Finitude

The movement of human history is contingent upon the reproduction of the historical possibility.  This is achieved by a mode of production.  Capitalism facilitates our self-reproduction, but it does so artificially, and the consequences are disastrous.  As capitalism has evolved and endured through myriad crises, it has acquired for itself a disproportionately mythical power that is enchanting in its sway.  Yet capitalism, for all its glory, is absolutely drawn up within a greater movement than its own:  dialectical materialism.  It is the singular antagonistic element of modern history after industrialization from which all of our contemporary antagonisms spring.  But as the dialectic of science necessitates, the process of creative evolution is the harbinger of decision; for from out of opposition emerges a transformative synthesis that has the power to mark the “end of history” or its new beginning.  In this sense, capitalism may be said to have (as an organism) a finite course.  Wallerstein’s world systems analysis has this principle to offer us:

“Once one takes historical systems as the basic units of analysis, time becomes as important as space…  We have already noted that there are three basic movements in time for any historical system:  the time of its coming into being; the time (much longer) of its “normal” functioning and development/evolution; the time of its structural crisis, bifurcation, and demise.”

    Once it is clear that there is a process of aging or duration to the historical system as organism – once it is clear that capitalism has become that totalizing historical system – it is possible to identify both internal characteristics and external interactions that signify a certain period in the life of capitalism itself.  In its “self-conditioning,” capitalism “articulates” itself, revealing its form; Mandel posits

the capitalist world economy is an articulated system of capitalist, semi-capitalist, and pre-capitalist relations of production, linked to each other by capitalist relations of exchange and dominated by the capitalist world market.  It is only in this way that the formation of this world market can be understood as the product of the development of the capitalist mode of production… and as a combination of capitalistically developed and capitalistically under-developed economies and nations into a multilaterally self-conditioning system” (49).

Capitalism as an organism# has a duration; it is thus possible to speak of the lifespan of the capitalist mode of production.  The mode of production is a material mode – it is the physical relationship human beings have to the matter of the earth, how we harvest it, transform and consume it.  Capitalism as a mode of production is the systematic categorization of the earth and its parts into parts, the standards of measurement of which produce quantifiable data allowing for the allotment of all resources into their most efficient or productive use (use-values are thus organically determined from the accumulated history of use-values of the products of the historical mode of production – i.e. the history of their exchange.  Again, “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” (14).  The fundamental resource of the capitalist mode of production for Marx is labour-power, which capital appropriates on loan in order to produce surplus-value, which in turn is re-circulated through direct application by the capitalist in a medley of ways.  This circulation and re-circulation of capital is inherently expansionist and all-subsuming (totalizing).  It reproduces itself not only through the exploitation of labour-power but in demonstrating the enchanting intensity for transforming the world into use-values for human consumption.  This, however, is an illusion, for it is not capital itself which contains the power but human beings laboring in concerted cooperation to reproduce themselves:  “the capitalist mode of production is both the mode of production in which the economy is most easily recognized as the ‘motor’ of history, and the mode of production in which the essence of this ‘economy’ is unrecognized in principle (in what Marx calls ‘fetishism’)” (Mandel, 242-3).  Capitalists in this sense are leeches feeding and reproducing themselves through the market – the place of exchange which is the metaphorical lungs of the organism that is capitalism.  Marx, in Capital III, describes the relationship of evolving industry to the “world market”, which “itself forms the basis for this [capitalist] mode of production.  On the other hand, the immanent necessity of this mode of production to produce on an ever-enlarged scale tends to extend the world market continually, so that it is not commerce in this case which revolutionized industry, but industry which constantly revolutionizes commerce (328).  Marx’s explanation of the evolution of the money-form of the commodity demonstrates this relationship, for money, representative of exchange-value, is imbued with the same abstract process of the signification of value.  It is for this reason that Marxists constantly cry for the differentiation between value and “price”.#

   Capitalism attempts cultural equalization through its dual processes of formal and real subsumption.  Mandel reminds us, however, that global capitalism does not equalize economically; rather, it is the opposite that occurs:

The law of value would only lead to uniform prices all over the world if there had been a general international equalization of the rate of profit as a result of the complete international mobility of capital and the distribution of capital over all parts of the world, irrespective of the nationality or origin of its owners; in other words, if practice only if there were a homogenized capitalist world economy with a single capitalist world state (71).

It is an organism that attempts to absorb all other organisms as dependent parts of its historical-material process.  This is a gradual process in which nation-states restructure their economies in order to open up the flow of capital; it is the assimilating mechanism necessary in capitalism’s expansion at the behest of authoritarian measures imposed by capital-dependent states (imperialism).  The unequal distribution of global wealth is a distribution, but, to re-sculpt Mandel’s statement, the state of the world is one of singular (and total) dependence upon the capitalist mode of production.  This form of “single capitalist world state” we may properly call “late capitalism”.
    Bergson, speaking of the movement of aging – how an organism’s development times itself and its own unfolding growth – describes how the details of our material world may appear to be constantly refreshed, but at the core is measured qualitatively by a more organic duration.  He writes:

The cause of growing old must lie deeper.  We hold that there is unbroken continuity between the evolution of the embryo and that of the complete organism.  The impetus which causes a living being to grow larger, to develop and to age, is the same that has caused it to pass through the phases of the embryonic life.  The development of the embryo is a perpetual change of form.  Any one who attempts to note all its successive aspects becomes lost in an infinity, as is inevitable in dealing with a continuum.  Life does but prolong this prenatal evolution.  The proof of this is that it is often impossible for us to say whether we are dealing with an organism growing old or with an embryo continuing to evolve… (13).

   In a very relative sense, the persistence of any organism is framed in its own riddle of the sphinx.  All organism age, and in that aging, relative to themselves as well as their species, experience youth and its development into old age.  As all organisms, there are both quantitative and qualitative changes to capitalism’s characterization over its apparently organic development, or aging.  Mandel explains that our previous inability to

explain late capitalism hitherto can be attributed to neglect of this interlinkage [between ‘organized capitalism’ and generalized commodity production] – in other words, to incomprehension of the famous formula applied to joint-stock companies by Marx in Capital: ‘It is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself, and hence a self-dissolving contradiction, which prima facie represents a mere phase of transition to a new form of production.  It manifests itself as such a contradiction in its effects…

    What Mandel neglects to remark upon is that this “famous formula” is not “abolition” but rather displacement, a “fetishization” of wealth that seems to spontaneously generate in the hands of mathematically-skilled manipulators and analysts of the market movements of capital around the globe.  Industrial labour, on the other hand, becomes globalized but nationally and regionally fragmented in its inequalities:  “On the world market, the labour of a country with a higher productivity of labour is valued as more intensive, so that the product of one day’s work in such a nation is exchanged for the product of more than a day’s work in an underdeveloped country” (71-2).  Meanwhile, the developed world seems on the verge of breaking away from labour-power simply because the flow of capital has been internationalized.  Mandel continues:

…  [Late capitalism] establishes a monopoly in certain spheres and thereby requires state interference.  It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, state issuance, and stock speculation.  It is private production without the control of private property.’  Likewise: ‘The credit system appears as the main lever or over-production and over-speculation in commerce solely because the reproduction process, which is elastic by nature, is here forced to its extreme limits, and is so forced because a large part of the social capital is employed by people who do not own it and who consequently tackle things quite differently than the owner, who anxiously weighs the limitations of his private capital in so far as he handles it himself.  This simply demonstrates that the self-expansion of capital based on the contradictory nature of capitalist production permits an actual free development only up to a certain point, so that in fact it constitutes and immanent fetter and barrier to production, which are continually broken through by the credit system’ (523-4) [Italics his].

Capitalism’s end may be in this over-elasticity of the distribution of wealth.  This is in light of the fact (which Marx initially shows us) that capitalism has an “inherent tendency towards ruptures of equilibrium” (Mandel, 27).  Bergson reminds us, however, to

[c]onsider the most complex and the most harmonious organism.  All the elements, we are told, conspire for the greatest good of the whole.  Very well, but let us not forget that each of these elements may itself be an organism in certain cases, and that in subordinating the existence of this small organism to the life of the great one we accept the principle of an external finality.  The idea of a finality that is always internal is therefore a self-destructive notion” (28).

Strung through Marxist discourse is a lens-like movement between the localized activity of capital and the wide landscape of its expansion; the former is the site of scientific analysis, the latter is the vision of historical materialism as a process (though it, too, is simply another lens of relative proportion (here we find Bergson, who asks us “relative to what?”)).  The former is fundamentally static – an opportunity for close critical examination and signification – the latter, in constant motion, is equally a glimpse of the whole dialectical movement of history which, however grand it appears, begins in a relationship between humanity and our own production and reproduction, or what Marx calls our historical mode of production.  In advanced capitalism, all exchanges are exchanges of commodities; the actual fragmentation of human beings into commodity-conduits for the flow of capital mirrors itself in the marketization of all qualitative human attributes (marketization here taken to be literally the effective objectification and quantification of all things human; the pretense is their exchangeability).

Fragmentation is the opposite of unification (unity).  It is the result of categorical intensity.  It is the shattering of portions into alienated parts that are closed-off to meaningful interrelation and exist in apparent solitude.  Gradually we are beginning to see the effect of quantitative systems of analysis on every aspect of our lives, as scientific and mathematical cybernetics totalize their grip on us.  Capitalism is transforming all lives into numerical intelligibility, for mathematics is the language of capitalist apportionment.  The more mathematizable all qualities of the world become (Martin Heidegger speaks specifically to the reduction of all possibilities to a single understanding that proclaims its own truth, i.e. science), the greater the possibility of exploitation of the resources the world has to offer.  The more identifiable the world becomes in our insistent (even imperialist) categorization of its generative matter, the more the attributes or personality of the world is broken down into parts whose only source of life or momentum is the circulation of capital on a global scale.  Bergson details this totalizing transformation as one of quantitative disintegration:

“When the mathematician calculates the future state of a system at the end of a time t, there is nothing to prevent him from supposing that the universe vanishes from this moment till that, an d suddenly reappears.  It is the t-th moment only that counts—and that will be a mere instant.  What will flow on in the interval—that is to say, real time—does not count, and cannot enter into the calculation.  If the mathematician say that he puts himself inside this interval (as Marx does), he means that he is placing himself at a certain point, at a particular moment, therefore at the extremity again of a certain time t¹; with the interval up to T¹ he is not concerned.  If he divides the interval into infinitely small parts by considering the differential dt, he thereby expresses merely the fact that he will consider accelerations and velocities—that is to say, numbers which denote tendencies and enable him to calculate the state of the system at a given moment.  But he is always speaking of a given moment—a static moment, that is—and not of flowing time.  In short, the world the mathematician deals with is a world that dies and is reborn at every instant—the world which Descartes was thinking of when he spoke of continued creation.  But, in time thus conceived, how could evolution, which is the very essence of life, ever take place?  Evolution implies a real persistence of the past in the present, a duration which is, as it were, a hyphen, a connecting link.  In other words, to know a living being or natural system is to get at the very interval of duration, while the knowledge of an artificial or mathematical system applies only to the extremity” (15).

Capitalism is an artificial system that mimics a natural system by apparently organic stimulation.  It is only “apparent,” however, and not actual – for even as it alienates and fetishises, it is this very process of alienation and fetishization that reveals its own false eternity; its internal and external finitude; in a word, its lifespan.  Once revealed in its artificiality, the very means of its own reproduction and propagation may be turned against it – an act that can only be considered the genesis of a revolutionary science.  This is what Marx did when he wrote Capital and set out the principles of capitalism’s artificial, antagonistic momentum.

Its internal finitude is measured in the human cost of labour-power; its external finitude is measured metabolically, in relation to the sheer quantity of natural resources available for consumption.  Today, labour is at its limits, in tension with a mode of production that is trying to squeeze out surplus-value where internal and external contradictions render this, under the laws of capitalist motion, impossible:

In terms of space, a historical social system had boundaries, but the boundaries were not fixed. The structures of the modern world-system, which was a capitalist world-economy, led to its continual geographic expansion, such that over time the capitalist world-economy came to encompass the entire globe. At that point, the issue for the modern world-system was no longer how it related to zones outside its geographical limits but how it coped with the fact that there were no longer zones outside its geographical limits (Wallerstein, 6).

Geographical and resource limits are external antagonisms to the fully developed form of capitalism, or “late capitalism”.  Maitra’s study on the development potential of the “third world” claims that “a complete capitalist transformation of the Third World economies will not materialize, despite a tremendous growth of capital accumulation as a result of these economies being an integral part of global capitalist production” (67).  Part of the reason for this is the systematization and apparent lapse into permanence undergone by the world systems at this time.  There are, however, more vital matters at hand than anthropomorphism.  The very earth itself appears to be deteriorating around us, as Grifo’s eco-economic analysis succinctly notes:

Habitat degradation, overexploitation, introduced species, pollution and contamination, and global climate change, driven by an ever-growing human population and greatly increased consumption levels, are the primary factors behind the loss of biodiversity.  This loss can be characterized as a two-step process consisting of ecosystem disruption and the subsequent extinction of species…  It is the objective of this chapter to examine one set of specific consequences of this loss:  the profound implications it has had and will continue to have for human health (197).

   Moreover, this deterioration in habitable and cultivatable space is directly associated with the rising levels of both poverty and landlessness in underdeveloped nations.#  There is a sprawling contemporary debate around the appropriate human response to these external limiting factors; meanwhile, capital continues to suck the labour of the world dry.  These are only brief remarks on the current environmental crisis, but the exhaustion of earth’s carrying capacity is a potentially severe limiting factor in the continuation of capitalism’s evolution.

Today, capitalism has become a given – hence a necessary – historical epoch in the creative evolution of humanity’s internal development of an antagonistically artificial – inorganic but historical nonetheless – mode of production.  In Mandel’s words:

The crisis of capitalist relations of production hence appears as the crisis of a system of relations between men, within and between units of production (enterprises), which corresponds less and less to the technical basis of labour in either present or potential form.  We can define this crisis as a crisis not only of capitalist conditions of appropriation, valorization and accumulation, but also of commodity production, the capitalist division of labour, the capitalist structure of the enterprise, the bourgeois national state, and the subsumption of labour under capital as a whole.  All these multiple crises are only different facets of a single reality, of one socio-economic totality: the capitalist more of production (571).

It is a system that wants and strives to make every system a part of itself.  In doing so, it obscures all variety and makes all human history its own history by effecting a qualitative change in the global modes of production by homogenizing every exchange-relation it can find.  Capitalism appears to have managed even to subsume socialism by subsuming the state apparatus.  Though the state proclaims its “regulation” of the market, it is truly the opposite which transpires:  the market, at the mercy of capitalism, determines the state’s function.  Today, government has been placed in the absurd situation of relying upon the developed locality of capital’s flow (here, the United States) to fund programs attempting to ameliorate the conditions of a capitalist society in the first place!  It is apparent, particularly in the case of the Chinese state, that all initiatives and programs depend upon late capitalism for their funding.  The success of the “communist” Chinese state to rewire itself into the framework of capital’s torrential flow must be saved as a topic for another discussion, however.  What we are dealing with here is approaching complete system dependence upon late capitalism; the equivalent of Venezuela or Iran’s resource curse, or even American dependency on oil.  In other words, it is an overblown structure, primed for explosive deflation, an “epoch in history of the development of the capitalist mode of production in which the contradiction between the growth of the forces of production and the survival of the capitalist relations of production assumes an explosive form.  This contradiction leads to a spreading crisis of these relations of production” (Mandel, 562).

Taking a step back, we see the planet earth.  It is not only our habitation but lends itself generously to our habitude, the manners in which we live.  We depend upon it, yet it does not depend upon us.  Perhaps the clearest understanding we can have of the planet is that it will not support human civilization indefinitely, but only for as long as one or the other perseveres.  That support system is founded in the mode of production proper to its time in history; today, that system is global and it is called capitalism.  Marxism, on the other hand, uses the very science fostered by and appropriated for the purposes of capital to propel a revolution in the mode of production.  Humanity must necessarily rupture with capitalism, science’s jealous keeper, in order to right the historical imbalance and violence of societies.  Althusser writes, “the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production has the effect of a revolutionary rupture, and it is this effect which determines the transition from one mode of production to another… and thereby the transformation of the whole social formation” (228).

Creative evolution is the anarchy of the forces unleashed by the mode of production (variable), and it is this we must keep in mind when faced with the polemical “end of history”.  It is our means of producing new internal and external relationships and fundamentally transforming capitalism into a qualitatively new mode of production:  communism.