Sunday, January 15, 2012

Foundation

This, then, is where capitalism has brought us.  The duration of its antagonistic mode of production may not be measurable in mathematical time (concrete time), but it is qualitatively measurable in space, which is the breadth of alienation, exploitation, and devastation in the material human world we have built under its impetus.  The accumulated human experience of its own collective life (memory, which is more than history), brutalized by the purveyors of capital and its intense productive efficacy, qualitatively manifests itself in manifold miseries such as binding poverty, armed conflict, and the irreversible destruction of the earth’s natural resources.  Faced with gross discrepancies in the distribution of wealth, we have at last been able to stare down the immense power of profit and numbers (GDP gross, GDP per capita, supply and demand of commodities and their production, &c.) and demand different systems of measurement (Gini coefficient, gross national happiness, happy planet index, &c.).  These systems, however, in attempting to quantify and standardize what is experientially and qualitatively diverse, merely reproduce the mathematical, totalizing systems of analysis that are as intimately-linked with capitalism’s historical-epochal development as lovers bound up in the blind passion of their copulation.
Marx knew that the process of dialectical materialism in human history is the internal antagonism; yet simultaneously it is ever reaching beyond itself, projecting itself into the future.  The totalizing discourse of mathematical science (scientific mathematics) in its relationship to capitalist development, then, as the channel that capitalism sets to constructing itself (ideologically and materially), is one fold in the twofold antagonism of the capitalist mode of production itself.  Like a ratcheting, evolution regulates itself through a process of experimentation, which like science is a movement between the hypothetical and the actual; between possibility and actuality; between the virtual and the concrete.  Most importantly, however, it is the movement between thought and action, which, much like the development of exchange-value and the money-form themselves, occurs not in frame-able instants or moments but in a gradual effort of repetition and nuance (the qualities of individual organisms in general).  “Like ordinary knowledge,” Henri Bergson writes, “in dealing with things science is concerned only with the aspect of repetition.  Though the whole be original, science will always manage to analyse it into elements or aspects which are approximately a reproduction of the past” (20).
   Capitalism, as we know, is an evolved form of more “primitive” modes of production.  In itself (internally) it is comprised of a twofold antagonism:  on the one hand, between the forces of production and relations of the mode of production, on the other, between the affective, closed totality of mathematical science (scientific mathematics) and the immense breadth of possibility generated and proffered by the earth.  Real time, outside of mathematical, calculated time, is the space where this genesis is realized – timing itself.  Bergson writes:  “Organic creation… the evolutionary phenomena which properly constitute life, we cannot in any way subject to a mathematical treatment.  It will be said that this impotence is due only to our ignorance.  But it may equally well express the fact that the present moment of a living body does not find its explanation in the moment immediately before, that all the past of the organism must be added to that moment, its heredity—in fact, the whole of a very long history” (13-4).  Bergsonian creative evolution, in the accumulative nature of its movement, can be formulated as parallel to Marx’s characterization of historical materialism in the Communist Manifesto:

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these again, subordinate gradations. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones (35).

   Creative evolution is the same:  “new” relations emerge from an indeterminate duration of nuanced yet repetitive interactions between different organisms.  This latter side of the twofold of the capitalist mode of production is equally revealed through the respective “quantitative lens” and “qualitative lens,” or mode of historical interpretation.  The gradual subsumption of the latter by the former (through a particular dialectical process in human history) is the historical evolution of the singularly capitalist mode of production that has come to dominate the experiential realm of human affairs.
   Capitalism, like an organism, is composed of smaller, relatively more individualistic parts.  The evolution of the concerted function of this organism is Marx’s project in Capital, through his thorough examination of the development of the commodity and exchange value.  There is an intrinsic link between capitalism and the development of the commodity; the former depends upon the advent of the latter for its existence, as it is the production and exchange of commodities that drives the accumulation of wealth in the rising bourgeoisie class.  The commodity, which is any object of human need or desire, material or imagined, possesses twofold value.  In one respect, commodities have “use value” as things (that can be used in some sense); but they are also “expressions of an identical social substance, human labour,” and in the act of exchanging commodities – an object not becoming a commodity until it is exchanged – present us with their “exchange value,” that is, what is their equivalent in trade (Marx uses 20 yards of linen = 1 coat).  A commodity satisfies a human want, exhibits use value in its consumption (which is informed by the quality of the commodity), and exhibits exchange value as it is exchanged (quantity is fundamental to exchange value).  The commodity, however, in its exchange, is accompanied by both a leveling and an abstraction.
   All labour becomes the same in a capitalist economy.  When we move from use-value as a basis for exchange to exchange-value, we abstract the labour that produced the commodity in our abstraction of value; the nuances of material production disappear, and we are left with “materialized” value, “congealed quantities of homogenous human labour” (128-9).  The “magnitude” or quantity of this value is measured temporally in terms of the labour that produced the commodity, in terms “… of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure” (128).  A commodity’s exchange value is always equal to what it can be exchanged for; “… the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values” (127).  There is a third potential party involved, which is another substance that may be exchanged for either product, whose value does not arise naturally (money).  The substance of the commodity is labour; its measure of magnitude, labour-time.  A thing acquires value when it is “mediated through labour” (130).  It acquires exchange value as soon as it is exchanged.
   The value of a thing is established in terms of the labour-time that was invested in its production.  Once labour has been abstracted, however, the unitary phenomenon and expression of labour power must necessarily have a standard against which all labour can be measured (in terms of the product; i.e. a canner and a tanner can’t be expected to operate within the same system of value assignation).  As a whole, this standard Marx calls “socially necessary labor time,” or “the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society” (129).  When an item is exchanged, it acquires a different value, depending upon the nature of the exchange; these values “are always divided up between the different commodities brought into relation with each other by that expression” (140).  The “relative value” of a commodity is brought into relation with the “equivalent value,” by which it establishes the standard of its own value determination.  The relative value is always relating to the equivalent value; that is, positioning itself as equal to the equivalent value.  The universal determinant of equivalent exchange value is notorious:  money.  This abstraction of exchange value, appearing as a concrete item, is really the artificial birth of the blood of global capitalism, readily assailable as such only in its transformative power, turning labour-power into surplus-value and fresh capital.  Exploitation of labour-power is the foundation of capital accumulation and the driving opposition of modern history.
   Evolution too is driven both by internal antagonism and external antagonism at once.  Capitalism’s appropriation of the productive force of labour-power is an internal mechanism that is concretized in what economists call “development.”  Of course, this is in no sense an actual relationship, merely an artificially-created one, obscuring labour-power itself.  The course of history – which we ourselves have charted and continue to navigate, as explorers – is responsible for this.  Before we can conceptualize the human collective in its diverse fullness, however, humanity must be brought together to the point of a collective decision, or the antagonistic climax of the epoch of capitalism.  This is begun by the appropriation and exploitation of human labour-power, occurring under specific and unique historical conditions.
The movement of labour is the movement of modern history, dialectically materialized in the development of the commodity, the money form, and the capitalist mode of producing surplus-value.  This movement gave rise to Marx’s “labour,” which is homogenously responsible – in its productive power, that is, its capacity to create value – for the totality of material production within industrializing societies.  In acquiring objects with certain use-values and transforming them into different objects with new use-values, labour imbues objects with the potential for profitable exchange; in other words, a labourer creates an object that is both desired and exchangeable.  As a force of production, labour, which, lacking capital, also necessarily lacks the “means of production,” is desirable to the rising capitalist class, whose object is the production of surplus-value, or profit.
    None of the elements of the production process is capable of producing surplus-value (and thus new capital) save for labour.  Both the “value of the raw material” and the value of the means of production (equipment, machinery, &c.) may change, but these changes are only ever actualized in the labour that produced those values, and thus affect the process of production (costs, efficiency; i.e. how much surplus-value can be produced) only in the value these elements possess “independently of the process” (318).  Labour power (homogenous and crystallized) is the sole producer of value and surplus-value, and the accumulation of this in the hands of the employer or “capitalist” is the means for the cyclical accumulation of surplus-value and new capital.
Labour in general is up for grabs in “the assumption that the labour of the worker employed by the capitalist is average simple labour” (306).  The capitalist makes this assumption in light of the current economic conditions, which inform decisions regarding the capital “advanced” in the process of production, i.e. wages, pricing, hiring more or less labour, &c.  The capitalist market depends upon this relationship in order to expand its profitability.  The early labourer, landless, has only the productive value of their labour-power, which industrialization determines to be their sole means of subsistence.  Only by selling their “wage-labour” to the interests of accumulated capital will they survive.  The capitalist knows that

“The worker adds fresh value to the material of his labour by expending on it a given amount of additional labour, no matter what the specific content, purpose and technical character of that labour may be.  On the other hand, the values of the means of production used up in the process are preserved, and present themselves afresh as constituent parts of the value of the product…” (307).

   The latter point is particularly important to Marx’s argument; he insists upon the “metempsychosis” of value as labour changes “the means of production into constituent elements of a new product.”  Like the notion of the soul’s flight from the body in death, “[value] deserts the consumed body to occupy the newly created one” (314).  This act of creation, however, does not give rise to surplus-value on its own, but only when “loaned” to the capitalist by the labourer in exchange for the means of subsistence; first labour works, then it is paid… only once the profit has been made.
    Profit is one of the main constituents of surplus-value, and it is here that we are to ascertain the exploitation of labour.  A single labourer, working on their own, is really a craftsperson.  As soon as their labour is rented to the capitalist, they are bound to the terms of their contract, and must produce for the sake of producing commodities – values priced by the market – which will be sold in the circulatory, accumulative drive of capital, guided by capital but materialized by the proletariat.  Marx delineates the two types of capital in terms of “constant capital” and “variable capital,” the former representing “the raw material, the auxiliary material and the instruments of labour,” the latter being “labour power” (317).  These are the two factors intimately interwoven in the “valorization process,” by which value is produced in “excess” of “the sum of the values of its constituent elements,” or “the value of the capital originally advanced” (317).  This is surplus-value, or “the difference between the value of the product and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of the product, in other words the means of production and the labour-power” (317).
   In production, “The replacement of one value by another is here brought about by the creation of new value” (316).  This “new value” is what is exchangeable on the market, consumable by the population, desirable in some sense of the product’s novel use-value.  This is the situation in which we find labour:  co-opted into the process of production by their free-floating, flexible nature (movement of labour, quantity and quality of labour), and, in the need to sustain themselves, become the sole objects capable of engaging in the valorization of production and hence the means of sustaining the capitalist class in social production.  This is nothing less than the creation and re-creation of the classed social order, the exploitation of the labourer, and the ultimate consumption of what is produced, over and over again, in the temporarily self-sustaining of capitalist inequalities (arising from the conditions of production).  This is the internal contradiction of capitalism that Marx posited, and the basic social relation it illuminates is met, first and finally, in the factory.
The beginnings of the manic activity of wealth – growing into its own behavioural characteristics, its own “clout,” so to speak – manifested itself physically in the proliferation of factories.  The conditions in factories not only were abominable in Marx’s lifetime, but continue to exhibit their grotesquely-exploitative tendencies out of sight of our own first-world mode of seeing.  For Marx the factory was the central locus of capitalism itself, its breeding ground maintained by the flow of capital through its labouring heart.  In these environments the “metabolism” of humanity is acted out nearly twenty-four hours a day.  Machines demonstrate their productive value at their quickened and quickening rate of consumption.  The value of the particular components of the machine’s own production (labour-power, socially necessary labour time, raw materials, &c.) never even nears exceeding the value capital and unskilled labour-power are consequently enabled to extract from the process of production.  Thus in one act capital simultaneously castrates the labourer, who has become ever replaceable by an “industrial army” of cheaper, unskilled, largely uneducated labour, and augments itself manifold through efficiencies.  Capitalism is itself a “division of labour,” if labour is interpreted not as processes of production but the socio-cultural articulation of human driving forces.  The economic force of capital and its global scope have become a part of the function of societies.  Capitalism, moreover, is largely assumed, as is our participation in it.  Yet capitalism itself must be structured as efficiently as possible in order to run and expand seamlessly.  The fetishization of wealth itself is a result of the division of our needs and desires.  Capitalism feeds desires, and with the growth of desires comes the growth of needs, not only quantitatively but qualitatively.
The factory is founded on motion; it sustains itself only for as long as the velocity of capital is sustained (through commerce, expansion, and technologization).  The machine itself is a microcosm of the ideal factory, in which the labourer becomes nothing more than “conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force” (545).  In this “most developed form,” the labourer him or herself demands as little as possible in order to subsist and still function as socially-necessary labour.  Mechanization and technologization in general aid this process, as a labourer’s “skill” becomes less important as the complexity of the means of production increase and their operation is simplified.  The capitalists desire as much productivity out of their factories as possible for as low of a price as possible.  Unskilled factory labour, such as is done by women and children in many countries, is ideal for two reasons; one, the labourers themselves often experience chronic unemployment in their economies and must work whenever possible in order to survive; and two, their structural and individual lack of education and educational opportunities empowers their employers to fully exploit their labour-power in the production of surplus-value.  Wage-slavery, in factories explicitly, in many regions of the world, is little better than literal enslavement, and in many cases may be far worse.
Engels explicitly tells us that “capitalists cannot exist without wage workers” (32).  Wage-workers are an industrial phenomenon (though in developed countries, wage-labour has become largely synonymous with labour in the service sector), moulded in the factories themselves, woven into the very material function of the factory itself:  “In manufacture the workers are parts of a living mechanism.  In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages” (548).  The factory is an organism, comprised of component reproductive (labour) and metabolic (means of production) parts.  The factory is where the physical transformation of raw material into commodities – the commodification process – characteristic of the capitalist mode of production is produced and reproduced on a global scale by a reserve army of industrial labourers.  This is the metabolism of capitalism, which grows in exponential proportion to the expansion of its organism; “Marx foresaw this development over a century ago, when he wrote that capital could only develop itself (and the forces of production) by simultaneously pillaging both the sources of human wealth, earth and labour” (Mandel, 578).  It requires an industrial base of labour concentrated and powerful enough to metabolize for the whole global system of capitalism.

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