Why Western Marxism Misunderstands China’s Usage of Markets

By Carlos Garrido

I have elsewhere argued that at the core of Western Marxism’s[1] flawed analysis of socialist states lies a “purity fetish” which is grounded in a Parmenidean fixation of the ‘true’ as the one, pure, and unchanging. For this disorder, so I have contended, the only cure is dialectics. With the aid of Roland Boer’s prodigious new text Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, I wish to show how this purity fetish, or, in its negative formulation, how this lack of dialectical thinking, emerges in Western Marxists’ analysis of China’s usage of markets.

In V.I. Lenin’s ‘Conspectus to Hegel’s Science of logic’ he states that,

It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx![2]

For anyone familiar with G.W.F. Hegel’s 700+ page arguably impenetrable monster this daunting task alone seems harder than making a revolution. However, the central message in Lenin’s audacious statement is this: without a proper understanding of the dialectical method, Marxism is bound to be misunderstood. A century later and still, Western Marxists struggle to understand Marx. The paradox is this: “Western Marxists, although claiming to be the ones who rekindle the spirit of Hegel into Marxism, are the least bit dialectical when it comes to analysis of the concrete world.” This is lucidly seen in their treatment of China’s usage of markets, where they dogmatically accept Ludwig von Mises’ stale binary which states  – “the alternative is still either Socialism or a market economy.”[3]

As Boer highlights, already in Capital Vol 3 (specifically chapter 36 on “Pre-Capitalist Relations”) Marx shows how markets existed in the slave economies of the ancient world, e.g., Rome and Greece, and in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. Were the markets in each of these historical periods the same? Were they commensurable to how markets exist under capitalism? No, as Boer states “market economies may appear to be similar, but it is both the arrangement of the parts in relation to each other and the overall purpose or function of the market economy in question that indicates significant differences between them.”[4] As Boer points out, Chinese scholars, following the analysis of Marx’s Capital Vol 3, understand that “market economies have existed throughout human history and constitute one of the significant creations by human societies.”[5][6] If markets, then, predate the capitalist mode of production, why would a socialist mode of production not be able to utilize them?

Chinese Marxism, following upon the tradition of Eastern European socialism, was able to ‘de-link’ markets from capitalism and utilize them as a method (fangfa) and means (shouduan) to serve (fuwu) the ends of socialism, that is, to liberate the forces of production and guarantee collective flourishing.[7] If the last four decades – wherein China has drastically raised its population’s living standards and lifted 800 million out of poverty – has taught us anything, it is that China’s usage of markets as a shouduan to fuwu socialism works.

Considering the plethora of advances China has been able to make for its population and the global movement for socialism, why have Western Marxist continuously insisted that China’s market reforms are a betrayal of socialism and a deviation down the ‘capitalist road’? Unlike some of the other Western misunderstandings of China, this one isn’t merely a case of yixi jiezhong, of “using Western frameworks or categories to understand China,”[8] for, if the dialectical framework and categories the Marxist tradition inherits from Hegel were properly applied, there would be no misunderstanding here. Instead, it is precisely the absence of this dialectical framework which leads to the categorical mistakes.

In Hegel, but formulated clearer in Engels and Lenin, we come to know that universals are empty if not immanently negated by its particular (and individual) determinate form.[9] Since markets have existed throughout various modes of production, within the dialectic of universal, particular, and singular, markets stand as the universal term. Markets, Boer argues, as a “specific building block or component of a larger system” are a “universal institutional form” (tizhi), which can only be brought into concrete existence via a particular socio-economic system (zhidu).[10] When the particular zhidu through which the universal institutional form of a market comes into existence is a “basic socialist system” (shehuizhuyi jiben zhidu), the fundamental nature of how the tizhi functions will be different to how that tizhi functioned under the particular zhidu of slave, feudal, and capitalist modes of production. In short, as Huang Nansen said, “there is no market economy institutional form that is independent of the basic economic system of society.”[11]

As was the case with the planned institutional form in the first few decades of the revolution, the market institutional form has been able to play its part in liberating the productive forces and drastically raising the living standards of the Chinese people. However, because 1) China took this creative leap of grounding the market institutional form in socialism, and because 2) Western Marxists retain an anti-dialectical purity fetish for the planned institutional form, 3) the usage of markets in China is taken as a desecration of their Western Marxist pseudo-Platonic socialist ideal. It is ultimately a categorical mistake to see the usage of markets as ‘taking the capitalist road’ or as a ‘betrayal of the revolution.’ It is, in essence, a bemusing of the universal for the particular, of the institutional form for the socio-economic system. As Boer asserts, “to confuse a market economy with a capitalist system entails a confusion between commonality and particularity.”[12]

At a time when US aggression against China is moving the world into a new cold war,[13] these theoretical lapses carry an existential weight. The world cannot afford any more categorical mistakes which set the ground for an imperialist centered ‘left-wing’ critique of China. These, as has been seen in the past, merely give the state department’s imperialist narrative a socialist gloss.

Instead, it is time for the global left, and specifically the hesitant western left, to get behind China and its efforts to promote peace and international cooperation. The western left must stop being duped by propaganda aimed at weaponizing their sentiments to manufacture consent for a war that will only bring havoc and an unaffordable delay to the ingenious forms of global collaboration necessary to deal with the environmental crisis. It is the duty of every peace-loving individual to counter the US’ and former western colonial countries’ increasingly pugnacious discourse and actions against China. We must not allow the defense of their imperialist unipolarity to bring about any more death and suffering than what it already has.

Notes

[1] By Western Marxism I am referring specifically to a broad current in Marxism that comes about a quarter into the last century as a rejection of the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism. It is today, the dominant form of ‘Marxism’ in western academia. It encapsulates everything from the Frankfurt school, the French Marxists of the 60s-70s, the New Left, and the forms of Marxism Humanism that arise alongside these. Often, they phrase their projects as a Marxism that ‘returns to its Hegelian roots’, centering the Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and reading the mature Marx only in light of the projects of the younger Marx. Some of the main theorists today include Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Kevin Anderson etc. Although it might be tempting to just refer to this block as ‘Non-Marxist-Leninist Marxists’, I would urge against doing so, for there are many Marxist currents in the global south which, although drinking from the fountain of Marxism-Leninism, do not explicitly consider themselves Marxist-Leninists and yet do not fall into the same “purity fetish” Western Marxists do. It is important to note that a critique of their “purity fetish” does not mean I think their work is useless and shouldn’t be read. On the contrary, they have been able to make great theoretical advancements in the Marxists tradition. However, their consistent failure to support socialist projects must be critiqued and rectified.

[2] V.I. Lenin. Collected Works Vol 38. (Progress Publishers, 1976)., pp. 180.

[3] Ludwig von Mises. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. (Jonathan Cape, 1936)., pp. 142.

[4] Roland Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. (Springer, 2021)., pp. 119.

[5] Ibid.

[6] It is also important to note that this realization is common knowledge in economic anthropology since the 1944 publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, where, while holding that “there is hardly an anthropological or sociological assumption contained in the philosophy of economic liberalism that has not been refuted,” nonetheless argues markets have predated the capitalist mode of production, albeit usually existing inter, as opposed to intra, communally. Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation. (Beacon Press, 1957)., pp. 269-277.

[7] Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics., pp. 118.

[8] Ibid., pp. 13.

[9] For Hegel the individual is also a determinate universal – “the particular, because it is only the determinate universal, is also an individual, and conversely the individual, because it is the determinate universal, is just as much a particular.” G.W.F. Hegel. The Science of Logic. § 1343.

[10] Boer. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics., pp. 122-3.

[11] Ibid., pp. 124. Quoted from: Huang, Nansen. 1994. Shehuizhuyi shichang jingji lilun de zhexue jichu. Makesizhuyi yu xianshi 1994 (11): 1–6.

[12] Ibid., pp. 124.

[13] Although with the emergence of AUKUS a warm one does not seem unlikely.

Gentrification as Settler-Colonialism: Urban Resistance Against Urban Colonization

[Photo from Mike Maguire / Flickr]

By John Kamaal Sunjata

Gentrification is a ubiquitous phenomenon of political economy across the United States. Residential displacement, socioeconomic exclusion, political instability, homelessness, spatial transformation, and racial segregation coincide with the marked rapidity of the gentrification (Filion 1991, Atkinson 2002, Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008, Brown-Saracino 2010, Thörn 2012, Novy and Colomb 2013, Kohn 2013, Marcuse 2015, Domaradzka 2018). Local governments have appeared too impotent to mitigate the worsening effects that gentrification has on marginalized communities as urban landscapes continue their dramatic shifts and political struggles intensify within urban centers. In the era of increased fiscal austerity and decreased fiscal activism, local governments are better equipped to expand gentrification processes than contract them. This presents a puzzle for residents, organizers, and urban decision-makers alike about how to approach gentrification, especially when there are competing socioeconomic objectives.

This paper addresses the following questions: how do we contextualize gentrification as a political phenomenon? What are some of the political challenges that gentrification could present to cities? How have urban decision-makers responded to gentrification? How does gentrification contribute to what is happening on the ground from an urban resistance standpoint? This paper argues from a Marxist framework that gentrification (a) presents racialized challenges of density, diversity, and inequality; (b) urban decision-makers have largely responded by expanding gentrification efforts; and (c) gentrification itself may antagonize urban resistance movements. This argument follows from conducting case studies of Detroit and Brooklyn, where gentrification efforts and anti-gentrification movements have been observed and documented.

Three key findings emerge from the analysis. First, the process of gentrification starts with the racialization of a city’s inhabitants (read: the justification of their displacement) through patently white supremacist framing (Zukin, 2010; Quizar, 2019). Second, gentrification produces patently racialized outcomes for non-white people (Fullilove, 2001). Third, the dilemma of gentrification as a political process and the lack of meaningful urban policy responses to gentrification from local governments has given rise to urban anti-gentrification resistance movements. This paper has four sections. This first section discusses gentrification as a political process. The second section discusses urban resistance to gentrification. The third section analyzes the cases of Detroit and New York as sites of gentrification and anti-gentrification resistance. The fourth section concludes.

Gentrification as a political process

Gentrification defined

As an aspect of political economy, gentrification has been described and empirically examined by various scholars. Neil Smith has described gentrification as “the process by which poor and working-class neighborhoods in the inner city are refurbished by an influx of private capital and middle-class home buyers and renters” (Smith, 1996). Smith identifies the “rent gap,” a cycle of disinvestment and devalorization that establishes poor neighborhoods as sites of profitability, as a key factor in gentrification (Smith, 1987). Ipsita Chatterjee succinctly describes gentrification as “the theft of space from labor and its conversion into spaces of profit” (Chatterjee, 2014).

Gina Pérez comprehensively describes gentrification thusly:

…[A]n economic and social process whereby private capital (real estate firms, developers) and individual homeowners and renters reinvest in fiscally neglected neighborhoods through housing rehabilitation, loft conversions, and the construction of new housing stock. Unlike urban renewal, gentrification is a gradual process, occurring one building or block at a time. It also gradually displaces by increasing rents and raising property taxes (Pérez, 2002).

The previous scholars present valuable insights for what is a manifold political process with racial, economic, cultural, and spatial implications. This paper will rely on Samuel Stein’s definition of gentrification: “…[T]he process by which capital is reinvested in urban neighborhoods, and poorer residents and their cultural products are displaced and replaced by richer people and their preferred aesthetics and amenities” (Stein, 2019). Some have described gentrification as a net positive: it increases the number of affluent and educated persons, leading to a wealthier tax base, increased consumption of goods and services, and broader support for democratic political processes (Byrne, 2002). Others have posited that gentrification (namely, “residential concentration”) can have a beneficial effect but primarily for more educated groups (Cutler, Glaeser, & Vigdor, 2007), and may create job opportunities for the lower income residents, raise property values, enhance tax revenues, which could lead to improved social services via the wealthier tax base (Vigdor, Massey, & Rivlin, 2002). However, most of the literature points to gentrification as a net negative (Filion, 1991; Atkinson, 2002; Newman & Ashton, 2004; Lees, Slater, & Wyly, 2008; Shaw, 2008; Zukin, 2010; Brown-Saracino, 2010; Goetz, 2011).

Gentrification, as a multidimensional process, develops through some combination of three forms of “upgrading,” or renovation: economic (up-pricing), physical (redevelopment), and social (upscaling) (Marcuse, 2015). Up-pricing is the increased economic value of a neighborhood, namely the land it sits on.  Redevelopment, with respect to gentrification, is primarily a private undertaking (Marcuse, 2015). Upscaling refers to the pivot toward more affluent and educated people (Zukin, 2010). Within the United States context, “upgrades” take on a particularly racialized dynamic (Fullilove, 2001). These upgrades are led by capital employing racial segregation to secure private development (Stein, 2019).

Land is a key factor of gentrification

Land was a critical motivating factor for early American settlement (Campbell, 1959). Under a regime of racial capitalism,[1] land is a key factor in realizing both use and exchange values. Land is a both a “precondition for all commodities’ production and circulation, and a strange sort of commodity in and of itself” (Stein, 2019). Unlike other tradable or otherwise transportable commodities, land is a “fictitious form of capital that derives from expectations of future rents” (Harvey, 2013). Future rents are highly susceptible to demand- and supply-side pressures; therefore, the political economy cannot function without land prices and land markets for coordination. In treating land as a purely financial asset—an open field—for interest-bearing capital, it facilitates the circulation of anticipated surplus value production, bought, and sold according to the rent it yields (Harvey, 2018). The central contradiction of land under racial capitalism is its dual function as a collective good and commodity; a contradictory role as a site of social occupation and private ownership (Foglesong, 1986). It is on urban decision-makers to “reconcile” this contradiction for the capitalists [2] and workers. It is on the urban decision-maker to create the conditions wherein (1) capitalists can turn a profit; (2) labor power is reproduced; (3) infrastructure is maintained; and (4) basic welfare is ensured (Foglesong, 1986; Stein, 2019). The restructuring and redefinition of territorial foundations is central to the functioning private property regimes.

Private property generates dispossession

Private property [3] ownership exists at the nexus of racial capitalism. Robert Nichols argues that the “system of landed property” was fundamentally predicated on violent, legalized dispossession (particularly of Indigenous people) (Nichols, 2020). Racial capitalism reflects the “the social, cultural, political, and ideological complexes of European feudalisms” (Robinson, 2000) and institutionalizes a (colonial) regime of private property protection on that basis. Theft is generated as a recursive mechanism and “[r]ecursive dispossession is effectively a form of property-generating theft” (Burden-Stelly, 2020; Nichols, 2020). The institution of private property (especially and specifically in areas with Black people) manifests as a disjunction between the community’s use value and the exchange value of property (Pérez, 2004). Racial capitalism reproduces itself and a racist order through a series of supposedly race-neutral policies (Stein, 2019). In fact, race-neutral policies have been used to both “discredit and rationalize practices that perpetuate racial stratification” (Siegel, 2000). Modern American history has proven that racism can “coexist happily with formal commitments to objectivity, neutrality, and colorblindness” (Harris A. P., 1994).

Dispossession is justified by racialization

White supremacy is an underacknowledged political theory that articulates and structures the American polity. Even the origins of property rights within the United States are rooted in racial domination (Harris C. , 1993). It was the interaction of race and property that played a critical role in racially and economically subordinating Black and Indigenous people (Harris C. , 1993). Whiteness, as a historized social and legal construct, marks power and domination (Mumm, 2017), Blackness represents powerlessness, enslavement, and dispossession. Whiteness has, in various spaces, been “deployed as identity, status, and property, sometimes singularly, sometimes in tandem” (Harris C. , 1993). Whiteness is valorized and property ownership is an expression of whiteness; thus, property ownership is conflated with (white) personhood under racial capitalism (Safransky, 2014). Whiteness functions for racial exclusion (Harris C. , 1993) and capital advancement (Roediger, 2005). Racism is a feature of white supremacy and “its practitioners exploit and renew fatal power-difference couplings” (Gilmore, 2002). Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described racism as the “practice of abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories” (Bhandar & Toscano, 2015). It limits the life prospects of people it racializes, disproportionately burdens them with the costs of a “monetized and profit-driven world” while politically dislocating them from “the variable levers of power” that may well alleviate such burdens (Gilmore, 2002).

Racialized persons, especially Black people, confront the dual designations of superhumanity and subhumanity through their livelihoods. It is white supremacy that supports the synthesis of white domination through racial capitalism, across political, economic, and cultural geography. Black people are “fungible” in that they are commodifiable, their “captive [bodies]…vessel[s] for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others” (Hartman, 1997). Black lives do not matter, the ways in which Black people’s bodies can serve white interests; however, matter a great deal. The settler-colonial logic of elimination and the white supremacist logic of Black fungibility converge around the question of gentrification (Quizar, 2019). The spatialization of race and the racialization of space is critical to the settler-colonial logic embedded in racial capitalism and the processes of gentrification (Safransky, 2014). Gentrification comes from a refusal of the would-be settlers to allow inconvenient, often racialized, inhabitants to prevent them from occupying a desired region. Therefore, much gentrification can be thought of as a “contestation of blacks and whites for urban space” (Vigdor, Massey, & Rivlin, 2002).

Urban Resistance to Gentrification

Gentrification has led to the demoralization of the people most directly affected (Chernoff, 2010). The consolidation of racialized class inequalities via accumulation through dispossession often emerges from the processes of gentrification (Harvey, 2008; Casgrain & Janoschka, 2013). It has also inspired anti-gentrification activism in response to the uncomfortable political economic pressures (Castells, 1983; Harvey, 2008; Kirkland, 2008; Zukin, 2009; Creasap, 2012). This activism often includes broad coalitions, across various heterogeneous groups and networks, united under common objectives that may apply to a variety of concrete challenges such as density, diversity, and inequality (Novy & Colomb, 2013; Domaradzka, 2018).

Urban resistance to gentrification has manifested as residents demanding a “right to the city,” wherein they attempt to assert their self-determination and autonomy by controlling their urban environment (Portalious, 2007; Pruijt, 2007). At various times and spaces, movements, organizers, and community-based groups may employ confrontation–resistance (insurrectionary/revolutionary) strategies against the state or participation–cooperation (reformist/counterrevolutionary) strategies with the state (Hackworth, 2002; Novy & Colomb, 2013). Tactics of urban resistance may include but are not limited to “the occupation of empty houses, demonstrations in favor of urban infrastructure, spontaneous celebrations, the rejection of zoning, demands concerning leisure, issues related to participation, self-management and alternative ways of everyday life” (Portalious, 2007). Any expression of urban resistance may provoke a response (or non-response) from the presiding local governing body .

There is a creative tension that exists between confrontation and cooperation strategies; some of the contradictions are antagonistic and some are non-antagonistic. The confrontation–resistance actors tend to be radical or anti-capitalist and favor insurrectionary/revolutionary postures with the local governing body, whereas the participation–cooperation actors favor a “reformed” capitalist system and dialogue with the local governing body (Novy & Colomb, 2013). Under the regime of racial capitalism, local governments prioritize and support the displacer class. This may intensify local struggles and heighten the socioeconomic contradictions. The power imbalance engenders conflict between the classes of displacers and the displacees. The city becomes a contested object “both for powerful groups and the grassroots” (Portalious, 2007). This contestation creates sociopolitical spaces for movements to confront gentrification as a force that operates for the benefit of the elites. For racialized subjects, resistance to gentrification may take on decolonial dimensions.

The Cases of Detroit and Brooklyn

The United States has a long legacy of dispossessing poorer people of adequate housing stock through racist urban planning and housing policy (Moskowitz, 2017; Stein, 2019). Gentrification relies upon legal, logistical, infrastructural, and technological capacities developed, maintained, and reproduced by the repressive and ideological state apparatuses of racial capitalism (Althusser, 2014; Stein, 2019). Local governments are structurally ordered to establish the spatial order (Stein, 2019); therefore, if the state is ordered under racial capitalism, the governing body must maintain and expand that system. Gentrification relies on severe urban divestment, which over time, creates “gentrifiable” building stock, or dirt-cheap real estate. This creates the incentive for urban reinvestment (Moskowitz, 2017; Stein, 2019). The history of American urban planning, operating under the logics of white supremacy and racial capitalism, is the purposeful spatial concentration of Black people and their subsequent divestment (Moskowitz, 2017). Few places exemplify the cycles of urban disinvestment–reinvestment like Detroit and Brooklyn. In both places, urban decision-makers have responded to the challenges of gentrification by gentrifying further.

Detroit as a site of gentrification and urban resistance

The post-World War II economic boom brought tens of thousands of Black people to Detroit where they sought economic opportunities in the industrial sphere (Moskowitz, 2017; Mallach, 2018). Detroit’s black population was 6,000 in 1910, 41,000 in 1920, 120,000 by the eve of the Great Depression, 149,000 in 1940, and 660,000 by 1970 (Mallach, 2018). The growth in the Black population coincided with white flight (Mallach, 2018): the city’s white population declined from 84 percent in 1950 to 54 percent in 1970 (Doucet, 2020). From the 1960s through the 1980s, Black families moved into the parts of Detroit vacated by former white residents (Mallach, 2018). As deindustrialization took hold, a (further) segregated landscape developed with the economic burdens falling disproportionately on Black people (Safransky, 2014). The Detroit debt crisis, along with the subprime lending crisis through “reverse redlining,” the Global Financial crisis, and fiscal austerity devastated Detroit’s inner urban core (Safransky, 2014; Mallach, 2018). Property prices rose steadily and home sales rose dramatically before culminating into a real-estate crash (Mallach, 2018). Sarah Safransky writes the following (Safransky, 2014):

In March 2014, the city began an unprecedented process of declaring bankruptcy. This decision followed Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s order that Detroit be placed under emergency management. Detroit is one of six cities in the state (all with predominantly black populations) that Snyder has deemed to be in financial crisis. Emergency managers – who are unelected – are tasked with balancing cities’ revenue and expenditure and are granted sweeping powers to do so. They nullify the power of elected officials and assume control of not just city finances but all city affairs, meaning they can break union contracts, privatize public land and resources, and outsource the management of public services (Peck, 2012, 2013).

By 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau reported the Black population at about 526,644 (79 percent) and the white population at about 97,825 (15 percent) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). When Detroit cratered, a space for gentrification opened. Detroit was described as a “New American Frontier” (Renn, 2011) and the incoming, usually white, residents were described as “urban pioneers” settling into “urban homesteads” (Quizar, 2019). For decades, the imagery around Detroit—the Blackest large city in the United States—centered around decaying abandoned architecture—the implication being “emptiness” and “vacancy” (Doucet, 2020).

Whiteness, in the Detroit context, acts as a tool to invisibilize Black residents, delegitimize their rights to spatially occupy political, economic, and cultural geography, and advance capital. Now that white people are resettling the city they had once abandoned, Detroit is making a “comeback” and it is the “New Brooklyn” (Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). White people’s presence—along with their advanced buying power and aesthetic choices—confers “legitimacy.” It is white people who are “saving” Detroit from the failures of Black leadership and Black underproductivity (Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). The majority Black population is devalorized (or dehumanized) in favor of the “empty” urban landscape in the “empty” city they occupy (Safransky, 2014; Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). L. Brooks Patterson, the county executive of Oakland County, was asked by The New Yorker what should be done about Detroit’s financial woes. He answered, saying, “What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn” (Quizar, 2019). The logic of elimination and Black fungibility are present even in the words and actions of one of the premier urban decision-makers. The racialization of Black Detroiters and the genocidal framing facilitates the processes of gentrification: accumulation through dispossession.

There is a long history of Black Detroiters engaging in political struggle, including ground-level mobilizations that connect America’s history of settler-colonialism with anti-Black racism, as manifested in Detroit’s patterns of gentrification (Quizar, 2019). Detroit’s Black neighborhoods have been described by anti-gentrification activists as “colonized Indigenous land and sites of Black containment, displacement, and resistance” (Quizar, 2019). The urban resistance movements in Detroit have used a blend of confrontational and participatory strategies. Urban resistance in Detroit has looked like residents, activists, and academics mobilizing research to counter positive narratives about gentrification (Safransky, 2014; Doucet, 2020). Many Detroiters have engaged in mutual aid projects and extended their communities of care (Safransky, 2014). Some have held anti- foreclosure and -eviction protests and demanded that negligent landlords “take care of land and buildings.” (Safransky, 2014). Some activists even engaged in more radical tactics such as squatting empty houses wherein families had been recently evicted (Safransky, 2014).

Brooklyn as a site of gentrification and urban resistance

New York’s Black population grew rapidly in the 20th century. It was not until the 1950s, the majority stopped living in Manhattan and shifted to Harlem (Chronopoulos, 2020). The legacy of redlining played a tremendous role in developing what would become Black Brooklyn (Chronopoulos, 2020). Between 1940 and 2000, the white population of Brooklyn declined by 67 percent; the Black population increased by 682.9 percent (Chronopoulos, 2020). White residents, “anxious” about the changing racial composition, fled for Staten Island, New Jersey, or Long Island (Osman, 2011). White Brooklynites tried everything they could to force non-white residents out, particularly neighborhood defense (Chronopoulos, 2020). According to Themis Chronopoulos:

Neighborhood defense included real estate agents and landlords who resorted to unofficial discrimination and refused to rent or sell housing to minority populations; financial institutions that denied mortgages and other loans to minority populations trying to relocate or open a business in a white neighborhood; white neighborhood residents who verbally and physically harassed minority residents who managed to rent or buy a property or youths who attacked minorities attending schools or using the public spaces of white neighborhoods; and the police that hassled minorities because they were frequenting white neighborhoods. In a general sense, neighborhood defense was an effort to maintain the racial exclusivity of white neighborhoods during a period of political mobilizations by African Americans demanding equality.

The legacy of neighborhood defense has ensured that racial segregation still defines Brooklyn today. White supremacy as structured through housing, financial, and employment discrimination—de jure and de facto, as well as the maldistribution of resources, public goods, white terrorism, police brutality, racially-biased sentencing, and a dearth of socioeconomic mobility, has had a lasting adverse effect on the livelihoods of Black Brooklynites directly and indirectly affected even to the present day. By the late 1940s, Black people were the majority of downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, Bedford Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights (Woodsworth, 2016). As a result of persistent real-estate blockbusting, East New York’s population flipped from overwhelmingly white in 1960 to overwhelmingly Black in 1966 (Chronopoulos, 2020). White Brooklynites engaged in neighborhood defense and spatial separation projects to prevent Black Brooklynites from “spreading” to other areas, but by 1980 most whites had abandoned Black Brooklyn (Chronopoulos, 2020).

Today, Brooklyn has 2.6 million residents (if it were a city, it would be the fourth largest in the United States) and 788,00 Black people—more Black residents than any city in the United States except for New York and Chicago (Chronopoulos, 2020). Despite this, the movement of middle- to upper-middle class white people has contributed to patterns of racial segregation and gentrification (Wyly, Newman, Schafran, & Lee, 2010; Shepard, 2013; Hyra, 2017). White Brooklynites have disproportionately benefited at the expense of Black Brooklyn. [4] Black fungibility is exemplified; the contagion of Blackness was historically spatially limited to protect white Brooklynites’ capital investment before white flight but meticulously expelled to expand white Brooklynites’ capital investment via gentrification.

Brooklyn, beset by the political challenges of deindustrialization, gentrification, globalization, has been a site of smaller scale contestations (Shepard, 2013). Residents have resisted rezoning efforts by drafting alternative “community plans” (Shepard, 2013). Brooklyn has been the site of urban resistance from wide coalitions of actors, from organizers, artists, global justice activists, and anti-war demonstrators (Shepard, 2013). Brooklynites have resisted evictions by engaging in eviction defense at the local level, protesting the development of big box stores, and developed community gardens, and fought police brutality (Shepard, 2013). Overall, the erosion of militancy has undermined effective anti-gentrification resistance within Brooklyn (Chronopoulos, 2020).

Conclusion

Gentrification has restructured and reconstituted urban space, reproducing new zones of privatization, exclusion, and homogenization (Kohn, 2013) via the racialized logics of elimination and Black fungibility. It induces urban instability and crises at the global urban scale, as real estate developers search for creative ways to maximize profit through and above antagonistic forces at the local level. The limited geographic investments that are tied to geospatial localities creates local dependence for firms, local governments, and residents (Cox and Mair 1988). Urban instability and crises are inherent to racial capitalist political economy; however, local governments may navigate by ensuring that the most politically disempowered, typically racialized, persons absorb the brunt of the economic burdens (Smith, 1996; Stein, 2019; Burden-Stelly, 2020). Black people are disproportionately displaced and dispossessed by gentrification in urban spaces as they occupy an identity of accumulation and deaccumulation (Burden-Stelly, 2020). This feat of racial capitalist political economy is accomplished through Black people’s structural location as simultaneously indispensable and disposable racialized subjects (Harris C. , 1993; Quizar, 2019; Burden-Stelly, 2020). The disposability, exchangeability, and expendability of Black people via purposive campaigns of dehumanization and devalorization accelerates the gentrification process, especially in the cases of Detroit and Brooklyn.

The devalorization of Black people for urban private property has been a constant feature of American racial capitalism since Black people ceased being legal chattel (Harris A. P., 1994). Thus, cities are “saved” when white people presumably “rescue” the urban centers and the decaying architecture from “Black underdevelopment, mismanagement, and underproductivity” (Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). So, gentrification within the American context, functions as a more benign form of ethnic cleansing wherein racialized people are evacuated from urban centers; it may be presented as the result of non-violent market forces despite evidence to the contrary. Gentrification exacts “spatialized revenge” against the inconvenient racialized inhabitants of urban centers (Smith, 1996).

Racialized people may develop class consciousness because of the disruptions created by gentrification (Cox & Mair, 1988). Class consciousness among the racialized may be an altogether natural affair as “[r]ace is the modality in which class is lived.” (Hall et al., 2013). This class consciousness may develop into urban resistance against the political forces that allow gentrification to continue. The mobilization of resistance occurs as cleavages develop among the urban political establishment and opportunity for successful urban resistance manifests (Pruijt, 2007). As gentrification continues, contradictions emerge; gentrification as a phenomenon possesses both the conditions for its expansion and its contraction. The success of urban resistance movements against what is effectively urban colonization; however, is not guaranteed.

Bibliography

Althusser, L. (2014). On The Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Brooklyn: Verso Books.

Atkinson, R. (2002). Does Gentrification Help or Harm Urban Neighbourhoods? An Assessment of the Evidence-Base in the Context of the New Urban Agenda. ESRC Centre for Neighbourhood Research, 2-20.

Bhandar, B., & Toscano, A. (2015). Race, Real Estate and Real Abstraction. Radical Philosophy, 8-17.

Brown-Saracino, J. (2010). What is Gentrification? In J. Brown-Saracino, The Gentrification Debates (pp. 12-13). New York: Routledge.

Burden-Stelly, C. (2020). Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights. Monthly Review, 8-20.

Byrne, J. P. (2002). Two cheers for gentrification. Howard LJ, 405.

Campbell, M. (1959). Social Origins of Some Early Americans. In J. M. Smith, Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (pp. 63-89). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Casgrain, A., & Janoschka, M. (2013). Gentrification and resistance in Latin American cities: The example of Santiago de Chile. Andamios, 19-44.

Castells, M. (1983). The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chatterjee, I. (2014). Displacement, Revolution, and the New Urban Condition: Theories and Case Studies. SAGE Publications India.

Chernoff, M. (2010). Social Displacement in a Renovating Neighborhood's Commercial District: Atlanta. In J. Brown-Saracino, The Gentrification Debates (p. 295). New York: Routledge.

Chronopoulos, T. (2020). “What’s Happened to the People?” Gentrification. Journal of African American Studies, 549-572.

Cox, K., & Mair, A. (1988). Locality and community in the politics of local economic development. Annals of the Association of American geographers, 307-325.

Creasap, K. (2012). Social Movement Scenes: Place-Based Politics and Everyday Resistance. Sociology Compass 6/2, 182–191.

Cutler, D. M., Glaeser, E. L., & Vigdor, J. L. (2007). When Are Ghettos Bad? Lessons from Immigrant Segregation in the United States. NBER Working Paper No. 13082, 1-22.

Domaradzka, A. (2018). Urban Social Movements and the Right to the City: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Urban Mobilization. International Society for Third-Sector Research, 607-620.

Doucet, B. (2020). Deconstructing Dominant Narratives of Urban Failure and Gentrification in a Racially Unjust City: The Case of Detroit. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 634-648.

Filion, P. (1991). The gentrification social structure dialectic: a Toronto case study. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 553-574.

Foglesong, R. E. (1986). Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fullilove, M. T. (2001). Root Shock: The Consequences of African American Dispossession. Journal of Urban Health, 72-80.

Gilmore, R. W. (2002). Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography. The professional geographer, 15-24.

Goetz, E. (2011). Gentrification in Black and White: The Racial Impact of Public Housing Demolition in American Cities. Urban Studies, 1581-1604.

Hackworth, J. (2002). Postrecession gentrification in New York City. Urban Affairs Review, 815-843.

Harris, A. P. (1994). The jurisprudence of reconstruction. California Law Review, 741.

Harris, C. (1993). Whiteness As Property. Harvard Law Review, 1710-1791.

Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, D. (2008). The right to the city. The City Reader, 23-40.

Harvey, D. (2013). Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Brooklyn: Verso.

Harvey, D. (2018). The limits to capital. Brooklyn: Verso.

Hyra, D. (2017). Race, class, and politics in the cappuccino city. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kirkland, E. (2008). What's Race Got to Do With it? Looking for the Racial Dimensions of Gentrifícation. The Western Journal of Black Studies, 18-29.

Kohn, M. (2013). What Is Wrong with Gentrification? Urban Research & Practice, 297-310.

Lees, L. (2008). Gentrification and Social Mixing: Towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance? Urban Studies, 2449–2470.

Lees, L., Slater, T., & Wyly, E. K. (2008). Introduction. In L. Lees, T. Slater, & E. K. Wyly, The gentrification reader (p. xv). London: Routledge.

Mallach, A. (2018). The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Marcuse, P. (2015). Gentrification, Social Justice and Personal Ethics. International journal of urban and regional research, 1263-1269.

Moskowitz, P. E. (2017). How to kill a city: Gentrification, inequality, and the fight for the neighborhood. New York: Nation Books.

Mumm, J. (2017). The racial fix: White currency in the gentrification of black and Latino Chicago. Focaal, 102-118.

Newman, K., & Ashton, P. (2004). Neoliberal urban policy and new paths of neighborhood change in the American inner city. Environment and Planning, 1151-1172.

Nichols, R. (2020). Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory. Durham: Duke University Press.

Novy, J., & Colomb, C. (2013). Struggling for the Right to the (Creative) City in Berlin and Hamburg: New Urban Social Movements, New ‘Spaces of Hope’? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1816–1838.

Osman, S. (2011). The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pérez, G. M. (2002). The Other "Real World": Gentrification And The Social Construction Of Place In Chicago. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 37-68.

Pérez, G. M. (2004). The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, & Puerto Rican Families. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Portalious, E. (2007). Anti-global movements reclaim the city. City, 165-175.

Pruijt, H. (2007). Urban Movements. In G. Ritzer, Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (pp. 5115-5119). Malden: Blackwell.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. & Roberts, B. (2013). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Quizar, J. (2019). Land of Opportunity: Anti-Black and Settler Logics in the Gentrification of Detroit. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 113-128.

Quizar, J. (2019). Land of Opportunity: Anti-Black and Settler Logics in the Gentrification of Detroit. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 115-130.

Renn, A. M. (2011, July 20). Detroit: A New American Frontier . Yes! Magazine.

Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Roediger, D. R. (2005). Working toward whiteness, How America’s immigrants became white: The strange journey from Ellis Island to the suburbs. New York: Basic Books.

Safransky, S. (2014). Greening the urban frontier: Race, property, and resettlement in Detroit. Geoforum, 237-248.

Shaw, K. (2008). Gentrification: What It Is, Why It Is, and What Can Be Done about It. Geography Compass 2, 168-184.

Shepard, B. (2013). The Battle of Brooklyn: World City and Space of Neighborhoods. Theory in Action, 15-46.

Siegel, R. B. (2000). Discrimination in the Eyes of the Law: How "Color Blindness" Discourse Disrupts and Rationalizes Social Stratification. California Law Review, 77-118.

Smith, N. (1987). Gentrification and the Rent Gap. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 462-465.

Smith, N. (1996). The new urban frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city. London: Routledge.

Stein, S. (2019). Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Brooklyn: Verso Books.

Thörn, H. (2012). In between Social Engineering and Gentrification: Urban Restructuring, Social Movements, and the Place Politics of Open Space. Journal of Urban Affairs, 153-168.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2019, July 1). QuickFacts: Detroit city, Michigan; United States. Retrieved November 30, 2020, from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/detroitcitymichigan,US/PST045219

Vigdor, J. L., Massey, D. S., & Rivlin, A. M. (2002). Does gentrification harm the poor?[with Comments]. Brookings-Wharton papers on urban affairs, 133-182.

Woodsworth, M. (2016). Battle for Bed-Stuy: the long war on poverty in New York City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wyly, E., Newman, K., Schafran, A., & Lee, E. (2010). Displacing New York. Environment and Planning A, 2602-2623.

Zukin, S. (2009). Changing landscapes of power: Opulence and the urge for authenticity. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 543-553.

Zukin, S. (2010). Gentrification as market and place. In J. Brown-Saracino, The Gentrification Debates: A Reader (pp. 37-44). New York: Routledge.

Notes

[1] Racial capitalism does not describe a distinct permutation of capitalism or imply there exists a non-racial capitalism, but rather emphasizes that, in the words of Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines.” As a system of political economy, it depends on racist practices and racial hierarchies because it is a direct descendent of settler-colonialism. It is a translation of the “racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional” antagonisms of European feudal society, reconstituted for the American context. It profits off the differentiated derivations of human values, non-white people are especially devalued and their exploitation is a justifiable and profitable enterprise (see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[2] Although the capitalist class makes up what Marxists refer to as the ruling-class, there still exists contradictions within the ruling-class about certain objectives and interests, especially with respect to gentrification. Neil Smith once noted this, saying, “to explain gentrification according to the gentrifier’s actions alone, while ignoring the role of builders, developers, landlords, mortgage lenders, government agencies, real estate agencies is excessively narrow.” A business owner may want their workers (who are also tenants) to have affordable housing because it reduces the likelihood that workers would demand raises. Real estate developers would dislike “affordable housing” as that puts a constraint on their ability to maximize profits on rental properties. There are a lot of competing interests to consider and an uncareful conflation of capitalist interests could lead to unanalytical analysis.

[3] Private property is not the same as personal property, which is almost exclusively wielded for its use value, it is not a personal possession, it is social relation of excludability. It is the ownership of capital as mediated by private power ownership that removes legal obstacles for one’s existence and provides an unalloyed right to violence. It is “the legally-sanctioned power to dispose” of the factors of production and “thus dispose of [labor-power]: property as synonymous with capital.” Toscano, Alberto, and Brenna Bhandar. “Race, real estate and real abstraction.” Radical Philosophy 194 (2015): 8–17.

[iv] [4] This paper, drawing upon Chronopoulos’ article, What’s Happened to the People?” Gentrification. Journal of African American Studies, 549-572., defines Black Brooklyn as “Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Brownsville, Ocean Hill, East New York, Canarsie, Flatlands, East Flatbush, Flatbush, parts of Bushwick, and parts of downtown Brooklyn.

Relative Surplus Value: The Class Struggle Intensifies

By Mazda Majidi

Republished from Liberation School.

Toward the end of our earlier introduction to surplus value, the heart and motor of the class struggle, we wrote that:

The rate of surplus value for the capitalist is the rate of exploitation for the worker. By merely prolonging the working day, the capitalist accrues more (absolute) surplus value. Increasing the working day from eight to 10 hours results in two more hours of surplus value for the capitalist and of exploitation for the worker.[1]

For any working period—whether it be a day, an hour, or five minutes—part of the period is “necessary labor” and another part is “surplus labor.” The former is when the worker produces the value of their own wage, and the latter is when the worker produces surplus value for the capitalist. The ratio between the two is the rate of surplus value for the capitalist and the rate of exploitation for the worker.

Absolute surplus value, Marx says, is “produced by prolongation of the working-day” [2]. In other words, if the ratio between necessary and surplus labor is fixed, then prolonging the working day will result in more surplus value for the capitalist and a greater degree of exploitation for the worker.

Capital’s entire reason for being is to produce surplus value, to increase the exploitation of the working class. As a result, there’s a logical impulse for each capitalist to extend the working day as much as possible. Yet not only might this produce problems for capitalism as a whole (in that it could exhaust the supply of labor-power available), but the working class fights back against exploitation, and at times is able to force limits to the length of the working day.

What happens, then, when political legislation limits the working day to, say, eight hours? This is obviously a limit to capitalist accumulation. For capital, however, “every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome” [3]. Relative surplus value is capital’s strategy for overcoming this limit.

Relative surplus value

If absolute surplus value is produced by lengthening the working day, then relative surplus value is produced by “the curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working-day” [4]. Let’s say the working day was previously 10 hours, and that 10 hours was divided between four hours of necessary labor and six hours of surplus labor. If the working day is reduced to eight hours and wages remain the same, capital will lose two hours of surplus value. The only way to overcome this barrier and to reclaim those two hours of surplus labor is to reduce necessary labor by two hours.

How can this happen?

Remember that necessary labor time is variable capital, or the value of labor power. The value of labor power is, like all values, determined by the socially-necessary labor time required for its production and reproduction, which as we saw in the last part was largely the product of class struggle. The value of labor power can be represented by the bundle of commodities that go into the worker’s production and reproduction, like the value of housing, clothing, education, child-rearing, electricity, and so on.

If the conditions are right, the capitalist can—and sometimes does—merely decrease workers’ wages in this scenario. The state can also step in and provide some of the basic commodities that factor into the value of labor power. However, in Capital, Marx sets these aside because he wants to show us how it can happen within the very logic of a “perfectly” functioning capitalist system.

Two interrelated forms of relative surplus value

There are two interrelated ways that capitalists drive down necessary labor. One way it happens is by decreasing the value of the commodities that factor into the value of labor power:

Whenever an individual capitalist cheapens shirts, for instance, by increasing the productiveness of labour, he by no means necessarily aims at reducing the value of labour-power and shortening, pro tanto, the necessary labour-time. But it is only in so far as he ultimately contributes to this result, that he assists in raising the general rate of surplus-value.[5]

The second form explains the reason the capitalist producing shirts ends up raising the rate of surplus value even though they don’t intend to.

To understand this, we have to distinguish between two values: individual value and social (or real) value. Remember that part of the reason Marx calls value socially-necessary labor time is because it’s the average labor time required to produce some useful good or service “under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time” [6]. This is the social or real value: the average of all production times.

The individual value is the labor time required for production in a particular factory or under a particular capitalist.

Capitalists are always in competition with each other. They’re subjected to “the inherent laws of capitalist production” the “external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist” [7]. Each capitalist is always seeking to gain an edge over their competitors, and as a result, they’re trying to produce more (and sometimes better) commodities faster.

If the socially-necessary labor time required to produce a commodity is two hours, then every capitalist wants to find a way to produce it in less time. If a capitalist can, by employing some new method or technology, produce the same commodity in one hour, then the individual value of the commodity is half of the social value. As Marx writes:

“If therefore, the capitalist who applies the new method, sells his commodity at its social value… he sells it… above its individual value, and thus realizes an extra surplus-value” [8]. Suppose the social value of a shirt is $4 but a capitalist’s individual value is $2. In this case, they can gain an extra $2 in surplus value.

However, whereas previously a working day of eight hours was represented by two shirts, it’s now represented by four shirts. In order to sell the extra shirts, the market needs to be twice as large or the capitalist will sell the shirt at, say, $3—above its individual value but below its social value. In this case, necessary labor is shortened, and the capitalist captures more relative surplus value.

The contradictions of relative surplus value production

Just as capital sees barriers as obstacles to overcome, each new limit it surpasses only creates new contradictions and intensifies existing ones. There are several contradictions that arise from the pursuit of relative surplus value.

The first contradiction is that the capitalists are producing more commodities in terms of use values, yet each commodity contains less value (and therefore exchange-value). This can potentially benefit workers. If wages remain the same, they can either spend less on shirts or purchase more shirts than before. Such a scenario will depend on the class struggle, of course.

This drive to decrease necessary labor can also contribute to a crisis of overproduction. All capitalists are trying to decrease necessary labor time, which means more and more commodities are produced in a given time frame. For the commodities to be realized (sold), there must be an expansion of the market. But at some point, there will be a glut in the market, and there will be more commodities than can be sold at a profit.

The third contradiction is that the “external coercive laws of competition” compel competing capitalists to decrease their own production times, and “this extra surplus-value vanishes, so soon as the new method of production has become general, and has consequently caused the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value to vanish” [9]. Consequently, the overall rate of surplus value also declines, and the need for even faster production re-emerges. Moreover, the competing capitalists don’t only want to match the new innovation and production time but they want to beat it, thereby exacerbating the above contradictions.

Initial methods of producing relative surplus value

There are two initial methods of producing relative surplus value that don’t entail capitalism revolutionizing the means of production. These take place when capital “formally” subjects production to its command, meaning that it takes existing production processes but without fundamentally altering their nature.

One is cooperation, which is a quantitative distinction that leads to a qualitative change. Merely by bringing workers together in one place, capitalists help facilitate the cooperation of workers. “Even without an alteration in the system of working, the simultaneous employment of a large number of labourers effects a revolution in the material conditions of the labour-process. The buildings in which they work, the store-houses for the raw material, the implements and utensils used simultaneously or in turns… in short, a portion of the means of production, are now consumed in common” [10].

Cooperation results in “an increase in the productive power of the individual” worker as well “the creation of a new power, namely, the collective power of masses” [11]. A collective of workers “working in concert has hands and eyes both before and behind and is, to a certain degree, omnipresent” [12]. Importantly, this doesn’t cost capital anything, although it looks like it’s a power of capital itself.

This is the beginning of the collectivization of labor or the production of the collective laborer, which is another contradictory process because “as the number of the co-operating labourers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital” [13]. Workers can more easily agitate and organize, distribute literature and build class consciousness when we’re together in one place.

The other is the division of labor. Capitalism also, without revolutionizing the production process, produces relative surplus value by increasing the division and specialization of labor. When the worker is no longer producing the entire commodity but merely performing one action in the production process, the productivity of labor increases. In other words, “a labourer who all his life performs one and the same simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic, specialized implement of that operation” and “takes less time in doing it” [14].

Taken together with cooperation, it also decreases any gaps in the labor process: the worker doesn’t have to get up and move to different stations, sit back down, use different tools, and so on.

Capitalism encounters a crucial limit to these methods of relative surplus value production, namely that it is still the workers who are the active agents in production or who serve as the “regulating principle of social production” [15]. The production processes above still rely on the workers’ bodies, skills, knowledges, and so on. Living labor still had the upper hand over dead labor, or the means of production.

Real subjection: Machinery

Marx says capitalists first take existing production processes as they find them and “formally subject them” by, for example, lengthening the working day or instituting cooperation. In order for capitalism to come into its own, it had to totally or really subject labor to its command, and it could only do so by taking the skill and knowledge of the worker and absorbing it into machinery, so that machinery, and not the workers, would drive production; so that dead labor dominates living labor.

Thus is born the industrial factory:

An organized system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have, in the place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out in the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs.[16]

The worker becomes, Marx says, “a mere living appendage” to the machine [17].

As constant capital, the machine can’t produce new value; it can only transfer its existing value to the finished product. However, machinery can produce relative surplus value by decreasing necessary labor time for the individual capitalist and lowering the value of labor-power.

Yet again, this is never finished. It’s only when the capitalist employs new labor-saving technologies that they can produce relative surplus value.

During this transition period… the profits are therefore exceptional, and the capitalist endeavours to exploit thoroughly ‘the sunny time of his first love’.[18]

The love doesn’t last, as other capitalists match or beat the new technologies with more productive ones. The overall rate of surplus value is driven down and, moreover, there are fewer workers engaged in production. The capitalist ends up investing more in machinery and less in labor-power and, overall, surplus value decreases (this is also tied to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall).

This explains why, as Marx and Engels wrote in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, “the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society” [19]. The search for relative surplus-value in the face of the limits imposed on capital by the class struggle compel the constant revolutionizing of productive forces like technologies and machinery.

Contradictions intensify

There are numerous other key impacts technological transformations have on capitalism, workers, the class struggle, colonialism, imperialism, and more. Marx addresses many of these, some of which previous Liberation School articles cover [20]. For this introductory article, we want to touch on just a few more issues.

In their ruthless search for surplus value, capitalists work to increase the productivity of labor and the mass of commodities in the world. They produce unemployment and induce crises of overproduction. As Marx puts it:

The enormous power, inherent in the factory system, of expanding by jumps, and the dependence of that system on the markets of the world, necessarily beget feverish production, followed by over-filling of the markets, whereupon contraction of the markets brings on crippling of production. The life of modern industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, a crisis and stagnation[21].

The expansion and intensification of capitalism’s command over life and work is accompanied by an enlargement and escalation of its internal contradictions. The capitalist system produces ever more and ever greater misery and destruction.

At the same time, this destruction of the worker, the earth, and its inhabitants produced by modern industry—which is spurred on by the search for relative surplus value—can lay the foundations for socialism: “By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements of the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one” [22].

There’s nothing deterministic or mechanistic about this argument. Marx isn’t saying it will automatically happen or that it will only or universally happen after a certain level of technological development takes place. It’s important to remember that Marx’s case study in Capital is England, where the capitalist mode of production was most developed [23].

Absolute and relative surplus value as tactics

Absolute and relative surplus value are dialectically related. On the one hand, Marx says, they’re the same in that relative surplus value is absolute in the sense that it lengthens the part of the working day that the worker works for the capitalist (by reducing necessary labor time), and absolute value is relative because it compels an increase in the productiveness of labor.

On the other hand, when we look at the matter practically, they’re distinct. The difference between the two, he writes, “makes itself felt, whenever there is a question of raising the rate of surplus-value” [24]. In other words, sometimes capital will try to get absolute surplus value, and other times it will try to get relative surplus value.

They are each class tactics in its arsenal of exploitation. If workers can limit the working day, capitalists will go back to relative surplus value. But if capital can lengthen it, either by peeling back legislation or by destroying the entire concept of the working day, like it’s done with the “gig economy,” then it will pursue absolute surplus value.

For the working class, it’s imperative to know the tools in capital’s arsenal. When we fight for a normal working day and a living wage, we can make gains by limiting absolute and relative surplus value, but capital can change tactics and exploit us in different ways. If capital can’t increase absolute surplus value by lengthening the work day due to the united struggle of the workers, it will try to increase relative surplus value by increasing the intensity of work through introducing new technologies to the productive process. Conversely, when capital is unable to overcome the workers’ resistance to increase relative surplus value, it will look for ways to extend the workday. For example, capital might increase the number of salaried workers, whose wages do not increase when they work longer workdays.

Class struggle is conducted in many spheres–political, ideological, cultural, and of course the most easily observable, economical. The economic struggle between workers and capitalists over the rate of absolute and relative surplus value, and hence the rate of exploitation, is yet one more facet of class struggle between labor and capital.

Notes:

[1] Ford, Derek and Mazda Majidi. (2021). “Surplus value is the scass Struggle: An introduction,”Liberation School, March 30. Availablehere.
[2] Marx, Karl. (1967).Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): The process of production of capital, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers), 299.
[3] Marx, Karl. (1993).Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books), 408
[4] Marx,Capital, 299.
[5] Ibid., 299-300.
[6] Ibid., 47.
[7] Ibid., 257.
[8] Ibid., 301.
[9] Ibid., 302.
[10] Ibid., 307.
[11] Ibid., 309f1. In a footnote, he quotes John Bellers, who writes “As one man cannot, and ten men must strain to lift a ton of weight, yet 100 men can do it only by the strength of a finger of each of them.”
[12] Ibid., 310.
[13] Ibid., 313.
[14] Ibid., 321.
[15] Ibid., 347.
[16] Ibid., 360.
[17] Ibid., 398.
[18] Ibid., 383.
[19] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1848/1967).The communist manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin), 222.
[20] Hernandez, Estevan, John Prysner, and Derek Ford. (2019). “A Marxist approach to technology,”Liberation School, December 9. Availablehere.
[21] Marx,Capital, pp. 425-7.
[22] Ibid., 472.
[23] In fact, later on he wrote that the Russian “rural commune” can “by developing its basis, the common ownership of land… become a direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends.” Marx, Karl. (1881). “First draft of letter to Vera Zasulich,” trans. A. Blunden. Availablehere.
[24] Marx,Capital, 479.

Conspiracy Theory vs. Socialist Logic

Originally published by Socialist Standard.

Conspiracy-theory, or conspiracism, has it that much of the world today is to be understood in terms of ‘conspiracy’ be it by scientists, extra-terrestrials, masons, or whoever.

Currently gaining credence among many is the idea that all accepted science is a conspiracy, for relativity theory and quantum physics are specialised subjects. Einstein is difficult to understand and the majority of us are not astrophysicists, or other types of scientist, but that is no reason to dismiss these theories.

Many in society seek solace in pseudoscience, and therefore in conspiracism, whereby they can feel in control over what they cannot understand. Conspiracism absolves you from having to undertake painstaking research where you are not willing to trust those who actually have expertise in a difficult subject. Conspiracism attracts people from an entire spectrum, eager to feel that they belong to something: right or left in their leanings, dependent on what they were before becoming conspiracist. The phenomenon appears to attract ‘truthers’ – those who know the ‘truth’ despite the facts. Some are avowedly Christian, others not. Some dally with other rehashed mythologies, interpreted to fit in with their modern conspiracism. Many are, in fact, as members of the working class, confused and vulnerable, and want to feel significant; which they feel modern scientific thinking cannot help them with.

It is tempting to draw some similarity in all of this to the declining years of the Roman Empire, so brilliantly shown in the film Agora, about the last days of the great Library of Alexandria. Science and learning were then the property of a privileged few, and this is largely how they are seen today by many attracted to conspiracism and ‘truthism’. Today we are bombarded, flooded, with ideas and theories via the internet, whilst actual reading has declined.  Some conspiracy theorists tend to deride books which contradict them, dismissing them as the propaganda of those ‘in on’ the ‘great conspiracy.’ Book-learning becomes associated with closeted academia and so is deemed irrelevant. So refutation of a conspiracist’s ideology from facts outlined in books is futile.

With many people feeling disenfranchised from intellectual life, as they are in fact disenfranchised economically (being born in the wage-slave class), old and new-style forms of fanaticism win converts. Conspiracism is an obstacle to socialist awareness. Vital to the spread of socialist awareness is the materialist conception of history and recognition of human scientific progress.

Marx knew this when he wrote welcoming and applauding the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, recognising science as the necessary ally of socialism. Above all, the scientific study of history is vital and paramount, as history is an evolutionary process.

Capitalism is not a conspiracy. It is a system that evolved through social and economic processes, just as socialism will have done. Capitalism, and class societies as a whole, do by definition encourage ‘conspiratorial’ behaviour, but they are historically, not ‘conspiratorially’, produced.

Everything grows from an antecedent and does not appear out of the blue.

Conspiracy theory backs up the bourgeois myth of an evil human nature (‘Original Sin’ rehashed for the modern age). To paraphrase Karl Marx, the morality of a given age is the morality of its ruling class. The cut-throat values of the capitalist class have us believing in a human cut-throat nature in which everyone is a potential conspirator, a potential thief, a potential brigand. Thus an ideology of brigandage, sustained by the viciously competitive nature of capitalism, leads people to see their fellow beings as either real or potential brigands.

Conspiracism reduces everything to a school playground view wherein everything is viewed as the machinations of some cartoon-like gang independent of history. Those who attempt to spread conspiracy theory do a disservice to the cause of achieving a better world, by further confusing already confused workers and by giving ammunition to those who label socialists as cranks and claim capitalism to be the end of history.

We urge our fellow workers to face reality, embrace knowledge, and recognise for what it is the ridiculous zealotry known as conspiracy theory. Emancipation from the system of wage-slavery, poverty, prices and profits requires a grasp of social history and of social and natural realities.

Bernie Sanders Should Run Solo if Democrats Dirty-Break the Democratic Process

By David Goodner

Two nights ago in Tacoma, during a rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders attended by thousands, Seattle City Councilor and Socialist Alternative leader Kshama Sawant called for an independent Third Party for the working class. 

Last night on the debate stage in Nevada, every Democratic presidential candidate except Sanders refused to commit support for a plurality primary winner, escalating the possibility of a screwjob during a potentially brokered convention in Milwaukee this summer.

Bernie Sanders is likely to continue to rise in popular support and cleanly win the Democratic party nomination and then the White House in November – making this a moot point. At this time, mass popular social movements should take advantage of the momentum and continue to work with or alongside the Sanders campaign to challenge the party from the inside, exposing the sharp contradictions that come with fighting for social justice in a system that is designed to cater to capital.

However, Sawant's call for a third party this year absolutely makes sense if billionaire Michael Bloomberg buys the nomination outright or there is convention fuckery in Milwaukee that robs Sanders of the nomination. 

If either of these happen, it is imperative that the movement respond in kind by winning a Sanders presidency on a third-party ballot. There is no time to wait. An independent Sanders run against two bipartisan billionaires could realistically win a plurality of the general election vote, but we don't just want an independent sitting-in as president, we also need a new party structure that grows and lives on beyond Bernie.

Independent candidates can gain ballot access in most states by submitting the required number of petition signatures by August or September. These numbers can range anywhere between a few hundred and twenty thousand, but all are doable for a movement that has already shown impressive turnouts on the ground.

Small groups need to quietly begin working in the few states with earlier ballot access requirements. This doesn't have to be widely advertised or become a distraction from our main work right now, but it must become a priority if and when the Democratic party sabotages the movement by obstructing Sanders’ ascendancy.

We also need to ramp up movement organizing around the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. If Sanders is going to win the nomination cleanly, he'll need backup inside and outside the convention hall. And if he loses, there must be a powerful and immediate response on the ground. The city itself will be militarized with riot police. We will need 50,000 or more people ready to contest for space in the streets in addition to all of our delegates and observers inside. 

If Bernie Sanders is not the nominee this year, the core of an independent workers (third) party must be formed from: 

1. Bernie Sanders and the Sanders campaign, including Squad surrogates AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Andrew Yang, and all of their followers; 

2. The Democratic Socialists of America;

3. The umbrella network of community organizations dedicated to electoral power independent of the Democratic Party, such as National Nurses United, People's Action, and their allies; 

4. the groundswell of Black, Arab, Muslim, Hispanic, and Latino organizations already backing Bernie this year;

5. The remnants of the Green Party and Libertarian parties.

The current momentum that has been generated by the Sanders campaign is impossible to ignore. More importantly, the corollary movement that is building alongside this momentum, which has radical characteristics that appear to be carrying folks beyond the limitations of not only the capitalist political arena and the Democratic party, but also beyond Sanders himself (a good thing), is setting a foundation that can successfully uproot capital’s grip on the public agenda.

The presidency of the United States has always served as the CEO of global capital and imperialism. Ignoring its occupant will inevitably bring us closer to a fascistic reality, something we are witnessing in real time. Getting Sanders in this office, while representing a small step in the right direction, can slow this tide. Therefore, it behooves us to keep our eyes on the prize and push to elect him state-by-state on the Democratic Party ballot - by doing electoral politics better and cleaner than everybody else. 

But we have to keep our eyes open, too. We need to start anticipating the rearguard and flank attacks inevitably coming our way, instead of always reacting to them after the fact like we have been doing. If Billionaire Bloomberg wins the Democratic party nomination, or a brokered DNC convention robs Sanders of the same, we have to respond in kind. The rhetorical and practical groundwork for a third party run needs to be laid now.