nom de guerre
27th October 2008, 13:21
I find this to be an excellent and engaging article pertinent for anyone interested in historical materialism and revolutionary theory in the 21st century. I'm curious to see what other people here think.
[Source: Kapitalism101 - In Defense of Teleology (http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/in-defence-of-teleology/)
A Defense of Materialist Teleology: Motion and Contradiction
By Brendan Cooney
August 2008
“What recent event or political process that you have participated in, witnessed or studied has given you inspiration and confidence that ‘a better world is possible’ and why do you think the fight for a better world will succeed?”
A good answer to any question begins with a critique of the question itself. Times have changed since a good socialist would claim, “a better world is inevitable”. Beyond the fall of the Bolshevik experiment and the slow demise of the liberal welfare state lie even more disturbing realities that have pushed teleology- the belief in the historical inevitability of socialism- out of the picture.
The hardest blow to the romantic teleology of old-school Marxism has come from the study of capitalist crisis itself. The concept of regulation has entered the foreground. Now we recognize that crisis is good for capitalism. It is an essential, cleansing process within the cycle of accumulation. Each new round of devaluation creates new modes of displacing and regulating crisis, through financial, political, productive and cultural institutions, which allow capital to recover and reconstitute the accumulation process anew. Instead of seeing crisis as a sign of the downfall of capital, Marxist literature increasingly stresses the ways in which crisis is merely a way of evolving the contradictions of capital to a new level of capitalist regulation.
Yet, the regulation school still holds a progressive view of history. The evolution of one mode of regulation to the next implies a dialectical assumption about the relation between structural contradictions that determine the motion of capitalism and the agency of individuals within these structures to alter the form that this evolution takes. For example, we recognize the diversity of forms that Neoliberalism has taken yet still argue that all Neoliberal formations share a common vision of resolving the contradictions of capital through free markets, strong states, deregulation, accumulation by dispossession, etc. This basic content of Neoliberalism reveals itself through its specific historical incarnations. As much as these forms are shaped by contingency there seems to be no escape from the basic form itself and its heightening contradictions. Furthermore, in the transition from the Fordist era to the Neoliberal era we see this basic form revealing itself as a necessary response to the crisis of the welfare state.(1)
So, in this sense, Marxists still recognize the essentially progressive movement of capital in the way in which contradictions necessitate solutions, which merely move contradictions to higher levels. Individuals acting within these structures create the basic form of the appearance of this contradiction. The aspect of teleology that is out of style is the belief that the ultimately unresolvable nature of these contradictions will necessitate a proletarian revolution.
It is precisely this second aspect of teleology which I wish reinsert into the discussion, though not quite in the traditional sense. Capitalism is all too hegemonic, all encompassing, and powerful to still hold onto a Leninist vision of inevitable, violent, global revolution. In fact, the version of socialist teleology that I advance here fits more squarely within the theoretical structure of Marx’s historical materialism than a Leninist vision that depends solely on human agency and contingent action in the face of actual historical conditions.
Marx’s observations about history were formed at a time when capital was rapidly disintegrating the social relations of European feudalism. A new mode of production was emerging from the old, replacing or appropriating old institutions and cultures with a new bourgeois social order. The emerging capitalist order took many forms. Many feudal institutions coexisted with capitalist institutions for a long time, forming contradictory or parasitic relationships. Though often sudden and violent, this process took several hundred years. From this privileged perspective, watching two modes of production rub up against each other, Marx was able to make the sort of observations that are less apparent to observers lodged thoroughly within one mode of production. The friction between these two worlds allowed for a type of transcendent critique allowing Marx to see past the appearances of bourgeois society and reveal its inner laws of motion.(2)
I believe a theory of post-capitalist social relations needs to come from a similar transcendent perspective. Where in the current crisis facing capital do we see the emergence, or possibility for emergence, of some sort of new social relations? Is the emergence of some new world discernible within the current one? If so, what does the rubbing together of these two worlds tell us about the nature of a potential new order?
Here we must make the distinction between progressive and reactionary social formations. Progressive formations are an unfolding of the contradictions of capitalism in the direction of either higher stages of contradiction or toward some communist society free of social dissonance. As stated above, the theory of successive modes of regulation is still progressive in this sense while still refusing to speculate about a communist future. Reactionary formations are attempts to restrain this unfolding- to hold the social order in place by force. The current militarism of the Bush administration is a good example of such a reactionary politic: In order to stop the basic crisis in value creation embodied in its falling dollar and crumbling financial system the US government has launched two aggressive wars and countless interventions aimed at maintaining the value of the dollar by sheer military force. This desperate, reactionary gesture has in no way changed the actual reality of the contradictions besetting the American economy. It has merely altered the form of appearance of the crisis. Like all reactionary gestures, there is a certain Oedipal tragedy to the Bush wars: the unfolding of these contradictions will happen regardless of how hard we try to stop them. In speculating about how crisis will evolve over the next century it will be important to keep in mind this distinction between progressive and reactionary formations. It is important not to see reactionary forms like authoritarian states as representing, in themselves, a qualitatively new mode of regulation. Such fetishism is common amongst the left today and has created a culture of defeatism and fear which we must not fall into if we are to understand the truly radical potential that exists within the coming crisis of capital.
There are many aspects of crisis converging within our lifetime. I argue here that within many of these crisis we can see the emergence of possible resolutions which point the way toward a new form of post-capitalist social relations- in short, some sort of socialist order which we do not yet have the perspective to fully comprehend. The transformation to a fully new mode of production will most likely take time. We will likely see new forms of socialist relations coexisting side by side with capitalist institutions in all sorts of contradictory and symbiotic relationships. The specific forms that such a transformation will take and the types of reactionary responses that may constrain the emergence of these new forms will be determined by all manner of contingent factors. What is crucial is to see the essentially progressive nature of socialism as it appears in nascent form within the heart of capitalist crisis.
Despite the diversity of forms that the transition to capitalism took, some sort of primitive accumulation was essential to the creation of private property and labor markets. I argue here that a similar process of socialist primitive accumulation will also be necessary to create the conditions for a true emergence of socialist social relations. Following Marx’s logic, we can look to capitalism to prepare the ground for us. Capital has already reduced heterogeneous labor to abstract, socially necessary labor to create a universal class with universal material interests. When we follow the logic of the evolution of the forces of production to its logical conclusion we see the possibility of a socialist primitive accumulation emerging.
Capitalists in competition with each other must revolutionize the productive forces in a never-ending attempt to extract more surplus value from workers. In their individual attempts to make labor more efficient they undermine their own basis for value creation, creating a crisis. In addition to this crisis, something else happens when labor efficiency is taken to the level of total automation, eliminating labor from a task altogether: The task becomes decommodified- essentially value-less. Capitalism began by appropriating free things and turning them into private property through a process of primitive accumulation. But through the evolution of productivity it eventually eliminates this very basis and creates a new basis for free, socially-owned production. Let us look at how this process could play out in the future.
Intellectual Property
If we are looking for an example of fully evolved forces of production, the technological revolutions in computing and the Internet are the obvious starting point. Among the many fetishes that exist in our culture, one of the most dominant is the one that attributes magical qualities to computer technology- that somehow computers in themselves will liberate us from the raw, physical world of capitalism and launch a new era of human freedom, free from want, scarcity or work. Furthermore it is made to seem as if the evolution of this technology has come about through some natural law of technological evolution determined solely by the natural properties of the machines themselves.(3)
We must always remember that technological evolution is driven by class struggle. The primary drive of this class struggle is to make labor more efficient and increase control of that labor. In the computer age we now find that many tasks, primarily those of duplication and distribution, have been automated to the point of rendering them valueless and hence free. In some sectors of the economy the only thing left to transfer value to a commodity is intellectual labor. But when this intellectual labor can be immediately duplicated and distributed for free it becomes clear that the attempt to keep this intellectual labor embodied in traditional commodity form is an essentially reactionary force that contradicts the basic nature of its technological basis.
The information commodity contains an inherent contradiction. It represents a narrow legal enclosure between two open spaces. On one side is the open space of intellectual production. Intellectual creation is an essentially social process. It is difficult to draw the line between one person’s ideas and the next. On the other side is the open space of computerized distribution in which it is virtually impossible to control the dissemination of intellectual ideas. The attempt to control these open spaces with a complex legal code, the violent power of the capitalist state, and technological surveillance is a reaction to the essential openness of this new technology. The concept of an information commodity embodies this point of conflict in which capital and labor battle for control of the means of intellectual and cultural production. Let us look closer at what is at stake in this struggle.
The struggle over intellectual property is a class struggle. Though it doesn’t bring to mind the traditional, shop-floor images of class struggle, I think it actually embodies a more advanced form of this struggle. Once the battle over labor efficiency creates a fully automated system it becomes hard to control the ownership of those means of production. In the case of intellectual property, increasingly powerful computers were sold to the working class at a decreasing price until the means of production were essentially collectivized. In this process we have seen the emergence of new forms of collective cultural production which have emerged to challenge all forms of capitalist cultural production. A proliferation of bloggers, independent journalists and other independent media-makers has challenged the capitalist press. The open source movement has proven that open communities of programers can outperform traditional capitalist software producers.(4) Hackers have consistently undermined copyright laws and profits, “playing Robin Hood” with the capitalist form of production and distribution. The language of these communities, especially the open source and hacking communities, increasingly moves in an open direction, seeking more ways to open up systems of cultural production in this democratic, socialized sense. Alternative models of economic organization are evolving spontaneously, prompting a wide variety of labels: gift economies, library economies, free-economies, etc.(5) Not surprisingly, people have begun theorizing about the way we can expand this collectivized virtual space into the physical world.(6) Within these developments we can see possibilities for radically different economic modes.
In response, capital has sought to commodify this open space with legal and technological enclosures. Before we discuss these enclosures we need to return to the distinction between progressive and reactionary formations. Obviously, the open-source movement and various forms of collective cultural production that have emerged with the new technology are progressive in the sense that they grow out of the nature of the technology themselves and seek to move these technologies and the accompanying social relations forward toward a new type of society. The question is whether the effort of capital to commodify this same space is also progressive. If it could be shown that this enclosure is similar to the sort of primitive accumulation that early capitalism was founded upon- if it could be shown that the commodification of the internet was an opening up of new sources of value creation that would launch a new stage of capitalist production- then we would have to label these enclosures as progressive as well. Then the theoretical question becomes merely one of historical contingency in a struggle between two progressive options. It should be pointed out, again, that this is still a teleological argument in the sense that we are admitting the progressive nature of history, but not teleological in the sense of leading towards socialism.
If the enclosures of capital are seen as essentially reactionary then we must take a different approach. We must identify the power of this reactionary force to hinder the progressive direction of the new technology and make guesses as to how successful these efforts will be, recognizing that at any stage in this process we will be examining contradictory formations- contradictions which must eventually be resolved progressively. I argue here that these enclosures are essentially reactionary. Let us look closer.
The commodification of virtual space is dominated by advertising revenue- not the selling of physical commodities. Contrary to those leftists who would dismiss the radical potential of the Internet because of the vast proliferation of Internet sales, it must be understood that this represents a symbiotic relation between two different modes of production. The sale of real physical commodities that embody real, socially necessary labor is external to the crisis of value production within the problem of intellectual property. The two worlds do not threaten each other at this abstract level. What we should be concerned with is the crossing over between the physical and virtual worlds- the ways in which an emerging virtual socialism might spill over into the physical world and the ways in which capital can infiltrate the virtual universe. The selling of t-shirts and I-pods online does not threaten the socialist potential of the Internet.
Advertising is a different issue. Much of virtual space is funded by advertising. Capitalist media, which have been forced to lower their prices to zero, exist solely through these advertising dollars. At the same time much of the server space that supports the mass-culture of the Internet is paid for through advertising revenue. Is this dependence on advertising a structural flaw in the progressive socialism of the Internet? I argue against such a conclusion for three reasons: 1. The same emergence of new forms of economic organization that has spurned the open source movement could equally spill over into alternative ways of funding server space. Perhaps this is even a way in which virtual democracy might first cross over into the physical world. 2. It has been suggested that in the same way that transistors and microchips have gradually seen a drop in value due to increased productive efficiency, storage space may soon see a significant enough drop in value to render it more or less free.(7) 3. Advertising does not create value. Because there is no real connection between the amount of money spent and the actual amount of sales advertising is, in some ways, a fictitious investment. But, unlike true fictitious capital, advertising is aimed at realizing surplus value, not creating it. Advertising cannot sustain an economy in the long run.
In order to create a secure business climate capital must be able to have some control over consumer information.(8) To that extent the rise of Internet surveillance has become a major force of enclosure. Capitalists collect consumer information in increasingly secretive and centralized ways, threatening the autonomy and anonymity that sustains much of the hacker and blogger communities. Combined with an increasingly reactionary, authoritarian state, this power of surveillance threatens to give capital an overwhelming force in which to quell dissent and mold the 21st century into a century of its choosing. But as we see the myth of the bourgeois, liberal utopia disappear into a new age of authoritarian capitalism we must remember that authoritarian state forms are always reactionary and unsustainable in the long run. Authoritarianism is a sign of weakness. It seeks to iron out the contradictions of capital by force and to impose absolute social harmony. Because this absolute social harmony is a falsity imposed over the real social dissonance of capitalism it is doomed to fail as a political project, especially in the face of an essentially open new technological world in which the means of cultural production have already been sold to consumers in the form of computers.
This is why forces of enclosure have turned to the infrastructure of the Internet in order to extend control over the virtual world. This battle has taken two fronts: the code infrastructure, and the physical infrastructure (cable and phone lines). There are plans underway to change the basic coding languages of computers, down to the basic machine code, in ways that make hacking impossible. (9) This would protect the intellectual property of the capitalist class though it wouldn’t necessarily stop the open source movement. Meanwhile, in the battle over net-neutrality, telecommunication companies threaten to use their control of the physical infrastructure of the net to determine web content and limit the use of the Internet.
How should we read this attempt to exploit infrastructure to redefine the Internet? After all, if we assume that technology is neutral and its evolution determined by class struggle; and if we assume that capitalists can and do evolve technology in progressive ways in order to displace crisis endlessly, can’t this rebuilding of the internet along lines more fit for capitalist accumulation be seen as progressive? I argue against such an interpretation for three reasons: 1. Even with such an infrastructural enclosure the absence of value creation is still a central issue in the Internet age. Intellectual property is still contradictory. The attempt to keep that contradiction in a static state is doomed to fail. An attempt to build an entire economic sector upon something that basically contains no value means that revenue increasingly comes merely from purely parasitic monopoly rent. This is not a sustainable model. 2. Competition over this rent will lead to a democratization of the infrastructure. We can imagine competition over wireless devices and other sorts of infrastructure leading to consumer ownership of some parts of infrastructure. How will hackers find ways to highjack this infrastructure? 3. Such infrastructural changes are still merely enclosures around an open concept. Machine code can always be hacked. When people own the same machines that capitalists do there is no way to maintain any real monopoly over code.
As the conflict evolves along these lines we can predict a plethora of possible historical outcomes, all moving forward through the contingent action of free agents acting on a variety of motives. At the same time we must see these actions within the context of an essentially progressive technological paradigm in which the abolition of labor value for certain commodities creates an opening for a new type of social relations. Regardless of the frightening forces of reaction, this essentially progressive dimension is key to the formulation of revolutionary strategy. The theoretical space for teleology is opened.
Ecological Design
There is much doom and gloom about the impending environmental crisis. But it is not often pointed out that environmental crisis could potentially be healthy for capitalism. Hurricane Katrina showed us that environmental disasters can simulate the same sort of devaluation that is such an important antidote to capitalist overaccumulation. After Katrina, the City of New Orleans launched a massive project of rebuilding and gentrification opening up spaces for new investment. As the plot thickens in the ecological crisis we can imagine a world of increasing disasters followed by more “capitalist field-days” of maniacal gentrification.
Yet there is possibility for the ascendance of ecological design in energy, industry and agriculture. The rise of a new type of capitalist green design would require a vastly different set of inter-class alliances and a more desperate political climate. It is possible to imagine a world in which the rising cost of non-renewable resources or the rising cost of global warming pushes constant capital costs to a point where we see schisms in the capitalist class and the rise of a truly green politic. An inter-class division between coal and oil on one side and the rest of the capitalist class on the other could open up space within the bourgeois state for radical politics as well as green politics. (In the future we will likely see lots of divisions within the capitalist class and should be ready to take advantage of them.) If some green political agenda is to be initiated it will, by its very nature, have to be centrally coordinated and dictatorial. The anarchy of capitalist competition will have to be subjugated to the political will of a long-term green program.
For those who see in this the immediate possibility for a socialist politic, it must be pointed out that the rise of a green agenda will probably mean the rise of a new class of green capitalists. The transformation of the global power grid will require massive investments in infrastructure, fierce competition between emerging technologies, the redirecting of overaccumulated capital into newly emerging sectors, etc. We can predict an economic boom following in the footsteps of a “green revolution”
This is why it is essential to take the logic of the evolution of the forces of production to the next level. The principles of efficiency and sustainability that dominate ecological design can easily be seen as the next stage in the evolution of capitalist efficiency. Much of current capitalist industry externalizes its social costs. Pollution and resource depletion are displaced into other areas. This is only possible as long as capitalism has room to expand. The progress of “globalization” is rapidly eliminating such spaces, bringing these costs back into the production process. These displaced social costs will be increasingly factored into the collective costs of social production. (Remember that value creation is a social process from which capitalists withdraw their profit.) Current capitalist production is extremely inefficient from this global perspective. Green design (in its most progressive forms) is extremely efficient from this perspective because it sees these social costs as internal to the system of value production.
This also means that a truly green system requires much less labor to maintain. Consider the difference between a solar panel and a pile of coal. Not only does coal produce pollution and require strip mining which all must be cleaned up at great expense but it also requires much labor before it can become energy. Once this energy has been consumed the process must start over again. Nonrenewable resources are perfect examples of planned obsolescence. In contrast, once a solar panel is built it continues to provide energy without any more labor. Given the proper technology, renewable resources are essentially free goods. Nobody has a monopoly over sun, wind or geothermal power. An explosion of green capitalism will soon arrive at an interesting crossroads where the basic profitability of the system is undermined by its very efficiency. Out of this we will most likely see a decentralized socialization of energy in a similar way to the decentralized socialization of culture provided by a second Internet revolution. To this end, radicals within the ecological movement need to recast the green movement as a “free energy” movement.
Space does not permit it here, but I think similar arguments could be made in respect to green agriculture. If we follow the logic of permaculture to its logical conclusion we can imagine the emergence of a second agricultural revolution which would redraw the map of food production in such a way that would suggest the emergence of new social relations of food and land.
Money
In both of the above examples I have argued that the logic of capitalist efficiency leads to a process of “decommodification” which turns privately owned commodities into collective property. Of course, this is not a sci-fi picture of a socialist utopia in which machines do all the work. As far as we know, economies must be based on some organization of human labor in order to function. The argument here is that by socializing cultural production, energy and agriculture we can create models for and momentum towards a future socialism. Free culture, free energy and a decentralized agricultural system would also drastically reduce the dependence of labor on capital thus creating space for a more effective resistance to exploitation.
As a movement for real socialism moves forward, it will have to confront the question of how value is measured, produced and distributed. I am not ready to answer this question now, but I would like to point to some of the theoretical openings that I believe the current crisis in money points towards. In the same way that I followed the logic of “decommodification” above, I will here expand upon the theme of “demonetization”.
In Marx’s theory of money we are faced with the ever-present contradiction between money as a measure of value and money as a medium of circulation. As this contradiction evolves, money takes on more functions, like hoarding and credit, which are merely extensions of this original contradiction. As money circulates in order to circulate commodities it begins to loose its relationship to its original value as a commodity. This process, which Marx initially relates to shavings taken from gold coins, is called the “dematerialization of the money commodity”. I will simply use the term “demonetization”.(10) Our current system of credit money, no longer backed by a gold standard, may be seen as the ultimate stage in this insane process of demonetization. Money can circulate at lightening speed in the form of computerized digits yet it has no basis of value whatsoever. When prodded, it reveals its fictitious nature leaving panic in its wake.(11)
Marxists have debated without resolution what the meaning of this non-commodity money is for Marx’s commodity theory of money. Perhaps it is best to see this as the logical progression of a process of demonetization which exposes the hideous inadequacy of measuring and distributing value in a capitalist society. We should be able to find a way in which the highest stage of this contradiction might lead to a new stage of measuring and distributing value and thus a new form of social relations.
For one, the high speeds as which modern consumer and producer signals are coordinated via a centralized computerized system of banking and credit is a central-planner’s fantasy come true. The problems of coordination which plagued the Soviet experiment might disappear with such a system. It also brings to mind Michael Albert’s “Parecon” in which loosely coordinated cooperative networks of consumers and producers organize production through computerized signals of demand and supply.(12)
We should see the calls for a return to a gold standard as essentially reactionary- a misunderstanding of the basic evolution of the financial and monetary logic of capitalism. Instead the left should begin to theorize about the possibilities afforded us not just by impending economic catastrophes brought on by money but by the most advanced forms of money itself. Instead of dismissing money as merely a mystifying agent, we need to recognize that it lies at the heart of the commodity form. Whether an anarchist, a market socialist or a central-planner, everyone needs to take a good look at the way money is evolving and posit ways of moving the money form to the next, post-capitalist, level.
Conclusion
There is a hypothetical aspect to the above argument. When Marxists make predictions about the future we often get into trouble. Marx himself oscillates between fiery, absolutist predictions and staid, careful argumentation. Still, even those predictions which are most often derided for failing to come true contain a theoretical foundation with strong explanatory potential. Thus, the failure of modern society to develop the sort of starkly polarized class system that Marx predicted is best explained using the same theoretical tools of class analysis Marx used to make that prediction. Thus, even within our theory we must distinguish between the form of appearance of a prediction and the actual theoretical meat that underlies it.
This essay attempts to provide such “theoretical meat” to the theory of history in a late capitalist society. I argue that teleology must be rooted in the sort of transcendent critique available only to those who straddle two modes of production. To this end we must examine the state of class struggle for signs of truly progressive forms of alternative social relations from which to base our theory. Radical politics must then proceed with an understanding of what is truly progressive and what is reactionary in these struggles. The endgame lies too far into the future for clear, bold predictions. But such predictions are not the point of a materialist teleology anyway. The point is to identify the forces of forward motion within the contradictions of capital and to use this knowledge to push history forward- to be both the subjects and the objects of our history. (13) It is in such a theoretical space that we can begin to argue that a better world is inevitable.
1. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell Publishing, 1989
2. Meghnad Desai. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism. Verso, 2004
3. Perhaps the guru of such high-tech fetishism is Wired mogul Chris Anderson. Despite the fetish, he has a lot of important things to say:
Anderson, Chris. “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business.” Wired. Feb. 25, 2008
4. Soderberg, Johnathan. “Copyleft vs. Copyright; A Marxist Critique.” First Monday volume 7, number 3 (March 2002)
URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_3/soderberg/index.html
5. StefenMerten “Contemporary Germ Forms” Oekonux Wiki. http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/StefanMerten/CapitalAndClass/ContemporaryGermForms
6. For instance, the “propertyleft” extension of the copyleft movement: http://www.bluestack.org/PropertyLeft
7. Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail, http://www.thelongtail.com/
8. Soderberg, ibid.
9. Soderberg, ibid.
10. De Brunhoff, Suzanne. Marx on Money New York: Urizen Books, 1976
11. Harvey, David. Limits to Capital. Verso: 2nd ed. 1999, chapter 10
12. Albert, Michael. Parecon. NY: Verso, 2003
http://www.zmag.org/zparecon/pareconlac.htm
13. Much of my thinking about the relation between agency and determinism in dialectical theory has been formed by a lecture by Slavoj Zizek on Lacan and Hegel. He argues, in short that human beings are determined by their past, but that their actions simultaneously recreate that past.
Zizek, Slavoj. “A Master Class on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction.” Birkbell College, London: 2006. http://www.discoursenotebook.com/
[Source: Kapitalism101 - In Defense of Teleology (http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/in-defence-of-teleology/)
A Defense of Materialist Teleology: Motion and Contradiction
By Brendan Cooney
August 2008
“What recent event or political process that you have participated in, witnessed or studied has given you inspiration and confidence that ‘a better world is possible’ and why do you think the fight for a better world will succeed?”
A good answer to any question begins with a critique of the question itself. Times have changed since a good socialist would claim, “a better world is inevitable”. Beyond the fall of the Bolshevik experiment and the slow demise of the liberal welfare state lie even more disturbing realities that have pushed teleology- the belief in the historical inevitability of socialism- out of the picture.
The hardest blow to the romantic teleology of old-school Marxism has come from the study of capitalist crisis itself. The concept of regulation has entered the foreground. Now we recognize that crisis is good for capitalism. It is an essential, cleansing process within the cycle of accumulation. Each new round of devaluation creates new modes of displacing and regulating crisis, through financial, political, productive and cultural institutions, which allow capital to recover and reconstitute the accumulation process anew. Instead of seeing crisis as a sign of the downfall of capital, Marxist literature increasingly stresses the ways in which crisis is merely a way of evolving the contradictions of capital to a new level of capitalist regulation.
Yet, the regulation school still holds a progressive view of history. The evolution of one mode of regulation to the next implies a dialectical assumption about the relation between structural contradictions that determine the motion of capitalism and the agency of individuals within these structures to alter the form that this evolution takes. For example, we recognize the diversity of forms that Neoliberalism has taken yet still argue that all Neoliberal formations share a common vision of resolving the contradictions of capital through free markets, strong states, deregulation, accumulation by dispossession, etc. This basic content of Neoliberalism reveals itself through its specific historical incarnations. As much as these forms are shaped by contingency there seems to be no escape from the basic form itself and its heightening contradictions. Furthermore, in the transition from the Fordist era to the Neoliberal era we see this basic form revealing itself as a necessary response to the crisis of the welfare state.(1)
So, in this sense, Marxists still recognize the essentially progressive movement of capital in the way in which contradictions necessitate solutions, which merely move contradictions to higher levels. Individuals acting within these structures create the basic form of the appearance of this contradiction. The aspect of teleology that is out of style is the belief that the ultimately unresolvable nature of these contradictions will necessitate a proletarian revolution.
It is precisely this second aspect of teleology which I wish reinsert into the discussion, though not quite in the traditional sense. Capitalism is all too hegemonic, all encompassing, and powerful to still hold onto a Leninist vision of inevitable, violent, global revolution. In fact, the version of socialist teleology that I advance here fits more squarely within the theoretical structure of Marx’s historical materialism than a Leninist vision that depends solely on human agency and contingent action in the face of actual historical conditions.
Marx’s observations about history were formed at a time when capital was rapidly disintegrating the social relations of European feudalism. A new mode of production was emerging from the old, replacing or appropriating old institutions and cultures with a new bourgeois social order. The emerging capitalist order took many forms. Many feudal institutions coexisted with capitalist institutions for a long time, forming contradictory or parasitic relationships. Though often sudden and violent, this process took several hundred years. From this privileged perspective, watching two modes of production rub up against each other, Marx was able to make the sort of observations that are less apparent to observers lodged thoroughly within one mode of production. The friction between these two worlds allowed for a type of transcendent critique allowing Marx to see past the appearances of bourgeois society and reveal its inner laws of motion.(2)
I believe a theory of post-capitalist social relations needs to come from a similar transcendent perspective. Where in the current crisis facing capital do we see the emergence, or possibility for emergence, of some sort of new social relations? Is the emergence of some new world discernible within the current one? If so, what does the rubbing together of these two worlds tell us about the nature of a potential new order?
Here we must make the distinction between progressive and reactionary social formations. Progressive formations are an unfolding of the contradictions of capitalism in the direction of either higher stages of contradiction or toward some communist society free of social dissonance. As stated above, the theory of successive modes of regulation is still progressive in this sense while still refusing to speculate about a communist future. Reactionary formations are attempts to restrain this unfolding- to hold the social order in place by force. The current militarism of the Bush administration is a good example of such a reactionary politic: In order to stop the basic crisis in value creation embodied in its falling dollar and crumbling financial system the US government has launched two aggressive wars and countless interventions aimed at maintaining the value of the dollar by sheer military force. This desperate, reactionary gesture has in no way changed the actual reality of the contradictions besetting the American economy. It has merely altered the form of appearance of the crisis. Like all reactionary gestures, there is a certain Oedipal tragedy to the Bush wars: the unfolding of these contradictions will happen regardless of how hard we try to stop them. In speculating about how crisis will evolve over the next century it will be important to keep in mind this distinction between progressive and reactionary formations. It is important not to see reactionary forms like authoritarian states as representing, in themselves, a qualitatively new mode of regulation. Such fetishism is common amongst the left today and has created a culture of defeatism and fear which we must not fall into if we are to understand the truly radical potential that exists within the coming crisis of capital.
There are many aspects of crisis converging within our lifetime. I argue here that within many of these crisis we can see the emergence of possible resolutions which point the way toward a new form of post-capitalist social relations- in short, some sort of socialist order which we do not yet have the perspective to fully comprehend. The transformation to a fully new mode of production will most likely take time. We will likely see new forms of socialist relations coexisting side by side with capitalist institutions in all sorts of contradictory and symbiotic relationships. The specific forms that such a transformation will take and the types of reactionary responses that may constrain the emergence of these new forms will be determined by all manner of contingent factors. What is crucial is to see the essentially progressive nature of socialism as it appears in nascent form within the heart of capitalist crisis.
Despite the diversity of forms that the transition to capitalism took, some sort of primitive accumulation was essential to the creation of private property and labor markets. I argue here that a similar process of socialist primitive accumulation will also be necessary to create the conditions for a true emergence of socialist social relations. Following Marx’s logic, we can look to capitalism to prepare the ground for us. Capital has already reduced heterogeneous labor to abstract, socially necessary labor to create a universal class with universal material interests. When we follow the logic of the evolution of the forces of production to its logical conclusion we see the possibility of a socialist primitive accumulation emerging.
Capitalists in competition with each other must revolutionize the productive forces in a never-ending attempt to extract more surplus value from workers. In their individual attempts to make labor more efficient they undermine their own basis for value creation, creating a crisis. In addition to this crisis, something else happens when labor efficiency is taken to the level of total automation, eliminating labor from a task altogether: The task becomes decommodified- essentially value-less. Capitalism began by appropriating free things and turning them into private property through a process of primitive accumulation. But through the evolution of productivity it eventually eliminates this very basis and creates a new basis for free, socially-owned production. Let us look at how this process could play out in the future.
Intellectual Property
If we are looking for an example of fully evolved forces of production, the technological revolutions in computing and the Internet are the obvious starting point. Among the many fetishes that exist in our culture, one of the most dominant is the one that attributes magical qualities to computer technology- that somehow computers in themselves will liberate us from the raw, physical world of capitalism and launch a new era of human freedom, free from want, scarcity or work. Furthermore it is made to seem as if the evolution of this technology has come about through some natural law of technological evolution determined solely by the natural properties of the machines themselves.(3)
We must always remember that technological evolution is driven by class struggle. The primary drive of this class struggle is to make labor more efficient and increase control of that labor. In the computer age we now find that many tasks, primarily those of duplication and distribution, have been automated to the point of rendering them valueless and hence free. In some sectors of the economy the only thing left to transfer value to a commodity is intellectual labor. But when this intellectual labor can be immediately duplicated and distributed for free it becomes clear that the attempt to keep this intellectual labor embodied in traditional commodity form is an essentially reactionary force that contradicts the basic nature of its technological basis.
The information commodity contains an inherent contradiction. It represents a narrow legal enclosure between two open spaces. On one side is the open space of intellectual production. Intellectual creation is an essentially social process. It is difficult to draw the line between one person’s ideas and the next. On the other side is the open space of computerized distribution in which it is virtually impossible to control the dissemination of intellectual ideas. The attempt to control these open spaces with a complex legal code, the violent power of the capitalist state, and technological surveillance is a reaction to the essential openness of this new technology. The concept of an information commodity embodies this point of conflict in which capital and labor battle for control of the means of intellectual and cultural production. Let us look closer at what is at stake in this struggle.
The struggle over intellectual property is a class struggle. Though it doesn’t bring to mind the traditional, shop-floor images of class struggle, I think it actually embodies a more advanced form of this struggle. Once the battle over labor efficiency creates a fully automated system it becomes hard to control the ownership of those means of production. In the case of intellectual property, increasingly powerful computers were sold to the working class at a decreasing price until the means of production were essentially collectivized. In this process we have seen the emergence of new forms of collective cultural production which have emerged to challenge all forms of capitalist cultural production. A proliferation of bloggers, independent journalists and other independent media-makers has challenged the capitalist press. The open source movement has proven that open communities of programers can outperform traditional capitalist software producers.(4) Hackers have consistently undermined copyright laws and profits, “playing Robin Hood” with the capitalist form of production and distribution. The language of these communities, especially the open source and hacking communities, increasingly moves in an open direction, seeking more ways to open up systems of cultural production in this democratic, socialized sense. Alternative models of economic organization are evolving spontaneously, prompting a wide variety of labels: gift economies, library economies, free-economies, etc.(5) Not surprisingly, people have begun theorizing about the way we can expand this collectivized virtual space into the physical world.(6) Within these developments we can see possibilities for radically different economic modes.
In response, capital has sought to commodify this open space with legal and technological enclosures. Before we discuss these enclosures we need to return to the distinction between progressive and reactionary formations. Obviously, the open-source movement and various forms of collective cultural production that have emerged with the new technology are progressive in the sense that they grow out of the nature of the technology themselves and seek to move these technologies and the accompanying social relations forward toward a new type of society. The question is whether the effort of capital to commodify this same space is also progressive. If it could be shown that this enclosure is similar to the sort of primitive accumulation that early capitalism was founded upon- if it could be shown that the commodification of the internet was an opening up of new sources of value creation that would launch a new stage of capitalist production- then we would have to label these enclosures as progressive as well. Then the theoretical question becomes merely one of historical contingency in a struggle between two progressive options. It should be pointed out, again, that this is still a teleological argument in the sense that we are admitting the progressive nature of history, but not teleological in the sense of leading towards socialism.
If the enclosures of capital are seen as essentially reactionary then we must take a different approach. We must identify the power of this reactionary force to hinder the progressive direction of the new technology and make guesses as to how successful these efforts will be, recognizing that at any stage in this process we will be examining contradictory formations- contradictions which must eventually be resolved progressively. I argue here that these enclosures are essentially reactionary. Let us look closer.
The commodification of virtual space is dominated by advertising revenue- not the selling of physical commodities. Contrary to those leftists who would dismiss the radical potential of the Internet because of the vast proliferation of Internet sales, it must be understood that this represents a symbiotic relation between two different modes of production. The sale of real physical commodities that embody real, socially necessary labor is external to the crisis of value production within the problem of intellectual property. The two worlds do not threaten each other at this abstract level. What we should be concerned with is the crossing over between the physical and virtual worlds- the ways in which an emerging virtual socialism might spill over into the physical world and the ways in which capital can infiltrate the virtual universe. The selling of t-shirts and I-pods online does not threaten the socialist potential of the Internet.
Advertising is a different issue. Much of virtual space is funded by advertising. Capitalist media, which have been forced to lower their prices to zero, exist solely through these advertising dollars. At the same time much of the server space that supports the mass-culture of the Internet is paid for through advertising revenue. Is this dependence on advertising a structural flaw in the progressive socialism of the Internet? I argue against such a conclusion for three reasons: 1. The same emergence of new forms of economic organization that has spurned the open source movement could equally spill over into alternative ways of funding server space. Perhaps this is even a way in which virtual democracy might first cross over into the physical world. 2. It has been suggested that in the same way that transistors and microchips have gradually seen a drop in value due to increased productive efficiency, storage space may soon see a significant enough drop in value to render it more or less free.(7) 3. Advertising does not create value. Because there is no real connection between the amount of money spent and the actual amount of sales advertising is, in some ways, a fictitious investment. But, unlike true fictitious capital, advertising is aimed at realizing surplus value, not creating it. Advertising cannot sustain an economy in the long run.
In order to create a secure business climate capital must be able to have some control over consumer information.(8) To that extent the rise of Internet surveillance has become a major force of enclosure. Capitalists collect consumer information in increasingly secretive and centralized ways, threatening the autonomy and anonymity that sustains much of the hacker and blogger communities. Combined with an increasingly reactionary, authoritarian state, this power of surveillance threatens to give capital an overwhelming force in which to quell dissent and mold the 21st century into a century of its choosing. But as we see the myth of the bourgeois, liberal utopia disappear into a new age of authoritarian capitalism we must remember that authoritarian state forms are always reactionary and unsustainable in the long run. Authoritarianism is a sign of weakness. It seeks to iron out the contradictions of capital by force and to impose absolute social harmony. Because this absolute social harmony is a falsity imposed over the real social dissonance of capitalism it is doomed to fail as a political project, especially in the face of an essentially open new technological world in which the means of cultural production have already been sold to consumers in the form of computers.
This is why forces of enclosure have turned to the infrastructure of the Internet in order to extend control over the virtual world. This battle has taken two fronts: the code infrastructure, and the physical infrastructure (cable and phone lines). There are plans underway to change the basic coding languages of computers, down to the basic machine code, in ways that make hacking impossible. (9) This would protect the intellectual property of the capitalist class though it wouldn’t necessarily stop the open source movement. Meanwhile, in the battle over net-neutrality, telecommunication companies threaten to use their control of the physical infrastructure of the net to determine web content and limit the use of the Internet.
How should we read this attempt to exploit infrastructure to redefine the Internet? After all, if we assume that technology is neutral and its evolution determined by class struggle; and if we assume that capitalists can and do evolve technology in progressive ways in order to displace crisis endlessly, can’t this rebuilding of the internet along lines more fit for capitalist accumulation be seen as progressive? I argue against such an interpretation for three reasons: 1. Even with such an infrastructural enclosure the absence of value creation is still a central issue in the Internet age. Intellectual property is still contradictory. The attempt to keep that contradiction in a static state is doomed to fail. An attempt to build an entire economic sector upon something that basically contains no value means that revenue increasingly comes merely from purely parasitic monopoly rent. This is not a sustainable model. 2. Competition over this rent will lead to a democratization of the infrastructure. We can imagine competition over wireless devices and other sorts of infrastructure leading to consumer ownership of some parts of infrastructure. How will hackers find ways to highjack this infrastructure? 3. Such infrastructural changes are still merely enclosures around an open concept. Machine code can always be hacked. When people own the same machines that capitalists do there is no way to maintain any real monopoly over code.
As the conflict evolves along these lines we can predict a plethora of possible historical outcomes, all moving forward through the contingent action of free agents acting on a variety of motives. At the same time we must see these actions within the context of an essentially progressive technological paradigm in which the abolition of labor value for certain commodities creates an opening for a new type of social relations. Regardless of the frightening forces of reaction, this essentially progressive dimension is key to the formulation of revolutionary strategy. The theoretical space for teleology is opened.
Ecological Design
There is much doom and gloom about the impending environmental crisis. But it is not often pointed out that environmental crisis could potentially be healthy for capitalism. Hurricane Katrina showed us that environmental disasters can simulate the same sort of devaluation that is such an important antidote to capitalist overaccumulation. After Katrina, the City of New Orleans launched a massive project of rebuilding and gentrification opening up spaces for new investment. As the plot thickens in the ecological crisis we can imagine a world of increasing disasters followed by more “capitalist field-days” of maniacal gentrification.
Yet there is possibility for the ascendance of ecological design in energy, industry and agriculture. The rise of a new type of capitalist green design would require a vastly different set of inter-class alliances and a more desperate political climate. It is possible to imagine a world in which the rising cost of non-renewable resources or the rising cost of global warming pushes constant capital costs to a point where we see schisms in the capitalist class and the rise of a truly green politic. An inter-class division between coal and oil on one side and the rest of the capitalist class on the other could open up space within the bourgeois state for radical politics as well as green politics. (In the future we will likely see lots of divisions within the capitalist class and should be ready to take advantage of them.) If some green political agenda is to be initiated it will, by its very nature, have to be centrally coordinated and dictatorial. The anarchy of capitalist competition will have to be subjugated to the political will of a long-term green program.
For those who see in this the immediate possibility for a socialist politic, it must be pointed out that the rise of a green agenda will probably mean the rise of a new class of green capitalists. The transformation of the global power grid will require massive investments in infrastructure, fierce competition between emerging technologies, the redirecting of overaccumulated capital into newly emerging sectors, etc. We can predict an economic boom following in the footsteps of a “green revolution”
This is why it is essential to take the logic of the evolution of the forces of production to the next level. The principles of efficiency and sustainability that dominate ecological design can easily be seen as the next stage in the evolution of capitalist efficiency. Much of current capitalist industry externalizes its social costs. Pollution and resource depletion are displaced into other areas. This is only possible as long as capitalism has room to expand. The progress of “globalization” is rapidly eliminating such spaces, bringing these costs back into the production process. These displaced social costs will be increasingly factored into the collective costs of social production. (Remember that value creation is a social process from which capitalists withdraw their profit.) Current capitalist production is extremely inefficient from this global perspective. Green design (in its most progressive forms) is extremely efficient from this perspective because it sees these social costs as internal to the system of value production.
This also means that a truly green system requires much less labor to maintain. Consider the difference between a solar panel and a pile of coal. Not only does coal produce pollution and require strip mining which all must be cleaned up at great expense but it also requires much labor before it can become energy. Once this energy has been consumed the process must start over again. Nonrenewable resources are perfect examples of planned obsolescence. In contrast, once a solar panel is built it continues to provide energy without any more labor. Given the proper technology, renewable resources are essentially free goods. Nobody has a monopoly over sun, wind or geothermal power. An explosion of green capitalism will soon arrive at an interesting crossroads where the basic profitability of the system is undermined by its very efficiency. Out of this we will most likely see a decentralized socialization of energy in a similar way to the decentralized socialization of culture provided by a second Internet revolution. To this end, radicals within the ecological movement need to recast the green movement as a “free energy” movement.
Space does not permit it here, but I think similar arguments could be made in respect to green agriculture. If we follow the logic of permaculture to its logical conclusion we can imagine the emergence of a second agricultural revolution which would redraw the map of food production in such a way that would suggest the emergence of new social relations of food and land.
Money
In both of the above examples I have argued that the logic of capitalist efficiency leads to a process of “decommodification” which turns privately owned commodities into collective property. Of course, this is not a sci-fi picture of a socialist utopia in which machines do all the work. As far as we know, economies must be based on some organization of human labor in order to function. The argument here is that by socializing cultural production, energy and agriculture we can create models for and momentum towards a future socialism. Free culture, free energy and a decentralized agricultural system would also drastically reduce the dependence of labor on capital thus creating space for a more effective resistance to exploitation.
As a movement for real socialism moves forward, it will have to confront the question of how value is measured, produced and distributed. I am not ready to answer this question now, but I would like to point to some of the theoretical openings that I believe the current crisis in money points towards. In the same way that I followed the logic of “decommodification” above, I will here expand upon the theme of “demonetization”.
In Marx’s theory of money we are faced with the ever-present contradiction between money as a measure of value and money as a medium of circulation. As this contradiction evolves, money takes on more functions, like hoarding and credit, which are merely extensions of this original contradiction. As money circulates in order to circulate commodities it begins to loose its relationship to its original value as a commodity. This process, which Marx initially relates to shavings taken from gold coins, is called the “dematerialization of the money commodity”. I will simply use the term “demonetization”.(10) Our current system of credit money, no longer backed by a gold standard, may be seen as the ultimate stage in this insane process of demonetization. Money can circulate at lightening speed in the form of computerized digits yet it has no basis of value whatsoever. When prodded, it reveals its fictitious nature leaving panic in its wake.(11)
Marxists have debated without resolution what the meaning of this non-commodity money is for Marx’s commodity theory of money. Perhaps it is best to see this as the logical progression of a process of demonetization which exposes the hideous inadequacy of measuring and distributing value in a capitalist society. We should be able to find a way in which the highest stage of this contradiction might lead to a new stage of measuring and distributing value and thus a new form of social relations.
For one, the high speeds as which modern consumer and producer signals are coordinated via a centralized computerized system of banking and credit is a central-planner’s fantasy come true. The problems of coordination which plagued the Soviet experiment might disappear with such a system. It also brings to mind Michael Albert’s “Parecon” in which loosely coordinated cooperative networks of consumers and producers organize production through computerized signals of demand and supply.(12)
We should see the calls for a return to a gold standard as essentially reactionary- a misunderstanding of the basic evolution of the financial and monetary logic of capitalism. Instead the left should begin to theorize about the possibilities afforded us not just by impending economic catastrophes brought on by money but by the most advanced forms of money itself. Instead of dismissing money as merely a mystifying agent, we need to recognize that it lies at the heart of the commodity form. Whether an anarchist, a market socialist or a central-planner, everyone needs to take a good look at the way money is evolving and posit ways of moving the money form to the next, post-capitalist, level.
Conclusion
There is a hypothetical aspect to the above argument. When Marxists make predictions about the future we often get into trouble. Marx himself oscillates between fiery, absolutist predictions and staid, careful argumentation. Still, even those predictions which are most often derided for failing to come true contain a theoretical foundation with strong explanatory potential. Thus, the failure of modern society to develop the sort of starkly polarized class system that Marx predicted is best explained using the same theoretical tools of class analysis Marx used to make that prediction. Thus, even within our theory we must distinguish between the form of appearance of a prediction and the actual theoretical meat that underlies it.
This essay attempts to provide such “theoretical meat” to the theory of history in a late capitalist society. I argue that teleology must be rooted in the sort of transcendent critique available only to those who straddle two modes of production. To this end we must examine the state of class struggle for signs of truly progressive forms of alternative social relations from which to base our theory. Radical politics must then proceed with an understanding of what is truly progressive and what is reactionary in these struggles. The endgame lies too far into the future for clear, bold predictions. But such predictions are not the point of a materialist teleology anyway. The point is to identify the forces of forward motion within the contradictions of capital and to use this knowledge to push history forward- to be both the subjects and the objects of our history. (13) It is in such a theoretical space that we can begin to argue that a better world is inevitable.
1. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell Publishing, 1989
2. Meghnad Desai. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism. Verso, 2004
3. Perhaps the guru of such high-tech fetishism is Wired mogul Chris Anderson. Despite the fetish, he has a lot of important things to say:
Anderson, Chris. “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business.” Wired. Feb. 25, 2008
4. Soderberg, Johnathan. “Copyleft vs. Copyright; A Marxist Critique.” First Monday volume 7, number 3 (March 2002)
URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_3/soderberg/index.html
5. StefenMerten “Contemporary Germ Forms” Oekonux Wiki. http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/StefanMerten/CapitalAndClass/ContemporaryGermForms
6. For instance, the “propertyleft” extension of the copyleft movement: http://www.bluestack.org/PropertyLeft
7. Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail, http://www.thelongtail.com/
8. Soderberg, ibid.
9. Soderberg, ibid.
10. De Brunhoff, Suzanne. Marx on Money New York: Urizen Books, 1976
11. Harvey, David. Limits to Capital. Verso: 2nd ed. 1999, chapter 10
12. Albert, Michael. Parecon. NY: Verso, 2003
http://www.zmag.org/zparecon/pareconlac.htm
13. Much of my thinking about the relation between agency and determinism in dialectical theory has been formed by a lecture by Slavoj Zizek on Lacan and Hegel. He argues, in short that human beings are determined by their past, but that their actions simultaneously recreate that past.
Zizek, Slavoj. “A Master Class on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction.” Birkbell College, London: 2006. http://www.discoursenotebook.com/