What Every Child Should Know About Marx's Theory of Value

By Michael A. Lebowitz

Republished from Monthly Review.

Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour. —Karl Marx [1] [2]

Every child in Marx’s day might have heard about Robinson Crusoe. That child might have heard that on his island Robinson had to work if he was not to perish, that he had “needs to satisfy.” To this end, Robinson had to “perform useful labours of various kinds”: he made means of production (tools), and he hunted and fished for immediate consumption. These were diverse functions, but all were “only different modes of human labour,” his labor. From experience, he developed Robinson’s Rule: “Necessity itself compels him to divide his time with precision between his different functions.” Thus, he learned that the amount of time spent on each activity depended upon its difficulty—that is, how much labor was necessary to achieve the desired effect. Given his needs, he learned how to allocate his labor in order to survive. [3]

As it was for Crusoe, so it is for society. Every society must allocate its aggregate labor in such a way as to obtain the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of its needs. As Marx commented, “In so far as society wants to satisfy its needs, and have an article produced for this purpose, it has to pay for it.… It buys them with a certain quantity of the labour-time that it has at its disposal.” [4] It must allocate “differing and quantitatively determined” amounts of labor to the production of goods and services for direct consumption (Department II) and a similarly determined quantity of labor for the production and reproduction of means of production (Department I).

To ensure the reproduction of a particular society, there must be enough labor available for the reproduction of the producers—both directly and indirectly (for example, in Departments II and I, respectively)—based upon their existing level of needs and the productivity of labor. This includes not only labor in organized workplaces, which produce particular material products and services, but also necessary labor allocated to the home and community and to sites where the education and health of workers are maintained. Every society, too, must allocate labor to what we may call Department III, a sector that produces means of regulation, and may contain institutions such as the police, the legal authority, the ideological and cultural apparatus, and so on.

In addition to the labor required to maintain the producers, in every class society a quantity of society’s labor is necessary if those who rule are to be reproduced. Thus, the process of reproduction requires the allocation of labor not only to the production of articles of consumption, means of production, and the particular means of regulation, but, ultimately, to the production and reproduction of the relations of production themselves.

Reproduction of a Socialist Society

Consider a socialist society—“an association of free [individuals], working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.” [5] Having identified the differing amounts of needs it wishes to satisfy, this society of associated producers allocates its differing and quantitatively determined labor through a conscious process of planning. In this respect, it follows Robinson’s Rule: it apportions its aggregate labor “in accordance with a definite social plan [that] maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations.” [6]

The premise of this process of planning is a particular set of relations in which the associated producers recognize their interdependence and engage in productive activity upon this basis. “A communal production, communality, is presupposed as the basis of production.” Transparency and solidarity among the producers, in short, underlie the “organization of labour” in the socialist society with the result that productive activity is consciously “determined by communal needs and communal purposes.” [7] The reproduction of society here “becomes production by freely associated [producers] and stands under their conscious and planned control.” [8]

To identify their needs and their capacity to satisfy those needs, the producers begin with institutions closest to them—in communal councils, which identify changes in the expressed needs of individuals and communities, and in workers’ councils, where workers explore the potential for satisfying local needs themselves. Those needs and capacities are transmitted upward to larger bodies and ultimately consolidated at the level of society as a whole, where society-wide choices need to be made. On the basis of these decisions (which are discussed by the associated producers at all levels of society), the socialist society directly allocates its labor in accordance with its needs both for immediate and future satisfaction.

Driving this process is “the worker’s own need for development,” “the absolute working-out of his creative potentialities,” “the all-around development of the individual”—the development of what Marx called “rich” human beings. [9] This goal is understood as indivisible: it is not consistent with significant disparities among members of society. In the words of the Communist Manifesto, “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” [10] Accordingly, given the premise of communality and solidarity, this socialist society allocates its labor to remove deficits inherited from previous social formations. The socialist society, in short, is “based on the universal development of individuals and on the subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth.” [11]

Conscious planning—a visible hand, a communal hand—is the condition for building a socialist society. This process does more, however, than produce the so-called correct plan. Importantly, it also produces and reproduces the producers themselves and the relations among them. What Marx called “revolutionary practice” (“the simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self-change”) is central. Every human activity produces two products: the change in circumstances and the change in the actors themselves. In the particular case of socialist institutions, the labor-time spent in meetings to develop collective decisions not only produces solutions that draw upon the knowledge of all those affected, but it is also an investment that develops the capacities of all those making those decisions. It builds solidarity locally, nationally, and internationally. Those institutions and practices, in short, are at the core of the regulation of the producers themselves (Department III activity). They are essential for the reproduction of socialist society. [12]

Reproduction of a Society Characterized by Commodity Production

But what about a society that is not characterized by communality, a society marked instead by separate, autonomous actors? Such a society’s essential premise is the separation of independent producers. [13] Rather than a community of producers, there is a collection of autonomous property owners who depend for satisfaction of their needs upon the productive activity of other owners. “All-around dependence of the producers upon one another” exists, but theirs is a “connection of mutually indifferent persons.” Indeed, “their mutual interconnection—here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing.” Yet, if these “individuals who are indifferent to one another” do not understand their connection, how does this society go about allocating its “differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour” to satisfy its “differing amounts of needs”? [14]

Obviously, such a society does not utilize Robinson’s Rule: it cannot directly allocate its aggregate labor in accordance with the distribution of its needs. “Only when production is subjected to the genuine, prior control of society,” Marx pointed out, “will society establish the connection between the amount of social labor-time applied to the production of particular articles, and the scale of the social need to be satisfied by these.” [15] Although the application of Robinson’s Rule is not possible, its function remains. As Marx commented, those simple and transparent relations set out for Robinson Crusoe “contain all the essential determinants of value.” [16] In particular, the “necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions” remains.

The necessary law of the proportionate allocation of aggregate labor, Marx insisted, “is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production.” Only the form of that law changes. As Marx wrote to Ludwig Kugelmann, “the only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves.” In the commodity-producing society, the form taken by this necessary law is the law of value. “The form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products.” [17]

Since the allocation of society’s labor embedded in commodities is “mediated through the purchase and sale of the products of different branches of industry” (rather than through “genuine, prior control” by society), however, the immediate effect of the market is a “motley pattern of distribution of the producers and their means of production.” [18] Yet, this apparent chaos sets in motion a process by which the necessary allocation of labor will tend to emerge. In simple commodity production, some producers will receive revenue well above the cost of production; others will receive revenue well below it. Assuming it is possible, producers will shift their activity—that is, they will show a tendency for entry and exit. An equilibrium, accordingly, would tend to emerge in which there is no longer a reason for individual commodity producers to move. Through such movements, the various kinds of labor “are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them.”

In short, although “the play of caprice and chance” means that the allocation of labor does not correspond immediately to the distribution of needs as expressed in commodity purchases, “the different spheres of production constantly tend towards equilibrium.” [19] Through the law of value, labor is allocated in the necessary proportions in the commodity-producing society. In the same way as “the law of gravity asserts itself,” we see that “in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature.” [20] There is a “constant tendency on the part of the various spheres of production towards equilibrium” precisely because “the law of the value of commodities ultimately determines how much of its disposable labour-time society can expend on each kind of commodity.” [21]

Can that equilibrium, in which labor is allocated to satisfy the needs of society, be reached in reality? If we think of a society characterized by simple commodity production, equilibrium occurs when all commodity producers receive the equivalent of the labor contained in their commodities. In fact, however, there are significant barriers to exit and entry: the particular skills and capabilities that individual producers possess will not be easily shifted to the production of differing commodities. Indeed, this process might take a generation to occur, in which case producers in some spheres will appear privileged for extended periods.

In the case of capitalist commodity production—the subject of Capital—the individual capitalist “obeys the immanent law, and hence the moral imperative, of capital to produce as much surplus-value as possible.” [22] Accordingly, there is a “continuously changing proportionate distribution of the total social capital between the various spheres of production…continuous immigration and emigration of capitals.” [23] Equilibrium here occurs when all producers obtain an equal rate of profit on their advanced capital for means of production and labor power. This tendency “has the effect of distributing the total mass of social labour time among the various spheres of production according to the social need.” [24] However, here again there is an obstacle to the realization of equilibrium—the existence of fixed capital embedded in particular spheres does not permit easy exit and entry.

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Nevertheless, for Marx, the law of value (the process by which labor is allocated in the necessary proportions in capitalism) operates more smoothly as capitalism develops. Capital’s “free movement between these various spheres of production as so many available fields of investment” has as its condition the development of the credit and banking system. Only as money-capital does capital really “possess the form in which it is distributed as a common element among these various spheres, among the capitalist class, quite irrespective of its particular application, according to the production requirements of each particular sphere.” [25] In its money-form, capital is abstracted from particular employments. Only in money-capital, in the money-market, do all distinctions as to the quality of capital disappear: “All particular forms of capital, arising from its investment in particular spheres of production or circulation, are obliterated here. It exists here in the undifferentiated, self-identical form of independent value, of money.” [26]

Equalization of profit rates “presupposes the development of the credit system, which concentrates together the inorganic mass of available social capital vis-á-vis the individual capitalist.” [27] That is, it presupposes the domination of finance capital: bankers “become the general managers of money capital,” which now appears as “a concentrated and organized mass, placed under the control of the bankers as representatives of the social capital in a quite different manner to real production.” [28]

Marx’s Auto-Critique

There is no better way to understand Marx’s theory of value than to see how he responded to critics of Capital. With respect to a particular review, Marx commented to Kugelmann in July 1868 that the need to prove the law of value reveals “complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science.” Every child, Marx here continued, knows that “the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour.” How could the critic not see that “It is SELF-EVIDENT that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production!” [29] Similarly, answering Eugen Dühring’s objection to his discussion of value, Marx wrote to Frederick Engels in January 1868 that “actually, no form of society can prevent the labour time at the disposal of society from regulating production in ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.” [30] That was the point: in a commodity-producing society, how else could labor be allocated—except by the market!

Although Marx was clearer in these letters on this point than in Capital, he was transparent there in his critique of classical political economy on value and money. In contrast to vulgar economists who did not go beneath the surface, the classical economists (to their credit) had attempted “to grasp the inner connection in contrast to the multiplicity of outward forms.” But they took those inner forms “as given premises” and were “not interested in elaborating how those various forms come into being.” [31] The classical economists began by explaining relative value by the quantity of labor-time, but they “never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the value of the product.” [32] Their analysis, in short, started in the middle.

This classical approach characterized Marx’s own early thought. It is important to recognize that Marx’s critique was an auto-critique, a critique of views he himself had earlier accepted. In 1847, Marx declared that “[David] Ricardo’s theory of values is the scientific interpretation of actual economic life.” [33] In The Principles of Political Economy, Ricardo had argued that “the value of a commodity…depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production.” By this, he meant “not only the labour applied immediately to commodities,” but also the labor “bestowed on the implements, tools, and buildings, with which such labour is assisted.” Accordingly, relative values of differing commodities were determined by “the total quantity of labour necessary to manufacture them and bring them to market.” This was “the rule which determines the respective quantities of goods which shall be given in exchange for each other.” [34]

Marx followed Ricardo in his early work. “The fluctuations of supply and demand,” Marx wrote in Wage Labour and Capital, “continually bring the price of a commodity back to the cost of production” (that is to say, to its “natural price”). This was Ricardo’s theory of value: the “determination of price by the cost of production is equivalent to the determination of price by the labour time necessary for the manufacture of a commodity.” Further, this rule applied to the determination of wages as well, which were “determined by the cost of production, by the labour time necessary to produce this commodity—labour.” [35] The same point was made in the Communist Manifesto in 1848: “the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production.” [36]

In the 1850s, however, Marx began to develop a new understanding. In the notebooks written in 1857–58, which constitute the Grundrisse, he began his critique of classical political economy. Marx concluded the Grundrisse by announcing that the starting point for analysis had to be not value (as Ricardo began), but the commodity, which “appears as unity of two aspects”—use value and exchange value. [37] The commodity and, in particular, its two-sidedness is the starting point for his critique and how he begins both his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Capital. [38]

The Best Points in Capital

The law of value as a “regulative law of nature” was not one of the best points in Capital, nor one of the “fundamentally new elements in the book.” After all, if the law of value is the tendency of market prices to approach an equilibrium in the same way as “the law of gravity asserts itself,” then this “regulative law of nature” was already present in Ricardo.

Rather, what Marx argued in Capital is that classical political economy did not understand value. “As regards value in general, classical political economy in fact nowhere distinguishes explicitly and with a clear awareness between labour as it appears in the value of a product, and the same labour as it appears in the product’s use value.” [39] But that distinction, Marx declared to Engels in August 1867, is “fundamental to all understanding of the FACTS”! That “two-fold character of labour,” he indicated, is one of the “best points in my book” (and indeed, the best point in the first volume of Capital). [40]

Marx made the same point in the first edition of the first volume of Capital about the two-fold character of labor in commodities: “this aspect, which I am first to have developed in a critical way, is the starting point upon which comprehension of political economy depends.” [41] Writing again to Engels in January 1868, Marx described his analysis of the double character of the labor represented in commodities as one of the “three fundamentally new elements of the book.” All previous economists having missed this, they were “bound to come up against the inexplicable everywhere. This is, in fact, the whole secret of the critical conception.” [42]

The secret of the critical conception, the starting point for comprehension of political economy, the basis for all understanding of the facts—what made the revelation of the two-fold character of labor in commodities so important? Very simply, it is the recognition that actual, specific, concrete labor, all those hours of real labor that have gone into producing a particular commodity, in themselves have nothing to do with its value. You cannot add the hours of the carpenter’s labor to the labor contained in consumed means of production and come up with the value of the carpenter’s commodity. That specific labor, rather, has gone into the production of a thing for use, also known as a use value. Further, you cannot explain relative values by counting the quantity of specific labor contained in separate use values. If you do not distinguish clearly between the two-fold aspects of labor in the commodity, you have not understood Marx’s critique of classical political economy.

Marx’s Labor Theory of Money

“We have to perform a task,” Marx announced, “never even attempted by bourgeois economics.” [43] That task was to develop his theory of money—in particular, to reveal that money is the social representative of the aggregate labor in commodities. For this, Marx demonstrated that (1) the concept of money is latent in the concept of the commodity and (2) that money represents the abstract labor in a commodity and that the manifestation of the latter, its only manifestation, is the price of the commodity.

If adding up the hours of concrete labor to produce a commodity does not reveal its value, what does? Nothing, if we are considering a single commodity. “We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp as a thing possessing value.” [44] We can approach grasping the value of a commodity only by considering it in a relation. The simplest (but undeveloped) form of this relation is as an exchange value—the value of commodity A is equal to x units of commodity B, where B is a use value. We always knew A as a use value but now we know the value of A from its equivalent in B. (If we reverse this, we would say the value of B is equal to 1/x units of A, and here A is the equivalent.) The second commodity, the equivalent, is a mirror for the value in the first commodity. It is through this social relation that we may grasp the commodity as something possessing value.

Having established that the value of a commodity is revealed through its equivalent, Marx logically proceeds step-by-step to establish the existence of a commodity that serves as the equivalent for all commodities—that is, is the general form of value. It is a mini-step from there to reveal the monetary form of value: money as the universal equivalent, money as the representative of value. [45] In short, once we begin to analyze a commodity-exchanging society, we are led to the concept of money. This is what Marx identifies as his task: “We have to show the origin of this money form, we have to trace the development of this expression of value relation of commodities from the simplest, almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money form. When this has been done, the mystery of money will immediately disappear.” [46] But this was a closed book to the classical economists; “Ricardo,” Marx commented years later, “in fact only concerned himself with labour as a measure of value-magnitude and therefore found no connection between his value-theory and the essence of money.” [47]

But what is money? To understand money, we need to return to the two-fold character of labor in commodities, that point upon which comprehension of political economy depends. We know that concrete, specific labor produces specific use values. Insofar as labor is concrete, we cannot compare commodities containing different qualities of labor. But we can compare them if we abstract from their specificities—that is, consider them as containing labor in general, abstract labor, “equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour power.” [48] The aggregate labor of society is a composite of many “different modes of human labour”: “the completed or total form of appearance of human labour is constituted by the totality of its particular forms of appearance.” [49] That “one homogeneous mass of human labour power,” that universal, uniform, abstract, social labor in general, “human labour pure and simple,” enters into each commodity. [50]

Think about the aggregate labor in commodities as so-called jelly labor, as made up of a number of identical, homogeneous units. A certain amount of this jelly labor goes into each commodity. The value of a commodity is determined by how much of this jelly labor—how much homogeneous, universal, abstract labor, that common “social substance”—it contains. Obviously, we cannot add up jelly labor simply, as we might attempt for concrete labor. How, then, can we see the value of a commodity? We have answered that already. The value of a commodity (that is, the homogeneous, general, abstract labor in the commodity) is represented by the quantity of money, which is its equivalent. Indeed, the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself is the money-form.

Every society obtains the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of its needs by devoting a portion of the available labor time to its production. As noted above, “in so far as society wants to satisfy its needs, and have an article produced for this purpose, it has to pay for it…[and] it buys them with a certain quantity of the labour-time that it has at its disposal.” [51] How do we satisfy our needs within capitalism? We buy them with the representative of the total social labor in commodities—money.

Ignorance both of the Subject under Discussion and of the Method of Science

As Michael Heinrich writes, “many Marxists have difficulties understanding Marx’s analysis.” Like bourgeois economists, “they attempt to develop a theory of value without reference to money.” [52] It is a bit difficult to understand why, however, given Marx’s criticisms of classical political economy about this very point. Ricardo, Marx commented, had not understood “or even raised as a problem” the “connection between value, its immanent measure—i.e., labour-time—and the necessity for an external measure of the values of commodities.” Ricardo did not examine abstract labor, the labor that “manifests itself in exchange values—the nature of this labour. Hence he does not grasp the connection of this labour with money or that it must assume the form of money.” [53]

That is why Marx undertook his task “to show the origin of this money form” and to solve “the mystery of money,” a task “never even attempted by bourgeois economics.” We need to understand the nature of money, and how we move from value directly to money. As he explained in chapter 10 of the third volume of Capital:

in dealing with money we assumed that commodities are sold at their values; there was no reason at all to consider prices that diverged from values, as we were concerned simply with the changes of form which commodities undergo when they are turned into money and then transformed back from money into commodities again. As soon as a commodity is in any way sold, and a new commodity bought with the proceeds, we have the entire metamorphosis before us, and it is completely immaterial here whether the commodity’s price is above or below its value. The commodity’s value remains important as the basis, since any rational understanding of money has to start from this foundation, and price, in its general concept, is simply value in the money form. [54]

To understand why Marx felt it was essential to solve the mystery of money, it helps to understand his method of dialectical derivation. Like G. W. F. Hegel, upon examining particular concepts, he found that they contained a second term implicitly within them; he proceeded then to consider the unity of the two concepts, thereby transcending the one-sidedness of each and moving forward to richer concepts. In this way, Marx analyzed the commodity and found that it contained latent within it the concept of money, the independent form of value—and that the commodity differentiated into commodities and money. Further, considering that relation of commodities and money from all sides, Marx uncovered the concept of capital. [55]

The concept of capital, in short, does not drop from the sky. It is marked by the preceding categories. Since money is the representative of abstract labor, of the homogeneous aggregate labor of society, capital must be understood as an accumulation of homogeneous, abstract labor. By understanding money as latent in commodities, we reject the picture of money juxtaposed externally to commodities as in classical political economy and therefore recognize that abstract labor is always present in the concept of capital.

However, all accumulations of abstract labor are not capital. For them to correspond to the concept of capital, they must be driven by the impetus to grow and must have self-expanding value (i.e., M-C-M´). How is that possible, however, on the assumption of exchange of equivalents? Where does the additional value, the surplus value, come from? The two questions express the same thing: in one case, in the form of objectified labour; in the other, in the form of living, fluid labor. [56]

The answer to both is that, with the availability of labor power as a commodity, capital can now secure additional (abstract) labor. This is not because of some occult quality of labor power, but, because by purchasing labor power, capital now is in a relation of “supremacy and subordination” with respect to workers, a relation that brings with it the “compulsion to perform surplus labour.” [57] That compulsion, inherent in capitalist relations of production, is the source of capital’s growth.

Let us consider absolute surplus value by focusing upon “living, fluid labor.” The value of labor power, or necessary labor, at any given point represents the share of aggregate social labor that goes to workers. The remaining social labor share is captured by capitalists. When capital uses its power to increase the length or intensity of the workday, total social labor rises; assuming necessary labor remains constant, capital is the sole beneficiary. The ratio of surplus labor to necessary labor—the rate of exploitation—rises.

Alternatively, let the productivity of labor be increased. To produce the same quantity of use values, less total labor is required. Accordingly, increased productivity brings with it the possibility of a reduced workday (a possibility not realized in capitalism). If, conversely, aggregate social labor remains constant, who would be the beneficiary of such an increase in productivity? Assuming the working class is atomized and capital is able to divide workers sufficiently, capital obtains relative surplus value because necessary labor falls. Alternatively, to the extent that workers are sufficiently organized as a class, they will benefit from productivity gains with rising real wages as commodity values fall. In Capital, this second option is essentially precluded because, following the classical economists, Marx assumed that the standard of necessity is given and fixed. [58]

In short, we need to understand money if we are to understand capital, and for that we need to grasp the two-fold character of labor that goes into a commodity. Unfortunately, many Marxists fail to grasp the distinction “between labour as it appears in the value of a product, and the same labor as it appears in the product’s use value”—the distinction Marx considered “fundamental to all understanding of the FACTS.” As a result, they offer a “theory of value without reference to money,” what Heinrich calls “pre-monetary theories of value,” which I consider to be pre-Marxian theories of value or Ricardian theories of value. [59]

Ricardian Marxists do not grasp Marx’s logic, or how Marx logically moves from the abstract to the concrete. The problem is particularly apparent when it comes to the so-called transformation problem. What those who attempt to calculate the transformation from values to prices of production fail to understand is that, rather than transforming actually existing values, prices of production are simply a further logical development of value. [60] The real movement is from market prices to equilibrium prices, that is, prices of production. As we have seen, this is how the law of value allocates aggregate labor in commodities, similar to a law of gravity. The failure of these Marxists to distinguish between the logical and the real demonstrates their “complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science.”

Notes

1. In his fine introduction and interpretation of Capital, Michael Heinrich criticizes traditional and worldview Marxism in An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012). Heinrich further expounds the early sections of the first volume of Capital intensely in Michael Heinrich, How to Read Marx’s Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021).

2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 43, 68.

3. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1977), 169–70.

4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 288.

5. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 171.

6. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 172.

7. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 171–72.

8. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 173.

9. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 772; Marx, Grundrisse, 488, 541, 708; Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), 24.

10. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, 506.

11. Marx, Grundrisse, 158–59.

12. On this view of socialist society, see Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010) and Michael A. Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).

13. Discussion of the individual commodity producer applies as well to collective or group commodity producers (as in the case of cooperatives).

14. Marx, Grundrisse, 156–58.

15. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 288–89.

16. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 170.

17. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 43, 68.

18. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 476. It is important to keep in mind the distinction between the aggregate labor in commodities and the aggregate labor in society as a whole.

19. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 476.

20. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 168.

21. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 476.

22. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1051.

23. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 895.

24. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part II (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 209.

25. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 491.

26. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 490. We are describing here so-called jelly capital.

27. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 298.

28. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 528, 491.

29. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 43, 68.

30. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42, 515.

31. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 500.

32. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 173–74.

33. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, 121, 123–24.

34. David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Homewood: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1963), 5–6, 12–13, 42.

35. Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 9, 208–9.

36. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, 491. Here, Marx accepted Ricardo’s symmetry in the production of hats and men, and he continued to hold that position in Capital. For a criticism, see Lebowitz, “The Burden of Classical Political Economy” in Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community, chapter 6.

37. Marx, Grundrisse, 881.

38. By the time of the writing of Capital, however, Marx had moved to identify that two-fold nature of the commodity as use value and value and explained that exchange value is merely the necessary form that value takes.

39. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 173n.

40. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42, 407.

41. Albert Dragstedt, Value: Studies by Karl Marx (London: New Park Publications, 1976), 11.

42. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42, 514.

43. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 139.

44. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 138.

45. In classical political economy and in Marx’s time, gold was the money-commodity; however, Marx’s theory of money only requires social acceptance as the universal equivalent.

46. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 139.

47. Karl Marx, “Marginal Notes on Adolph Wagner’s Lehrbuch der Politschen Oekonomie” in Dragstedt, Value, 204.

48. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 129.

49. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 157.

50. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 129.

51. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 288.

52. Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, 57, 63–64.

53. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part II, 164, 202.

54. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 294–95.

55. See the discussion of the derivation of capital in Michael A. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 55–60.

56. “The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 326.

57. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1026–27.

58. See Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community, chapter 7.

59. Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, 57, 63–64.

60. As Heinrich indicates, the transformation of values “represents a conceptual advancement of the form-determination of the commodity.” Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, 148–49.

Ethical Consumption in the Socialist Imaginary

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

Since its advent in the 1990s, globalization has transformed the world. One of its many notable effects was the further siloing of consumers from the labor that produced their goods and services. Increasingly complex global supply chains alongside deceptive advertising make it nearly impossible to uncover every step in a product’s production and distribution. Of course, strategic clarification of these processes would come to represent its own form of advertising, as the professed “social and environmental values of consumer products” became reliable selling points in and of themselves. This was mainly due to an increase in consumer consciousness — spurred by globalization’s poster child, the internet — that begged for opportunities to consume “ethically.”

Though such “ethical consumption” marked an improvement over previous consumptive practices, a socialist lens reveals its limitations. As socialists understand, capitalist production relies on the exploitation of workers by capital owners, meaning that no level of consciousness or self-awareness on the part of traditional companies can shed their fundamentally unethical character. Even in instances where a worker’s experience with their employer is satisfactory — as can happen when receiving a high salary or wage, robust benefits, or other perks — the company’s simultaneous profiteering is more than just a harmless manifestation of mutual benefit. The very act of turning a profit beyond that which would sufficiently refinance operating costs is one of theft, particularly of the value that the worker has produced via their labor. This surplus value is not returned to the worker nor does it serve operational ends. It instead comprises the millionaire salaries of executives and further grows the capital to which the company can now claim legal rights. In other words, as socialists often argue, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. However, when considering the ethics of capitalist consumption, the analysis cannot stop there.

It is not so much ethical consumption but rather ethical purity which is impossible under capitalism. Moreover, beneath such a threshold of ethical purity, there lie two spectra upon which one’s capitalist consumption can and should still be measured: that of ethics and, more importantly, that of the consumer. 

The spectrum of ethics — henceforth referred to as the ethical spectrum — is that which the deliberately advertised “social and environmental values of consumer products” implies. In other words, a hierarchy of ethics in consumption does exist just shy of ethical purity. And, most pressingly, that hierarchy is primarily highlighted by the aspects of a good or service’s production and distribution that can be observed, analyzed, and understood. Of course, such aspects are most often only made publicly available for observation, analysis, and understanding at the behest of their corporate manufacturers but they are empirical points of ethical reference nonetheless. Take the purchase of a shirt, for example. When a consumer purchases a shirt, the ethical spectrum offers a host of consumptive options based on the available social and environmental factors at hand, ones which, for the sake of argument, will be boiled down here into three outstanding choices.

The first choice, which will be the optimal form of ethical consumption in this scenario, is one in which it is known to the consumer that the shirt is both the product of union labor and produced in an environmentally conscious way, be that through the use of reusable materials, renewable energy, waste minimization, etc. The second choice, which will be the middle-of-the-road, intermediate form of ethical consumption in this scenario, is one in which the shirt is still the product of union labor but environmental considerations are not present, meaning labor exploitation is minimized through the presence of unionized production but the sustainable nature of the product is lacking. The third and final choice, which will be the worst and least preferable form of ethical consumption in this scenario, is one in which the production of the shirt lacks both union labor and environmental considerations, making it an ethically lackluster product regarding its accommodations for both labor exploitation and sustainability. It is in determining which of the three choices one should pursue, if any at all, that the second spectrum — that of the consumer — becomes relevant.

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The spectrum of the consumer — henceforth referred to as the consumer spectrum — is one which makes an even deeper distinction between consumptive practices than that of the ethical spectrum, as it precedes the question of ethics with the question of ability. To consider consumption under capitalism as an exercise of solely ethical dimensions is to neglect the vital reality underlying such a society: inequality is rampant, poverty is ever-worsening, and the material conditions of the masses only become more dire by the day. As such, it is often the case that for many consumers, ethical considerations are an aspect of capitalist consumption in which they simply do not have the socioeconomic capacity to engage. After all, who is to blame a working-class family for neglecting the exploitative or unsustainable aspects of a good or service they’ve consumed when their socioeconomic conditions may not even allow them to ensure their most basic needs?

The consumer spectrum acknowledges this disparity and ensures that the degree of ethical consideration a consumer engages in is proportional to their socioeconomic standing, one best represented by the consumer’s income. However, conditions beyond those of financial earnings can determine whether disposable income in particular will fluctuate over time, a trend that would then require the consumer’s ethical considerations to similarly shift. These outstanding conditions can take on many forms, incorporating factors such as working conditions — a greater likelihood of on-the-job injuries could decrease disposable income prospects due to evermore frequent medical bills — immigration status — undocumented workers have less access to social safety nets and unemployment benefits than their documented counterparts — and living conditions — crumbling infrastructure could gradually increase the financial burden of maintenance faced by tenants, decreasing their disposable income over time. As such, the consumer spectrum adjusts the ethical considerations incumbent upon a consumer based both on their income and on the potential for their disposable income to fluctuate. In turn, the consumer spectrum ensures two important outcomes.

On the one hand, it makes sure that socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals are not burdened with the task of considering ethics when making consumptive decisions to survive. On the other, it holds socioeconomically advantaged individuals to a higher standard of ethical consumption, one in which they would be remiss to not undergo the kind of ethical considerations previously outlined in the shirt exercise. Admittedly, the former assurance has become more widely accepted in discourse regarding working-class consumption. The latter, on the other hand, risks not achieving the same, as the maxim that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism can serve as low-hanging fruit for socioeconomically advantaged individuals to conveniently justify knowingly unethical consumption. The consumer spectrum seeks to account for such co-optation and counter it head-on.

This layout of consumptive spectra can be useful on the individual level of consumption. For those with the appropriate socioeconomic bandwidth, it offers bountiful considerations that can inform the consumption of a given good or service. However, the utility of the model is perhaps best understood on the macro level. Beyond the pressure that socialists must continue to exert on the existing system — uprooting the power of capital owners and corporations in the process — these spectra provide greater nuance to the socialist perspective on individual accountability and action. Through the ethics and consumer spectra, we can better envision the untapped potential of individualized proactivity in creating a less exploitative and more sustainable society, while also accommodating the diversity of lived experiences and forms of exploitation endured under the current economic system.

Thus, the notion of ethical consumption under capitalism should not simply culminate in an indisputable law of impossibility. Rather, it should be understood as a range of activity that can be engaged in — just shy of ethical purity — based on the ethical considerations at hand and, more pressingly, those which directly pertain to the socioeconomic capacities of the consumer. Only in considering this reality can we better understand the role of individual consumption in the broader socialist project of radical change and revolutionary transformation.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

What is social class?

By Danica Rachel

Republished from Red Flag.

A recent Essential poll found that 79 percent of Australians believe social classes still exist in Australia. This is unsurprising, given the distribution of wealth. For example, the Australia Institute’s Inequality on Steroids report estimates that the top 10 percent of Australian income earners received 93 percent of the benefits from all economic growth in the decade from 2009 to 2019.

Of Essential poll respondents, 49 percent consider themselves to be middle class, 30 percent self-identify as working class and 4 percent as upper class. This raises a question: what is a social class? 

Definitions typically revolve around income. “Middle class”, we’re often told, means earning something like the median income—about $65,000 a year according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. There’s no consensus on how much below or above this figure someone can earn while still being in the middle. 

This is a vague way to define class and is ripe for misinterpretations and distortions. An article published in the Australian last year described yearly earnings between $120,000 and $160,000 as “middle income” in an attempt to defend the high-end tax cuts due to be implemented by the federal Labor government next year. 

In reality, according to the most recently available statistics from the Australian Taxation Office, people making this much money are comfortably in the top 15 percent of Australian income earners.

More sophisticated classifications refer to education levels, cultural interests and family occupations as well as income. But again, the outcome is imprecise. Anyone with a university degree becomes middle class, and “working class” often becomes a synonym for “lower class”—that is, anyone economically worse off or with lower formal education levels than those in the “middle”.

 Socialists are more precise. While income can often be an indicator of social class, we define the latter in terms of people’s relationship to society’s economic infrastructure. That gives us three categories: the capitalist class, the working class and the middle classes.

Capitalists are the parasites at the top. They’re the executives, CEOs and board members who own and/or control the big companies, and with them the machinery, farmland, office buildings, media outlets, electricity grids, telecommunications infrastructure, ports and so on. They own the “means of production”, which they put to use with the singular purpose of generating profit.

Workers, on the other hand, don’t own any means of production. They might own personal property such as a car, a phone, maybe a house. But while workers use their personal property to meet their daily needs, capitalists use their private property as capital—a means to generate wealth through exploiting workers. 

A worker might grow some veggies in their garden to cut grocery costs; an agricultural capitalist uses thousands of acres of farmland to turn a profit. A house owned by a worker is just a home, but it becomes capital when owned by a real estate investor, used to generate wealth on the market.

The threat of poverty, homelessness and starvation gives workers no choice but to sell the only thing they can: their capacity to labour. They are deprived of control over much of their daily lives, having little say over the work they do or the workplaces in which they are employed. Even simple dignities like meals and bathroom breaks in many places can be taken only when allowed by the boss. 

The number of people fitting this definition of “working class” is difficult to quantify. Diane Fieldes, writing in the 2005 anthology Class and struggle in Australia, estimated that the working class makes up a substantial majority of the population—more than double the 30 percent figure in the Essential poll. 

“Middle class” also takes on a different meaning in this framework. It describes those who sit between the working class and the class of big capitalists. There are many different categories that fit in here: small business owners, middle managers, union officials, academics and state bureaucrats, to name a few. They can have different and contradictory relationships to the means of production—some are small capitalists, others just bureaucrats. What they generally have in common is that they control their own work or the work of others. They certainly make up a lot less than 49 percent of the population.

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The Marxist definition of class is much more useful than loose definitions based on income or education. 

First, it gives us an understanding of how capitalism works. Workers and bosses don’t exist in isolation; they are intimately connected through exploitation. Capitalists own the means of production, but need workers to operate machines, maintain infrastructure, harvest crops, serve customers and so on. The workers are the ones who produce the goods or services that their bosses sell for profit.

But there’s the rub. For the boss to make a profit, they have to sell the products for more than the costs of production, which crucially includes what they pay their workers. So the workers have created value, but that value has been seized from them by the capitalist, and only a fraction returned as a wage. This isn’t just the case with blue-collar workers, but also applies to workers in retail, hospitality, healthcare, IT, administration and elsewhere. 

Whether a business is successful depends on how much profit it can make, and therefore how much its workers are exploited. Profits are the lifeblood of capitalism—and every cent of them comes from exploited labour. By understanding exploitation, we can understand how 93 percent of wealth went to the top 10 percent last decade.

Second, the Marxist definition shows that classes have counterposed interests. What’s good for capitalists is whatever makes their profits go up. This often means, for instance, paying workers less, cutting costs wherever possible and lowering workplace safety standards. What’s good for workers is the opposite: being paid more and having more rights at work. Thinking of class simply as where someone sits on the spectrum from “low income” to “high income” obscures this tension.

Third, defining classes by their relation to the means of production tells us who has power in society. The capitalists own the most important section of the economy, so they make all major decisions about what society produces and how it will be produced. And because of this control, governments must keep them onside. Otherwise, they might move their investments overseas, threaten the economy, or even outright depose governments.

But profits are generated by workers, which gives them a different kind of power. When a workplace goes on strike, its production stops, and therefore profits cannot be made. The bosses go to great lengths to avoid this happening. They’ll pit workers against each other and spread lies about unions to stop workers organising.

Finally, we can see who is needed to run society—and who runs it day to day. The capitalists portray themselves as the deserving few who are indispensable. But their profits and wealth are the fruits of workers’ labour. Workers, not bosses, construct buildings, run hospitals, and stock shelves. Workers run the world, but under capitalism they are forced to run it for the capitalist class.

Another world is possible, where workers run the world for ourselves, because of the simple fact that the bosses need us, but we don’t need them.

Know Your Enemy: What Capitalism Is and How to Defeat It

By Michael A. Lebowitz

Republished from LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

In a capitalist society, there is always a good explanation for your poverty, your meaningless job (if you have a job), your difficulties and your general unhappiness. You are to blame. It is your failure. After all, look at other people who do succeed. If only you had worked a little harder, studied a little more, made those sacrifices.

We are told that anybody who works hard can become a success. Anyone can save up and become your own boss, a boss with employees. And there is some truth to this. Often, any one person can do these things–but we can’t conclude from this that every person can. It is a basic fallacy to conclude that because one person can do something, therefore everyone can. One person can see better in the theater if he stands, but if everyone stands no one can see better. Anyone can get the last seat on the plane, but everyone can’t. Any country can cut its costs and become more competitive, but every country cannot become more competitive by cutting costs.

The lessons they want you to learn

So, what does this focus upon the individual tell you? It tells you that it’s your own fault, that you are your own worst enemy. But maybe you don’t accept that. Maybe what’s holding you back is those other people. The problem is those people of color, the immigrants, indeed everyone willing to work for less who is taking a job away from you. They are the enemy because they compete with you. They’re the ones who force you to take a job for much less than you deserve, if you are to get a job at all.

The prison

Think about what’s known as “The Prisoners’ Dilemma”. Two people have been arrested for a crime, and each is separately made an offer: if you confess and the other prisoner doesn’t, you will get a very short sentence. But if the other confesses and you don’t, you will be in jail for a long time. So, each separately decides to confess. That’s a lot like your situation. The Workers’ Dilemma is: do I take the low wage job with little security or do I stay unemployed? “If everything were left to isolated, individual bargaining,” argued the General Council of the International Workingman’s Association (in which Karl Marx was a central figure), competition would, if unchecked, “reduce the producers of all wealth to a starvation level.” Of course, if the prisoners were able to cooperate, they would be much better off. And so are workers.

Immigrants, people of color, people in other countries are not inherently enemies. The other prisoners are not the enemy. Something, though, wants you to see each other as enemies. That something is the prison–the structure in which we all exist. That is the enemy: capitalism.

The secret

The separation of workers in capitalism is not an accident. Capitalism, which emerged historically in a time of slavery, extermination of indigenous peoples and patriarchy, has always searched actively for ways to prevent workers from cooperating and combining. How better than to foster differences (real and imagined) such as race, ethnicity, nation and gender, and to convert difference into antagonism! Marx certainly understood how capital thrives upon divisions within the working class. That, he argued, is the secret of capital’s rule. Describing the antagonism in England at the time between English and Irish workers, he explained that this was the secret of the weakness of the English working class–“the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it.” It’s not hard to imagine what he would have said about antagonisms between white and Black workers in the United States; further, the effect of divisions between workers in different countries should not be a secret for workers.

To understand why separation of workers is so central for capitalists, we need to consider the characteristics of capitalism.

Capitalist relations of production

All production begins with “the original sources of all wealth”–human beings and Nature, according to Marx. Production is a process of activity (labor) involving the use of the products of past labor (means of production, including that drawn directly from Nature) to achieve a particular purpose envisioned at the outset. But production under capitalist relations has particular characteristics. By considering the relation between the capitalist class and the working class, we can analyze it as a system and show the connection between many patterns.

Capitalist relations of production are characterized by the relation between the side of capitalists and the side of workers. On the one hand, there are capitalists–the owners of wealth, the owners of the physical and material means of production. Their orientation is toward the growth of their wealth. Beginning with capital of a certain value in the form of money, capitalists purchase commodities with the goal of gaining more money, additional value, surplus value. And that’s the point: profits. As capitalists, all that matters for them is the growth of their capital.

On the other hand, we have workers–people who have neither material goods they can sell nor the material means of producing the things they need for themselves. Without those means of production, they can’t produce commodities to sell in the market to exchange. So, how do they get the things they need? By selling the only thing they do have available to sell, their ability to work. They can sell it to whomever they choose, but they cannot choose whether or not to sell their power to perform labor … if they are to survive. In short, workers need money to buy the things they need to maintain themselves and their families.

The logic of capital

But why does the capitalist want to hire workers? Because by doing so, he gains control over the worker’s capacity in the workplace. Marx commented that once the worker agrees to sell his capacity to the capitalist, “he who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker.” Through his command over the worker, the capitalist is able to compel the extraction of more labor from the worker’s capacity than the labor he is paying for; or stated another way, he can get more value from the employment of the worker than he pays in the form of wages. A coercive relationship of “supremacy and subordination” of capital over workers is the basis for exploitation–surplus labor and surplus value.

Since the capitalist’s goal is the growth of his wealth, he is always searching for ways to achieve this. Nothing is fixed for him. So, he can try to increase exploitation of the worker by extracting more labor from her–for example, by extending the workday. Similarly, the pores of the given workday, when the worker pauses or takes a bathroom break, are a waste for the capitalist, so he does what he can to intensify the pace of work (“speed-up”). Every moment workers rest is time they are not working for capital.

Further, for workers to be able to rest away from work allows capital more room to intensify the pace of work. The existence of unpaid labor within the household reduces the amount of the wage that must be spent upon necessities and facilitates the driving down of the wage. In this way, capitalism supports the maintenance of patriarchy and exploitation within the household.

Both by intensification of work and by driving wages downward, surplus labor and surplus value are increased. Accordingly, it’s easy to understand why Marx commented that “the capitalist [is] constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum and extend the working day to its physical maximum.” He continued, however, saying “while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.”

Class struggle

In other words, within the framework of capitalist relations, while capital pushes to increase the workday, both in length and intensity, and to drive down wages, workers struggle to reduce the workday and increase wages. Just as there is struggle from the side of capital, so also is there class struggle from the side of the worker. Why? Take the struggle over the workday, for example. Why do the workers want more time for themselves? Time, Marx noted, is “the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labor for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden.” And the same is true if all your energy is consumed by the pace of work so that all you can do is collapse at home.

What about the struggle for higher wages? Of course, workers have physical requirements to survive that must be obtained. But they need much more than this. The worker’s social needs, Marx commented at the time, include “the worker’s participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste, etc.” Of course, our social needs now are different. We live in society and our needs are formed by that. While we struggle to satisfy those needs through higher wages, capital resists because it means lower profits.

What determines the outcome of this struggle between the capitalist and worker? We already have seen what determines the relative power of the combatants–the degree of separation of workers. The more workers are separated and competing against each other, the longer and more intense the workday and the lower the wages they get. In particular, the more unemployment there is, the more workers find themselves competing for part-time and precarious work in order to survive.

Remember, though, that Marx pointed out that “the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.” Workers press in the opposite direction to capital by struggling to reduce the separation among them. For workers in capitalism to make gains in terms of their workdays, their wages and their ability to satisfy their needs, they need to unite against capital; they need to overcome their divisions and competition among workers. That was and is the point of trade unions–to strengthen workers in their struggle within capitalism.

Of course, capital doesn’t bow down and give up when workers organize. It does everything it can to weaken and evade trade unions. How does capital respond? By using racism and sexism to divide workers. It brings in people to compete for work by working for less–for example, immigrants, impoverished people from the countryside. It subcontracts and outsources so organized workers can be replaced. It uses the state–its state–to regulate, outlaw and destroy unions. It shuts down operations and moves to parts of the world where people are poor and unions are banned. Even threatening to shut down and move is a powerful weapon because of the fear that workers have of losing their jobs. All this is logical from the perspective of capital. The logic of capital is to do everything possible to pit workers against each other because that increases the rate of exploitation.

Why capital reorganizes production

The struggle between capitalists and workers, thus, is a struggle over the degree of separation among workers. Precisely because workers do resist wages being driven to an absolute minimum and the workday to an absolute maximum, capitalists look for other ways for capital to grow. Accordingly, they are driven to revolutionize the production process: where possible, they introduce machinery and organize the workplace to displace workers. By doing so, the same number of workers can produce more–increased productivity. In itself, that’s not bad. The effect of the incorporation of science and the products of the social brain into production offers the obvious potential to eliminate poverty in the world and to make possible a substantially reduced workday. (Time, after all, is room for human development). Yet, remember, those are not the goals of the capitalist. That is not why capital introduces these changes in the mode of production. Rather than a reduced total workday, what capital wants is the reduction in the portion of the workday that workers work for themselves, the reduction of “necessary labor”; it wants to maximize surplus labor and the rate of exploitation.

But what prevents workers from being the beneficiaries of increased productivity–through rising real wages as the costs of production of commodities fall? There are two reasons why these changes in the workplace tend to benefit capitalists rather than workers. One is the bias of those changes, and the other is the general effect upon the working class.

The bias of productive forces introduced by capital

Remember that the technology and techniques of production that capital introduces is oriented to only one thing: profits. The logic of capital points to the selection of techniques that will divide workers from one another and permit easier surveillance and monitoring of their performance. Further, the changes may permit the displacement of particular skilled workers by relatively unskilled (and less costly) workers. The specific productive forces introduced by capital, in short, are not neutral–capital has no intention of introducing changes that reduce the separation of workers in the workplace. They are also not neutral in another way: they divide mental and manual labor and separate “the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labor.” Indeed, “all means for the development of production,” Marx stressed about capitalism, “distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him” and “alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process.”

But that’s not capital’s concern. Capital isn’t interested in whether the technology chosen permits producers to grow or to find any pleasure and satisfaction in their work. Nor about what happens to people who are displaced when new technology and new machines are introduced. If your skills are destroyed, if your job disappears, so be it. Capital gains, you lose. Marx’s comment was that “within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker.”

The reserve army of labor

There is another way that capital gains by the changes it introduces in the workplace. Every worker displaced by the substitution of machinery and technology adds to the reserve army of labor. Not only does the existence of this body of unemployed workers permit capital to exert discipline within the workplace, but it also keeps wages within limits consistent with profitable capitalist production. And that’s the point–in capitalism, unemployment, the existence of a reserve army, is not an accident. If there’s full employment, wages tend to rise and capital faces difficulty in imposing subordination within the workplace. That’s unacceptable for capital, and it’s why capital moves to displace workers. The simultaneous existence of unmet needs and unemployment of workers may seem irrational, but it is perfectly rational for capital because all that matters for capital is profits.

Capital achieves the same result when it moves to other countries or regions to escape workers who are organized–it replenishes the reserve army and ensures that even those workers who do organize and struggle do not succeed in keeping real wages rising as rapidly as productivity. The value produced by workers rises relative to what they are paid because capital increases the separation of workers. Even with rising real wages, Marx argued that the rate of exploitation would increase–the “abyss between the life-situation of the worker and that of the capitalist would keep widening.”

In the absence of extraordinary successes on the part of workers, capital has the upper hand in the sphere of production. Through its control of production and over the nature and direction of investment, it can increase the degree of exploitation of workers and expand the production of surplus value. Yet, there is an inherent contradiction in capitalism: capital cannot remain in the sphere of production but must return to the sphere of circulation and sell the commodities that have been produced under these conditions.

The logic of capitalist circulation

Capitalists do not want these commodities containing surplus value. Their goal isn’t to consume those commodities. What they want is to sell those commodities and to make real the surplus value latent within them. They want the money.

Exploitation in the sphere of circulation

To turn commodities containing surplus value into money, capitalists need people to work in the sphere of circulation. Of course, they want to spend as little as possible in their circulation costs because those lower the potential profits generated in the sphere of production. So, the logic of capital dictates that it should exploit workers involved in selling these commodities as much as possible. The lower the wages and the higher the intensity of work, the lower capital’s costs and the higher the profits after sale. Thus, for distribution outlets and commodity delivery, capitalists have introduced elaborate methods of surveillance and punishment, paralleling what Lenin called early in the last century the scientific extraction of sweat in the sphere of production. Further, wherever possible, capital will use casual labor, part-time labor, precarious workers–this is how it can exploit workers in the sphere of circulation the most.

And it’s not simply the workers in the formal sphere of capitalist circulation that capital exploits. When there is very high unemployment, capital can take great advantage of this–it can transfer the risk of selling to workers. In some countries, a large reserve army of the unemployed makes it possible for capital to use what is called the informal sector to complete the circuit of capital. (The commodities sold in the informal sector don’t drop from the sky; for the most part, they are produced within capitalist relations.) These workers are part of the circuit of capitalist production and circulation, but they have none of the benefits and relative security of workers formally employed by capital. They look like independent operators, but they depend upon the capitalist, and the capitalist depends upon them to sell those commodities containing surplus value. Like unorganized workers everywhere, they compete against each other–and capital benefits by how little the sale of commodities is costing it.

Capital’s need for an expanding market

Of course, the proof of the pudding is whether those commodities that contain surplus value can be sold. They must be sold not in some abstract market but in a specific market–one marked by the specific conditions of capitalist production (that is, exploitation). In the sphere of circulation, capitalists face a barrier to their growth: the extent of the market. In the same way, then, that the logic of capital drives capitalists to increase surplus value within the sphere of production, it also compels them to increase the size of market in order to realize that surplus value. Once you understand the nature of capitalism, you can see why capital is necessarily driven to expand the sphere of circulation.

Creating new needs to consume 

How does capital expand the market? One way is by “the production of new needs”. The capitalist, Marx pointed out, does everything he can to convince people to consume more, “to give his wares new charms, to inspire them with new needs by constant chatter, etc.” It was only in the 20th Century, however, that the expansion of output due to the development of the specifically capitalist mode of production made the complementary sales effort so essential. Advertising to create new needs now was everywhere. The enormous expenditures in modern capitalism upon advertising; the astronomical salaries offered to professional athletes whose presence can increase the advertising revenues that can be captured by mass media–what else is this (and so much more like it) but testimony to capital’s successes in the sphere of production? Those commodities must be sold; the market must be expanded by creating new needs. There is, in short, an organic link between the poverty wages paid to workers who produce sports equipment and the million-dollar contracts of star athletes.

Globalization of needs

There’s another way that capital expands the market: by propagating existing needs in a wider circle. Whatever the size of market, capitalists are always attempting to expand it. Faced with limits in the existing sphere of circulation, capital drives to widen that sphere. “The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome,” Marx commented. Thus, capital strives “to tear down every spatial barrier” to exchange and to “conquer the whole earth for its market.”

In this process, the mass media play a central role. The specific characteristics of national cultures and histories mean nothing to capital. Through the mass media, capital’s logic tends to conquer the world through the homogenization of standards and needs everywhere. Everywhere the same commercials, the same commodities, the same culture–unique cultures and histories are a barrier to capital in the sphere of circulation.

The accumulation of capital

Inherent in the nature of capital is the overwhelming tendency to grow. We see capital constantly attempting to increase exploitation by extending and intensifying the workday and by lowering the wage absolutely and relatively. When it comes up against barriers to growth–as in the case of worker resistance–we see capital drives beyond those barriers by investing in labor-saving machinery and by relocating to areas where workers accept lower wages. Similarly, when it comes up against barriers in terms of the limits of existing markets, capital does not accept the prospect of no-growth, but drives beyond those barriers by investing in advertising to generate new needs and by creating new markets for its commodities. With the profits it realizes through the successful sale of commodities, it expands its operations in order to generate more growth in the future. The history of capitalism is a story of the growth of large, powerful corporations.

Growth interruptus

Capital’s growth, however, is not consistent. It goes through booms and slumps, periods of acceleration and periods of crisis. Crises are inherent in the system itself. They flow from imbalances generated by the process of capital accumulation.

Consider what Marx described as “overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capitalism.” He did not mean overproduction relative to peoples’ needs; rather, it was overproduction of commodities containing surplus value relative to the ability to realize that surplus value through sale of those commodities. But why did this happen periodically? Simply because there are inner structural requirements for the balance of production and realization of surplus value given by the rate of exploitation. However, those balance conditions tend to be violated by the actions of capitalists, who act as if no such conditions exist. Since capitalist production takes place, Marx pointed out, “without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or needs backed by the ability to pay,” there is a “constant tension between the restricted dimensions of consumption on the capitalist basis, and a production that is constantly striving to overcome these immanent barriers.”

In particular, capital’s success in driving up the rate of exploitation in order to grow tends to come back to haunt it when it comes to selling commodities. Sooner or later, the violation of the balance conditions produces a reckoning in which that apparent indifference to those conditions produces a crisis. Commodities containing surplus value cannot be sold; and if they cannot be sold, they will not be produced and thus the crisis spreads. However, “transitory over-abundance of capital, over-production and crises”, Marx stressed, do not bring capitalism to an end. Rather, they produce “violent eruptions that reestablish the disturbed balance for the time being.” The effect of the crisis is “to restore the correct relation between necessary and surplus labor, on which, in the last analysis, everything depends.” Until the next time. Such crises are inevitable, but they are not permanent.

There is a second systemic imbalance that interrupts the growth of capital. When capital tied up in means of production rises relative to that used for the purchase of the labor power–the source of surplus value–the rate of profit falls, dampening the accumulation of capital. This tends to occur when productivity in the production of means of production lags behind productivity gains in general. Marx, however, explicitly argued that there would be no tendency for the rate of profit to fall if productivity increases were equal in all sectors. So, why that productivity lag in the sector producing means of production? Although random patterns are always possible, there is no systemic reason for productivity change in that portion of means of production represented by machinery to fall behind; however, Marx identified an obvious reason for lags in productivity in the raw material portion of means of production.

After all, when it comes to agriculture and extractive industries, natural conditions, as well as social forces, play a role in productivity growth. Indeed, Marx argued that it is “unavoidable when capitalist production is fully developed, that the production and increase in the portion of constant capital that consists of fixed capital, machinery, etc. may run significantly ahead of the portion consisting of organic raw materials, so that the demand for those raw materials grows more rapidly than their supply and their price therefore rises.” Especially in boom periods, relative underproduction of raw materials and overproduction of fixed capital is predictable. Developed capital, he declared, “acquires an elasticity, a capacity for sudden extension by leaps and bounds, which comes up against no barriers but those presented by the availability of raw materials and the extent of sales outlets.” With relative underproduction of raw materials, the rate of profit falls; “the general law [is] that, with other things being equal, the rate of profit varies inversely as the value of the raw material.” And, as noted, falling profit rates bring accumulation to an end. These barriers explain why capitalism is characterized by booms, crisis and stagnation.

But barriers are not limits. They can be transcended. In particular, capital is not passive when faced by relative underproduction of raw materials. Marx noted that among the effects of rising raw material prices are that (1) these raw materials are supplied from a greater distance; (2) their production is expanded; (3) substitutes are now employed that were previously unused; and (4) there is more economical use of waste products. Precisely because relative underproduction of raw materials produces rising prices and relatively rising profit rates in those sectors, capital inevitably flows to those sectors.  Indeed, “a condition of production founded on capital”, Marx stressed, is “exploration of the earth in all directions” and of all of Nature to discover new raw materials. Capital, in short, responds to this barrier by seeking ways to posit its growth again; and, to the extent it is successful, it enters a phase (whether cycle or long wave) characterized by relatively declining raw material values and a rising rate of profit.

Because capital is an actor, left to itself it has a tendency to restore the disturbed balances. While economic crises are inevitable, that does not mean–as some believe–that capitalism will collapse. Again, every apparent limit to capitalism is a barrier to be overcome. Crises produce interruptions but growth continues.

The tendency for capitalist globalization

We have already seen the underlying basis for imperialism. Capital’s drive for profits leads it to search for new, cheaper sources of raw materials and new markets in which to sell commodities. Further, we’ve seen that capital will move in order to find workers who can be exploited more: workers who are unorganized and weak, workers willing to work for low wages and under poor working conditions and, in particular, separated from organized workers. When you understand the logic of capital, you understand that global capitalism is inherent in capital itself; that it drives “to tear down every spatial barrier” to its goal of profits.

Wherever possible, capital will try to get what it needs through the market–for example, as the result of the competition of primary producing countries to sell or the availability of a large pool of workers to exploit in production. However, capital follows the motto of “as much market as possible, as much state as necessary”. If necessary, it draws heavily upon the coercive power of the state.

Capital’s state 

The state is not neutral. It reflects the dominant forces in society, and within capitalism (except in extraordinary circumstances) it belongs to capital. Accordingly, it functions to support capitalist exploitation and the production and realization of surplus value. Thus, its institutions will foster scientific and technical development at public expense that can increase profits. And, when needed to support its rule, capital will use the power of the state to enact “bloody legislation” and “grotesquely terroristic laws” that keep workers in the capitalist prison. That state will use its police and judicial powers to keep the working class at the desired level of dependence. It will act to alleviate economic crises, will accept reforms that do not threaten capital, and will remove those that do. Thus, it will put an end to what at some point may seem to be a social compact when conditions change, so it no longer needs that appearance. As long as the state belongs to capital, that state is your enemy.

Capital’s state and globalization 

Capital’s state plays a central role in the process of globalization. For one, capital uses its state to create institutions which ensure that the market will work to achieve its desired goals: international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and so-called “free trade agreements” (which are really “freedom for capitalists” agreements) all have been created to enforce the logic of capital internationally. By itself, though, this would not be enough, given the desires of people around the world for their own self-development. In particular, once capital has decided to generate surplus value directly in the periphery, it demands the assurance that its investments will be protected. Thus, capital uses the imperialist state to intervene militarily and to support, both by subversion and through financial and military resources, colonial states that act to produce conditions for the reproduction of the capitalist world order.

Imperialism and the colonial state

With the support of local oligarchies and elites, these colonial states are assigned the function of creating the framework in which the market serves capital best. By separating agricultural producers from the land and providing special economic zones for capital to function freely, these instruments of global capital make available the reserve army of labor that capital wants. Further, they are there to police; to use their coercive power to outlaw or otherwise prevent independent trade unions, and to apply grotesquely terroristic laws to support conditions for the growth of capital within their regimes. And, although capitalists speak much about “democracy”, support for undemocratic and authoritarian regimes that will make life (and profits) easier for capital is no accident. Of course, if these colonial states are unable to carry out this function, capital is always prepared to intervene internationally for “humanitarian” purposes. It is not a mere coincidence, for example, that so many United States foreign military bases are located near sources of energy and other raw material supplies.

Imperialism, in short, will stop at nothing. Its history of barbarism demonstrates this over and over again. As Che Guevara pointed out, it is a bestiality that knows no limits–one that tries to crush under its boots anyone who fights for freedom.

What keeps capitalism going?

Think about capitalism: a system in which the needs of capital stand opposite the needs of human beings. The picture is that of an expanding system that both tries to deny human beings the satisfaction of their needs and also constantly conjures up new, artificial needs to seduce them into a pattern of consumerism. A system which both leaves people always wanting more and at the same time threatens life on this planet. It is a Leviathan that devours the working lives of human beings in pursuit of profits, that destroys the skills of people overnight, that fosters imperialist domination of the world, and that uses the coercive power of the state to attack every effort of people to support their own need for development.

What other economic system can you imagine that could generate the simultaneous existence of unused resources, unemployed people, and people with unmet needs for what could be produced? What other economic system would allow people to starve in one part of the world, while elsewhere there is an abundance of food and the complaint is that “too much food is being produced”?

If it is possible to see the social irrationality of capitalism, why is this abomination still around?

The mystification of capital 

Capital continues to rule because people come to view capital as necessary. Because it looks like capital makes the major contribution to society, that without capital there would be no jobs, no income, no life. Every aspect of the social productivity of workers necessarily appears as the social productivity of capital. Even when capital simply combines workers in production, the resulting increase in their social productivity is like a “free gift” to capital. Further, as the result of generations of workers having sold their labor-power to the capitalist, “the social productivity of labour” has been transposed “into the material attributes of capital”; the result is that “the advantages of machinery, the use of science, invention, etc…. are deemed to be the attributes of capital.”

But why does the productivity of workers necessarily look like the productivity of capital? Simply because capital purchased labor-power from the worker and thus owns everything the worker produces. We lose sight of the fact that productivity is the social productivity of the collective producers because of the way the sale of labor-power looks. This act, this central characteristic of capitalism, where the worker surrenders her creative power to the capitalist for a mess of pottage, necessarily disguises what really happens.

When the worker sells the right to use her capacity to the capitalist, the contract doesn’t say “this is the portion of the day necessary for you to maintain yourself at the existing standard and this is the portion the capitalists are getting”. Rather, on the surface, it necessarily looks like workers sell a certain quantity of labor, their entire workday, and get a wage which is (more or less) a fair return for their contribution; that they are paid, in short, for all the labor they perform. How else could it possibly look? In short, it necessarily appears as if the worker is not exploited–that no surplus labor has been performed.

If that’s true, profits must come from the contribution of the capitalist. It’s not only workers, the story goes, the capitalist also makes a contribution; he provides “machinery, the use of science, invention, etc,”, the results of the social productivity of labor over time that appear as “the attributes of capital.” Thus, we all get what we (and our assets) deserve. (Some people just happen to make so much more of a contribution and so deserve that much more!) In short, exploitation of workers is hidden because the buying and selling of the worker’s capacity appears to be a free transaction between equals and ignores the “supremacy and subordination” in the capitalist workplace. This apparent disappearance of exploitation is so significant that Marx called it the source of “all the notions of justice held by both worker and capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism’s illusions about freedom.”

The exploitation of workers is at the core of capitalism. It explains capital’s drive to divide workers in order to grow. Exploitation is the source of the inequality characteristic of capitalism. To fight inequality, we must fight capitalist exploitation. However, inequality is only one aspect of capitalism. In and by itself, exploitation is inadequate to grasp the effects of capital’s drive and thus the products of capitalism. Focus upon exploitation is one-sided because you do not know the enemy unless you understand the double deformation inherent in capitalism.

The double deformation 

Recall that human beings and Nature are the ultimate inputs into production. In capitalist production, they serve specifically as means for the purpose of the growth of capital. The result is deformation–capitalistically-transformed Nature and capitalistically-transformed human beings. Capitalist production, Marx stressed, “only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth–the soil and the worker.” But why?

The deformation of Nature 

By itself, Nature is characterized by a metabolic process through which it converts various inputs and transforms these into the basis for its reproduction. In his discussion of the production of wheat, for example, Marx identified a “vegetative or physiological process” involving the seeds and “various chemical ingredients supplied by the manure, salts contained in the soil, water, air, light.” Through this process, inorganic components are “assimilated by the organic components and transformed into organic material.” Their form is changed in this metabolic process, from inorganic to organic through what Marx called “the expenditure of nature.” Also, part of the “universal metabolism of nature” is the further transformation of organic components, their deterioration and dying through their “consumption by elemental forces”. In this way, the conditions for rebirth (for example, the “vitality of the soil”) are themselves products of this metabolic process. “The seed becomes the unfolded plant, the blossom fades, and so forth”–birth, death, renewal are moments characteristic of the “metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”

This universal metabolism of Nature, however, must be distinguished from the relation in which a human being “mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.” That labor process involves the “appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature.” This “ever-lasting nature-imposed condition of human existence,” Marx pointed out, is “common to all forms of society in which human beings live.”

As we have indicated, however, under capitalist relations of production, the preconceived goal of production is the growth of capital. The particular metabolic process that occurs in this case is one in which human labor and Nature are converted into surplus value, the basis for that growth. Accordingly, rather than a process that begins with “man and his labor on one side, nature and its materials on the other,” in capitalist relations the starting point is capital, and “the labor process is a process between things the capitalist has purchased, things which belong to him.” It is “appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements” not of man but of capital. There is, as noted, “exploration of the earth in all directions” for a single purpose–to find new sources of raw materials to ensure the generation of profits. Nature, “the universal material for labor,” the “original larder” for human existence, is here a means not for human existence but for capital’s existence.

While capital’s tendency to grow by leaps and bounds comes up against a barrier insofar as plant and animal products are “subject to certain organic laws involving naturally determined periods of time”, capital constantly drives beyond each barrier it faces. However, there is a barrier it does not escape. Marx noted, for example, that “the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profit–stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations.” Indeed, the very nature of production under capitalist relations violates “the metabolic interaction between man and the earth”; it produces “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”

That “irreparable” metabolic rift that Marx described is neither a short-term disturbance nor unique to agriculture. The “squandering of the vitality of the soil” is a paradigm for the way in which the “metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself” is violated under capitalist relations of production. In fact, there is nothing inherent in agricultural production that leads to that “squandering of the vitality of the soil”. On the contrary, Marx pointed out that a society can bequeath the earth “in an improved state to succeeding generations.” But this requires an understanding that “agriculture forms a mode of production sui generis, because the organic process is involved, in addition to the mechanical and chemical process, and the natural reproduction process is merely controlled and guided”; the same is true, too, in the case of fishing, hunting, and forestry. Maintenance and improvement of the vitality of the soil and of other sectors dependent upon organic conditions requires the recognition of the necessity for “systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production.”

With every increase in capitalist production, there are growing demands upon the natural environment, and the tendency to exhaust Nature’s larder and to generate unabsorbed and unutilizable waste is not at all limited to the metabolic rift that Marx described with respect to capitalist agriculture. Thus, Marx indicated that “extractive industry (mining is the most important) is likewise an industry sui generis, because no reproduction process whatever takes place in it, at least not one under our control or known to us.” Given capital’s preoccupation with its need to grow, capital has no interest in the contradiction between its logic and the “natural laws of life itself”. The contradiction between its drive for infinite growth and a finite, limited earth is not a concern because, for capital, there is always another source of growth to be found. Like a vampire, it seeks the last possible drop of blood and does not worry about keeping its host alive.

Accordingly, since capital does not worry about “simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth–the soil and the worker,” sooner or later it destroys both. Marx’s comment with respect to capital’s drive to drain every ounce of energy from the worker describes capital’s relation to the natural world precisely:

Après moi le deluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and every capitalist nation. Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so.

We are seeing the signs of that approaching deluge. Devastating wildfires, droughts, powerful hurricanes, warming oceans, floods, rising sea levels, pollution, pandemics, disappearing species, etc are becoming commonplace–but there is nothing in capital’s metabolic process that would check that. If, for example, certain materials become scarce and costly, capital will not scale back and accept less or no growth; rather, it will scour the earth to search for new sources and substitutes.

Can society prevent the crisis of the earth system, the deluge? Not currently. The ultimate deformation of Nature is the prospect, because the second deformation makes it easier to envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The deformation of human beings 

Human beings are not static and fixed. Rather, they are a work in process because they develop as the result of their activity. They change themselves as they act in and upon the world. In this respect there are always two products of human activity: the change in circumstances and the change in the human being. In the very act of producing, Marx commented, “the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and new ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language.” In the process of producing, the worker “acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.”

In this “self-creation of man as a process,” the character of that human product flows from the nature of that productive activity. Under particular circumstances, that process can be one in which people are able to develop their capacities in an all-rounded way. As Marx put it, “when the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species”. In such a situation, associated producers may expend “their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force”, and the means of production are “there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development”.

For example, if workers democratically decide upon a plan, work together to achieve its realization, solve problems that emerge, and shift in this process from activity to activity, they engage in a constant succession of acts that expand their capacities. For workers in this situation, there is the “absolute working out of his creative potentialities,” the “complete working out of the human content,” the “development of all human powers as such the end in itself”. Collective activity under these relations produces “free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth.” In the society of the future, Marx concluded, the productive forces of people will have “increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”.

But that’s not the character of activity under capitalist relations of production, where “it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker.” While we know how central exploitation is from the perspective of capital, consider the effects upon workers of what capital does to ensure that exploitation. We’ve seen how capital constantly attempts to separate workers and, indeed, fosters antagonism among them (the “secret” of its success); how capital introduces changes in production that divides them further, intensifies the production process and expands the reserve army that fosters competition. What’s the effect? Marx pointed out that “all means for the development of production” under capitalism “distort the worker into a fragment of a man,” degrade him and “alienate him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour process”. In Capital, he described the mutilation, the impoverishment, the “crippling of body and mind” of the worker “bound hand and foot for life to a single specialized operation”, which occurs in the division of labor characteristic of the capitalist process of manufacturing. But did the subsequent development of machinery end that crippling of workers? Marx’s response was that under capitalist relations, such developments complete the “separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour”. Thinking and doing become separate and hostile, and “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” is lost.

In short, a particular type of person is produced in capitalism. Producing within capitalist relations is what Marx called a process of a “complete emptying-out,” “total alienation,” the “sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end”. Indeed, the worker is so alienated that, though working with others, he “actually treats the social character of his work, its combination with the work of others for a common goal, as a power that is alien to him”. In this situation, in order to fill the vacuum of our lives, we need things–we are driven to consume. In addition to producing commodities and capital itself, capitalism produces a fragmented, crippled human being, whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things. More and more things. Capital constantly generates new needs for workers, and it is upon this, Marx noted, that “the contemporary power of capital rests”. In short, every new need for capitalist commodities is a new link in the golden chain that links workers to capital.

Accordingly, rather than producing a working class that wants to put an end to capitalism, capital tends to produce the working class it needs, workers who treat capitalism as common sense. As Marx concluded:

The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.

To this, he added that capital’s generation of a reserve army of the unemployed “sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker”. That constant generation of a relative surplus population of workers means, Marx argued, that wages are “confined within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable, is secured”. Accordingly, Marx concluded that the capitalist can rely upon the worker’s “dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.”

However, while it is possible that workers may remain socially dependent upon capital in perpetuity, that doesn’t mean that capital’s incessant growth can continue in perpetuity. In fact, given that workers deformed by capital accept capital’s requirement to grow “as self-evident natural laws”, their deformation supports the deformation of Nature. In turn, the increase in flooding, drought and other extreme climate changes and resulting mass migrations that are the product of the deformation of Nature intensify divisions and antagonism among workers. The crisis of the earth system and the crisis of humanity are one.

If we don’t know our enemy 

To put an end to that double deformation, we must put an end to capitalism. To do that, we must know the enemy: capital. We will never defeat that enemy if we do not understand it–its effects, its strengths and weaknesses. If, for example, we don’t know capital as our enemy, then crises within capitalism due to overaccumulation of capital or the destruction of the environment will be viewed as crises of the “economy” or of industrialization, calling for us all to sacrifice.

The nature of capital comes to the surface many times. In recurring capitalist crises, for example, it is obvious that profits–rather than the needs of people as socially developed human beings–determine the nature and extent of production within capitalism. However, there’s nothing at all about a crisis that necessarily leads people to question the system itself. People may struggle against specific aspects of capitalism: they may struggle over the workday, the level of wages and working conditions, against the unemployment brought about by a crisis of overaccumulation, over capital’s destruction of the environment, over capital’s destruction of national cultures and sovereignty, against neo-liberalism, etc. But unless they understand the nature of the system, they are struggling merely for a nicer capitalism, a capitalism with a human face. If we don’t understand the nature of capital, then every attempt to make life better will ultimately end up being what Marx called “a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system”.

Indeed, so long as workers do not see capital as their own product and continue instead to think of the need for healthy capitalists as common sense (and in their own interest), they will hold back from actions that place capital in crisis. Even if we are successful in struggling to gain control of the state, even if we manage to take government away from capital, we’ll continue to think of capital as necessary if we don’t understand it.

For this reason, faced with threats by capital, we will always give in rather than move in. That is the sad history of social democracy. While it presents itself as proceeding from a logic in which the needs and potentialities of human beings take priority over the needs of capital, social democracy always ends up by reinforcing the logic of capital. It does because it does not know the enemy.

Knowing your enemy, though, is no guarantee that you will be prepared to go beyond capital.

Know yourself

Consider this picture of you. It’s a picture of you against the world. You are separated from everyone else, and you are all that matters. You’ll lie, cheat and steal as long as you can do that without being caught.

Do you recognize yourself? Certainly, it’s the you that capital constantly tries to produce–the separated, atomistic, selfish maximizer. It’s the way the economic theorists of capital picture you as well

But that’s not really you (or, at least, all of you). Something stops you from always lying, cheating and stealing even if you can get away with it. It’s not fair. Not fair to other people. You don’t do that to members of your family. And you don’t do that to your neighbors because you have to live with them. In fact, if they need your help, you will gladly help them because some day you may need their help. And if there is a threat (like floods, fire, predators) to the neighborhood, you’ll join with them because you know that people need each other.

It’s the same at work. You enjoy seeing and joking with the people you work with. And you know that if you are facing the same problems, such as low wages and horrible working conditions (no time for bathroom breaks, etc.), you’re not going to solve them by yourself. In fact, when you join together to fight for what is fair, you feel strong. That is why capital is always trying to divide you. It doesn’t want to face workers who are strong. And it’s not only in the workplace. Capital wants to be able to continue to produce profits without fear that people will organize against the pollution and destruction of the earth it generates. It wants you separate, prepared to turn away if you’re not yourself directly affected, and that, even if you are affected, you won’t act. Why? Because you feel that you are too weak by yourself to fight.

Capital counts on you deciding that there’s nothing you can do. It takes your lack of action as proof that you really are what it wants: a separated, selfish maximizer. But it’s not that you are acting selfishly; rather, it’s because you lack confidence that others will join with you to do what is right. Holding you back is not that you are separate but that you are afraid that you will be alone.

There’s a saying, “You can’t fight City Hall”. You may also think you can’t fight capital and the capitalist state. It’s true–you can’t fight them and win if you are alone. But you can fight and win if you are not alone. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is only a dilemma if the prisoners are kept separate. When you join together with other people, it’s quite different.

Something important happens when you struggle along with others. You win sometimes, and you learn the importance of uniting. But it’s not only that your prospect for victory improves. You also change. You begin the process of shedding those sides of yourself that capital has produced. You are changing your social relations: in place of separation, there is solidarity. You know yourself as part of a community and you come to recognize others as part of that community too.

You change in another way in the process. You develop new capacities. It’s what Marx called “revolutionary practice”–the simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self-change. And, that process of increasing your capacity through practice is not limited to any specific sphere. When you change, the changed you can enter into new spheres of struggle. Whether you struggle collectively against exploitation in the workplace, against racism, against sexism and patriarchy, against all the divisions among people that capital fosters, against inequality and injustice, against the deformation of Nature both locally and globally, you remake yourself in the process (in Marx’s words) to be someone fit to build a new world. Through your protagonism, you come to know yourselves as the person you want to be.

You learn to recognize the importance of community and solidarity. That’s part of the “secret” capital doesn’t want you to know. That concept of community is always there; it’s why you think about what is fair. It’s why you are bothered by injustice, why you enjoy cooperating and take pleasure in helping others. Fully developed, the system of communality is one, Marx proposed, where “instead of a division of labour… there would take place an organization of labor”; one where “working with means of production held in common”, the activities undertaken by associated producers are “determined by communal needs and purposes”. In short, production for social needs, organized by associated producers, and based upon social ownership of the means of production (three sides of what Hugo Chávez called “the elementary triangle of socialism”) correspond to the developed system of community.

This goal of communality is, we understand, largely subordinated by capitalism with its emphasis upon individual self-interest. Nevertheless, you may begin to get glimpses of community in the process of collective struggle. There are many possibilities, for example, within municipalities and cities: struggles for tenant rights, free public transit, support for public and co-op housing, increasing city-wide minimum wages, initiating community gardens, climate action at the neighborhood and community level, immigrant support, and opposition to racial profiling and police oppression, all have the potential for people to develop our capacities and a sense of our strength.

By learning to work together, we strip off (in Marx’s words) the “fetters” of our individuality. We begin to envision the possibility of a better society, one in which people can develop all their potential. The possibility of a society (in the words of the Communist Manifesto) where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all–a society based upon solidarity and community.

That won’t happen overnight. Building the new human being is a process, and it takes more than good ideas. To develop that potential, practice can make those ideas real. Institutions based upon democratic, participatory and protagonistic practice and solidarity are an important part of that process. Neighborhood government, communal councils, workers councils and cooperative forms of production are examples of what Chávez called “the cells” of a new socialist state, where you change both circumstances and yourselves.

Local institutions by their very nature, of course, do not directly address problems at regional, national and international levels. However, local activity is the form that allows for the combination of nationwide struggles with the process of building capacities. Thus, struggles to end capitalist ownership of particular sectors or to end the destruction of the environment, for examples, are strengthened by being rooted in local organization that simultaneously builds a basis for further advances. In the process, you develop further, too, by knowing yourself as part of a larger community.

Know your enemy and know yourselves 

If we don’t know ourselves, we are disarmed: we will never grasp our collective strength nor the possibility of a better world, that of community. If we know ourselves but not capital, we will not understand why capitalism seems like common sense and we will at best create barriers to capital that it transcends and grows beyond. In both cases, it will appear that capitalism is “guaranteed in perpetuity”. In both cases, we will be unable to take advantage of capital’s inevitable crises and, most significantly, will not prevent the ultimate crisis of the earth system.

To know capital is to understand its strengths and the effects of its activity. To know ourselves is to know our strengths and the effects of our activity. To know both is to recognize the necessity for taking the state away from capital and to build the new state from below through which we develop our capacity. We need, in short, to learn to walk on two legs to transform the state from one over and above us into one that Marx called for, “the self-government of the producers”.

But we will never learn this spontaneously. Rather than discovering all secrets overnight, knowing our enemy and ourselves is a process. Understanding the links between all struggles, too, is an important part of that process. Given the mystification of capital and the divisions that capital has fostered, it’s important to have a body of people who can teach and guide us (while learning from us at the same time). It means that we need to think seriously about building a political instrument that can help us all to learn to walk on two legs, to help us to know the enemy and ourselves. Once we do, as Sun Tzu taught, we will win every battle and the war. In place of capitalism, we will build community.

Note:

[1] Citations and extended arguments may be found in Michael A. Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020). The concept of “The Double Deformation” is developed explicitly here.

From Commodity Fetishism to Teleological Positing: Lukács’s Concept of Labor and Its Relevance

By Wang Pu

Republished from Monthly Review.

The concept of labor constituted a pivotal problematic in Georg Lukács’s theoretical development throughout his Marxist years. His 1922 essay, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”—the central piece of his work History and Class Consciousness, famously opens with the phrase phantom objectivity. The idea of phantom (or phantom-like) objectivity derives from Karl Marx’s discussion of commodity and labor in Capital. The question of labor becomes especially crucial in the third section of History and Class Consciousness, where the young Lukács argues that the proletariat will become conscious of being the object-subject of history. On one hand, labor is reduced to the pure abstractness of labor-time, which marks the nadir of capitalist reification; on the other, it is within the immediate experience of reified labor that the proletarian consciousness is rendered possible. In this sense, labor under capitalism not only determines the lowest point of reification, but also forms “the vantage point of the proletariat.” [1]

Lukács’s later criticism of History and Class Consciousness revolved around the issues of labor and human praxis in general. In his preface to the 1967 edition, he wrote that “the purview of economics [in History and Class Consciousness] is narrowed down because its basic Marxist category, labor as the mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing.” Thus, labor refers not only to the historical phenomenon of reification (that is, wage-labor), but also stands for a more general, even ontological, question. In the same preface, Lukács later wrote that labor, characterized by its “teleological system,” should be taken as “the original form and model” of all human praxis. [2] He described his own development in the following way:

Once I had gained a definite and fundamental insight into what was wrong with my whole approach in History and Class Consciousness, this search became a plan to investigate the philosophical connections between economics and dialectics. My first attempt to put this plan into practice came early in the thirties, in Moscow and Berlin, with the first draft of my book The Young Hegel (which was not completed until autumn 1937). Only now, thirty years later, am I attempting to discover a real solution to this whole problem in the ontology of social existence, on which I am currently engaged. [3]

The first attempt produced his book The Young Hegel, in which the discussion of labor is associated with his reading of G. W. F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and his encounter with Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The outcome of this project, on which he was working in the 1960s, was The Ontology of Social Being, one chapter of which was devoted to the question of labor. In that chapter, labor is philosophically defined as the fundamental teleological positing that forms the model for social praxis.

His 1923 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and later works, The Young Hegel and TheOntology of Social Being, constitute a trajectory in his theorization of labor. Here, we trace emergence of the question of labor in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” and the ambiguity it causes in the Hegelian-Marxian tradition.

Dualism of Wage-Labor: Labor-Time and the Soul

It is no accident that the issue of the of labor emerges in third section of essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in which Lukács discusses immediacy and mediation. The reification confronting the proletariat differs little from the rigid immediacy imprisoning the bourgeoisie. However, the proletariat contains the potential of unveiling and overcoming the “opposition of subject and object.” For the proletarian consciousness to emerge, both the immediacy and the mediating force must consist of reified labor. When writing this essay, Lukács was highly concerned with “the Marxist analysis of labor under capitalism.” What he referred to as labor was wage-labor, rather than labor per se. He conceived of wage-labor as the point of departure for the identity of immediacy and mediation for the proletariat. [4]

Above all, Lukács wrestled with the issue of labor-time. While bourgeois thought always assumes a rigidly double form, “for the proletariat social reality does not exist in this double form.” To substantiate this thesis, Lukács followed Marx’s abstraction of labor into labor-time in the first volume of Capital. This abstraction is identical to the historical “process of abstraction of which [the proletarian] is the victim.” Yet Lukács also went on to claim that it is this very fact of quantification into labor-time that “forces [the worker] to surpass the immediacy of his condition.” At this point, the young Lukács’s eloquence and ambiguity become intertwined. He continued thus: “the quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral existence.” The emergence of this consciousness hinges on the fact that “the worker is forced to objectify his labor-power over against his total personality and to sell it as a commodity.” In this sense, labor-time is not merely considered the immediate social existence of reification and abstraction in which the worker is dehumanized; it is also the mediation for class consciousness. [5]

A presupposed duality, however, is already discernible, for the commodification of both the worker’s labor-power and “total personality” coexist in the same labor-time. Lukács then raised the question of the “work-situation” as the concrete experience of dualism within wage-labor, abstract labor-time versus “the soul”:

This enables us to understand why it is only in the proletariat that the process by which a man’s achievement is split off from his total personality and becomes a commodity leads to a revolutionary consciousness. It is true…that the basic structure of reification can be found in all the social forms of modern capitalism… but this structure can only be made fully conscious in the work-situation of the proletarian. For his work as he experiences it directly possesses the naked and abstract form of the commodity, while in other forms of work this is hidden behind the facade of ‘mental labor.’… The more deeply reification penetrates into the soul of the man… the more deceptive appearances are. Corresponding to the objective concealment of commodity form, there is the subjective element. This is the fact that while the process by which the worker is reified and becomes a commodity dehumanizes him and cripples and atrophies his ‘soul.’… It remains true that precisely his humanity and his soul are not changed into commodities.

Here, the word soul is especially worth pausing over. Lukács indicated that it is the coincidence of the reifying manual, machine-like labor and the resisting soul in the same work-situation that determines the proletariat’s “vantage point,” from which to grasp historical totality. [6]

To this point, we can summarize that Lukács’s dualism assumes two corresponding, yet incongruous, forms: the first, as shown above, is the dual meaning of labor-time, that is, that labor-time is simultaneously recognizable as the pure quantity and the determining category of personality. The second is a kind of internal division of the “total personality.” The worker is divided into two antagonistic parts: the commodified labor-power and the soul resisting dehumanization. To some extent, the second seems to be developed to mediate the first, but at any rate, the two forms highlight the ambiguity in the identification of immediacy with mediation. Between the two forms arises Lukács’ ambivalence. [7]

The reference to “the soul” reminds us of Lukács’s pre-Marxist aesthetic endeavor; his invocation of experience also is reminiscent of the Diltheyian categories and the Neo-Kantian atmosphere of German so-called spiritual sciences in the early twentieth century. We must also bear in mind that, as Harrt Liebersohn has tried to demonstrate, the young Lukács’s pre-Marxist conception of labor was in dialogue with Weber’s and Simmel’s discussions of work in the context of bourgeois life and Christian-Protestant culture. Yet what characterizes Lukács’ dualism on the issue of labor in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” is his radical move from German sociology and Neo-Kantianism to revolutionary Marxism. The mediation for this move was nothing other than his turn toward Hegel. [8]

One of the philosophical origins for such correlation between labor and self-consciousness is found in Hegel’s “lord-bondsman dialectic.” According to his work The Phenomenology of Spirit self-consciousness springs from the triangular relationship among the lord, the bondsman, and the object on which the bondsman is working. Hegel asserted forcefully that “through work… the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.” Thus, Hegel assumed the activity of labor as the “middle term” and concluded that “it is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.” What lies hidden the bondsman’s work is the issue of objectification. That is to say, the bondsman’s spiritual freedom is objectified in the “permanent independence” of the product of his labor, and thereby is made conscious. [9]

Though Lukács certainly drew upon Hegelian logic in the discussion concerning labor and consciousness, it is evident that his case was complicated by the fact that he wedged commodity fetishism into this context. The worker’s objectification through wage-labor is interlocked with the commodification of labor-power. [10] As quoted above, wage-labor is shaped by the “compulsion to objectify [the worker] himself as a commodity.” Lukács then argued:

Above all, the worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity. As we have seen, his immediate existence integrates him as a pure, naked object into the production process. Once this immediacy turns out to be the consequence of a multiplicity of mediations, once it becomes evident how much it presupposes, then the fetishistic forms of the commodity system begin to dissolve: in the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own relations with capital. [11]

Here, the mediating role of work in Hegel’s dialectics is repeated, yet reversed: while the Hegelian bondsman recognizes his freedom in his objectification, the Lukácsian worker recognizes his imprisonment. If the product of work attests to the bondsman’s humanity, as is shown in Hegel’s case, then the capitalist history in the Lukácsian sense is the opposite: the worker himself is commodified as the “pure, naked object.” To translate this into Marxian language: what the bondsman recognizes in the object is his own objectification; what the worker recognizes in the object/commodity, according to Lukács, is actually his own “phantom-like objectivity.”

Moreover, though this step forms a parallel with Hegel’s idea of labor as the “middle term,” in Lukács this very mediation itself is dualized—at least implicitly—corresponding to Marx’s fundamental insight about labor’s duality under capitalism (that is, use-value/value, objectivity/phantom-like objectivity). The antithesis between the qualitative objectivity and the quantitative “phantom objectivity” cannot be solved by a Marxian version of the Hegelian notion of labor that mediates self-consciousness. Rather, what is at stake here is how, in the crude immediacy of the “work-situation,” can commodity fetishism dissolve in the experience of the worker, rather than devour the worker’s whole humanity and absorb it into phantom objectivity? Despite Lukács’s theoretical vigor, the chasm between objectification (as found in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit) and phantom objectivity (from the penetrating analysis offered by Marx) remains unbridgeable. [12]

Vergegenständlichung and Entäusserung [13]

It is interesting to note that, when writing History and Class Consciousness, Lukács, like V. I. Lenin, had no access to Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In formulating his revolutionary labor theory of Entäusserung (or alienation, also translated as estrangement and externalization), the young Marx placed Entwirklichung (“the loss of realization”) in opposition to Vergegenständlichung (objectification), thereby launching a profound critique of Hegel’s phenomenology:

The object which labor produces—labor’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. [14]

Concerning the alienation of labor, Marx went on to say:

The fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his worker, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself…does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. [15]

This striking account, with no doubt, marks a Marxian subversion of Hegel’s dialectics of labor: the independence of the product does not testify the bondsman’s freedom, but stands as an alien power governing the worker’s existence. While the Hegelian concept of work humanizes the bondsman and realizes his being as self-consciousness, Marxian wage-labor dehumanizes the worker totally and alienates the worker from his or her own “essential being.”

Marx’s critique turned out to be a crucial intervention into Lukács’s theoretical practice following the debate about History and Class Consciousness. In his preface to the 1967 edition he recollected one of his “unexpected strokes of good luck” in the 1930s: “the text of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts had just been completely deciphered and I was able to read it.… In the process of reading the Marx manuscript all the idealist prejudices of History and Class Consciousness were swept to one side.” [16] This encounter with early Marx therefore helped initiate his study of early Hegel. The same passage from the young Marx was used in The Young Hegel to lay the foundation for Lukács’s analysis of the difference between Hegelian Entäusserung and Marxian Entäusserung. Lukács’s emphasized Hegel’s “confusion” concerning alienation: the young Hegel equated alienation (Entäusserung) with objectification (Vergegenständlichung), while the young Marx drew a “precise distinction between objectivity and alienation in human praxis.” [17]

Only when it comes to the question of labor can the relevance of such confusion or distinction be fully manifested. In the chapter “Hegel’s Economics During the Jena Period,” Lukács dealt with the young Hegel’s labor theory in relation to Entäusserung. Correspondingly, in the concluding chapter, “‘Entäusserung’ as the Central Philosophical Concept of The Phenomenology,” Lukács elaborated on this concept in relation to Marx’s labor theory. Through a close reading of the bondsman’s labor, Lukács believed that Hegel’s discovery of the origin of self-consciousness concerned labor as the universal mode of human existence. Whereas in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” Lukács focused on wage-labor under capitalism, this time, Lukács wanted to seize the interpretation of labor (in a universal sense) found in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. [18]

Here arises the problem of Entäusserung. In short, at least two interrelated points made by Lukács are significant at this juncture. First, since Hegel had no insight into the “specifically capitalist form of ‘externalization’ (alienation or Entäusserung), i.e. what Marx would later call ‘fetishism,’” Hegel tended to equate Entäusserung with objectification. [19] Second, as the alienation of labor was beyond his sight, Hegel made a “false equation of ‘externalization’ (Entäusserung) and ‘thinghood’ or objectivity.” [20] This led to his central theme that “all alienation (Entäusserung) of the human essence is therefore nothing but alienation of self-consciousness.” [21] As a consequence, alienation can always be superseded by returning to the subject-substance identity. Hegel’s characterization of labor as the origin of self-consciousness, therefore, conceals the starting point of what Lukács called the “mystification of alienation.” Drawing upon Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Lukács summarized Hegel’s confusion in a schematic manner: “on the subjective side, there is the mistaken identification of man and self-consciousness demonstrated and criticized by Marx; on the objective side, there is the equation of alienation and objectification in general.” [22] Meanwhile, Lukács’s distinction between alienation and objectification is built solely upon a distinction between two modes of labor itself. The following passage, as a part of Lukács’s cross-reading of Hegel with Marx, is particularly lucid:

For alienation is sharply distinguished from objective reality, from objectification in the act of labor. The latter is a characteristic of work in general and of the relation of human praxis to the objects of the external world; the former is a consequence of the social division of labor under capitalism, of the emergence of the so-called free worker who has to work with the means of production belonging to another and for whom, therefore, these means of productions as well as his own product exist as an independent, alien power. [23]

One can even go so far as to say that if the act of labor is the universal mode of human praxis, objectification is the alienated labor under capitalism.

While Lukács asserted that “the socialist critique of ‘externalization’ (Entäusserung) has exposed the real alienation contained in the capitalist form of work, an alienation that has to be annulled in reality,” he nevertheless gave much credit to Hegel for uncovering labor as the origin of human essence: “the decisive factor…was that Hegel thought of work as the self-creating process of man, of the human species.” Rather than point out the road toward the supersession of alienation of labor (so-called bad labor), Lukács seemed more concerned with laying the philosophical foundation of labor as the genesis and model of praxis, that is, the universal and humanizing labor (or good labor). [24]

Between these two chapters of The Young Hegel, there is a chapter devoted to labor and the problem of teleology. There, Lukács turned to Marx for a definition of labor as “an exclusive characteristic” of human beings. He quoted from Marx: “at the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.” By linking it with Hegel’s philosophy, Lukács tried to elevate this Marxist insight into labor as a “purposeful activity” to a kind of teleology of labor, and, therefore, a teleology of history. Since labor is posited as the objective realization of purpose, Lukács’s teleology of labor comes back to Hegelian alienation/objectification and use-value. What he attempted to demonstrate is that “Hegel’s concrete analysis of the human labor-process shows that the antinomy of causality and teleology is in reality a dialectical contradiction in which the laws governing a complex pattern of objective reality become manifest in motion.” For the young Hegel, the bondsman’s labor—associated with a pre-capitalist, quasi-feudal economy—is a phenomenological agent; in early Marx, the worker’s labor testifies to the alienation of labor under capitalism. But in grounding labor as the model of human praxis, Lukács now reached a point of further generalizing labor as an ontological category. [25]

The If… then of Teleological Positing Versus the as if of Commodity Fetishism

In his post-Hungarian Uprising magnum opus, The Ontology of Social Being—written in the 1960s and still under revision until the last days of the author’s life—Lukács addressed the issue of labor in the first chapter of the second volume. His elaboration of labor teleology was a direct continuation of his discussion of the relationship between labor and teleology in The Young Hegel. [26]

In the section on “teleological positing,” Lukács came to focus on what he found missing in his early writings (such as “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”): labor as immediacy and mediation; as the metabolism between man and nature; and as a condition for human social being. In this way, he proceeded from the so-called general characteristic of labor to “elementary labor” in its “essential original nature.” In this chapter, most of Lukács’s examples come from primitive forms of labor, such as the making of a knife or an axe from stone. This generalization was undertaken by Lukács in order to fill the gap left by what he called the “leap” from nature to humanity. Again, labor is posited as the “genuine humanization of man.” [27]

At the beginning, Lukács cites Marx’s definition of labor as purposive activity: “labor, then, as the creator of use-value, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society.” Central here is use-value/objectivity in labor teleology. Lukács then articulated his ontological category of labor:

Through labor, a teleological positing is realized within material being, as the rise of a new objectivity. The first consequence of this is that labor becomes the model for any social practice, for in such social practice—no matter how ramified its mediations—teleological positings are always realized, and ultimately realized materially. [28]

Clearly, the Hegelian ideas of objectivity and realization again resurface. Here, the later Lukács reverts to the Hegelian/pre-Marxist idea of Entäusserung (alienation/objectification), which, according to Lukács’s interpretation, initially meant the positing of the object in the German idealist tradition. [29] Ultimately, the “teleological positing of causality” is supposed to contain the “ontological kernel of freedom.” Consequently, every social practice, no matter how developed or complex it is, can be ontologically reduced to the original nature of labor, which, he maintained, is as elementary as everyday experience. Its basic rationality, as Lukács contended, can be formulated as if… vthen. [30]

Though Lukács often said that he would deal with the question of capitalist labor in subsequent chapters, one cannot help but realize that what is missing on this ontological landscape is precisely the phantom objectivity of capitalist labor, or commodity fetishism. According to Slavoj Žižek, commodity fetishism centers on the fantasy of as if rather than if… then For Žižek, the problem of fetishism happens on the side of objective reality: people act as if the money-form is the embodiment of the objective Universal; “they are fetishists in practice, not in theory.” It is in the sense of as if that the objectivity of capitalist labor becomes phantom-like at best. Interestingly enough, both the Žižekian as if and the Lukácsian if… then hinge on the famous Marxian formula to which both Lukács and Žižek frequently referred: “they do not know it, but they do it.” Žižek considered Marx’s formula to be a definition of ideology and related it to the “fetishistic illusion” Žižek attempted to demonstrate that commodity fetishism is “at work in the social reality itself, at the level of what the individuals are doing” and that it is in the reality of doing that people “are guided by the fetishistic illusion.” He then drew the following conclusion:

The illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know.

In this light, we can say that phantom-like objectivity is presupposed and performed as if it were the Universal the objective necessity. [31]

Yet for Lukács’s ontology, Marx’s formula means that, even though humans do not consciously recognize the causality of objective necessity, the teleological positing of causality is still constantly practiced in basic human labor. In this labor, objective causality is directed to human ends, and in turn contains the genesis of science and human knowledge. However, a closer look reveals that this rationality is not purged of as if. Above all, if labor teleology is indeed ultimately determined by social being itself, then objective necessity (the internal necessity of nature; the chain of causality; the logic condition of if… then; and so on) can be viewed as if it were necessity. The formula of if… then seems to be drawn closer to the “bourgeois philosophy” that had been criticized by the young Lukács in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” In the labor process of if… then, an illusion has to be presupposed as the internal necessity of nature in order to structure labor (doing/reality) itself. Under capitalism, a new layer of phantom-like objectivity is added upon the layer of presupposed objective necessity in order to structure capitalist labor. This is what Lukács depicted as the “doubly intensified” alienation (or objectification) of labor or, in Žižek’s language, the “doubled” illusion. [32] At this point, Žižek came much closer to the critique of bourgeois idealism developed in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” Žižek wrote that “the roots of philosophical speculative idealism are in the social reality of the world of commodities; it is this world which behaves ‘idealistically.’” In this light, the later Lukács’s ontology of if…then has idealized—if not fetishized—labor per se with a concealed, yet presupposed, as if. Thus, if then actually represents an elementary level of fetishistic as if. [33]

While raising the question of teleology in The Young Hegel, Lukács cited Lenin: “in actual fact, men’s ends are engendered by the objective world and presuppose it… but it seems to man as if his ends are taken from outside the world, and are independent of the world.” [34] This is a Leninian version of Marx’s formula, a version in favor of Lukács’s labor teleology. However, Lenin’s as if should be reversed to a Žižekian one. To translate it into Žižekian language: as if happens precisely on the side of presupposition; on the side of actual human activity. The presupposition of the objective world is an as if, which engenders the chain of if…then. The idea of teleological positing betrays the imprint of positing as if. [35]

All this leads us to the issue of the fundamental leap from nature to human. As we have seen, Lukács’s labor teleology is formulated in order to address this leap ontologically. Although—and also because—this leap cannot be historically reconstructed, Lukács believed that his labor teleology could fill the unfathomable chasm between nature and human beings. As he wrote: “the leap remains a leap, and in the last analysis it can only be made clear by intellectual comprehension.” [36] Here, by “intellectual comprehension,” Lukács meant the Marxist method of abstraction. Yet his ontological abstraction—from every social practice to the elementary realization of use-value—runs counter to Marx’s historical abstraction which, following the abstracting power of capital itself, moves from use-value to phantom objectivity. Nevertheless, this ontologization/de-historicization is itself a structural positing, or presupposition like as if, in the understanding of human nature.

Conclusion and Further Questions

From the “phantom objectivity” of labor-time to “useful labor” as teleological positing, this theoretical trajectory can be sketchily characterized as a reversal in development of the historical abstraction from use-value to value that opens Marx’s Capital. Moreover, this counter-movement should be examined alongside the historical context in which Lukács was writing. As Lukács himself noted, History and Class Consciousness was related to the high tide of Bolshevism and Messianism in Central Europe, as well as his determination to become a communist in the wake of the catastrophic First World War and triumphant October Revolution. His study of Hegel was associated with his reflections on his early work, but also on the changed situation of European communist politics. After the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution and the controversy of his Blum Theses, he had to reorient himself amid a series of party struggles toward the new historical task of antifascism. This turn should be viewed as an effort to renew the linkage between Marx and Hegel under Stalinism. One should bear in mind, finally, that The Ontology of Social Being was undertaken in a post-1956 situation; it was written between his Specificity of the Aesthetic (finished in 1963) and his long-planned (yet constantly suspended) Ethics. When he dealt philosophically with the realization of freedom modeled on elementary labor, he was, practically speaking, concerned with the deterioration of everyday ethical life under socialism as it existed at the time.

This outline of Lukács’s theoretical development is not immune to doubt, for the theology of labor was not intended to be the final chapter of Lukács’s The Ontology of Social Being. His philosophy of labor was written in preparation for subsequent chapters on reproduction, ideology, and alienation. Yet the other side of the story is also worth noting: according to his student István Mészáros, when Lukács began writing his Ethics, he realized in the process that it was necessary to write an introductory ontology. Not only did this introduction turn out to be a manuscript of more than two thousand pages, but the protracted writing of this social ontology “procede[d] very slowly” up until his death. [37] The difficulty for our philosopher might be this: there is always an idealistic short-circuit in any materialistic ontology, just as in Žižekian sense, reality presupposes a fetishistic as if. Lukács’s theory of labor attains particular significance in that it shows how he was caught between historicization and ontologization—a structural yet symptomatic tension of his Marxist theory.

But we will not end this essay merely with this critical note. Criticism of a similar kind, in fact, have already surfaced in internal debates between Lukács himself and his disciples. “Notes on Lukács’ Ontology”—a document prepared by his students Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, György Márkus when Lukács requested critical feedback in the late 1960s—records their discontent with their mentor’s manuscript. The first sentence of their commentary to the labor chapter reads thus: “In our view, the greatest defect of this chapter is that the problem of objectification remains unsolved—indeed, is not even posed—which is the same reproach that Comrade Lukács leveled against his own History and Class Consciousness.” [38] In this, his students touched upon the ultimate aporia of Lukács’s lifelong philosophical inquiry. As they indicate in their notes, they became inclined to believe that a project of Marxist ontology may be a dead end. Upon receiving these critical yet insightful comments, the ailing Lukács submerged himself in painstaking revisions and suspended publication of the work. In “Lukács’ Later Philosophy,” Heller laments the futile effort–though “not a complete failure” of The Ontology of Social Being while lauding The Specificity of the Aesthetic as the true masterpiece of later Lukács. [39]

But should we simply consign the ontological issue of labor to the trash bin of the history of philosophy? I contend that precisely because of this aporia of ontologization that the role of the concept of labor in Lukács’s philosophical development should not be overlooked, and that his problematic conceptualization of labor spurs us on to re-problematize this classic Marxist category in a vastly changed historical context. Marxism holds that the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is the antinomy between capital and labor. Yet it seems to me that our current perception of labor—both as a concept and as human experience—has become ever-more confusing; vague and pallid. On one hand, the idea of labor has degenerated into a common positivistic word for sociology or economics, losing philosophical and political relevance. On the other hand, wage-labor has penetrated into every corner of social praxis and everyday life, becoming more amorphous and pervasive. Its contemporary dominant form is immaterial labor, which has less to do with the mediation between nature and humanity and more to do with the constant reconfiguration of effects within commodity fetishism itself. As a result, even the machine-like labor of industrial age seems backward and primitive, receding into the remote horizon. In this fully fetishized world, is an ontology of social being possible? To what extent can we revive and redeem the category of labor as a part of our de-fetishization and as a reflection of social praxis and its future? If we deny the possibility of the socio-anthropological-ontological issue of labor, we will surely avoid the idealistic abstractions we see in Lukács. At the same time, we risk giving up a task of critical philosophy and unintentionally succumbing to vulgar sociology, which is yet another product of bourgeois, limited consciousness. Therefore, Lukács’s conceptualization of labor, with all its insights and limitations, is not yet a closed case.

Wang Pu is associate professor of Chinese and chair of the comparative literature program at Brandeis University. He attended Peking University and received his PhD in comparative literature from New York University. He is author of The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018). He is also the translator of the Chinese edition of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life.

Notes

1. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 83; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage), 128.

2. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xvii, xviii, xx.

3. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxxiv.

4. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 167.

5. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 165, 166, 167–8.

6. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 171–2. Not only can one detect the duality between the dehumanization of labor power and the soul that resists such dehumanization, but there is also some trace of the latent division between the manual, mechanical labor and mental labor, the latter of which is doomed to fuller fetishization and therefore penetrates the soul. For the question of fetishism of intellectual labor, see Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (London: MacMillan, 1978), 13–16.

7. For one thing, the idea of “total personality” or “soul” seems to be too subjective to be historically grounded. In this respect, the soul is more like an enclave of overwhelming reification, further exposing an intense duality. This might account for what Lukács, in his later self-criticism, called subjectivism. More important, while labor-power can be reduced to the totalizing abstractness of labor-time, the “total personality” cannot be restored to the level of the historical totality. The furthest point Lukács could reach is labor’s daily experiential or phenomenological confrontation, or in his own language, appearance: the labor-time or work-situation “appears to the worker” as a qualitative category. Meanwhile, for the “mental laborer,” the appearance is too deceptive to be demystified. After all, according to the duality of capacity and personality that Agnes Heller, one of Lukács’s disciples, proposed in Everyday Life, the daily activity of work under capitalism does not necessarily involve any historical experience or historical consciousness. See Agnes Heller, Everyday Life, 60–70 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). In other words, while in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” the abstraction of labor is sufficiently formulated alongside historical abstraction, the mediating force of wage-labor turns out to be an invalid leap (or rebound) from the immediate work-situation to revolutionary consciousness, which itself remains unmediated. In short, rather than illustrate the identity between immediacy and mediation, Lukács became enmeshed in ambiguous dualism.

8. Harry Liebbersohn, “Lukács and the Concept of Working German Sociology,” in Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture, and Politics, ed. Judith Marcus et al., (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 63–71.

9. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 118, 114. Here arises the question of recognition, or, in Hegel’s language, “recognition as an independent self-consciousness,” a question that has been (over)developed by Alexandre Kojève and others. When Kojève marked the lord-bondsman dialectic (which he translated as “master-slave”) as the starting point of so-called recognition politics, he downplayed the relationship between the bondsman and the object was downplayed, thus missing the point of labor in his account.

10. Whereas Hegel’s lord-bondsman anecdote bears reference to feudalist conditions.

11. Lukás, History and Class Consciousness, 168; emphasis added.

12. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 128.

13. I leave the two terms untranslated because people have translated Entäusserung into different words. For instance, Martin Milligan, the translator of Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 into English, translated Entäusserung as estrangement. Rodney Livingstone, a major translator of Lukács, translated Entäusserung as alienation when related to Marx, and as externalization when related to Hegel.

14. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. D. J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1984), 108.

15. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 110.

16. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxxvi.

17. Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 561. Also see Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxiv.

18. Elsewhere in the book, Lukács was critical of Hegel’s myopic observation of labor under capitalism. Though the young Hegel, a reader of Adam Smith, was sensitive to the phenomena of labor division, abstraction or mechanization of labor, exchange of labor, and so on, his era simply did not allow for a dialectical understanding of capitalist labor. (See Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel, 329–31.)

19. Livingstone explained why he translated Hegelian Entäusserung as externalization in his Translator’s Note: “I have preferred to translate it as ‘externalization’, since in Hegel’s usage it has a broader application than the current term.” See Luckács, The Young Hegel, i.

20. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 540, 542.

21. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 178.

22. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 551.

23. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 549

24. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 570, 553.

25. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 338–64; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 284, 346.

26. This chapter includes sections of “Labor as a Teleological Positing” and “Labor as a Model for Social Practice,” translated into English as an independent volume entitled Labor.

27. Marx, Capital, vol 1, 133; Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, trans. David Fernbach (London: Merlin, 1980), 42.

28. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 133; Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 3.

29. See Lukács, The Young Hegel, 538; especially Lukács’s etymological survey of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s use of this term.

30. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 39.

31. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London: Verso, 1989), 31

32. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 18; The Young Hegel, 549.

33. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 32.

34. Cited in Lukács, The Young Hegel, 350

35. The disagreement between István Mészáros and Jean Hyppolite concerning Entäusserung can be viewed as a similar case. What was at issue was whether the transcendence of Entäusserung, which Mészáros insisted is a myth, or the “insurmountable otherness” (central to Hyppolite’s Hegelian version of Entäusserung), is a mystification. See Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin, 1972), 243–44.

36. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, iii

37. István Mészáros, Lukács’ Concept of Dialectic (London: Merlin, 1972), 6–7

38. Ferenc Fehér et al., “Notes on Lukács’ Ontology,” in Lukács Reappraised, ed. Agnes Heller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 141.

39. Agnes Heller, “Lukács’ Later Philosophy,” Lukács Reappraised, ed. Agnes Heller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 190.

Organizing in the “Inferno of Misery”: Jewish Workers’ Struggles in Britain Between 1900 and 1914

By Panos Theodoropoulos

Introduction: Why study the history of migrant workers’ movements?

When Rudolf Rocker, one of the central theorists of anarcho-syndicalism, began exploring London in the turn of the 20th century, he witnessed “an abyss of human suffering, an inferno of misery” (Rocker 2005: 25). Eager to get acquainted with the workers and the movements in his new city, he started going to the East End to attend meetings and socialize with fellow migrant socialists and anarchists. Many recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had congregated in the area, which was “a slum district”. He remembers “a church at the corner of Commercial Street, at the Spitalfields end, where at any time of the day you would see a crowd of dirty, lousy men and women, looking like scarecrows, in filthy rags, with dull hopeless faces, scratching themselves. That was why it was called Itchy Park”. The Jewish working-class Londoners who attended these meetings, primitive cells of what would soon become a powerful migrant trade union movement, “looked sad and worn; they were sweatshop workers, badly paid, and half starved” (Rocker 2005: 26-27). The destitution he saw in London led him to conclude that, contrary to popular beliefs that revolution is triggered by a worsening of living conditions, “there is a pitch of material and spiritual degradation from which a man can no longer rise. Those who have been born into misery and never knew a better state are rarely able to resist and revolt” (2005: 25). A social movement in these locations, targeting these specific circumstances, had to be based on more than abstract theory. It had to directly fight for the improvement of living conditions, while at the same time providing resources for the masses of Jewish (and English) workers to expand their horizons, emerge from the alienation of daily life, and imagine alternatives. This is a conclusion that remains relevant today.

The history of migrant workers’ movements in the United Kingdom remains, largely, unwritten. Plenty of books have been written focusing on specific ethnic groups or on specific time periods. However, no singular book or study exists that specifically surveys the historical struggles of migrant populations as migrants and as workers, attempting to draw connections between the experiences of different ethnic migrant groups and, ultimately, lessons for movements wishing to organize with migrant and marginalized people today. This is, however, an incredibly important task, as these groups not only had been organizing along broadly intersectional lines long before these concepts were formally introduced in the 1970s, but also because their methods of organizing offer fruitful suggestions for working around the effects of precarity, transience, alienation, language and cultural difficulties, and disorientation that frequently debilitate attempts by migrant solidarity movements to organize (with) these populations. Broadly speaking, despite the innumerable differences that stem from different ethnic groups’ cultural backgrounds, positions within the labor and social hierarchy in their host countries, locations on the gradient of whiteness, etc., all the migrant groups that managed to organize themselves in the UK did so by acting on at least three crucial ideas.

Primarily, they understood that, rather than fight for acceptance within the dominant structures of society and trade unions (which were often outright racist and exclusionary), their exclusion necessitated their autonomous organization. Critically, this autonomy emerges historically not as detrimental, but actually beneficial to, the empowerment of the working class as a whole. Secondarily, their autonomy and continuous empowerment depended on their physical embeddedness within the communities that they represented. Third, this embeddedness, and their wider analysis and praxis, had to extend beyond the narrow domain of class politics; they understood that cultural symbols play a key role in maintaining the illusion of disempowerment amongst oppressed groups, and thereby operationalized a broad, non-economistic conception of capitalism which recognized its multi-faceted, culturally dependent character. The example of the Jewish workers’ activities in London, specifically those coalitions that were established around the Arbeter Fraint group, is one small but inspiring instance of how a completely marginalized, hated, divided, and alienated mass of migrant workers managed to not only disprove Rocker’s initial pessimism, but also support the very same British local working class that excluded them.

The wider context: Struggling in a hostile environment

While migrant worker groups in the UK during the 1900s varied in countries of origin, occupations, and specific experiences, they shared some characteristics in terms of the social exclusion and exploitation they faced upon arrival. These characteristics bear significant resemblance to those experienced by migrant populations currently in the West. In the early 1900s, minorities in the UK consisted mainly of West Indian, Caribbean, Asian and Irish populations, all of which arrived through the networks fostered by Britain’s expansive imperial activities (Ramdin 2017; Virdee 2014; Freyer 1984). Migration in Britain is deeply historically structured by imperialism, and the role of Empire cannot be ignored when analyzing migrant lives and trajectories. As such, the experiences of migrant groups have been determined by an interplay of both the demands of British capitalism and an imperial ideology of racial difference and superiority, which enabled and justified their exploitation and socio-political exclusion (Virdee 2014; Tabili 1994).

Migrants were swiftly inserted in those occupations that demanded workers or were otherwise kept as a reserve army of labor until demand rose again (Ramdin 2017; Virdee 2014; Tabili 1994). Located in the most insecure and exploitable segments of the labor hierarchy, a variety of interrelated factors impeded migrants’ chances of joining trade unions. Perhaps the biggest contributor to this were the attitudes of the British trade union movement, which was active in anti-immigration campaigns under the claim that migrant workers represented “unfair competition” to British labor. Lack of familiarity with the English language and culture, spatial segregation, de-skilling, and the unwillingness of many bosses to employ migrants pushed them to the lowest paid and most exploitative occupations; importantly, these occupations were usually not covered by the union victories that had been gained by many British workers in the course of their historic struggle. These same characteristics, alongside a necessity to constantly fight for one’s survival stemming from their precarious circumstances, were also a contributor in migrant workers being used as strike-breakers in various instances of labor struggle. For example, when the skilled tailors from the West End of London went on strike in 1911, the owners turned to Jewish labor from small and mostly unskilled East End workshops (Rocker 2005: 127).

These factors combined in making it easy for unions, bosses, British workers, the local media and politicians to draw a fictitious connection between migrant labor and the threat to established labor rights, which was used to establish and expand a climate of hostility and exclusion that further cemented migrant disempowerment, and therefore, exploitability (Fishman 2004). Migrant workers mostly found themselves outside the organizing priorities of the major unions and were regularly directly blamed for the wider economic difficulties of the British working class. Their exclusion from mainstream unions combined with the aforementioned cultural and subjective factors to create a highly vulnerable and exploitable population.

The Arbeter Fraint and the organization of London’s Jewish workers

Williams (1980) locates the beginning of significant numbers of Jewish migration to the UK in the 1840. However, in response to an increase in pogroms and wider anti-Semitic activity in Europe, Jewish migration to the UK peaked between the 1880s and 1914, with the Jewish population increasing from 60,000 to approximately 300,000 (Virdee 2014). Between 1881 and 1882 more than 225,000 Jewish families fled Russia, with many settling in the East End of London (Fishman 2004). Newly arrived Jewish workers were predominantly absorbed by the tailoring industry, finding themselves in a complex network of independent workshops, many of which were sweatshops (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004; Buckman 1980;). Over time, Jewish workers became fully connected in popular imagination to these workshops, which further curtailed their chances of finding other types of employment (Fishman 2004). Caught between being heavily exploited by wealthier members of their own communities, known as Masters (the owners of the workshops), and being excluded from most significant trade unions while facing intense racism from wider society, Jewish workers were forced to organize themselves and struggle for both labor and social rights (Virdee 2014; Fishman 2004; Buckman 1980). In so doing, they engaged with and directly aided the wider working-class movement, with individuals such Eleanor Marx playing key organizing roles in the social struggles of the time.

The competition inherent in capitalism combined with the general poverty of migrant Jewish communities to create a constant race to the bottom in terms of working conditions in the workshops. Rocker (2005: 89) writes that “the clothing industry in the East End was run by hundreds of small master-tailors who were sub-contractors for the big firms in the City and the West End. In order to get the contract they under-bid each other mercilessly, thus creating their own hell. They passed that hell on of course to their workers. The new immigrants, the greeners, as they were called, who had just arrived from Poland or Russia or Romania and had to earn their bread, went to these small sweatshops to learn to be pressers of machinists. They started as under-pressers or plain-machinists, working for about six months for a skilled presser or machinist, doing the first preparatory work for him, till they learned to work for themselves.”

To further complicate matters, the skilled presser or machinist was usually responsible for paying and organizing the labor of the workers under him, while he was being paid directly by the master. This is illustrative of the wider chain of relationships that created the adverse labor conditions experienced by Jewish workers: large firms and industries, themselves engaged in competition with each other, constantly demanded lower prices from masters; therefore, masters demanded more work for less remuneration by the skilled workers; who, in turn, demanded the same from the “unskilled” workers under them. Jewish workers, especially the newer arrivals, were poor and willing to accept whatever conditions saved them from starvation. According to Rocker, “the evil of the sweating system was that it was so contrived that each drove everybody else” (2005: 89). There were frequent attempts by individual workers to amass the money required to open a private workshop and join the ranks of the masters; however, this proved very difficult and only a few managed to sustain their businesses. Most workers remained workers (Fishman 2004).

The unionization of Jewish workers was rendered difficult due to a variety of factors, including the fact that organizers had to contend with the exploitation stemming from within the community as well as hostility from without. Class divisions quickly solidified as Jews were simultaneously excluded from the wider labor market and therefore pushed to find work within their communities (Buckman 2008; Fishman 2004). Jewish masters were adept at forming coalitions amongst themselves when threatened by strike or other activity and were supported by other industrialists (Williams 1980; Buckman 1980). To further problematize matters, early arrivals were unacquainted with the traditions of English unionism, exasperating local organizers when they attempted to engage with them (Buckman 1980). Furthermore, the structure of the industry meant that there was a high degree of mobility; workers moved between sweatshops as well as gradually gaining skills and rising up the hierarchy. The oscillations of the trade meant that during one season there could be a large pool of workers ready for union activity, while in the next season the majority of those workers could be unemployed (Rocker 2005; Buckman 1980). This precarity also acted as a barrier to workers’ readiness to engage in potentially risky oppositional actions. However, the most significant barrier to Jews joining unions were the unions themselves: despite some notable exceptions, generally unions were unwilling to work with Jews and were active campaigners in favor of stricter migration controls (Virdee 2014; Rocker 2005).

Despite the difficulties, the exclusion and exploitation experienced at all levels of social existence led Jewish workers to approach some local unions and to eventually begin organizing themselves autonomously as migrant workers (Virdee 2014; Buckman 1980). The efforts of the Socialist League, which included the Jewess Eleanor Marx in its ranks, were instrumental in providing an initial impetus for organization as well as material support. The Socialist League was one of the few British socialist formations of the late 19th century that explicitly rejected refused to subscribe to a myopic, white and British-centered view of the working class, instead promoting internationalism, anti-imperialism and migrant solidarity (Virdee 2017; 2014). The Jewish working class, which already had members with highly developed radical ideas, resonated with the SL and began organizing. Crucially, the SL managed to forge alliances between Jewish and British elements of the working class. In 1889, for example, the Socialist League pressured for an alliance between the Leeds Jewish tailors and the anti-immigration Gasworkers union. The tailors joined the struggle for the eight-hour movement, which culminated in a successful strike that won the demands within days (Buckman 1980). This, and subsequent victories by the Leeds Jewish Tailor’s Union made a significant contribution in the battle against anti-immigrant sentiment, while at the same time advancing the interests of the wider working class in the UK (Buckman 2008).

The years between 1900 and 1914 also witnessed a period of intense organizing and victories by Jewish workers in the East End of London (Virdee 2014; Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). The first seeds for radical activity in the region had been sown in the 1870s through the establishment of the Hebrew Socialist Union, led by Aron Lieberman (Fishman 2004). The HSU was involved in a plethora of campaigns, its main purpose being to spread socialism amongst the Jewish working class and assist in their organization in trade unions. While the group was short lived, it set the stage for subsequent actions. A variety of Jewish unions began emerging in the late 19th century, including “the Hebrew Cabinet Makers’ Society, Stick and Cane Dressers’ Union, International Furriers’ Society, Tailor Machinist union, Tailors and Pressers Union, Amalgamated Lasters; Society, United Cap Makers’ Society and International Journeymen Boot Finishers’ Society” (Fishman 2004).

In the early 1900s, a group of Jewish radicals and anarchists centered around the radical Yiddish newspaper Arbeter Fraint expanded these attempts (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). The existence of the newspaper was fundamental in unionization processes because, since most British trade unions were unwilling to organize Jews, it was imperative that they organize themselves. For that, political education was of paramount importance (Rocker 2005). The paper’s readership increased significantly through the years, gaining thousands of readers and becoming firmly embedded in both local and international movement circles. Most importantly, it was read and supported by the working-class, with Rocker (2005: 96) remembering that “young girls who slaved in the sweatshops of a weekly pittance of ten or twelve shillings, literally took the bread from their mouths to give the movement a few pennies.”

In 1906, the Arbeter Fraint group opened a social club in Jubilee Street which was to play a major role in the East End Jewish workers’ movement (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). It quickly became one of the centers of community life, organizing events that connected Jewish workers to their culture as well as maintaining a commitment to political education and providing meeting spaces for workers to organize. It consisted of an 800-capacity gallery, some halls with space for meetings and various events, and a library. It offered classes in English, history and sociology, as well as hosting a range of cultural events, including debates, live music, and poetry readings. Importantly, most of these provisions were open for everyone regardless of club membership or background (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). An example of the club’s activities which illustrates the organizers’ priorities is the annual trip to Epping Forest, regarded by many workers as “the highlight of their lives, in contrast with the everyday gloom and drudgery of the sweatshop” (Fishman 2004: 262). People would bring their families, and, following a long walk, would then congregate to listen to Rocker lecture on topics ranging from literature to history and politics (Fishman 2004). Rather than simply viewing workers as faceless units in need of strict labor organization, emphasis was placed on substantial empowerment, experience of beauty, and the destruction of the alienation experienced in the course of their daily occupations.

The constant agitation and work inside the community eventually led to a wave of militant union activity, extending beyond the narrow spaces of East London (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). At its peak, Rocker (2005: 6) claims that the East End had “the most powerful migrant movement that had developed in Britain.” Years of political education had resulted in the mass meetings of the Federation of Jewish Anarchists being attended by “five, six, seven thousand people” (2005: 6). Crucially, and in contrast with many other immigrant communities, Jewish immigrants had no intention of returning to their countries of origin, which resulted in them becoming fully invested in the improvement of their daily lives in the UK (Rocker 2005). When, in 1912, the skilled tailors of the West End commenced strike activity, the Arbeter Fraint group used the opportunity to agitate for a general strike amongst East End Jewish tailors, many of whom were being used as strike breakers.

Thousands attended the general meeting that was called, and more than 13,000 workers participated in the strike in the first 2 days. They attempted to permanently do away with the sweatshop system, demanding a normal working day, the abolition of overtime, higher wages, and the closure of small workshops with unhygienic conditions. As this community was not wealthy, many participated in the strike without strike pay. They forged alliances with the contemporaneous London dockers’ strike and held joint meetings and demonstrations. The strike was ultimately successful after 3 weeks: the masters conceded shorter hours, no piecework, better conditions, and committed to only employ unionized workers. Emerging victorious, the Jewish workers didn’t stop there: seeing the dockers’ strike drag on, they decided to ask Jewish families to care for the dockers’ children, and over 300 were taken in Jewish homes. This strike represented the culmination of decades of organizing, its results ranging far beyond narrow material gains: it succeeded in abolishing sweatshops in the East End, while at the same time challenging the dominant British perceptions about Jewish workers and establishing strong bonds of solidarity with the local workers’ movement (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004).

Between the East End and the future

This wave of radicalization ultimately faded away with the onset of the First World War and the British government’s crackdown on all radical activity. Rocker and many of his comrades were imprisoned, and the legacy of the East End Jewish workers was largely forgotten as it was erased from most accounts of history emanating from British trade unions. However, despite the vast differences that exist between the 1900s and now, there are several crucial lessons that can be drawn from the Jewish workers’ methods of organizing. They address structural barriers to organization that are shared by many migrant groups today: namely, their exclusion from most mainstream trade unions (despite the lip service paid to notions of “equality” and diversity”), their precarity and transience in the job market, their spatial segregation in specific neighborhoods and areas, and their exclusion from the host society more generally.

In the example of the East end workers and their club in Jubilee Street, the issues of patience and embeddedness emerge as paramount to organizing the excluded. The first noteworthy attempts at unionization and collective resistance from Jewish workers in Britain can be located at least as far back as the mid-1800s, slowly sowing the seeds for the powerful movement that emerged in the early 1900s. These consistent efforts laid the groundwork for establishing physical entities which the workers could access outside of their workplaces: this was critical for their capacity to organize because, 1) being based close to where they lived, it provided a space to come together despite the transitory and precarious nature of their labor trajectories, 2) it was a safe space to organize away from the masters and their cronies, and 3) far from myopically attempting to organize workers purely on the basis of their class status, it was a space which enabled the generation of various activities that aimed at substantial empowerment.

These elements were all undoubtedly impacted, to some degree, by the Arbeter Fraint’s broad, non-economistic conception of capitalist oppression. Their analysis, informed by anarchism, Marxist economics, but also sociology and philosophy, was able to understand how marginalization and alienation not only debilitate oppressed groups’ capacities for action now, but also penetrate deep into their psyches and foreclose those possibilities for the future as workers begin to naturalize their circumstances. The Arbeter Fraint’s patient agitating work, and the existence of a physical space that became a beacon of hope in the East End, were direct, tangible examples that another world is possible. And that we can collectively begin crafting this world today, in our daily interactions.

The combination of embeddedness and a broad conception of capitalist oppression is perhaps the most critical lesson the East End movement has to offer in terms of organizing (with) oppressed groups today. In the West’s hyper-precarious realities, where social bonds have generally grown weaker and liquified, where migrant workers are not only marginalized and exploited but are actively hunted and imprisoned, where worker transience has expanded to almost all sectors of the lower rungs of the labor hierarchy, and where capitalism is increasingly becoming naturalized as an unalterable quasi-natural phenomenon, social movements and those wishing to organize with oppressed groups must focus on becoming rooted in the communities they claim to represent. Furthermore, they must offer imaginative, inspiring alternatives that engage with workers as full human beings, rupturing the sterile and literally depressing one-dimensionality of capitalist realism. Recall how the Jubilee Street club’s annual retreat to Epping Forest represented, for many workers, the highlight of their year.

These activities are inseparably connected to the movement’s militant success: as anarchists and socialists, we are not simply fighting for improvements in our socioeconomic statuses. We are fighting to develop the conditions for all humans to have the resources, space, time, and ideas to fully actualize themselves, to emerge from the drudgery of daily alienation into an empowered state where everything is possible, as long as we work towards it together. Although we are workers, our outlook is geared towards the emancipation of labor, and towards emancipation from the status of wage laborers. In response to capitalism’s tendency to minimize, regiment, and direct the complexity of human existence purely towards the production of surplus value, the Jewish migrant workers in the East End foregrounded culture, education, community, and, crucially, having fun. These characteristics were vital in inspiring others to join their ranks as empowered individuals uniting for a collective cause, and can be equally powerful and inspirational today. To reach these horizons, community embeddedness, especially through the establishment of autonomous, open, and radical social spaces, emerges as an inescapable necessity.

This article includes segments of Panos’s PhD thesis on the barriers to the organization of precarious migrant workers in Scotland, available in full and for free here.

References

Buckman, J. (1980) Alien Working-Class Response: The Leeds Jewish Tailors, 1880-1914. In: Lunn, K. (ed.) (1980) Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society 1870-1914. Kent: Dawson

Fishman, J. (2004) East End Jewish Radicals. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications

Freyer, P. (1984) Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press

Ramdin, R. (2017) The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain. London: Verso

Rocker, R. (2005) The London Years. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications

Tabili, L. (1994) “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. New York: Cornell University Press

Virdee, S. (2014) Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Williams, B. (1980) The Beginnings of Jewish trade Unionism in Manchester, 1889-1891. In: Lunn, K. (ed.) (1980) Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society 1870-1914. Kent: Dawson

About the author:

Panos Theodoropoulos is a sociologist based in Athens, Greece, and is currently active with the Libertarian Syndicalist Union (ESE). His Ph. D thesis was focused on examining the barriers that precarious migrant workers in Scotland experience in regard to labor organization. Previously active with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), he has been involved in various organizing campaigns as a migrant worker in the UK and is currently focused on using sociology to develop theoretical tools that can practically assist social movements organizing towards our complete liberation.

Null Space and Null Existence Under the Spectacle

By Mike Templeton

Exit any stretch of interstate and you will immediately be confronted with the mass of business which defines contemporary American existence. From the multi-lane interchange that draws you off the interstate highway to the seemingly endless retail and restaurant chains, life is one continuous stretch of consumer destinations. Gas stations are full-service outlets selling roller food, beer and wine, lottery tickets, trinkets, ball caps, etc. The gas pumps now have video screens so you can watch sports update videos and some kind of corporate version of the news while you pump gas. From this point onward it is nothing but consumption. Consumer existence is human existence.

The full-service gas stations are generally the first places you encounter upon exiting the highway. BP, Speedway, Pilot—it really does not matter which specific brand you choose they all offer the same things. There are hotdog rollers with taquitos and three or four forms of processed meat tubes. Gourmet coffee and “cappuccino” machines that pour frothy French Vanilla and Caramel flavored hot drinks loaded with high-fructose corn syrup are available at stations with glossy images of crafted Starbuck’s-style drinks. There are generally two walls of coolers stocked with every known soft drink. They have a section for a dozen or so brands of beer ranging from the common American corporate brands to the so-called craft brews (all of which are owned and brewed by the corporate American brands). Row upon row of food-substances the origins of which are unknown and unknowable. Then you move to the microwavable food stations. Many of these service stations have now partnered with fast food chains so some sort of drive-through fare is also available. The entire panoply of consumer choice and consumer life are contained under these multi-purpose service stations designed to make your stop from the interstate as seamless and convenient as possible. Of course, the most important commodity on offer is gasoline: the blood that is the life of contemporary life.

Surrounding these service stations, stretching for miles in any direction, are fast food and restaurant chains of all types and varieties. The obvious McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, etc. are punctuated by the more elaborate fare found in Outback, Cracker Barrell, and Chilie’s. Food of every known kind can be obtained either in drive through or take out, or in the form of an actual dine-in experience with wait staff. Along with food, these thoroughfares will feature Target, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. Each of these big-box retail stores will anchor an entire strip of other retail stores such as Staples and Home Goods. Within these plazas there are also stores with shorter lives: Chinese and Indian take-out, used video game stores, Hallmark stores, Christian bookstores, etc. None of these last long, and each is replaced with something equally transient. Not only is the merchandise consumable and disposable, so are the retail outlets which provide the merchandise.

Nearly any exit off an American interstate will look like what I describe above. Each will be identical. The only changes will be local versions of the same thing—White Castle in the north turns into Krystal in the south. The local fare will reflect the regional identities to the extent that regional identities are easily identifiable across all regions. This is to say that a restaurant in Tennessee will offer something unique to the state of Tennessee only insofar as anyone from outside the region would be able to understand the image. “Hillbilly” will be packaged and marketed so that people from Maine, Minnesota, and California are not in any way mystified by the image of Tennessee. All big-box retail stores are the same in every state and region. Stand in a Target in Ohio and you are standing in the same Target as the one in Nevada. You are effectively in the same place since the place itself is as interchangeable and exchangeable as everything in the store.

Beyond the retail strip and restaurant chains, housing developments stretch off into the distances. Farmland may well still exist, but the developments of new housing will invariably stretch along or through the rural landscape. Each subdivision differs only in the most superficial ways. These are houses which are built in precisely the same way as all mass-produced commodities. Within each subdivision, all individual structures will be virtually identical, differing only in superficial details. These housing developments are arranged so as to create the illusion of a neighborhood. Streets arranged in rows or semi-circles all of which join a central street which is connected to the main artery of retail and commercial sprawl. The neighborhoods are generally named after local features such as trees and geological forms none of which can be seen since all of these things were removed to make way for the retail, restaurant, and housing complexes and sprawls which now occupy the terrain.

Some areas off the interstates are devoted primarily to commercial development. These consist mostly of information processing industries, transportation of goods and services, and corporate headquarters for companies which may still be in the business of manufacturing goods, but the actual manufacturing takes place miles away, often in different countries altogether. Shipping companies occupy large areas in order to facilitate the transfer and movement of consumer goods. Office parks occupy massive geographical areas with enormous parking lots. Surrounding all of the commercial plots are carefully landscaped grounds complete with circulating lakes and manicured greenspaces. The natural environment which once defined these areas, the rural landscapes and natural terrain were completely cleared and replaced by these artificial landscapes which give rise to an industry of landscaping and lawncare all to itself.

The images described above have overtaken the American landscape. Various regions of the country will differ according to the climate, but the basic layout of consumer life, commercial development, and suburban development will remain constant. There is no place that is significantly different than any other place. Place itself is interchangeable and exchangeable so that individual places no longer exist except insofar as places have been commodified and branded. Neighborhoods exist because land developers have named them as neighborhoods. Regional identities exist to the extent that they are marketable brands of regional identities. Individual places are unrecognizable, and the space between individual places exists only to be overcome with the greatest speed and convenience. Even the fundamental identity of the rural world and rural culture has been effaced by the encroachment of consumer life and suburban development. The only remnant of rural life is the brand of rural life found in Cracker Barrell where one can buy “farm-style” breakfast plates stuffed with every example of breakfast food imaginable. These feed people who sit in cars and work in offices and only walk as far as the front doors of their newly constructed pre-fab homes to their cars.

Although all of this development takes place within the domain of civic authority, the actual force of authority are the capitalist ventures which own the land and the points of consumption. This is to say that all actual power and authority remains squarely within the realm of capitalist ownership. Civil law and the concept of a civic arena are subordinate to the private ventures which fuel these forms of consumer developments and the consumer culture which drives the private ventures. It is a reciprocal system to the extent that individual demand drives corporate development and corporate development creates the space and conditions for consumer demand. This is a purely spectacular world, one which is driven by forms of authority which far exceed the civic domain. The cultural conditions of contemporary American terrain are defined by the capitalist drives which fuel consumer culture, and this finds its most extreme expression in landscape I have described above. As Debord explains:

At the core of these conditions we naturally find an authoritarian decision-making process that abstractly develops any environment into an environment of abstraction. The same architecture appears everywhere just as soon as industrialization begins. (The Society of the Spectacle, 122-123)

American geography has become an environment of abstraction. The Real—any idea of the Real—which may have once existed has been plowed under and replaced by abstract forms of geography designed entirely to facilitate a culture of pure consumption, a culture which produces nothing but consumption and waste. The lives of individuals who live in these regions are defined in terms of consumption and waste. All commodities lose value the moment they are purchased and must endlessly be renewed with new versions of the same thing. This is culture abstracted from material life and rendered entirely in the form of consumption.

Consumer capital is all there is, and virtually all of life is subsumed by consumer capital. Basic needs are provided through a diffuse network of supply which is so far removed from the sources of food, fuel, electricity, and water that all of these things appear to simply appear ex nihilo. The massive waste generated by this world is also removed and landfilled in regions largely cut-off from the lives and businesses which generate the waste. Once dumped, it no longer exists. The super-highway interstate system makes all of this possible. A vast system of interstates connects the entire country via a network of space which provides nothing but the means to move past it. The space of the interstate system is nothing but space to be overcome. The sole reason for its being is to pass it behind. The interstate system and the worlds which develop along their length and breadth are heterotopias, abstract spaces on which abstract lives are lived in relation to a world which grows ever more abstract. What is the highway but a space of abstraction in which “(t)he undifferentiated daily flow is punctuated only by the statistical, foreseen, and foreseeable series of accidents, about which THEY keep us all the better informed as we never see them with our own eyes—accidents which are never experienced as events, as deaths, but as a passing disruption whose every trace is erased within the hour” (This is Not a Program, 152). As the highway effaces all difference through its endless uniformity and totalizing program of mathematical planning and control, everything else becomes undifferentiated to the point that what marks one “thing” apart from another is lost. Accidents and real deaths are experienced only as transitory moments in which the ceaseless flow becomes momentarily interrupted. And as all space becomes continuous in a seamless flow of undifferentiated space, space itself is lost. Designed to facilitate the movement over distances, “the pure space of the highway captures the abstraction of all place more than all distance” (152). This “all place” is also the multiple “places” in which everyday life is now lived in the abstraction of space. Suburban sprawl is pure abstraction laid out in accordance with the abstraction of the highway.

The places which emerge at every exit and on-ramp off and onto the highway are completely interchangeable and exchangeable places. They are nothing but forms of abstract space. The housing developments are abstractions based on a flimsy reference to what once occupied actual places. Where there were farms, expanses of woodland, and even small towns, there are now abstractions of those places that bear metonymical links with what once marked those places as real. The woodland that was clear-cut and plowed under is replaced with a pre-fab development of completely indistinguishable housing units arranged in some geometric pattern and then named after a species of tree which once grew in the woodland. It may be named after a native American tribe wiped out centuries ago, and now the local school system takes its name. The lost Lakota Indians become Lakota High School and the people who live in this abstract no-place can find a point of identification with the linguistic representation of an idea no one knows anything about and suture that linguistic representation to a life which unfolds amid absolutely nothing but things to be consumed. Words and individual identities are evacuated of all meaning and re-filled with exchangeable meanings that can be traded along the interstate corridor of abstraction. Consumption is life, and life takes place in the abstract space of pure nullity.

All of life is “presided over in unmediated fashion by the requirements of consumption” (Debord, 123). What of the culture of this world? What emerges within this landscape of nullity is a new form of peasantry, one which is conditioned entirely by the logic of consumer society. Unlike the old peasantry in which natural ignorance was a function of an isolated world, the new peasantry is conditioned to their ignorance by a cultural logic which denies anything exterior to consumer culture. In this landscape of consumerism,

Natural ignorance has given way to the organized spectacle of error. The “new towns” [subdivisions] of technological pseudo-peasantry are the clearest indications, inscribed on the land, of the break with historical time on which they are founded: their motto might well be: “On this spot nothing will ever happen—and nothing ever has.” (124)

An organized spectacle of error is the inevitable result of a population who derive all knowledge of the world from the spectacle of the image and the mediation of the commodity. Nothing can be known except insofar as it is represented in a consumable form that is exchangeable with any other commodity. Therefore, knowledge itself is a commodity, and if it is not commodified knowledge, it is not knowledge. The break with historical time comes about, at least in part, from the ex nihilo fashion in which these communities spring up around consumer culture and consumer culture springs up around these communities. The process is one of expressive causality. One aspect of consumer life does not precede the other. The entire landscape and culture of the American landscape now simply appears on the horizon complete with everything I described above and much more. Any history of the regions which may have preceded the creation of the consumer landscape is denuded with the very land on which the spaces are built. Since this historical narrative is completely negated, any narrative of the existence of these regions is created from within the same cultural logic by which they come into being. Nothing ever happened here because everything happens exactly the same way every minute of every day. Nothing will ever happen here because everything that could happens is a reproduction of everything else that has ever happened. The term peasantry is perfect since what we see in the people whose lives are defined by these regions and the forms of culture which define these regions consists of a population which lives in total ignorance of what is beyond the society of the spectacle.

We are left with a geography of homogeneity and a population which mistakes this homogenous nullification of life for life itself. There are no spaces to be; only spaces to have…

Michael Templeton is an independent scholar, writer, and musician. He completed his Ph.D. in literary studies at Miami University of Ohio in 2005. He has published scholarly studies and written cultural analysis, creative non-fiction, and poetry published in small independent publications. He currently works as a freelance writer providing articles for a non-profit called the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. He is also the lead guitar player for the IdleAires, a communications service and information dissemination apparatus operating as a Rock n' Roll trio. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio with my wife who is an artist.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone           Books,1995.

The Invisible Committee. This is Not a Program. Tr. Joshua David Jordan. Cambridge:

Semiotext(e). 2011.

Dialectics of Hope

(Photo: Ekaterina Bykova/Shutterstock.com)

By Yanis Iqbal

The situation of the world is grim. Decades of neoliberalism - marked by the privatization of social life, deregulation of markets, increasing income inequality, labor flexploitation - has finally culminated in a politically regressive wave of right-wing resurgence. What we have now is “neoliberal fascism” - a new social formation in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of neoliberal capitalism with the fascist ideals of ultra - nationalism and racial supremacy. Thus, in contradiction with the Right’s populist discourse, brutal processes of surplus-value extraction still occur; it is just that they have been politically re-packed through the use of archaic religio-cultural symbols to whip up mass hysteria against manufactured enemies.

The rise of the Right reflects the relations of forces in today’s world. With the technocratization of the state and party as mere appendages of neoliberal regulation, the scope for alternatives within electoral competition was drastically reduced. This led to an inter-party consensus on neoliberal orthodoxy. In this way, parties were reduced to different shades of the same economic policy with slightly varying promissory propagandas. Electoral competition, therefore, was exponentially abridged to signify a process through which people could choose different parties, all geared towards imposing austerity packages. Aijaz Ahmad calls this phenomenon the emergence of “mature liberal democracy in the neoliberal age” in which competing parties “function as mere factions in a managing committee of the bourgeoisie as a whole”. 

In a context like this - characterized by a shift in the balance of forces within the state in favor of the bourgeoisie and the installation of “policies without politics” - many people on the Left are understandably pessimistic about the prospects for socialism. The primary question reverberating loudly through the terrain of struggle is this: what grounds do we have for continuing the hard labor of sustaining a revolutionary movement in highly adverse conditions? Insisting on the indispensable presence of hope is perceived as playing with fire. However, hope is what we need. Without hope, there is no possibility of sustained engagement in a revolutionary movement. Moreover, hope for a radical re-constitution of existing societal conditions is present in the very movements of capital. In other words, we need to discover the material determinations of hope in its present mode of existence as a hidden potentiality and turn it into actuality through conscious revolutionary action.

The Origins of Capitalism

A highly schematic look at the origins of capitalism helps us to ground hope in a material soil. The present system we have was not a result of the operation of quasi-supernatural forces. Rather, it was the outcome of a (continuing) conflict between the logic of capitalist accumulation and other logics stemming from the resistance of social forces that suffer the effects of such economic processes. The separation of the direct producer from the means of production, the consequent transformation of labor power into a commodity, and the concentration of the means of production in the hands of the buyer of labor power were the contingent results of concrete antagonisms and social struggles. The interpretation of capitalism as a social form composed of unstable conjunctions of domination and resistance is elaborated by Etienne Balibar in his preface to “Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities”.

In the preface, Balibar writes: “The capitalist division of labor has nothing to do with a complementarity of tasks, individuals and social groups: it leads rather…to the polarization of social formations into antagonistic classes whose interests are decreasingly ‘common’ ones. How is the unity (even the conflictual unity) of a society to be based on such a division? Perhaps we should then invert our interpretation of the Marxist thesis. Instead of representing the capitalist division of labor to ourselves as what founds or institutes human societies as relatively stable ‘collectivities’, should we not conceive this as what destroys them?... If this is so, the history of social formations would be not so much a history of non-commodity communities making the transition to market society or a society of generalized exchange (including the exchange of human labor-power) - the liberal or sociological representation which has been preserved in Marxism - as a history of the reactions of the complex of ‘non-economic’ social relations, which are the binding agent of a historical collectivity of individuals, to the de-structuring with which the expansion of the value form threatens them. It is these reactions which confer upon social history an aspect that is irreducible to the simple ‘logic’ of the extended reproduction of capital or even to a ‘strategic game’ among actors defined by the division of labor and the system of states.”

Insofar that class struggle has a primacy over classes, the structure of a mode of production is constituted by the antagonisms it contains, notably the systemic contradiction between the forces and relations of production, and the contradiction internal to the relations of production between exploiters and exploited i.e. social conflicts between classes generated by antagonistic relations of production. If we extrapolate from our understanding of capitalism’s origins as one unified not by the uniformity of its components, but through their contradiction, inconsistency, and incommensurability, we are given the following general statement about the motion of history: history is not the working out of some plan imprinted in the nature/essence of humans. It is the result of the struggles between different and opposed classes. These struggles are structurally conditioned, but history leaves their result open. There is no natural necessity which decides which class will be victorious.

Understanding Capitalist Society

As in the origins of capitalism, the workings of a capitalist society are also deeply cut by the friction and tensions of class struggle. Following the schema developed by Karl Marx in his book “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, we can say that a capitalist society is made up of the economic “base” and the ideological “superstructure”. It needs to be emphasized that the base-superstructure metaphor is only a heuristic device; the division of capitalist society into these two segments is only present at the analytical level. In reality, base and superstructure are inseparably intertwined; one can’t be conceptualized without the other. Can capitalism’s predatory mechanisms of exploitation survive in the absence of specific ideological codes that make human subjects accept that exploitation as being in the “nature of things”? The answer is in the negative.

The inextricable intertwinement of base and superstructure was also stressed by Marx through the conceptualization of the economy as an essentially social and historical entity, the unity of the social relations of production and the productive forces, rather than that of the technological conditions of material production. Thus, in Capital, Volume I, Marx shows how the technological development of the productive forces, rather than providing the motor for the growth of capitalism was a result of the emergence of capitalist social relations of production. The inter-imbricatedness of base and superstructure means that capitalist society is a complex totality comprising various relatively autonomous yet interrelated structural instances. The economy (which is ultimately determinant) exercises its effects indirectly, by determining the specific efficacy of other instances.

Insofar that the political and ideological instances are relatively autonomous from the economy, the formative influence exercised by the functional requirements of reproduction is neither simple nor unilateral; it is mediated by the complex, uneven and contradictory logic of the class struggle. Therefore, what we define as “structures”, namely relations that tend to be reproduced, materialized and interiorized, are also internally contradictory because of the effectivity of class antagonism and antagonistic social relations. In other words, the state and various politico-ideological apparatuses used for the reproduction of capitalism are “fields” (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term) of conflicts. In a field, agents and institutions constantly struggle, according to the regularities constitutive of this space. Those who dominate in a given field are in a position to make it function to their advantage, but they must always contend with the resistance and contentions of the dominated.

From what we have discussed so far, it is evident that a capitalist society is a social formation of conflicting, differential, and multilayered forces constantly in flux. Furthermore, the structure of society is immanent within that uneven balance of forces, rather than transcendent on them. There are no guarantees about any practice or variation in the formation. Changes in social formations over time develop unevenly through these forces, the movements of all the combined practices and articulations of practices. Rather than a transcendent or mechanical structure imposed upon individuals and groups, the social structure in this case is tightly contained within the practices individuals and groups enact. The structure emerges. There is thus no teleogy or supervening subject in history. This view of immanent change is opposed to an understanding of capitalist society as an “expressive totality”, which involves treating the different aspects of social life as expressions of some core or basic principle. The effect is reductionism: these different aspects possess no life and movement of their own, but merely exist as indices of their underlying essence.

Marx was in favor of an immanentist theory of change. In Vol. 3 of Capital, Marx wrote: “[in] the division of…social labour and the reciprocal complementarity or metabolism of its products, subjugation to and insertion into the social mechanism, is left to the accidental and reciprocally countervailing motives of the individual capitalist producers. Since these confront one another only as commodity owners, each trying to sell his commodity as dear as possible (and seeming to be governed only by caprice even in the regulation of production), the inner law operates only by way of their competition, their reciprocal pressure on one another, which is how divergences are mutually counterbalanced. It is only as an inner law, a blind natural force vis-à-vis the individual agents, that the law of value operates here and that the social balance of production is asserted in the midst of accidental fluctuations.” Here, we can observe that structural patterns emerge not because of external regulation or command but as the result of the operation of an inner law - an immanent process. General trends, historical tendencies and regularities are not solid, law-like phenomena; they are constituted and reproduced by the daily activities of human beings. Capitalism perpetuates its existence not due to self-sustaining structures but due to the contradictory unity of myriad class-rooted practices performed by living individuals.

Reclaiming Hope

Our discussion of the origins of capitalism and nature of capitalist society should make it clear that (1) capitalism is a historically specific totality, a result of class struggle; (2) a capitalist society is a structured whole consisting of the economic base and other quasi-autonomous yet interrelated levels, with the interaction between these elements generating the matrix of the social formation. The interaction is made possible by acting individuals who reproduce structures through recursive social practices. Both these conclusions are situated in a common problematic: they emphasize the fact that history is ultimately made by individuals.

The material determinations of hope derive from this fundamental fact. Since individuals create their own history, structures can’t be considered as unsurpassable obstacles. Structures are themselves the result of social practices. To overcome structures, critical consciousness needs to be combined with revolutionary action; the glue binding them together is hope. In the current conjuncture, hope needs to be reclaimed so that the struggle to achieve socialism can be revitalized. Once this is done, the political praxis of the Left will gain the ability to appropriately problematize our structural conditionedness and pierce through the open-ended nature of history.

Fascism, and How to Fight It

[PHOTO CREDIT: John Minchillo/AP]

By Peter Fousek

Both the name and the ideology of fascism originated in Italy in the early 20th century, where it arose as a spontaneous mass movement. It relied on a combination of large-scale, militant mobilization of working-class and middle-class people, with organization and financing provided by a wealthy elite. Its leader Benito Mussolini, having learned the power of popular discontent during his socialist days, was elevated to ruling status without any government background, in a time and place where such ascendancy was all but unheard-of.

The present Trumpist movement in the United States is analogous to this origin story of fascism. It is a movement relying on mass support, on a populist appeal to working and middle-class people who are terrified of losing an undue sense of social superiority, itself the product of longstanding practices of systemic racism and discrimination against marginalized minorities. Such practices of bigoted repression serve, more than anything else, to provide that angry and exploited demographic with an enemy based on racial sectarianism, such that they are convinced to direct their anger at the alien other designated thereby, rather than at their true exploiters and oppressors.

Those angry, white, working-class masses are the fuel of the fascist fire. They are not the directors but rather the foundation of the movement; the members of the society convinced that they stand to gain the most from the preservation of the present order. They are privileged by the longstanding system, kept complacent in the belief that they are not an exploited proletariat, but rather members of the ruling class. They are convinced of such a blatant lie (that is, their status as rulers, rather than their systemic privilege, which itself is quite real) only in being elevated above the marginalized minorities who they are told, quite falsely, are the enemy at fault for their own sufferings and shortcomings. In Italy, these masses of the privileged-oppressed were the landed peasantry and the petty-bourgeoisie. It does not take much imagination to locate them in the United States today.

In drawing this parallel, it is important to consider the underlying social and economic currents that lead to the rise of fascism, which provide its appeal as a popular movement. Broadly, fascism becomes possible only when the standard resources of an existing government prove unable to maintain the equilibrium of society. In such times, under such conditions, it is easy for a small contingent of the elite, acting as the agent of fascism, to inflame a group of people already in the throes of desperation on account of economic hardship and poverty within a world where they have been told over and over that their success, or lack thereof, is entirely up to them. When this proves false, when an elite few grow richer while they become more and more destitute, these masses need someone to blame. It is antithetical to the worldview that they have been taught, to consider their suffering a necessary byproduct of market fundamentalism, and it would be suicidal for them to consider it a personal failure.

As Hannah Arendt writes, “men in the midst of social disintegration and atomization will do anything to belong” (Origins of Totalitarianism). Due to their worldview of individualism, the belief that hard work alone necessarily begets success, the financial hardship they experience in times of economic instability (instability and hardship both necessary products of the “free market”) forces them to question their own value as they have come to understand it. Here we must remember that, however obvious it might seem that the exploitative economic system is at fault for their suffering, the ideology of that system forms the basis of their reality. To call that reality into question is a far more difficult task than to assign the blame to some other place or group, however imaginary the link may be. The ingenuity of the fascist is the ability to provide such a scapegoat, coupled with a promise of salvation through the fight against that designated “other”.

In Italy, fascism only filled this role because of the failure of their socialist movement at the time. In the years after the First World War, working-class revolutionaries took power over factories and gained political power, stagnating only due to a lack of organization and progression, and their abandonment by the social democrats. Subsequently, to keep their members out of direct conflict and combat, the worker’s movement made concession after concession, making way for an antithetical mass movement ready to promise ambitious goals and, more importantly, to project a sense of natural aristocracy. Mussolini succeeded by appealing to the historical glory of Rome, by associating his followers with that legendary state. Such an appeal came at the welcome cost of demonizing their enemies as lesser, in so doing providing to the in-group that sense of belonging and superiority that they had lost in the period of instability.

In the United States, Trumpism appeals to the revolutionary movement that founded the nation. We see a parallel appeal to that employed by Mussolini, in response to mirrored crises of economic origin, occurring simultaneously with disorganized left-populism. The noble struggle of the Left in this country, advocating for long-needed alterations to a repressive state apparatus rooted in the slaveholding origins of the nation and its exploitative economic tendencies, have been again and again abandoned by the supposed “left” establishment (Democrats), which exists blatantly as a neoliberal, center-right party dedicated to maintaining the status quo. On top of that abandonment, massive for-profit media machines foment division through overt and omnipotent identity politics, furthering the divides among factions of the working class along sectarian lines.

Thus, the clear and decisive rhetoric of the new American Right has been welcomed with open arms by many frustrated and alienated members of the working class. They have been drawn in by anti-establishment slogans and promises of radical change; worse still is how readily Trumpists have heralded temporary economic upswings (largely ones for which the Right is not responsible) as material evidence of the truth behind their claims. This temporary and false sense of material success is necessary for the fascist to come into power fully. Its mass-movement supporters act as a battering ram, thoroughly destroying political and social obstacles in its path. We have seen this in the Trumpist destruction of the Republican Party, the undermining of the rule of law, and the delegitimization of the most basic truths. A state’s transition to fascism does not mean that the state apparatus itself is dismantled or dissolved; instead, it means that the apparatus is transformed into a tool for the suppression of political opponents, and for the defense and propagation of its own ideology.

These trends have clearly been shockingly evident as products of the Trumpist movement. Trump has put 234 federal judges into office, hand-picked according to ideological leanings. He has appointed three Supreme Court justices, with his party taking unprecedented measures to push them through against popular mandate and in direct hypocrisy to their own procedural convictions. He carried out an unheard-of ten federal executions this year alone, while doling out 92 pardons to partisan criminals as personal favors. He has deployed police and military to violently suppress peaceful protesters, and attempted to enact education reform in order to force a rightist ideological curriculum on public school students; he has suppressed minority voters while actively engaging in the most devastating attempt in history to destroy the democratic processes of the United States. And now, in a final effort to achieve that end, he incited his followers to an act of insurrection, their dogmatic devotion (the direct result of the fascist appeals explained above) making them all too willing to attempt a violent overthrow of the government, for his sake.

All the while, he has used the tools of the state—the police, the military, the courts—to further his fascist ends. The state apparatus, with its own origins deeply intertwined with racist and classist repression, leapt to attack and suppress the marginalized and the left with neither prompt nor justification. With nearly one trillion dollars in federal defense spending (more than the next ten countries combined), and similarly outsized police expenditures dominating local budgets as well, the repressive state apparatuses of the military and police forces have been used abroad as agents of imperialism, and domestically to attack minorities and activists on the left. Nonetheless, when the Trumpist insurrection stormed the Capitol, these state forces all but ushered them in, alleging that they were overwhelmed by the rioters despite the vast resources at their disposal. That hypocrisy, far from accidental, is the foremost symptom of fascism; the willingness of the state to assent to the fascist mob indicates that this trend not only enabled Trump, but will outlive him.

The times of social crisis which facilitate the rise of fascism may alternately be moments of dramatic progressive upheaval. In order to achieve that greater end, though, the lower-middle and working class must unite in the direction of their own liberation. The fascist tendency will win when one contingent or sub-contingent shifts instead towards the Right. Considering the present right-wing terrorism and violence, we can no longer fail to actively address the threat illustrated by the results of the most recent election. Trump lost, yes, and his party lost the house and senate as well. Nonetheless, in the face of the greatest social and economic chaos this country has seen in modern times, nearly 11 million more voters felt compelled to keep Trump in office than had sought to elect him in 2016. The fascist trend is moving definitively upward, and while Trump is an incoherent and unstable loudmouth guided more by hatred and narcissism than any ideology, there are plenty of far more intelligent, ideologically driven, and capable politicians, pundits, and celebrities on the right, willing and able to step into the spotlight and turn an already devastating movement into something from which we will never recover.

But all hope is not lost! It is crucial, if we are to reach a better end, a brighter, just, and egalitarian future, rather than one of despair, that we recognize this fascist movement for what it is, and that we recognize the state apparatus that gave birth to it. We cannot return to the old status quo if we are to be redeemed. Its failings, which not only enabled this fascist Trumpism but made it inevitable, cannot be simply reformed. A system based on market fundamentalism is innately tied to an individualist ideology, to the fundamental belief that one’s prosperity is a reflection of one’s worth, and therefore that exploitation is justified along with obscene excess in the face of terrible poverty and starvation. Such a corrupt moral mandate makes an eventual breakdown unavoidable: the cavalier risks taken by financial institutions for the sake of their own gain will, as we have seen in the past decade, push the exploited masses to the point of demanding change. And the time for change, whether we want to accept it or not, has now arrived—that much is clear.

If we ask ourselves, then, what combination of circumstances can turn the working class towards progress rather than reactionary repression and division, we wouldn’t find a more favorable set of conditions than those facing the USA today: economic instability, vastly inflating the wealth of an increasingly marginal elite while over a fifth of our country goes hungry, the blatant state-sanctioned racism assailing people of color, the disintegration of the rule of law and of sociopolitical norms, the crisis of democratic republicanism made clear by the rise of Trump, and the self-exposure of the Democratic establishment as unwilling to enact radical change. These conditions will only continue to ripen as corporations trend towards legal monopolization, as financial interests dominate more and more of our “representative” politics, as automation eliminates jobs and the effects of climate change wreak more and more devastation and increase resource scarcity. If we, the Left, are to have any hope of winning out, then we must accept the inadequacy of our present party and state institutions to handle the current crises, much less those to come. That basic fact can no longer be denied. Once it has been accepted, we can begin to engage with alternatives that might work better, and to organize with the goal of enacting them. But we must act fast, with the exigency of a people fighting for their very survival, because the Right is well on its way to dragging us down the opposing path.

The Short, Tragic, and Instructive Life of Anarcho-Punk

By Jackson Albert Mann

“I don’t think that the politics of anarcho-punk had that much to do with anarchism anyway… more like militant liberalism.”[1]

This is how Ramsey Kanaan, ex-vocalist of the Scottish punk band Political Asylum and founder of left-wing publishing houses AK Press and PM Press, characterized the politics of anarcho-punk, the wave of anarchist punk rock bands that washed over the United Kingdom in the early 1980s. His reflection comes from the final section of Ian Glasper’s colossal anarcho-punk oral history, within which similar sentiments are expressed by many former anarcho-punk musicians. They are right to feel ambivalent. In the first years of Thatcher’s rule, anarcho-punk developed into a surprisingly dynamic politico-cultural movement. Yet, by the end of the decade the movement had disappeared just as quickly as it had emerged, leaving behind a few catchy hooks, some memorable graphic design, but virtually no coherent political culture. For all of its bluster about political commitment, anarcho-punk was a spectacular failure.

Reading through Glasper’s numerous interviews, one is tempted to locate the origins of anarcho-punk’s aimless demise within the movement itself. Indeed, this is what many participants, fans, and scholars believe. According to Punk graphic design scholar Ana Raposo, it was competing “claims for authenticity” within the movement that generated the “cliquey, insular, and negative” attitudes which led to its downfall.[2][3] I would argue, however, that anarcho-punk’s eventual anticlimactic decline was a symptom of something external to the movement; the dire position of left-wing politics in the 1980s UK. To dismiss anarcho-punk without a proper analysis of its full politico-historical context is to do the contemporary Left a great disservice. An exploration of the movement’s rise and collapse holds important lessons for socialist cultural activists now aiming to construct what William Harris recently called “working-class cultural institutions.”[4]

A Political Economic Perspective

Alastair Gordon is one of the very few punk scholars to have analyzed the anarcho-punk movement from a political-economic perspective. In his short monograph on legendary anarcho-punk band Crass, Gordon proposes that the historical material foundation of anarcho-punk’s emergence was the UK’s rising youth unemployment rate combined with the effects of the country’s still comparatively generous welfare state.[5] At the turn of the decade, the UK unemployment rate doubled from six to about thirteen percent and remained around this level until 1987.[6] Lack of jobs created a state of enforced idleness for tens of thousands of young people and due to the welfare state’s material support, they had no compelling reason to protest or change their condition. This produced a social environment in which large numbers of youth began to pursue full-time their interests in a whole host of cultural activities, including music-making. It was this free time and disposable income, more than anything else, that formed the foundation of anarcho-punk’s most compelling structural feature; its economic independence from the UK music industry. Accordingly, the nature of anarcho-punk’s opposition to the music industry went far beyond the rhetorically subversive gestures of its first-wave predecessors such as the Sex Pistols or the Clash, who were branded as sell-outs by anarcho-punks for signing major label deals.

The early 1980s saw an explosion of anarchist-flavored independent, often band-run record labels, venues, and recording studios, as well numerous band- and fan-edited magazines. Punk scholars are correct to attribute much of the impetus for this explosion to Crass. Using the financial resources they gained from their unexpectedly successful 1978 debut album, Feeding of the 5000, the band established their own record label and press at Dial House, an informal artist colony and collective living space north of London, which drummer Penny Rimbaud had been running for almost a decade. It goes without saying that Crass’ do-it-yourself approach to cultural production was an inspiration to many young people in the UK. But, what made the early 1980s unique was the material reality of mass youth unemployment. It was these conditions that allowed the widespread replication of the Crass model by hundreds of young Punk musicians.

Indeed, Crass Records became merely the first in a vast patronage network of loosely-affiliated band-run record labels independent of the music industry proper. Anarcho-punk groups such as Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians, The Mob, Poison Girls, and Chumbawamba, all of which got their start on Crass, went on to form their own labels. Despite the excessive amount of ink that has been spilled to interrogate anarcho-punk’s subversive aesthetics, it was the sustained economic independence of this expanding patronage network that was the truly defining feature of anarcho-punk as an oppositional politico-cultural movement. The movement’s emphasis on its structural-economic autonomy and hostility to the capitalist music industry as the primary elements of its authenticity were in fact its most salient connections to anarchist ideologies, resembling a form of cultural syndicalism. These were advantageous conditions for an emerging oppositional movement of politically committed musicians. So why did nothing much come of anarcho-punk?

The Patronage Network Needs a Patron

In a recent article I co-authored with art historian Patricia Manos on Nueva Canción Chilena, the political folk music revival that swept Chile during Salvador Allende’s tumultuous socialist administration, I claim that for a politically committed culture to blossom, it must be actively mobilized by political groups.[7] In the case of Nueva Canción Chilena, a musical movement that already possessed a certain level of internal organization was actively courted, supported, and finally incorporated into the structure of the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) and later on, into Allende’s Unidad Popular (UP) socialist coalition government. In both instances this was done through the establishment of political record labels run semi-autonomously by members of socialist and Communist youth organizations.

Anarcho-punk emerged in very different circumstances. The early 1980s were a disastrous moment for left-wing politics in the UK and no militant left-wing organization capable of courting, supporting, and absorbing this wave of young, politically committed musicians existed. The Labour Party, never a bastion of radical leftism, was, nevertheless, entering the first years of a decades-long crisis, a catastrophic period during which the Party was thoroughly neoliberalized by a hegemonic, Thatcherist Toryism. Despite this, individual anarcho-punk musicians and bands did attempt to forge formal connections with issue-based political organizations such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and numerous anti-fascist and anarchist splinter groups. However, these organizations found themselves in a similar position to anarcho-punk: that is, the lack of an ascendant progressive movement left them atomized, often ineffective, and in no position to be the patrons of a nationwide cultural movement.

Attempts were made to mobilize the anarcho-punk movement for political action independent of organizations. Working through the structure of environmentalist NGO Greenpeace’s London office, a coalition of anarcho-punk musicians and fans organized the Stop The City (STC) protest of September 29th, 1983, during which several thousand activists occupied London’s financial district and severely impacted its normal operations. A second STC took place on March 29th, 1984. Notably, while a large trade union demonstration in support of the 1984 Miners’ Strike was held in London on the same day, no effort was made to integrate the two events. Punk scholar Rich Cross believes that anarcho-punk’s inability to develop a meaningful relationship with a trade union movement in the midst of a historic strike “highlighted not only the weaknesses in the culture’s ability to broker alliances, but also… its lack of interest [in] a wider common cause.”[8]

A Lesson In Tragedy

Cross may be right that by 1984 anarcho-punk musicians' interest in building coalitions with left-wing organizations was waning rapidly. A deeper analysis, however, reveals this developing apathy as a consequence of external factors. It was the declining UK Left’s inability to court this musical movement, a clear expression of general political, economic, and cultural discontent within the mass of young people, that led to anarcho-punk’s inward turn. Without the patronage and momentum of an ascendant Left, anarcho-punk became an insular world and its most negative aspects, such as competing claims of ideological purity, fracturing cliques, and anti-political apathy, became its defining features.

Reduced to its angry rhetoric and subversive aesthetic, anarcho-punk may appear as a utopian farce, in which masses of idealistic youths screamed truth to power over crunching chords and pounding drums, but took little interest in real political action. In context, however, the anarcho-punk movement represents something very different; a cultural expression of mass discontent emerging just as the political forces necessary for its development were entering full retreat. Anarcho-punk’s very lack of direction constitutes yet another profound tragedy that took place during a period of British history already filled with bitter setbacks for the working class. In the dark Thatcherist years following the National Union of Mineworkers’ devastating defeat in the 1984 strike, anarcho-punk’s cohesion as a unified politico-cultural movement disintegrated, and what could have been the soundtrack of a heroic left-wing resurgence became the last thing the British working class heard before lapsing into a decades-long neoliberal coma.

Notes

[1] Ian Glasper, The Day The Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980-1984 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014), 446.

[2] Ana Raposo, “Rival Tribal Rebel Revel: The Anarcho-Punk Movement and Sub-cultural Internecine Rivalries,” in The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music. Edited by Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (New York, NY: Minor Compositions, 2016), 89.

[3] Glasper, The Day The Country Died, 410.

[4] William Harris, “Why We Need Working-Class Cultural Institutions,” Jacobin Magazine, July 18th, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/social-poetics-working-class-culture.

[5] Alastair Gordon, Crass Reflections (London, UK: Active Distribution, 2016), 89-90.

[6] James Denman and Paul McDonald. “Unemployment Statistics from 1881 to the Present Day.” Labor Market Trends 104, no. 15-18 (Winter 1996).

[7] Jackson Albert Mann and Patricia Manos, “The Case for a Culture International: Learning from the 20th Century Latin American Left,” Socialist Forum 2, no. 1 (Winter 2020).

[8] Rich Cross, “‘Stop The City Showed Another Possibility’: Mobilization and Movement in Anarcho-Punk,” in The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music. Edited by Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (New York, NY: Minor Compositions, 2016), 143.

Further Reading

Berger, George. The Story of Crass. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009.

Beastly, Russ; Binns, Rebecca. “The Evolution of an Anarcho-Punk Narrative, 1978-1984.” In Ripped, Torn, and Cut: Pop, Politics, and Punk Fanzines from 1976. Edited by the Subcultures Network, 129-149. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018.

Cross, Rich. “‘There Is No Authority But Yourself’: The Individual and the Collective in British Anarcho-Punk.” Music & Politics 4, no. 2 (Summer 2010).

Donaghey, Jim. “Bakunin Brand Vodka: An Exploration in the Anarchist-punk and Punk-anarchism.” Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 1 (2013): 138-170.

Gosling, Tim. “‘Not For Sale’: The Underground Network of Anarcho-Punk.” In Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Edited by Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, 168-183. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.

Ignorant, Steve; Pottinger, Steve. The Rest Is Propaganda. London, UK: Southern Records, 2010.

Lake, Steve. Zounds Demystified. London, UK: Active Distribution Publishers, 2013.

Robb, John. Punk Rock: An Oral History. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012.

Rimbaud, Penny. Shibboleth: My Revolting Life. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998.

Rimbaud, Penny. The Diamond Signature & The Death of Imagination. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1999.

Rimbaud, Penny. The Last of the Hippies. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015.

Savage, John. England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London, UK: Faber & Faber, 1991.