Brexit and Empire

I should say at the start that the title of this post is a little misleading. I’m currently reading the influential book “Empire” by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri which theorises a shift from a 20th century ‘modern’ world built on sovereign nations to a ‘postmodern’ world of a transnational global order, which they refer to as Empire.

Hardt and Negri describe the prior regime of ‘modern’ capitalism as structured around physical industry as the dominant form of production. It therefore has a close relation to geographic location, with production based on factories and a physical relationship between raw material, production, circulation and consumption. This physical nature of production means that capitalism throughout the 19th and most of the 20th century was best served by nation states with clear boundaries.

In a similar argument to that put forward by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, Hardt and Negri see the modern nation state as a constructed entity, influenced by this geographic nature of industrial capital. Capitalism during this period is best served by a nations with physical boundaries within which capital accumulation can take, and outside which is a space for new markets and expansion. The creation of these nations leads to the idea of a ‘people’ on which that nation is founded, and idea that is created, not an inherent part of nature. The people does not exist first and build a nation around itself. Rather the nation defines its people, and creates a founding myth to go with it.

This geographical structure of ‘modern’ capital leads then to late 19th and 20th century imperialism, where sovereign nations compete for control of those parts of the globe ‘outside’ developed capitalism both grab control of raw materials for production and to support expansion through new markets. In many ways this is building on Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis in “The Accumulation of Capital” where she develops the idea that capitalism needs a space ‘outside’ itself to expand into to remain stable (or even viable over the long term).

The concepts of nation and people are therefore inherently exclusionary requiring an ‘other’ to define themselves against. In a world dominated by developed western European states where the rest of the world is colonised and exploited this division is inherently built on a concept of race. As Hardt and Negri say “the concepts of nation, people, and race are never very far apart” (Hardt and Negri 2001 p. 103). Further:

“despite the persistent nostalgia of some, European societies and peoples were never really pure and uniform. The identity of the people was constructed on an imaginary plane that hid and/or eliminated differences, and this corresponded on the practical plane to racial subordination and social purification.”

(Hardt and Negri 2001 p.103)

In other words, the nation state is a creation of industrial capitalism, not an eternal part of nature, and was built on racism from the very start. I’ll come back to the idea of nostalgia for this world in a moment.

“An originary notion of the people poses an identity that homogenizes and purifies the image of the population while blocking the constructive interactions of differences within the multitude.”

(Hardt and Negri 2001 p.113)

‘Post-modern’ capitalism though is different. Information and the shared exchange of data has become the defining nature of production in the postmodern world. This informational nature of commodity production (either through highly developed and technology driven physical production, or through the production of immaterial commodities) depends less on fixed geography of places and more on communication. Capitalism no longer needs fixed borders, instead it needs to remove barriers to people interacting with each other, because it is this interaction that drives the new production forward.

Hardt and Negri are hugely optimistic about what this means for the future. In an echo of Marx’s view that the development of capitalism would lead naturally towards socialism, they see postmodern production driven by collective information sharing as presaging the end of the need for private property. The controlling power of capital becomes an unnecessary fetter on the free sharing of information which is the key feature of the postmodern world – and this opens the possibility of a future without capital in control. What they sketch out seems like a utopia of people sharing information, facilitating production with the need for an owner of the information to mediate between them.

But in truth it’s not that simple. Capital cannot simply wipe away the structures (or perhaps that should be ‘superstructures’) that it has created. There remain people and companies whose livelihoods depend on the old ‘modern’ economy creating a tension between the interests of the old and the new.

What’s more the link between the economy and the rest of society is not (and never was) the sort of structure-superstructure fantasy imagined by some twentieth century marxists. What Brexit demonstrated is that the construction of the identity of the nation through some imagined uniformity imposed on heterogeneous reality has seeped deeply into the culture. For some the new postmodern world has created a strong sense of nostalgia for that lost uniformity, driving the desire to reassert ‘our’ culture through exclusion. This is why the vote for Brexit seems so both so reactionary, and a basically racist endeavour. These are the people who don’t feel part of the new postmodern world. Egged on by those parts of capital with a vested interest in fostering the tension between old and new, either as a means of making short term profit (for example hedge funds betting on the fluctuations created in the stock market) or as a means of preventing the sort of utopian future without capital sketched out by Hardt and Negri, enough momentum was created to get the Brexit referendum passed – and subsequently to maintain a core level of support for the Conservative party who have sought electoral advantage from this sentiment.

Hardt and Negri’s analysis therefore helps us make sense of the trends that led up to the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum, but also exposes their overly optimistic approach to that analysis. To understand how things seem likely to play out we need to keep in view the sources of tension and conflict too.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001)

Luxemburg, Rosa The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume 2: Economic Writings 2 (Verso, London, 2016)

Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities (Verso, London, 2016)

Some Brief Thoughts on Representation in UK Politics

I don’t often write about contemporary politics here, but after posting some brief thoughts on BlueSky (yes I’m on BlueSky now) about George Galloway’s victory in the Rochdale by-election I wanted to capture them here and perhaps add a little. Apparently we should all be very worried about Galloway’s victory. In an impromptu speech from Downing Street Rishi Sunak characterised it as part of a wider assault by unspecified extremists, claiming that “our democracy itself is a target”. As was pointed out on BlueSky, if someone you don’t agree with winning an election is an attack on democracy then it’s difficult to know what democracy actually means anymore.

But I think there’s more to it that that. In his book on China’s Twentieth Century, Wang Hui suggests that in the early 21st century both the western liberal democracies and modern Communist China are suffering from a crisis of representation. The parties that control the levers of the state no longer represent people’s views. This may feel self evident for China, but is equally true of modern UK politics. Our response to the Israeli assault on Gaza is a case in point, made much of by Galloway in his pitch to the electorate in Rochdale. There is a broad consensus between both Conservatives and Labour to avoid condemning Israeli or directly calling for the Israeli government to halt it’s attack. And yet this is out of step with the British public. Polling suggests that only 13% of British people think that Israel should continue military action in Gaza, with large majorities thinking Israel should stop fighting and enter peace negotiations with Hamas. A smaller majority (45%-24%) think that Israel’s attack on Gaza is unjustified.

While the public attitude to Israel and Gaza is the most obvious current example of the two main parties being out of step with the public, it is not the only one. To pick one more example, recent polling suggests that a large majority of British people support re-nationalisation of Britain’s railways (66% either strongly supporting or tending to support, with only 11% opposed).

If you’re one of the large majority of people who think that Israel should curb it’s assault on Gaza, or support re-nationalisation of the rail network, who do you vote for in Britain right now? Neither main party seemingly sees their role as being to represent opinion and seek to govern on the basis of broad popular support. In fact, the leadership of both Conservatives and Labour seem desperate to avoid the emergence of actual people into into their closed game of politics, aided and abetted by the Westminster media obsessed with the gossip of the village, who’s up and who’s down.

So what happens when formal politics no longer represents people? What is democracy even for if it isn’t about allowing people to influence the actions of the state through their representatives? When there are voters who have no outlet, when no one in the mainstream of politics is interested in representing them, they are likely to fly off in unexpected directions creating an opening for opportunists like Galloway (or for that matter Trump) who are prepared to say whatever it takes.

And why the comparison with China? It’s no accident that both the western liberal democracies and Communist China have pursued neoliberal economic policies over the last few decades, one of the key characteristics of which is a sharp separation between the political and the economic. “The economy” is cut loose from political influence, intentionally preventing the mass of people from intervening in the accumulation of capital. Despite their visibly different political systems, they suffer from the same symptom. The long term outcome of keeping people out of decision making is that they lose faith in that system and start to look for alternatives. And that’s something we should all worry about. What happens when the voters want radical change but no one in politics is prepared to offer it to them? As Walter Benjamin said “behind every fascism there is a failed revolution”.

Review: Empire

I’m not sure why I’ve not read this book before, as it’s pretty well known. Partly I suspect because it’s very strongly influenced by French writers like Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault – all of whom I’m pretty unfamiliar with.

Hardt and Negri theorise the modern working class as a ‘multitude’, international, working in common through information networks, in ways which are fundamentally social. There’s a strong link here to what Marx wrote in the Grundrisse about the development of a “general intellect” – the point at which scientific and technical development has progressed so far that labour no longer has any specific content, and the labour theory of value starts to break down. Hardt and Negri develop this theory for the capitalism of today. While this is interesting, it also feels a little disconnected from the actual working class of the modern world. So it makes sense in theory but there’s still work to do to make it a theory that could be used practically for a modern progressive movement.

Hardt and Negri also develop the idea of a new global order of control that is replacing that of sovereign nation states with controlled borders that manage their own economy. The modern system of control (“Empire”) is global, driven by big corporations, and eschews national borders. It’s all about the flow of information. In some ways this is a development of Rosa Luxemburg’s thinking about capitalism’s need for an ‘outside’ – something beyond that the global market can expand into, to absorb it’s surplus and provide a source of new raw material to drive expansion. In a sense, Hardt and Negri develop this theory to show what happens when the market has expanded to cover the whole world and there is no more ‘outside’. How does capitalism overcome the crisis this limit prompts? The answer is the ‘Empire’, the global order theorised by Hardt and Negri which takes advantage of the innovations created by the new social, networked labour to allow accumulation to continue.

All of this adds up to a theory which develops thinking about the move from a modern (industrial, colonial, imperialist) capitalism to postmodern (informational, networked, global) one.

As I noted, the language is that of French philosophy and that makes it a little difficult to follow, and perhaps a little disconnected from reality. It is also now perhaps a little dated, having been published in 2001 and therefore before both Donald Trump and Brexit – which in the context of Hardt and Negri’s theory might be thought of as a Thermidorian reaction against the revolutionary change represented by Empire. That said, this is an important book in theorising the change in the movement from modernism to postmodernism and what that means for the prospect progressive change.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001)

AI and Class Struggle

Artificial Intelligence has been one of the stories of 2023, whether it’s the UK government’s summit at Bletchley Park or the shenanigans at OpenAI. Many of these news stories have an undercurrent that AI poses a threat to the existence of humanity.

It is certainly true that the recent widespread availability of large language models such as ChatGPT has made it possible to interact with a computer in a way that feels like a conversation with an intelligent entity. The ability of large language models to construct text and therefore write documents and hold a conversation has spread the long running discussion about the continuing drive towards ever greater automation into a range of traditionally middle class jobs.

As a starting point, it’s interesting to think about what is driving the concern about AI. From one point of view, this is just another in a long sequence of technological change that has displaced people working with older technology while creating a new industry on the ruins of the old in a process as old as capitalism and in this sense is no different from the experience of the hand-loom weavers in the early 19th century. This is often presented as the optimistic view – jobs lost in the old industry are replaced in the new one – although it airbrushes out the misery of those put out of work. EP Thompson’s classic “The Making of the English Working Class” makes clear the terrible fate of those left behind by technological change which, while often presented as inevitable, is in truth far from it. The development of AI means that this sort of innovation is now impacting middle class jobs – including jobs like journalism or the lowest rung of the legal profession. Perhaps it’s the middle class angle that is making it garner so much journalistic attention?

The move to AI could also be seen as reflecting the next logical step in the development of what might be called a “knowledge economy” in developed countries. The change from a “modern” economy driven by large scale factory production to a “postmodern” one where physical production has largely been moved overseas and the economy instead becomes one based on the creation, manipulation, and movement of information between people. This change has huge implications for the way work is organised in developed economies. It is no longer dominated by manual workers operating together in factories under capital’s direct control. Instead it is more fragmented and individual, putting more emphasis on individual skills. The change this brought for how the workplace is organised and the implications for both worker and business were theorised by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in their book “The New Spirit of Capitalism“.

And now this change has ended up creating a problem for capital. It’s true that the move to an economy based on information helped capital to break the power of organised labour during the eighties and after detaching the continuation of capital accumulation from the industrial production, and was therefore fundamental to the rise of neoliberalism. But it also places more influence in the hands of those networked knowledge economy workers who possess the key skills which capital now needs. In other words, in creating a solution for the version of class struggle it was faced with in the sixties and seventies – the developing power of organised industrial labour – capital sowed the seeds for a future problem. Removing the power of organised factory labour laid the groundwork for an emerging problem of the growing influence of independent knowledge economy workers. Capital’s new dependence on these skills gave labour a bargaining power that now threatens to become a barrier to continuing capital accumulation. In other words as David Harvey has often suggested, the resolution of one crisis of capital sowed the seeds of the next.

There is then nothing inevitable about the progress of Artificial Intelligence. Its development is being driven partly by capital’s need to disempower labour, and partly by the competitive mechanisms driving technological innovation in pursuit of profit identified by Marx a century ago. Its development is not a force of nature, but a set of investment choices made by capital and are intrinsically part of the class struggle between capital and labour.

And this should worry us because it means that while AI may or may not be an existential threat to humanity as such, its development certainly is all about capital attempting to strengthen its ability to control labour and accumulate value. Far more important than whether AI will become more intelligent than humans are questions like who will own the AI, and for what purposes will they use it? How will the labour capacity saved by the implementation of AI be put to use?

It is possible to imagine a world where the implementation of AI is used to reduce the monotonous routine paperwork jobs and work is restructured and shared out to reduce the workload of everyone and reduce how much work we all need to do. Whatever that imaginary world might be, it isn’t called capitalism. Like so many other “labour saving” innovations, left in the control of capital AI seems likely to result in some of us being worked harder than ever while others are put out of work completely.

So yes, Artificial Intelligence is definitely a threat to society, but just not in the way the news would have us think. It is the control by capital that we ought to fear, not the machines themselves.

Review: Mute Compulsion

This is a magnificent book, subtitled “a Marxist theory of the economic power of capital” and based on Soren Mau’s doctoral thesis, it explores the nature of capital’s continuing control over the world and the mechanisms by which that control is maintained. Mau covers a lot of ground along the including what we mean when we talk about “the economy”, and the implications of capital’s relationship to nature.

The core of Mau’s thesis is the contention that a traditional Marxist approach to understanding the nature of power is based on the split between violence and ideology, force and consent, from Marx’s original insight about “primitive accumulation” to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Capital maintains it’s control through a combination of ‘soft’ ideological power that persuades enough people to acquiesce voluntarily to the social relations determined by it, but which is ultimately backed by the threat of force. Both these methods involve a direct and personal persuasion of individual members of society. Either they are directly convinced that living with capital is the best (or only) way forward for society, or they are cowed into submission through fear.

Mau proposes a third means by which capital asserts its domination of human social relations, the “mute compulsion” of the book’s title. What Mau suggests is that social relations under capital create an indirect and impersonal compulsion to maintain and continue their reproduction, and that this compulsion operates on both workers and capitalists in different ways. For the workers, the key is that they are separated from the means of production. At the birth of capitalism, capital successfully creates a gap between the direct producers and means needed to reproduce life and inserts itself between them and the worker. Once this separation is in place, survival – reproduction using the means of production – can only take place through the mediation of capital. Part of what labour power produces through the act of labour is therefore the reproduction of the capital relation itself.

This means that capitalism does not just actively maintain its domination of society through force or the assertion of hegemony (although it does both those things too) but it also remains dominant through the active, non-coerced, actions of everyone living under that domination.

Complimenting this, Mau also suggests that within a capitalist society domination is exercised in two ways, “horizontally” and “vertically”. The vertical aspect is the control exerted for example in the workplace between the boss and their workers. It is a control that is both narrow and deep, working only over those employed for that employer. The horizontal aspect operates far more broadly across society. It works for example through competition – which as Marx suggests compels each individual capitalist to conform to the drive of capital to accumulate, or go out of business. It also operates on workers who must compete with each other for work or fall into poverty and likely destitution (yes, even in modern economies with welfare states).

This is all very compelling, and Mau’s book is incredibly interesting for taking Marx as a starting point and building on his work to analyse how power works in modern society. If I have one criticism it is that it feels quite “structural” in approach. Mau sets things out like the mechanism of a clock, and without wholly ignoring the human element does prioritise the workings of the mechanism. The case could be made that in developing the theory of “mute compulsion” Mau creates the bridge between a structured theory of power and the reason humans continue to live and work within a structure that oppresses them. Be that as it may, there is a clear focus on mechanism.

For all that this is a superb book, easily one of the most interesting book using Marx’s analysis I have read.

Mau, Soren Mute Compulsion, A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (Verso, London, 2023)

Review: When China Rules the World

What to say about this book? First the positive, it is a useful corrective to easy western-centric assumptions about China, its place in the world, and what the future might hold as China becomes the largest economy in the world and its rapid modernisation. Jacques emphasises that there is not one single type of modernity (western capitalism coupled with liberal democracy) and that China is both on a route to global dominance, and that this journey is unlikely to be derailed (for good or ill) because it fails to conform to western notions of ‘good’ politics, respect for human rights etc.. It’s tempting to think that this part of Jacques’ thesis has been at least partially confirmed by what’s happened in Europe and the US since this book was written, with Brexit and the election of Trump markers for the degradation of that supposedly universally accepted vision of the western liberal state.

That China will indeed reach a position of global dominance, some that Jacques is keen to assert, now feels much harder to deny then in probably did in 2012 when this revised edition was published. That this dominance will come with a unique Chinese ‘flavour’ is rather than be delivered by China magically become a western liberal democracy is a reasonable conclusion, although Jacques’ emphasis on the unique nature of China’s culture and history as determinants of how it act in the future does seem a little odd coming from a former Marxist, and I think he over-emphasises this point.

Critically though, Jacques comes across as hugely positive about the Chinese state, the policies taken since 1978 that have delivered it to the point of global dominance, and its future prospects. There is a sense in which this is a useful corrective to western-centric accounts, but Jacques take this to the point of propaganda, seeming to suspend his critical reasoning. To take just one example, Jacques praises rapid Chinese development of public transport infrastructure, highlighting a prototype large bus which would straddle roads allowing cars to pass underneath. It turns out that shortly after Jacques wrote this, the project was cancelled, and the people involved prosecuted for corruption. A less western and more thoughtful approach to the impact of the rise of China is welcome, but Jacques takes this to the point of uncritical pro-China bias.

In short, a useful corrective but best read with a more critical eye than Jacques brings to the subject.

Jacques, Martin When China Rules The World (Penguin, London, 2012)

Reading (and listening) in Themes: Wagner

I hadn’t intended to write here about my current reading as it marks a bit of a departure from what I normally write about, but as I’ve been gathering books and links I needed a place to capture everything. So this theme is about the operas of Richard Wagner.

I’ve enjoyed Wagner’s operas since being introduced to the Ring by my father decades ago. I’d only really listened to his work in “bleeding chunks” recordings (although I’ve played the overture to Der Fliegende Hollander myself as part of an orchestra). This theme started when I spent some time listening to some of Wagner’s other operas in full in my “marginal time”. After listening to two separate version of Parsifal I wanted to understand Wagner’s last opera better, and this theme grew from there to wanting to better understand Wagner’s work as a whole.

Wagner’s operas make much use of “leitmotivs” small fragments of music each designating a person, a place, or even an emotion. They don’t just reflect what is happening on stage but tell you what is going on inside the characters, foreshadow the future, and much more. I’ll use this account on Youtube to help get to help get to grips with them, although as they point out in their introduction this isn’t about being able to annotate every moment with the right leitmotif. As Bryan Magee suggests they provide the language from which the music is woven

For the operas themselves (other than the Ring and Parsifal) there are a range of Bayreuth productions on Youtube which I’ve worked my way through thus far, which all have at least fair reviews, with the synopses available from the New York Met Opera, and the translated :

• Der Fliegende Hollander: Bayreuth 2021, synopsis, libretto.
• Tannhauser: Bayreuth 2019, synopsis, libretto.
• Lohengrin: Bayreuth 2018, synopsis, libretto.
• Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Bayreuth 2017, synopsis, libretto.

The Tannhauser is undoubtedly the most controversial on this list, although I rather enjoyed it for getting across in a modern sense the hedonistic but ultimately empty Venusberg. It was booed when performed.

My favourite from this list is the Meistersinger, which challenges you to think about the question of whether it’s possible to accept Wagner’s art while also coming to terms with his anti-semitism, with both Hans Sachs presented as Wagner with the action moving eventually to the courtroom of the Nuremberg trials singing his final paean to German art from the dock. It also suggests the theory documented by Bryan Magee that Wagner himself could be associated with the character of both Walther (as a young man) and Hans Sachs (as an older man). Fascinating stuff.

For the Ring I’ll watch the acclaimed partially staged version from Opera North in the UK from 2016 (and which I’m very regretful that I passed up the opportunity to see Die Walkure in person at the time). There are synopses from the Met for Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung.

The literature on Wagner is vast, so choosing what to read will be difficult. As I’m coming at this with an interest in philosophy, I’ll read Bryan Magee’s book on Wagner’s links to philosophy (and in particular Schopenhauer). As someone with an interest in Marxism, I should read Theodor Adorno’s book on Wagner. I’ll also read a general companion.

• Magee, Bryan Wagner and Philosophy (Penguin, London, 2001)
• Adorno, Theodor In Search of Wagner (Verso, London, 2005)
• Burbridge, Peter and Sutton, Richard (eds) The Wagner Companion (Faber and Faber, London, 1979)
• Badiou, Alain Five Lessons on Wagner (Verso, London, 2010)

Other books may follow as I get further into things, if they do I’ll add them here.

I started out wanting to understand Wagner’s last opera Parsifal better. So for books I’ll read a general introduction and a more analytical work:

• John, Nicholas (ENO Opera Guide series editor) Parsifal, Richard Wagner (John Calder, London 1986)
• Beckett, Lucy Richard Wagner: Parsifal (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981)

With two Bayreuth versions on video:

• Parsifal conducted by Horst Stein from 1981.
• Parsifal conducted by Stefan Herheim from 2012: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3.

Lastly there is some interesting content from BBC Radio 3.

• One of Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time” series on Wagner.
• “The Essay” series on Wagner and Philosophy.
• There was an interesting Composer of the Week segment, but unfortunately it seems to have fallen off BBC Sounds.

Marx’s Method

My latest reading theme tackled Marx’s life and method, including re-reading Bertell Ollman’s “Dance of the Dialectic” (from which I took a sequence of notes on first reading here, here, here, and here a couple of years ago) in which Ollman seeks to reconstruct Marx’s methods of both inquiry and exposition. Marx himself of course never wrote a clear statement explaining the method he used in either his research or his writing, although there are some slightly cryptic statements in his letters to Engels and in the Grundrisse (“it will be necessary later to correct the idealist nature of the presentation”).

In simple terms, as I understand it, the thesis set out by Ollman is that Marx doesn’t analyse the world as a place of “things” that are logically separate from each other and connected by links that are outside the things themselves. Instead he analyses the world as being made up of “relations”, conceptual blocks made up not only of what are traditionally thought of as separate “things” but also of the relationships between them. Capital and wage labourers are not separate things which interact through an employer-employee relationship, they are part and parcel of the same conceptual relation.

In other words, according to Ollman, Marx doesn’t have a pre-ordained starting point for how to divide the world up for analysis. Instead he starts with the “totality” and decides how best to divide things up depending on what he’s working on. This puts a lot of emphasis on the initial exercise of drawing boundaries around the units for further work, which is the process of abstraction.

Ollman breaks the process of abstraction down into three separate stages, of extension, of generality, and of vantage point. By abstraction of extension Ollman means that Marx draws boundaries in both space and time to separate out blocks for analysis encompassing the relations as integral parts of each block. In this way for example, wage labour and capital can become internally connected parts of the same conceptual block rather than separated elements that interact through linkages that are not part of the things themselves.

Ollman also defines seven levels of generality. From the most specific to the most general these are:

1. things that are unique to the individual.
2. things that are general to modern capitalism, the last 20 to 50 years.
3. capitalism more generally, as it has existed for the last few hundred years.
4. class society, encompassing earlier societies such as feudalism.
5. human society in general, those things common to all of human history.
6. the animal world.
7. anything that is a material part of nature.

I find this schema incredibly helpful for getting to grips with how Marx approaches analysis, and why it often seems that he is talking at cross-purposes with bourgeois economists. Marx is usually operating at either level 2 or 3, his analysis rarely works down at the level of the individual or above those things which are specific to capitalism. Conversely, as Ollman points out, much economics works at either level 1, things that are unique to each individual, or at level 5, things which are general to all human societies – with an assumption that the concepts used to analyse capitalist society can be generalised across all human societies.

Lastly Marx’s abstractions take place from a particular point of view, for example either capital or wage labour. This principle of taking a particular conceptual block and viewing it from different angles is something I’ve written about before using Douglas Adams’ character Trin Tragula and the “Total Perspective Vortex” to make sense of the idea.

It’s taken me a while (and reading Ollman’s book three times!) to feel like I’m starting to get to grips with this. So I was interested to find an example of Marx thinking in this way quoted by Francis Wheen in his biography of Marx:

“A philosophy produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crime but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as ‘commodities’… The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice, constables, judges, hangmen, juries, etc; and all these different lines of business, which form just as many categories of the social division of labour, develop different capacities of the human mind, create new needs and new ways of satisfying them… The criminal produces an impression, partly moral and partly tragic, as the case may be, and in this way renders a ‘service’ by arousing the moral and aesthetic feeling the public. He produces not only compendia on Criminal Law, not only penal codes and along with them legislators in this field, but also art, belle-lettres, novels, and even tragedies… The effects of the criminal on the development of productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks ever have reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves?… And if one leaves the sphere of private crime, would the world market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed would even the nations have arisen? And has not the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?”

(Wheen 1999 p.308-9, quoting Theories of Surplus Value)

Starting with crime and criminals, Marx draws all the connections to the rest of the criminal justice system, and keeps expanding to include art, to industrial production, even to the development of nations and the world market. This is the totality, with all its relations laid bare, all of which interact as things change and develop. The next step would then be to carve out a relation for analysis through an abstraction of extension, perhaps from criminals through lawyers to the criminal law all seen not as three separate things but as a single relation, internally connected; followed by a level of generality – are we interested in the legal system under modern capitalism? Or in class based societies more generally? Lastly a viewpoint which could change from lawyer to criminal, bringing different insight.

The end result of all this is that if Ollman is right then Marx’s analyses are built on complex abstractions of relations interacting within a totality. This way of thinking simply doesn’t have any place for simple cause and effect where a change in one thing impacts on a separate and external other thing to cause a reaction. Everything is complex interaction. Those – both Marxists and non-Marxists – who assume a simple determining relationship between an economic “base” and a social “superstructure”, usually on the basis of the Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy have fundamentally got the wrong end of the stick.

Interesting in this context, are a couple of late letters from Engels after Marx’s death where Engels seems (to me at least) to be arguing this very point, that the analysis based on complex interaction and not simple cause and effect. Read in the context of Ollman’s analysis, Engels clearly emphasises the relations between elements and their interaction alongside the role of core economic factors.

“…the fatuous notion of the ideologists that because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres which play a part in history we also deny them any effect upon history. The basis of this is the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction; these gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once an historic element has been brought into the world by other elements, ultimately by economic facts, it also reacts in its turn and may react on its environment and even on its own causes.”

(Engels to Mehring 14 July 1883 in Marx and Engels 1934 p.512)

Similarly:

“Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything else only has a passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of the economic necessity…”

(Engels to Starkenburg 25 January 1894 in Marx and Engels 1934 p.516)

In short I find Ollman’s approach to understanding Marx’s method hugely persuasive, and a convincing response to those who propose a more conventional cause and effect for Marx’s thought. And I find it particularly interesting that Engels – normally taken as promoting a more strongly economic-determinist approach – seems to be making similar points.

• Ollman, Bertell Dance of the Dialectic (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2003)
• Wheen, Francis Karl Marx (4th Estate Limited, London, 1999)
• Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich Correspondence 1846-1895, a Selection with Commentary and Notes (Martin Lawrence Ltd, London, 1934)

Marx and Circulation

I’m currently working my through David Harvey’s recently published “companion” to Marx’s Grundrisse which accompanies his new online class. Grundrisse itself is a set of notebooks written by Marx in the 1850s and not intended for publication. One reason it is interesting is that it shows Marx thinking things through, developing his analysis.

There’s an awful lot in Grundrisse that is thought provoking, but I want to capture here some thoughts on how Marx sets out about the dialectic nature of capital and its circulation as a totality. For Marx capital is not a static ‘thing’ be that either a sum of money, a building, or a machine. Capital is the process through which value is produced, circulated, and increased. The analogy that Marx uses on a number of occasions is that of the circulation of blood around the human body. Following in sequence, previously accumulated value is used to buy raw materials and labour power, using means of production already controlled by capital to create commodities; these commodities are then taken to the market and sale; the realised value is then fed back into the production process. Because the labour power bought by the capitalist creates more value than than the capitalist pays the labourer for its use, what sounds like a circular movement is in reality a spiral as more and more value is accumulated and ploughed back into production creating the capacity to produce more and more value.

Harvey has often suggested that Marx sees capital as “value in motion”, and this is how I read the view that Marx sets out here in Grundrisse. Marx shows capital to be a process not a thing, a process that is in perpetual motion passing through a number of individually specific “moments” in sequence. My political philosophy lecturer in the 90’s – Joe Femia – used to demonstrate this way of thinking by throwing a pen across his office and asking us to think about where the pen was located in space while it was moving. As soon as you try to pin it down to a single location you are left with a static pen that is no longer in motion. The only way to see the pen in motion is to see its path through the air as a complete whole. For capital then, while it is possible to analyse the individual points – the “moments” – of its spiral motion the reality of a complex moving whole needs to be kept in sight.

A number of implications flow from this. Most obviously that capital has to flow through each stage of the process going through a transition in form in each case: from money in hand; to labour and means of production; to commodities in transit to the market; to commodities for sale on the market; finally to realised money in hand again following sale and ready to start the process all over again. None of these transitions happen automatically and each comes with a risk that the flow may end up paused or interrupted. For production to start, raw materials and wage labour must be available for purchase on the market. Commodities on the market must find a buyer to realise the money to restart the production process.

Similarly significant is the time taken to progress around this flow. In Marx’s terms value is only created in production where living labour uses means of production and raw material to create new value. Any time that capital spends outside the stage of production itself is time when it is not created surplus value, and therefore time during which capital is literally devalued. Even without any unforeseen interruptions in the flow, capital has to handle the fact that a portion of each turnover is therefore spent unproductively.

This gives capital a strong incentive to reduce the time it takes to move commodities from production to market to sale, leading to a trend to the development of communication and transit technology including things like just-in-time logistics, and to the commodification of culture and other intangible things where the circulation time can be brought close to zero. It also means that capital is perpetually split into two parts, that part which is made of previously produced commodities heading to market and sale, and that part which is producing new commodities. This is the only way in which continuous production can be maintained.

This is all further complicated by the division between fixed and circulating capital. Marx’s definition here gets a little woolly, it is not as simple as saying that fixed capital is buildings and machinery. Rather fixed capital is that portion of capital that remains locked in the production process for a prolonged period of time, that is for more than one turnover. This does include buildings and machinery, but also for example cattle used for dairy (but not that used for meat). Fixed capital’s value circulates in tiny portions through the value that is transfers to each part of the product. The capitalist must then be prepared to make a large initial outlay only recouping this over a number of years as the bought fixed capital slowly deteriorates before being replaced (presumably by an updated and more productive version) some years down the line. Not only does this create a barrier to entry for new would-be capitalists (and one that increases over time as the technology required for production increases) it also means that a significant and growing portion of capital is locked immobile into the production process. This is a fundamental source of contradiction and crisis – just think about the potential for cashflow problems; or being stuck producing on old less productive machinery while your competitors advance; or how it can drive demand cycles in the economy when an industry all reach the need to renew their fixed capital at a similar time (and then withdraw that demand from the economy for the next 10 years). Capital is fundamentally value-in-motion, and the growth of fixed capital is a basic contradiction.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the implications of the circulation of capital that Marx explores, both in Grundrisse and elsewhere. Once you start thinking about it, it becomes clear that this is a rich source of contradiction and potential crisis.

• Marx, Karl Grundrisse (Penguin, London, 1993)
• Harvey, David A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso, London, 2023)

Review: A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse

I’ve read a fair amount of Harvey’s works on Marx, and his two volume “Companion” to Capital has been the key to my own understanding of Marx’s most well known work. As such I was very much looking forward to the publication of Harvey’s work on Grundrisse, the collection of notebooks kept by Marx during 1857-8 when he was researching political economy in the period leading up to completion of Capital, and not intended for publication.

I’ve read Grundrisse before, but it is a complicated book full of fascinating speculative fragments and without a coherent developed analysis. Having the sort of guide offered by Harvey feels like it could be a real help to getting to grips with it. I read the two books hand-in-hand working through each section of Grundrisse with the appropriate section from Harvey’s Companion turn-by-turn.

Harvey offers a pretty close reading, with large sections of Marx’s text quoted and commented on by Harvey. When this works, it really helps to make sense of things and guide you through what Marx is getting at. Just occasionally I felt that Harvey bordered on simply excerpting from the text and didn’t add much to Marx’s own writing. I suspect this is inevitable in a book of this type, on top of which I’m much more familiar with Marx’s economic work now than I was a few years ago, and therefore perhaps felt the need for a close guide less than I might have done the first time I read Grundrisse.

In short this is surely the right book to guide you through getting to grips with one of Marx’s most complex books written by one of the foremost experts on Marx in the English speaking world.

Harvey’s own reading class on Grundrisse is available on Youtube and his website, where you can also find his well known class on Capital.

Reading Grundrisse set me onto reading about Marx’s life and method which you can find here. I’ve also wrote some thoughts on how Marx presents the circulation of capital in Grundrisse here.

• Harvey, David A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso, London, 2023)
• Marx, Karl Grundrisse (Penguin, London, 1973)