Value of Labour and Its Representation by Money

1.
This fascinating story is told in Paul Seabright (ed.),
The Vanishing Rouble: Barter Networks and Non-Monetary Transactions in Post-Soviet Societies
, London, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

2.
John Maynard Keynes,
Essays in Persuasion
, New York, Classic House Books, 2009, p. 199.

3.
Silvio Gesell, (1916);
http:www.archive.org/details/TheNaturalEconomicOrder
, p. 121. For some further discussion of Gesell’s ideas see John Maynard Keynes,
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1964,
p. 363, and Charles Eisenstein,
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition
, Berkeley, CA, Evolver Editions, 2011.