Invisible Exploitation

Eva Swidler is an environmental political economist and social historian. She teaches at Goddard College and the Curtis Institute of Music.

The Marxist analysis of work under capitalism has long been associated with a preoccupation with wage labor: waged workers as wage-slaves, industrial workers as the revolutionary proletariat, and factory workers as the vanguard. The labor theory of value has been widely seen as applying to the wage form of work and no other. But Marx’s own writings describe other forms of labor under capitalism, and Marxist theorists have long pushed to expand our understanding of exploitation beyond the classic waged relations of production.

Capitalists have always used more than the wage form alone to extract surplus product from workers. However, this century is particularly distinguished by its growing reliance on alternate methods of extracting surplus. It’s time for Marxists to rethink our preoccupation with the wage and develop a theory encompassing a common ground of exploitation across a wide variety of extractive relations under capitalism. A recognition of that shared exploitation may prove key if the exploited “class-in-itself” is to become a “class-for-itself,” able to unite and act in solidarity.

Marx himself analyzed two major modes of capitalist exploitation of workers outside the wage form: “so-called primitive accumulation” and reproductive labor. Already in 1913, Rosa Luxemburg proposed in The Accumulation of Capital that primitive accumulation (better translated as “original” accumulation) was not a one-time event somewhere in the past, but instead an ongoing process under capitalism. Capitalist growth, she argued, required continual expansion into “non-capitalist” spheres: “accumulation is more than an internal relationship between the branches of the capitalist economy; it is primarily a relationship between capital and a non-capitalist environment.”¹ It is worth noting here that discussions of original accumulation tend to focus on the material objects of appropriation, such as seized oil fields or privatized water, minerals, or land. But much or even most original accumulation—sometimes also called, accumulation by dispossession or accumulation by theft—appropriates both raw materials and labor simultaneously. When infrastructure such as railroads, produced goods such as ships, tools, buildings, cleared and improved fields and lands, crops, mined metals, and so on are plundered, the labor used to modify and maintain those resources is also seized.

Another form of capitalist labor expropriation, slavery, can likewise be understood as a form of original accumulation, a direct theft of human labor power. The case for capitalism’s foundational need for slavery was made at least as early as 1944 by Eric Williams, although at the time he assumed that slavery was a labor form of the past.² However, from reports of workers padlocked into factories, a global traffic in women for coerced sex work, confiscated passports of domestic servants, and children held to work on cacao plantations, it is clear that unfree labor is not a pre-capitalist relic, but continues to thrive.

In addition to original accumulation, Marx studied the role of reproductive labor in capitalism: the unpaid work needed to reproduce labor power by creating and raising children, and by feeding, clothing, sheltering, and caring for adult workers. However, orthodox Marxism has tended to draw a sharp line between productive and reproductive labor, suggesting that the latter is necessary to capitalism’s function and expansion, but it does not in economic terms generate surplus value for capital. Beginning in the 1970s, Marxist feminists and movements like the Wages for Housework campaign countered this consensus by arguing that women’s domestic work was unpaid but nevertheless commodity-producing work; indeed, it created and sustained the most important commodity of all—labor-power. Women’s “reproductive” work was actually foundational to capitalist exploitation, and very much a productive activity. Yet “women’s work” was and remains largely invisible as labor, instead defined as a naturally occurring “labor of love,” allocated to the private rather than economic sphere. As Maria Mies famously pointed out in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, under capitalism, with the creation of the category of “housewife,” “women’s labor is considered a natural resource, freely available like air and water.”³

In her influential 1988 book If Women Counted, Marilyn Waring brought a feminist critique of conventional economic measurements to a broader audience, arguing that from carrying water to caring for the elderly, the worth of women’s work was unaccounted for in money-based metrics of wages, profits, and productivity. Waring’s work inspired the introduction of new statistical methods, on a national and international scale, that sought to assess the hours and imputed market value of domestic labor, caregiving, and other feminized forms of unpaid work performed by wives, daughters, and mothers. However, in her sophisticated introduction to the second edition of her book (entitled Counting for Nothing in some later editions), Waring notes a double edge to these attempts at an economic account of women’s unpaid work. While arguing for the theoretical and practical importance of recognizing the scope and volume of unpaid labor in the economy, she also makes clear the dangers of attaching narrowly numerical values to women’s work, which has strong qualitative, ethical, and affective dimensions: “what is the cost of ‘visibility’ in a patently pathological value system?” she asks. “Do we want all of life to be commodified in an economic model?”⁴ Waring stops short of wondering whether a recognition of shared capitalist exploitation could provide a common political and strategic ground between house-working women and other exploited parts of the population.

While work on the capitalist exploitation of women’s unwaged labor has flourished in recent decades, versions of this critique can be found much earlier, for instance in an article by the American Marxist Mary Inman entitled “The Role of the Housewife in Social Production,” published in 1940. She presciently observed that “the labor of a woman, who cooks for her husband, who is making tires in the Firestone plant in Southgate, California, is essentially as much a part of the production of automobile tires as the cooks and waitresses in the cafes where Firestone workers eat.… [T]heir labor is as inseparably knit into those tires as is the labor of their husbands.”⁵

This cursory survey shows that throughout the last century, various currents in Marxism have focused on the role of unpaid labor in the creation of capitalist profits, through original accumulation, slavery, and housework-as-labor. Yet for much of that time, most Marxists still placed waged work at the center of their analysis of capitalist exploitation, to the exclusion of other forms of labor. Some even welcomed the expansion of waged relationships into economies where unwaged labor predominated as marking the arrival of “real” capitalism—itself seen as a disruptive but necessary stage in the progress toward socialism.

In the current era of neoliberal globalization, however, original accumulation, slavery, and housework, far from being replaced or superseded by wage labor, have instead continued and even expanded. And now we also see that even more forms of non-waged and sometimes even extra-monetary capitalist exploitation have been created. It could perhaps be argued that more exploitation takes place through these various mechanisms than in the conventional realm of wages and salaries.

While the theories discussed above have made great advances, Marxism as a whole has still yet to fully reckon with its preoccupation with the wage. What follows is an attempt to enumerate just some of the many pathways of capitalist surplus extraction, not only beyond the wage form, but also beyond original accumulation, slavery, and housework, and an argument that these other forms of exploitation are intrinsic and essential to capitalism.

We might for convenience’s sake divide capitalist forms of exploitation beyond the wage into several categories. First, wage work itself is being reorganized so that more of what is demanded of a worker is claimed not to be “work” at all, and is therefore not waged; workers are paid for less and less of their necessary labor time. For instance, precarious waged workers are increasingly expected to log unpaid “on-call” time: Starbucks employees must remain available for constantly changing shift assignments, which daily appear and disappear on their schedules. Similarly, restaurant employees must do prep work before clocking in or clean up after clocking out, home care nurses take home paperwork to finish at night, and white-collar workers check their email in the evenings, on weekends, and on vacation. Although these workers are waged, much of their work is not.

Other familiar forms of labor exploitation that are entirely outside the formal wage model are also expanding. Long recognized in the global South, various kinds of piece work and contract labor have a growing presence in the North as well. These include entirely unpaid or nominally paid labor, such as internships or prison labor, and workers labeled “independent contractors” if their jobs are menial or “freelancers” and “consultants” if they are slightly higher up the economic scale, from adjunct professors and Uber drivers, to TaskRabbit workers and day laborers, to self-employed copy editors and dog walkers.

While “original accumulation” remains an academic term, the phenomenon itself is widely recognized as a form of capitalist profiteering, despite its lack of a wage form. The seizure of natural resources, for example, has never ceased, as in the eminent domain exercised by pipeline construction companies in the United States, or the encroachment on indigenous lands for mineral extraction and other uses, part of a broader privatization of the commons. But original accumulation has also taken on new forms, such as civil asset forfeiture in the United States, which totaled over $5 billion in 2014, according to the Washington Post, and which is set for a revival under Trump’s Department of Justice.⁶ Subsidies, tax benefits, and bailouts for large corporations and financial firms, which clearly provide significant and ongoing profits, could also well be categorized as primitive accumulation, an upward redistribution of public money to the capitalist class, without even a gesture to the wider public in return. The age of “too big to fail” has made it entirely clear that these transfers of value are not just occasional windfalls, but are inherent to the very structure of contemporary capital accumulation.

The dizzying and ever-expanding suite of financial and monetary instruments used to drain cash from households are further forms of exploitation. Predatory housing lending and ballooning debts to credit card corporations and student loan companies point to the increasing prevalence of this mode of extraction. For many workers, “financialization” is no abstraction, but instead a daily reality, a ready means of appropriating value by paying with one hand, and taking back that pay with the other, through mounting debt, interest, and fees.

Just as the exploitative forms of primitive accumulation and piece work are common to the global North and South alike, financialization as a form of bleeding workers prevails across the globe. International debt—including its attendant interest payments, budget rules, and monetary restrictions—is one obvious means of using finance to extract value from workers in the global South. Less discussed today, but still important, is the global system of unequal exchange, first named in the early 1960s by the economist Arghiri Emmanuel.⁷ The subject of much theorization and debate, unequal exchange might be summed up as a phenomenon in which international trade conditions and foreign exchange relations tend to value (or undervalue) labor in a way that transfers profits to capitalists in the North. Any tourist in the global South who has noticed the lopsided value of the U.S. dollar or the euro vis-à-vis the currencies of former colonies and neo-colonies has experienced unequal exchange firsthand.

Still other forms of exploited labor appear less obviously as work, or even as mechanisms of exploitation. Housework has already been mentioned, but feminist economists, along with scholars studying peasant societies, have expanded the discussion of housework to include all kinds of subsistence work that support and subsidize capitalism.

The socially necessary wage, in Marx’s conception, was the amount required for workers to survive and reproduce themselves under prevailing social conditions. The unpaid labor of women and other subsistence workers, by producing essential use values at no cost to capital, serves to lower that necessary wage. When women cook meals for free, or raise children at home rather than send them to day care, or care for ill household members—all as unpaid “labors of love” —they provide direct economic subsidies to the socially necessary wage. If workers had to pay for those services, their wages would need to be far higher. Similarly, if women or other household members grow food in kitchen gardens or fields, or repair houses and make their own clothes, as they often do in the global South, this subsidy, combined with variations in living standards and labor conditions, enables even lower wages, and therefore higher profits. To use Maria Mies’s formulation, this unseen labor represents the submerged bulk of an iceberg, of which formal waged work forms only the tip.

Another form of unwaged exploitation is often called “shadow work”— something we all engage in and often loathe, yet usually do not think of as work, or even a means of exploitation. Coined by the philosopher Ivan Illich, shadow work encompasses unpaid labor created by capitalist enterprises, yet which in itself is entirely unproductive, with no purpose other than to service profit-making enterprises, for free—casting a kind of “shadow” outside the economy. Examples include activities novel enough to still draw our attention and frustration, such as slogging through endless automated phone trees to argue with health insurance companies, or installing endless updates to computer systems. Older forms of shadow work that we now take for granted include time spent paying bills, or checking bank accounts.⁸

In short, the capitalist exploitation of labor outside and beyond the wage form has been well documented for many years. Yet many Marxists continue to focus on the wage as the singular embodiment of capitalist exploitation. An expanded Marxist understanding of capitalist exploitation is long overdue. This is not merely an academic question, but a problem with profound implications for anticapitalist movements and organizations around the world.

Centuries ago, to become a waged worker was to suffer a steep decline in status, a condition that workers fought against as they clung to self-provisioning and self-organized, subsistence-based work. As original accumulation proceeded, the means of both subsistence and production were privatized, and access to those means of production was denied to all but the capitalists. At this point, wage work slowly rose to a status of relative privilege among the working classes, and “access to the wage” became access to more power than was available to other workers.⁹ When a worker was waged, he (for it was usually a “he”) and his work were at least acknowledged, and the terms of engagement with bosses could be perceived, delineated, and contested.9

Meanwhile, workers who labored under other, non-waged terms were reclassified as “economically backward,” and sometimes were defined as not-even-working. For familiar historical examples, think here of tenant farmers framed as a kind of feudal holdover, or the bourgeois creation of the housewife. Even when their low position in the capitalist hierarchy was acknowledged, unwaged workers came to be seen as “marginalized” or at best as “oppressed,” rather than as exploited. In fact, far from being peripheral to capitalism, the labor of unwaged workers is central to both the production and maintenance of capitalist profits.

This preoccupation with waged labor, and the associated perception that modern economics could not explain the supposedly vestigial and non-economic oppression of women or sharecroppers, may partly explain why many communities began to see a politics of identity, rather than economic solidarity, as their best path to public visibility and progress. Access to the wage foregrounds some workers while obscuring the laboring reality of others, fracturing the potential for unity across the multiple working classes. The wage has been used to divide us.

Every day shows us the advancing and expanding grip of capitalism, as it invades and commodifies ever more areas of personal life and experience. Yet at the same time, the number of conventionally waged workers is shrinking, with the rise of temporary contracts, piece work, informal jobs, and other precarious forms of employment. An insistence on wage work as the hallmark of labor under capitalism cannot make sense of this scenario; it must be clear now that the sphere of capitalism has far surpassed the sphere of waged work.

The orthodox Marxist vision has long been that workers would meet and unite in an industrial workplace, with the experience of shared exploitation in a shared productive endeavor fostering solidarity and class consciousness. Capitalists have always had other plans. And with the neoliberal assault on unions, labor protections, and the welfare state, new capitalist strategies have emerged to further expand the existing realm of unwaged work. For the working classes—waged and unwaged alike—to recognize their shared condition, the assumption that wages represent the totality of capitalist labor relations must be rejected. Workers of all kinds must focus on the underlying reality of the extraction of their surplus labor, whether shrouded by wages, piece work rates, unpaid shifts spent waiting to be called in, usurious interest payments, subsistence labor, or unpaid care work. The constantly proliferating variety of novel labor forms has proven an effective distraction from the task of building unity. It is the task of intellectuals to help reveal the hidden connections among seemingly disparate modes of exploitation. Additionally, we are well equipped to draw on the long and rich history of workers’ struggles under the many different work regimes of capitalism and to find and create new models and possibilities, both for resistance and for the creation of independent, worker-based economies.

As capitalism retreats from the wage form in the twenty-first century, it is time to widen our understanding of capitalist exploitation to include both centuries-old forms of extraction and those now being invented or newly deployed: the status of independent contractor, intern, or consultant; the shadow work of ever-lengthening commutes; and parasitic financial mechanisms. It is time to connect the dots among these many methods of surplus appropriation, and begin to build an intellectual foundation for a resurgent and unified working-class movement, before it is too late.

Notes

1. ↩Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 417.
2. ↩Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
3. ↩Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986).
4. ↩Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), xxiv.
5. ↩Mary Inman, “The Role of the Housewife in Social Production,” reprinted in Viewpoint 5 (2015), http://viewpointmag.com.
6. ↩Christopher Ingraham, “Law Enforcement took More Stuff From People Than Burglars Did Last Year,” Washington Post November 11, 2015.
7. ↩Arghiri Emanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
8. ↩Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (London: M. Boyars, 1981).
9. ↩Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM, 2012).

Source

Notes on Marx’s “General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”

“Disposable Human Material,” illustrating the role of the surplus population (or reserve army of labor) in the extraction of value from workers, inspired by Chapter 25 of Karl Marx’s, Capital. This is just a small taste of a wonderful series of drawings created to illustrate Marx’s laws of motion of capital. There is at least one illustration for each chapter of Capital, vol. 1! The drawings were created by the Capital Drawing Group based in London, UK.

Andy Merrifield

June 19, 2019

If someone were to ask me what my favourite bit of Marx’s Capital is, I’d tell them Chapter 25, on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” Not that anybody has ever asked me; but I suspect I wouldn’t be alone in selecting this pinnacle performance, the beginning of the climatic unfurling of Volume One. For here those “laws of motion” that Marx had been trying to lay bare throughout Capital, really do motor before the reader’s very eyes, in all their disturbing fluidity. Hitherto, Marx had been attempting to piece together the intricate “inner mechanisms” of capitalist society. By Chapter 25, he’s ready to analyse these inner mechanisms as a giant well-oiled whirring machine.

And he’s mesmerised by the prodigious power of this machine, by capital accumulating, bursting through every historical and geographical restriction, conquering the entire world of social wealth. Yet, at the same time, he’s appalled by the ruthless force it unleashes, by the horrors the machine inflicts upon its cogs. Meanwhile, its normal functioning soon takes on a spiraling dynamic all its own, operating beyond the control of any single capitalist master. After a while, the enviable freedom of the capitalist gets transformed into a die-hard necessity, into an infamous historical mission:

Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake.

The drive to accumulate capital dramatically pits capitalist against capitalist, capitalist against worker, worker against worker. Accumulation fuels competition, and competition, Marx says, “subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external, coercive laws.” Thus, as capitalists strive to accumulate, as their actions become mere functions of capital, they inevitably clash with other capitalists seeking to do likewise. What erupts is a fratricidal war; different fractions of capital jostle one other, struggle to corner markets, to control and monopolise markets, to control and monopolise labour; a zero-sum accumulation mania transpires and conspires. Accumulation is the centrifugal impetus of “capital in general.” But competition hastens a splintering of capital, just as it hastens a splintering of labour, compounding each side into many “aliquot parts.” Thus, as capital accumulates, the formation and intensification of class structure manifests itself as a paradoxical obliteration of class structure.

Before long, the hullabaloo of accumulation is “supplemented” by concentration and centralisation, by big capitalist fishes gobbling up little fishes and sharks chomping on big fishes. Marx says this enhances the scale of operations, accelerates the overall effects of accumulation, but in uneven ways, for capitalists and workers alike. Trouble and strife brood. For, on the one hand, competition and the obligatory development of a credit system become powerful levers of centralisation—of the formation of joint stock companies, trusts and conglomerates, mergers and acquisitions—and of expanded accumulation; on the other hand, though, the “organic composition of capital”—the ratio of dead to living labour, of machines to workers, of constant to variable capital—gradually starts to creep upwards, diminishing the relative demand for labour.

Before long, too, the system breeds a new species: Marx labels them “a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and nominal directors, a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation.” Could Marx be talking about us? By God yes. Nowadays, we know these people by name, by sleazy reputation; we know, too, that within the overall accumulation process this new financial aristocracy has a stake very different to that of productive capital’s.

The former plays an extremely limited, if any, enabling role for valorisation: stock exchanges are now billion dollar markets for speculating on already existing stocks and shares. Little activity here actually raises money for new productive investment. Businesses generate money by selling stock and shares, relinquishing part of the company to shareholders; but little of the accruing booty gets recycled into future investment. Invariably, it’s doled out as dividends, and/or creamed off through inflated CEO salaries.

***

One of the reasons I like to affirm Chapter 25 isn’t only because it explains the working conditions of the world’s peoples today; it also explains the conditions of our whole existence. Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation is nothing less than the lever upon which all our lives now pivot. Its frame of reference needs to be opened out, out onto the broader canvas of life, especially planetary urban life. The mighty machine has made us cogs everywhere. It’s here where I’d like to develop Marx’s law, “a law of tendency,” as he calls it, which expels people from dwelling space as well as from the workplace. As such, this law isn’t just a condition of earning a living; it’s a condition of earning a life.

Marx knew in the 1860s that “the absolute” general law of capitalist accumulation could be “modified in its workings by many circumstances.” But in every case, he says, it “followed that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be their payment high or low, must grow worse.” In our present-day “neoliberal” context, the economy flourishes through sub-employed and over-employed workers, through contingent and gig economy workers, through zero contract hours workers: from Uber to Deliveroo, Handy to Hermes, Amazon to Adjunct Professors, work is evermore casualised and irregular; and worker benefits seem to diminish by day. Toilers here assume that category Marx reckons the general law of capitalist accumulation progressively produces: “a relative surplus population”—or, alternatively, “an industrial reserve army of labour.”

“Every worker,” Marx believes, “belongs to this relative surplus population during the time when they are only partially or wholly employed.” Marx, it’s worth pointing out, sees all work under capitalism as precarious; always has been, always will be. It’s a precariousness dependent on a consistently fickle capitalist business cycle, on short-term soars and long haul dips. Wage levels, he says, get regulated by the relative surplus population, by its expansion and contraction. Wages “aren’t determined by the variations of the absolute numbers of the working population,” Marx insists,

but by the varying proportions in which the working class is divided into an active army and reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the relative amount of surplus population, by the extent to which it is alternately absorbed and set free.

Sometimes wages might even rise should demand for labour rise. At these moments, wages can conceivably keep increasing so long as they don’t impinge upon the overall expansion of capital. Something resembling this actually occurred during the boom of the 1950s and 1960s, when real workers’ wages did in fact rise. Still, the more typical rule, Marx thinks, is that “the mechanism of capitalist production takes care that the absolute increase of capital isn’t accompanied by a corresponding rise in the general demand for labour.” “Capital,” he says, does something more innovative instead, something more dialectical: it “acts on both sides at once”:

If its accumulation on the one hand increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of workers by ‘setting them free’, while at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those who are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour to a certain extent independent of the supply of workers. The movement of the law of supply and demand for labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital.

And under this despotism, real wages have effectively stagnated, almost nowhere keeping pace with cost of living hikes. One of the U.S.’s top capitalist mouthpieces, TheHarvard Business Review(October 24^th 2017), admits that hourly inflation-adjusted wages for the typical American worker have, since the early 1970s, hardly risen, edging upwards a mere 0.2% per year. Throughout this period, remember, the overall economy has been growing. Thus American workers haven’t participated in any of the growth, nor benefited from gains in their own productivity. The reason why is classic Marx Volume One: new technology has put downward pressure on less-skilled workers’ wages; and workers displaced from work send disciplinary messages to those still active in work: work harder or else!

Whether in times of prosperity or decline, the industrial reserve army produces much the same effect: “it weighs down the active army of workers; during periods of over-production and feverish activity, it puts a curb on their pretensions.” The relative surplus population is,

the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work. It confines the field of action of this law to the limits absolutely convenient to capital’s drive to exploit and dominate workers.

***

If we dig a little deeper into Chapter 25, we can see how Marx identifies three types of relative surplus population: stagnant, floating, and latent. Alas, we haven’t got to dig too deeply, nor have too much imagination, to see how Marx’s types remain our types. The stagnant form, for a start, is “part of the active labour army,” he says, “but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it offers capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power.” It’s characterised “by a maximum of working time and a minimum of wages.” The downsized blue-collar worker might be filed under this category, since stagnant surplus populations, Marx says, are,

recruited from workers in large-scale industry who have become redundant, and especially from decaying branches of industry where handicraft is giving way to manufacture, and manufacture to machinery.

This stagnant workforce consists of time-served men repulsed from blue-collar employment and drawn into irregular jobs like security and custodial work, janitors, cabbies and deliverymen. Older generation blue-collar workers, who once worked the mines, the auto plants and steel mills, now find themselves literally stagnant. They’re no longer able (or willing) to do low-grade work, yet are too young to retire. So instead they slouch into the ranks of a non-participating labour-force. Men who once set rivets together now sit alone, able to recite daytime TV schedules by heart. Utter stagnation lingers everywhere in rust-belt Europe and America, where empty union halls look out over the rubble of what used to be the company plant.

The dialectic of the floating relative surplus population is similarly one of repulsion and attraction, but its charge is much more volatile. Participants here encounter working conditions wholly unstable and uncertain. The only thing that’s regular is the irregularity of their work. These men and women represent a huge pool of under-employed and sub-employed workers—part-time, on-call, self-employed or zero hours contractors—whose resumé is marked by a floating in and out of jobs. Despite the job-hopping, few new skills are ever learned. Steadily, its fluctuating force assumes a predictably deadening life-form. Many workers are absorbed into the “personnel services industry,” where the hiring and firing is managed by employment agencies like Manpower, Inc., who recruit temporary workers across America and the world. (Manpower has offices in fifty countries, and places 1.6 million “in assignments with more than 250,000 businesses worldwide annually…providing our customers with productive workers and our employees with work.”) The growth of this personnel services industry means evermore despotic control of an anarchic labour-market. Supply and demand for labour tightly track the expansions and contractions of capital; yet always its motioning seeks to trim monies laid out on variable capital.

As at May 2017, the U.S.’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said nearly 6 million workers are “contingent”—i.e. “persons who do not expect their jobs to last or who report that their jobs are temporary.” Moreover, there are a further 10.6 million people working as “independent contractors,” together with another 2.6 million on-call. And this doesn’t include 1.4 million temporary help workers nor the 933,000 employed by contract firms like Manpower. Which suggests that true numbers for contingent America total up to somewhere in the region of 20 million people. No coincidence, too, that the nation’s two largest employers are contingent kings Walmart and McDonald’s.⁽¹⁾

Techie giants like Google, often seen as egalitarian employers with idyllic workplaces, are likewise massively reliant on temporary and contracted labour. In fact, “a shadow workforce of temps” now outnumber Google’s full-time employees. As at March 2019, Google uses 121,000 temp and contracted workers, compared with a full-time workforce of 102,000. Google temps are employed by outside agencies and, in the U.S., make less money than Google full-timers. They have different benefits packages and no paid vacation. Last April, hundreds of Google employees signed a letter protesting the company’s “two-tier system,” as well as the dismissal of 80 percent of a 43-person artificial intelligence team of contingent workers. OnContracting, a temp employment agency for the high-tech industry, says that companies like Google save $100,000 a year on average per American job by using a temporary contractor instead of a full-time employee.⁽²⁾

Women swell the ranks of this floating contingent workforce. In the U.S., women are three times as likely to hold regular and irregular part-time work as men. These women make up about a fifth of the overall female workforce, earning, on average, 20 percent less than equivalent women employed full-time and 20 percent less that their male counterpart part-timers. Minority groups fare worse than their Anglo peers, and minority women worst of all. On the whole, African-American women tend to be twice as likely to be lower paid temps and much less likely to be self-employed; Hispanics, meanwhile, have a larger share of low-wage “on-call” work.

Capitalism has a handy knack of constantly inventing and reinventing its reserve army of labour. Often it does so miraculously, tapping into assorted branches of society and sectors of industry where labour has been lying latent. Thus, alongside the stagnant and floating forms, Marx acknowledges another category of flexible labour, the “latent” category, a sort of reserve reserve army of labourers. “As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture,” he says, “and in proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for a rural working population falls absolutely.” “Part of the agricultural population,” says Marx,

is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban population or manufacturing proletariat. There is a constant flow from this source of the relative surplus population. But the constant movement towards towns presupposes, in the countryside itself, a constant latent surplus population.

The movement of peoples from rural to urban areas, from agriculture to an urban-based factory system, continued apace during the twentieth-century. As at 2006, its flow tipped the global demographic balance: the majority of the world’s inhabitants, some 3.3 billion people, live in urban agglomerations, not rural areas. Some of that generation’s latent surplus populations, i.e. people formerly displaced from agriculture and reabsorbed into urban factories, have since fallen into the ranks of floating and stagnant relative surplus populations. Yet by 2030, 60% of the world’s population is projected to be urban; an additional 590,000 square miles of the planet will be urbanised, a land surface more than twice the size of Texas, spelling an additional 1.47 billion urban dwellers; many of whom will bolster the ranks of a latent reserve army. They’ll offer sustained nourishment for expanded capitalist accumulation everywhere.

A big chunk of this latent surplus population lurks in China. Shanghai is the planet’s fastest growing metropolis, expanding a massive 15 percent each year since 1992, boosted by $120 billion of foreign direct investment. Half the world’s cranes are reputed to be working in Shanghai’s Pudong district. Rice paddies have been filled with modern skyscrapers and vast factories. Outlying farmlands now host the world’s fastest train links and the tallest hotel. Four thousand buildings with twenty or more stories have gone up, ensuring Shanghai has twice the number of buildings as New York. With 171 cities of more than one million inhabitants, China over the past decade has commandeered nearly half the world’s cement supplies, and will doubtless monopolise the world’s supply and demand for latent surplus labour populations.

Of course, after 1989, with the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, another reservoir of latent labour flooded the capitalist marketplace. A freshly- proletarianised workforce initiated a primitive accumulation of capital, transforming former Eastern European state employees into freelance wage-labourers, set free to pit their wits on the flexible European labour market. The Eastern bloc’s headlong embrace of Western-style neoliberalism prised open a whole new array of market niches, together with a jamboree latent labour reserve—both at home, in some newly-formed nation-states, and in the European Economic Area (EEA). Almost overnight an ideology of dictatorial personality morphed into an ideological dictatorship of the free market, with its attendant rights of consumerist man.

Out of the ashes of communism rose the Phoenix of cheap labour. Western manufacturers, halving labour costs, beat a hasty path eastwards; while a lot of latent labour, almost as hastily, trekked westwards. Stimulated by the European Union’s freedom of labour movement (2004), they’ve found low-grade jobs in powerhouses like Britain, Germany and France. Pay is better than before, yet a lot less than homegrown workers’. British businesses have prospered enormously from this influx of Eastern European labour, especially Polish. Enterprises have been able to valorise a cheap labour they’d not had since the 1950s, when Afro-Caribbean Windrush immigrants arrived. The British agricultural sector has been a big gainer. Prior to 2004, crops like asparagus, cherries, raspberries and strawberries were suffering long-term decline. Remuneration in these sectors was meagre; the work backbreaking. Few locals were turned on. Yet since 2004, rather than invest in expensive new berry-picking technology, growers have exploited Eastern European labour reserves, latent labour-power, which has rekindled agricultural capital accumulation and boosted productivity.

***

When Marx formulated his General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, cities were sites for manufacturing valorisation. It was in urban factories where commodities got produced and surplus value created. The factory system—“Modern Industry,” Marx called it—was the mainstay of capital accumulation, and workers were attracted and repelled from this urban employment. Later in Chapter 25, however, Marx notes how the general law operates outside the factory gates as well—vividly exemplified, he says, in “‘improvements’ of towns which accompany the increase in wealth, such as the demolition of badly built districts, the erection of palaces to house banks, warehouses, etc., the widening of streets for business traffic, for luxury carriages, for the introduction of tramways, [which] obviously drive the poor away into even worse and more crowded corners.”

It’s not a bad description of what still happens in big cities today. Marx’s point here is “that the greater the centralisation of the means of production, the greater is the corresponding concentration of workers within a given space; and therefore the more quickly capitalist accumulation takes place, the more miserable the housing situation of the working class.” Landlords squeeze workers, ripping them off at home, as tenants, just as industrialists rip them off at work, as wage-labourers. Rents are high precisely because pay is low. Vulnerable workers equate to vulnerable tenants; both feel the force of “property and its rights,” Marx says. “Everyone knows,” he adds, “that the dearness of houses stands in inverse ratio to their quality, and that these mines of misery are exploited by house speculators with more profit and less cost than the mines of Potosi were ever exploited. The antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation, and thus of capitalist property-relations in general, is here so evident.” Marx’s adopted hometown of London, one of world’s richest cities, had the most squalid, overcrowded habitations, “absolutely unfit for human beings,” he says. Marx knew this because he and his family lived in many of these hovels. “Rents have become so heavy,” he cites one government health inspector saying, “that few labouring men can afford more than one room.” 1865 or 2019?

And yet, in another sense, a lot has changed since Marx’s day. Back then, his focus was on production in the industrial city; a century and a half on, the city itself has become the form of industrialisation. In the 1860s, cities were places where commodities got produced; nowadays, cities are themselves commodities, centres of gravity for the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation and for the expansive power of capital. Now, urban space itself is both the subject and object of valorisation, the means of production as well as the product this means of production creates. In manufacturing, Marx said new technology would prompt a change in the “organic composition of capital.” “The growth in the mass of means of production,” he argued, “as compared with the mass of labour-power that vivifies them, is reflected in its value-composition by the increase of the constant constituent of capital at the expense of its variable constituent.”

So, too, now, is the organic composition of capital in cities rising. Quite literally rising. Constant capital is displacing variable capital: capital circulates into the construction of new fixed capital assets, new items of the built environment, such as office blocks and shopping malls, Hudson Yards and Coal Drops Yard, upscale housing and elite cultural amenities—high-yield activities for the expanded reproduction of capital rather than low-yield necessities for the simple reproduction of labour-power. This is the sense in which workers have now been set free from life, not just from work: they’re displaced from dwelling space as they are rendered superfluous from the workplace.

The progress of urban accumulation lessens the relative magnitude of the variable part of capital, even if, as in industry, it can’t lessen it entirely. Capital, after all, needs its minion service workforce of busboys and valet parkers, of waiters and barmen, of cleaners and security guards, of nannies and cooks, of superintendents and doormen. But a push-pull effect has taken hold, a dialectic of attraction and dispossession, a sucking into the city of a relative surplus population together with a spitting out, a banishment from the centre. Poor old-time stagnant populations, as well as floating and latent reserve armies, now embrace one another out on the periphery somewhere, where rents are lower and life cheaper.

This system produces planetary geography as a commodity, as a pure financial asset, using and abusing people and places as strategies to accumulate capital. The process embroils everybody, no matter where; even when it doesn’t embroil, even when it abandons people and places, it embroils. Cities, like the factories of Marx’s era, become vortexes for sucking in everything the planet offers: its capital and power, its culture and people—its dispensable labour-power. It’s this sucking in of people and goods, of capital and information that fuels the urban accumulation machine, that makes it so dynamic as well as so destabilising. For it’s a system that secretes a residue, chewing people up when needed, spitting them out when they’re not.

Residues are something more than relative surplus populations and probably include a fair number of lumpenproletariat. They’re minorities who are far and away a global majority. They’re people who feel the periphery inside them, who identify with the periphery, even if sometimes they’re located in the core. Residues are workers without regularity, workers without any real stake in the future of work. Residues are refugees rejected and rebuked, profiled and patrolled no matter where they wander. Residues are those whose land has been grabbed, who’ve been displaced from housing, thrown out of housing, whose living space teeters on the geographic and economic edge. Residues are disenfranchised and decommissioned people everywhere who feel isolation strike them deep within. Residues come from the city as well as the countryside and congregate in a space that is often somewhere in-between, neither traditional city nor traditional countryside. We might call this somewhere in-between the globalbanlieue. (Remember, the French word banlieue comes from lieu, meaning “place,” and bannir, “to banish”; hence “place of banishment.”)

A lot of these residues know that now work is contingent life itself is contingent. And with little security, there’s little to lose, and, moreover, little to gain from playing by capitalism’s rules. So what’s the point? There is no point. Some residues play by different rules, beat a different drum. Others listen to reactionary demagogues and swing right, embrace populist ravings against the machine. Many others voice muffled hopes from the left. All somehow know the capitalist game is rigged, that those in power are liars and cheats. Still more residues know that a career of hustling and hawking, of wheeling and dealing, of petty criminality, of opioids and outlawing, become coping mechanisms from the outside to a life that offers no discernible future on the inside.

One of the problems Marxists face—and I think Marx knew it might one day become a big problem—is that many residues have lost their class address. How can they regain it, find the right door bell to ring on together? How can workers who have no Party, no regular workplace or arena for collective bargaining—in fact who have no real public arena at all—how can they find one another? Perhaps the more vital question is how can the twenty-first century “dangerous classes” become really dangerous? How can they endanger the capitalist system rather than just endanger themselves?

Notes

1. Walmart’s low-wage workers are so poor that they receive around $6.2 billion in federal assistance, principally in the shape of food stamps. The billionaire Walton business thus gets a huge public handout for its low-balling employment practices. In a recent study, conducted by the Organization United for Respect (OUR), 55 percent of Walmart part-timers admitted they didn’t have enough money to meet basic needs.
2. See “Google’s Shadow Workforce: Temps Who Out Number Full-Time Employees,” The New York Times, May 28, 2019.

Source

State and Capital in the Era of Primitive Accumulation

Jairus Banaji

In the second, posthumous volume of Sartre’s masterpiece, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, which is largely given over to the attempt to make deeper sense of Russia’s industrial expansion under Stalin, that is, to the problem of how a command economy works, Sartre explains that the best history is defined as a synthetic movement or what he calls “totalizing compression”. He writes, “two dialectical procedures are possible on the basis of an identical social reality. On the one hand, a procedure of decompressive expansion which starts off from the object to arrive at everything … in this case thought may be called detotalizing and the event loses out to the signified ensembles. On the other hand, a procedure of totalizing compression which, by contrast, grasps the centripetal movement of all the significations attracted and condensed in the event or in the object”.1 I want to suggest in this lecture2 that we need to integrate Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation into a wider history of capitalism that allows for the combined nature of its evolution, and that one way of doing this is to treat primitive accumulation as one of those “practical significations” or “signified ensembles” or structures that form a permanent dimension of capitalism. This means breaking with the linearity of the simplified model of primitive accumulation that many Marxists still subscribe to, with its “stagism” if you like, and with the strong resonance of teleology that usually goes with that. Retrospective readings of capitalism start with large-scale industry and imagine that primitive accumulation explains how that came about. But, if there is a sense in which this may account for Britain’s industrial primacy, it is hard to see how it would “explain” most other industrial trajectories which were in any case influenced by Britain’s own expansion, either correlatively (as in India) or by negation (as with Britain’s main industrial competitors). In a critique of Marx’s pages, Gerschenkron made a great deal of this point, noting that the bank-financed industrial expansion that occurred in Germany did not presuppose anything like the protracted processes Marx had described.3 But, if my general suggestion is accepted, the obvious question of course is – what wider history? Do we have the categories for that? And how exactly do we see primitive accumulation fitting into this broader canvas?

It may help to start by dispelling possible misconceptions. At the level of national capitals, there is no inevitability which says that primitive accumulation will always succeed. Thus Spanish mercantilists such as Alberto Struzzi and Sancho de Moncada were relentless in their criticisms of Spain’s backwardness;4 Spain, in the later 16^th and 17^th centuries, offers a striking demonstration of the failure of primitive accumulation, precisely because nothing was as emblematic of this “original” accumulation as Spain’s amassing of American treasure and the pure predation and brutality involved in the way that was done. Spain amassed gold and silver but failed to convert this accumulated mass of precious metals into capital. Thus “Moncada urged Spain to emulate France and Holland, countries without mines, in which, because of industry and active commerce, gold and silver abounded”;5 and the naturalised Spaniard Struzzi wrote in 1624, “It is absurd to expect money to stay in Spain. It is needed in trade. The Dutch and others pay for goods in money, but it then returns to them by other paths through trade. There is no nation rich without trade”.6 For primitive accumulation to have succeeded, Struzzi was telling his readers, Spain would have had to have had a class of commercial capitalists strong enough to match the competition of “the Dutch and others”; yet, if we look at the Mediterranean as a whole, the two regions where no substantial class of indigenous capitalists ever emerged, at least not in a serious way, were precisely the great empires ruled over by the Spanish Habsburgs and the Ottomans, including cities like Naples that were under Spanish rule.7

Secondly, the amassing of a large capital stock even in the more advanced countries was not a sufficient condition of industrial capitalism. In the Netherlands, in the eighteenth century, “rapidly accumulating stocks of capital” led in fact to the financial sector becoming an “important sector of the economy in its own right”, as Jan de Vries tells us.8 Here, of “the large capital stock amassed by a century of profitable expansion … [l]ittle new investment found its way into industry”. It flowed instead into doubling the size of the VOC in the face of new competition from the French and English, into establishing a Caribbean plantation economy, and into a new type of whaling enterprise which faced higher capital requirements as the whaling grounds retreated further north.9 In the case of England, Christopher Hill had asked, “Where did the capital for the Industrial Revolution come from?” and replied, “Spectacularly large sums flowed into England from overseas – from the slave trade, and especially from the seventeen-sixties, from organized looting of India”.10 Yet Hill went on to make the point “it is not always easy to trace connexions so directly. There is not much evidence that the plunder of India flowed directly into industry: much of it was spent on conspicuous consumption, and on buying political immunity for the plunderers”.11 This puts paid to Marx’s implied suggestion that the “plunder” of Bengal by the servants of the East India Company who legally engaged in private trade was directly instrumental to industrial expansion in Britain. In East Indian Fortunes Marshall calculated that “£3,000,000 was sent home before 1757 and about £15,000,000 over the 27 years between 1757 and 1784”, but notes, about those who returned to Britain from Bengal, “Few … regarded their fortunes as capital for further venturing in trade or manufacturing in Britain”.12

Thus, the narrow sense in which many non-Marxist scholars, economists more than historians, understand “primitive accumulation”, namely, as the accumulation of capitals which are then channelled into industrial development13 is a misconception of the broader sense in which Marx himself understood this dimension of capitalism’s history. Primitive accumulation was viewed by him both as a long and violent history of dispossession, of what he called the “terrible expropriation” of the “great mass of the people from the soil”14 and as a process of consolidation of capital. Much of Marx’s attention was, of course, given over to the first side of this long “pre-history of capital”,15 but Chapter 31, which deals with the consolidation of capital, alludes to a very wide range of topics that include colonial trade and the colonial system, public finance, indirect taxation, commercial wars, protectionism, child labour, and the slave-trade. However, the overall impression a reader comes away with is that primitive accumulation was to Marx’s mind a sort of long “pre-history” of industrial capitalism as this had developed by the 1860s. The main drawback of this model in this stark form is its linearity. Centuries of violence and dispossession, and of states intervening to consolidate capital, are followed, in the way Marx tells this story, by the eventual triumph of large-scale industry. But the fact that Marx’s last chapter dealt with Wakefield suggests that he extended this narrative into the 19^th century to include settler colonialism in his history of primitive accumulation at a time when Britain at least was widely thought to be suffering from a ‘superfluity’ or overaccumulation of capital,16 and, following this cue, I want to suggest a more complex or “combined” history of capitalism that allows, as I said, for the simultaneity of capitalism and primitive accumulation. A good example of this method is the way Rosa Luxemburg describes Russia in the 19^th century. She notes that in Russia “big industry staged its real entry” only in the last two decades of the 19^th century and goes on to say, “‘Primitive accumulation’ of capital flourished splendidly in Russia, encouraged by all kinds of state subsidies, guarantees, premiums, and government orders”, placing the expression itself in quotes.17 Again, the state is central to the process.

To allow for this history of capitalism, however, we need to establish a clear distinction between two forms or “determinations of form” that Marx himself tends either to conflate or to ignore. Marx saw what he called manufacture and the manufacturing period as signifying the emergence of industrial capital. In an interesting passage of the Grundrisse that I shall return to, the period of mercantilism is described as “an epoch where industrial capital and hence wage labour arose in manufactures”.18 Now, it is true that in the seventeenth century industrial production acquired new, enhanced, significance, for example, in the writings of those like the Calabrian Antonio Serra who saw state-supported production of manufactured exports as the most effective way of securing surpluses on the current account and the best form of a mercantilist policy.19 But, stated the way Marx does, this ignores the fact that these were largely merchant-controlled enterprises. As late as the eighteenth century, luxury-goods industries such as the Lyons silk industry were dominated by merchant’s capital, by the so-called marchands-fabricants studied by Carlo Poni in one remarkable paper.20 Those firms used the putting-out system and a battery of designers to generate the sort of flexibility that allowed them to dominate the European fashion market to the despair of competitors in England and Italy. In fact, as early as 1929, Henri Hauser had signalled the distinction involved here by writing, “at the end of the fifteenth century new industries appeared, the children of the Renaissance; war industries like the production of guns, luxury industries like silk; intellectual industries like printing, type-making and paper-making… It would, perhaps, be premature to speak of industrial capitalism… But let us at least speak of commercial capital being applied to industry”.21 Now, “commercial capital applied to industry” is not industrial capital in the sense in which the owners of modern large-scale industry have come to personify this. It seems more plausible to reserve the term “industrial capital” for enterprises that were run by manufacturers who were no longer merchants. In the US this transition was still ongoing in the 19^th century cotton industry22 and there industrial capital proper only truly emerged in the shape of the large vertically integrated enterprises in oil, steel, chemicals, rubber and so on, that came about towards the very end of the nineteenth century.23 The same is true of the development of industry on the Continent, for example in Germany where industrial capitalism exploded in the early 1870s as bankers like Bismarck’s friend Bleichröder came around to financing that “great expansion”.24 In any case, the merchant-controlled manufacturing enterprises of the late medieval and early-modern periods cannot be seen as industrial capital in this stricter, modern sense.

In volume 3 of Capital, there is a passing reference to “the manner and form in which commercial capital operates where it dominates production directly”.25 The two examples Marx cites of this are first “colonial trade in general (the so-called colonial system)”, that is, the vast transatlantic commercial system which among other things revitalised slavery as a modern development, and secondly, “the operations of the former Dutch East India Company”; in short, two very substantial trade sectors in both of which Marx seemed to think commercial capital was active in new, more “direct” ways. As important as this text is another. “Industrial capital has value for them, even the highest value”, Marx says about the mercantilists in the Grundrisse passage that was cited earlier, “because it creates mercantile capital and the latter, via circulation, becomes money”.26 Now, it is this creation of mercantile capital via “industrial capital”, that is, via production, that forms the stable heart of the pre-industrial regime, and I’d like to suggest that it is plausible to see merchant or commercial capitalism as a system of accumulation where merchant capitals are characterised by this tendential drive to subordinate production directly. Of course, since the biggest commercial firms were always highly diversified business enterprises that moved capital between finance, trade and manufacturing, the expansion of mercantile capital in this pure sense was part of more complex strategies of accumulation. It might make sense to see merchant capitalism as characterised by “sectors”, of which the four or five main ones were (1) the Verlag-based manufacturing that first sprawled across large parts of the countryside of western and central Europe as early as the thirteenth century, reaching an absolute zenith in the eighteenth; (2) the big concentrated money-markets which moved in sequence from Venice to Antwerp to Genoa to Amsterdam and finally to London; (3) the commercial investments that went into trade sectors such as the Atlantic and Asia; in the Atlantic the productive capital financed by merchants took the form of plantations and slavery; and (4) the produce trades that were the typical form of British mercantile capitalism in the 19^th century and characterised by advances to household producers circulated either directly (as in the Government’s monopoly of “Bengal” opium) or more generally through local brokers who were usually substantial indigenous merchants in control of their own networks. In Many-headed Hydra, Linebaugh and Rediker describe shipping as a “mode of production that united all of the others in the sphere of circulation”,27 and since most shipping magnates were also merchants, at least before the emergence of specialised shipowning in the late 18^th century,28 shipping should likewise be seen as a purely merchant-capitalist sector, a fifth one. The flexibility and sophistication of the bigger merchant firms lay not just in their minute knowledge of international markets but in their ability to move between sectors and combine them in various ways. On the other hand, the vast mass of lesser commercial capitals specialised within particular sectors, e.g. the London agency houses that financed much of the West Indian trade, or the cambisti or bankers who dominated Europe’s exchanges, starting with the very substantial money-market in Venice that was controlled by Florentine banks,29 and so on.

Today, we are in a much better position to flesh out some of the more abstract intuitions of Marxists like Preobrazhensky. When he argued that “the whole period of the existence of merchant capital” should “be regarded as a period of primitive accumulation, of the systematic plundering of petty production”,30 what he had in mind were sectors 1, 3 and 4 I have outlined above, basically Verlag + the colonial trades. By “plunder” he simply meant what Arghiri Emmanuel would later call “unequal exchange”, that is, enforced control over terms of trade in a world marked by mobility of capital/immobility of labour, for example, by holding the wages of weavers down, as all merchant capitalists were able to do when they monopolised raw materials. But Preobrazhensky situated himself in a tradition of historiography shaped by Franz Mehring’s views of merchant capital as the “revolutionary force of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”, one that “not only created modern absolutism but also transformed the medieval classes of society”.31 In Russia, this strand of history was best represented in the work of M.N. Pokrovsky, and Preobrazhensky showers praise on him when dealing with primitive accumulation.32 It is also there in Isaak Rubin’s lectures on economic history.33 Pokrovsky himself continued to maintain, as late as 1929, that “Commercial capitalism played a huge role in the creation of the Russian monarchy. It created this Russian absolute monarchy”,34 a position he was soon forced to retract. Thus when later historians like Georges Lefebvre posited a crucial “symbiosis between the State and the merchants” and argued that it was “the collusion between commerce and the State (that) promoted the development of capitalism” (this was the stand Lefebvre took in the transition debates),35 or, when Mousnier suggested that the absolute monarchies and large-scale capitalism were “functions of each other”,36 the same dissident historiography was being articulated. Indeed, Maurice Dobb himself devotes a whole chapter of Studies in the Development of Capitalism to what he calls “Capital Accumulation and Mercantilism”. He argues there that mercantilism was “essentially the economic policy of an age of primitive accumulation”, “a system of State-regulated exploitation through trade which played a highly important role in the adolescence of capitalist industry”.37 The peculiar nexus between state and capital reflected in the fluid array of mercantilist policies that have their origins in the later middle ages and reach their culmination in the seventeenth century seems to me to best describe the political economy of primitive accumulation.38

Before coming to this, however, let me say a bit about three of the five sectors I listed above. Putting-out networks were the “first hard evidence of a merchant capitalism”, Braudel wrote in Wheels of Commerce.39 Wolfgang von Stromer has argued that Verlag was the most widespread type of economic organisation in Europe before the advent of large-scale industry. The textile industries of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and later were entirely based on it. It allowed for “export-oriented standardized mass production” and in South Germany for a concentration of production in entire industrial basins.40 In London in the seventeenth century, as Beier shows, “big City merchants” “organized craft production in the suburbs and countryside”, a development, he argues, that led “naturally to the industrial revolution because, as Dobb states, ‘[T]he capitalist merchant-manufacturer had an increasingly close interest in promoting improvements in the instruments and methods of production’”.41 In France, “concentrations of capital were in commercial form”, Lefebvre writes. “Millions of peasants worked for city merchants”.42 Picardy and Beauvais in the north of France became the base of a rural-based textile industry controlled by “powerful merchants”.43 Putting out [le travail à façon] was widespread in the Swiss textile industry of the early 19^th century, as Veyssarat’s work shows,44 and outwork was still the predominant form of industrial organisation in Britain in the 1820s.45 Bythell who notes this cites Mendel’s argument that so-called “proto-industry” “created an accumulation of capital in the hands of merchant entrepreneurs, making possible the adoption of machine industry with its (relatively) higher capital costs”.46 Finally, it is worth noting Maxine Berg’s criticism that Marx’s model of manufactures was “useful in highlighting the features of some eighteenth-century industry” but it was a “linear model” and failed “to deal adequately with the features of the putting-out system and other related forms of domestic manufacture”.47 (Marx says little about putting out.)

The American plantations “were capitalist creations par excellence”, Braudel notes in Wheels of Commerce, and then clarifies, “[i]t was European trade that commanded production and output overseas”.48 London’s expansion in the late 17^th century was fuelled by the plantation trades. But to start with, it is worth noting that “in terms of both capital value and overseas trade, the slave system was expanding, not declining, at the turn of the nineteenth century”.49 “Twice as much money was invested in the slave trade during 1791–1807, at the height of the abolitionist agitation, as in the agitation-free decades 1761–1780”.50 British slave-trade capital, Drescher argues, rose sharply at the end of the eighteenth century.51 “There was little vocal opposition to the trade between the sixteen-fifties and the loss of America, not even from Quakers”.52 In the plantations themselves, next to slavery, the critical relation of production was merchant economic control over planters. The total sum owing to London merchants by West Indian sugar planters, for example, was several million pounds by 1770, roughly as much as the total mercantile debt owed by the mainland colonies to London at this time, viz. £3 million.53 In Cuba, the Matanzas sugar economy was largely financed by the Havana merchant houses through so-called “refacción” contracts which guaranteed sugar supplies for export.54 The bigger merchant establishments such as the Torrientes were the main accumulators of Cuban capital.55 Yet, this is not the end of the story. When Baron Alphonse de Rothschild visited Cuba in 1849, it was not the Havana merchant houses but the London merchant banks, he claimed, “who are making all of the profit from commissions, credits and consignation”. “The sugar business here is the monopoly of the (Havana) exporters… However, they are not doing the most important or weighty business, this [is] being done by Barings, Coutts, Fruehling & Goschen in London”.56And, for roughly the same reasons, in 1860 a North Carolina paper described New York as “the Northern state which had profited most by the slave labor of the South” thanks to the “commercial ties” that existed between them.57 Eric Williams was surely right to claim, “The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly”, and to say that “in so doing it (commercial capitalism) helped to create the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century”.58 Williams describes a historical dialectic similar to primitive accumulation, but one in which one form of capitalism feeds into the expansion of another and destroys itself as it does so, except that it did not, as Drescher’s critique showed, since slavery continued to expand. Finally, it is worth noting that in Theories of Surplus Value Marx focuses on the planters rather than on the London houses that financed this whole web of trade. When he wrote, “the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists”,59 he seemed to have the planters in mind. But in the Atlantic trades “there was a fundamental shift to the commission system” from the 1660s. British merchants supplied American planters “with a wide range of mercantile and quasi-banking services, including the provision of shipping, insurance, and eventually finance”.60 “The commission system, which was overwhelmingly centered on London, came to dominate the greater part of British Atlantic trade”.61 This explains how “at least half of the total for (Jamaica’s) import and exports made its way invisibly back to England (in freight charges, insurance, commissions, interest on debts, and transfers of money to absentee landlords). All in all, the net benefit for England in the year 1773 was getting on for £1,500,000. In London, as in Bordeaux, the proceeds of colonial trade were transformed into trading-houses, banks and state bonds”, says Braudel,62 confirming Rothschild’s point about where the profits of Cuban sugar went. Thus, Marx’s expression “conducted by capitalists” should really refer us back to a conglomeration of commercial interests at the heart of which lay the London West India houses whose judgements or instructions to the island agencies were “based on City news and outlook”.63

Finally, a third sector, the produce trades. British merchants who financed household production in India and West Africa in the 19^th century did so through a system of advances. Mercantile advances embodied a circulation of capital. These were not transactions in the sphere of “simple circulation” but a means of integrating peasant household labour into the capitalist world market. Chayanov called this form of accumulation “vertical capitalist concentration”. By this he meant that “while in a production sense concentration in agriculture is scarcely reflected in the formation of new large-scale undertakings, in an economic sense capitalism as a general economic system makes great headway in agriculture”. Agriculture, he wrote, “becomes subject to trading capitalism that sometimes in the form of very large-scale commercial undertakings draws masses of scattered peasant farms into its sphere of influence and, having bound these small-scale commodity producers to the market, economically subordinates them to its influence”.64 The example Chayanov cited was of the large cotton merchants of the Knoop family. “The need to lay out money in advance made heavy demands for working capital”,65 which meant that the produce trades were characterised, over time, by a growing concentration and centralisation of capital, with giant firms like the United Africa Company (UAC, the trading arm of Unilever) dominating very large shares of the produce market in British West Africa.66 It was this sort of “vertical concentration” that sustained the largely British and French trades in palm oil, raw cotton, opium, wheat, tea, teak, rice, coffee, jute, rubber, groundnut and so on, all of which saw major periods of expansion in the mid-to-late 19^th century and early twentieth.67On “very small farms” gross output per acre has always been the important calculation for households, as Krishna Bharadwaj showed for India back in the seventies; “very small cultivators” concentrate on high-value cash crops with a high labour input per acre.68 Jute was a prime example of this “forcing up of labor intensity”, as Chayanov characterised the economic behaviour of most farm households, and of course “[t]he key to making money out of jute manufacturing both in Calcutta and Dundee was to buy raw jute at as low a price as possible”.69 In parts of China the equivalent crop was tobacco, “the most valuable of all cash crops”, as Chen Han-Seng described it in a valuable study from 1939,70 except that here it was a large vertically integrated industrial firm B.A.T. or British American Tobacco that enforced the sort of price domination that held large numbers of peasant households in thrall. Prices were dictated by the company’s foreign leaf experts who were specially flown in from the US South, just as the English East India Company had, back in the eighteenth century, fixed the rates to be paid for a wide assortment of piecegoods from Bengal at their headquarters in London, two years before actual delivery, with no allowance for price increases that weavers had to contend with in the intervening period,71 and just as the French commercial houses that financed groundnut cultivation in Senegal fixed the prices to be paid to producers at their head offices in Bordeaux.72 The so-called “self-exploitation” of the peasantry fed directly into higher rates of surplus-value on these commercial capitals, and through them on the total social capital. “Is the general rate of profit raised by the higher profit rate made by capital invested in foreign trade, and colonial trade in particular?”, Marx had asked in volume 3,73 and replied of course in the affirmative. (Note that Emmanuel’s theory of unequal exchange presupposes equalisation of profits with unequal rates of surplus value, the latter thanks to immobility of the labour factor.)74

The expansion of mercantile capital was thus the standard form of capitalist accumulation for centuries together, even if this history has never been properly constructed. Any historian who does so would have to start with the fierce struggles between Venetian and Genoese capitalists for domination of the Byzantine markets in Constantinople, the Aegean and the Black Sea. But leaving that aside, it is quite clear that in the seventeenth century a major transformation took place, as the state stepped in to extend its formal backing to capital and the competition of capitals took on a much stronger “national” form. If Spanish mercantilism was a long lament on Spain’s failure to develop, the mercantilisms of France, Holland and England were quite different in character, as “[c]ommercial competition”, in the words of von Schmoller, “even in times nominally of peace, degenerated into a state of undeclared hostility: it plunged nations into one war after another, and gave all wars a turn in the direction of trade, industry and colonial gain”.75 A fascinating passage in Volume 3 refers to the commercial struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as “the industrial struggle of the nations on the world market” and sees the intervention of the state as seeking to accelerate the development of capital “by compulsion”, as Marx puts it. “It makes a substantial difference”, Marx says here, “whether the national capital is transformed into industrial capital gradually and slowly or whether this transformation is accelerated in time” by the use of tariffs and “the forcibly accelerated accumulation and concentration of capital, in short by the accelerated production of the conditions of the capitalist mode of production”.76 The passage ends with Marx underscoring both the “national”, that is, nationalist, “character of the Mercantile System”, as well as its purely capitalist content, saying that the mercantilists “show their awareness that the development of the interests of capital and the capitalist class, of capitalist production, has become the basis of a nation’s power and predominance in modern society”.77

The reference to primitive accumulation is unmistakable here, but what is interesting is that Marx now situates it within the global competition of capitals and it depends more than ever on the state’s “accelerating” role. All the various “methods” of primitive accumulation that were “systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England”, Marx had written, “employ the power of the state”,78 and there is a crucial sense in which the early development of capitalism was also about the expanding power of the modern state. It was Hilferding who picked up on this in the last piece of writing he ever drafted, but I shall come to that in a moment. In its most general sense, mercantilism expressed the identity of the interests of state and capital. This of course has been described in numerous ways, as “alliance”, “collaboration”, “liaison”, “partnership”, “backing”, “support”, and so on. For example, Rubin noted “during the age of merchant capitalism a close alliance was formed between the state and the commercial bourgeoisie, an alliance which found expression in mercantilist policy”.79 The general idea is nicely expressed in the way Brenner in his best work describes the relationship between Crown and company merchants, e.g. as the “powerful state backing” that “the City’s richest and most influential businessmen” received for their voyages of exploration under Elizabeth.80 But, in the sixteenth century, England was not a naval power. By the second half of the seventeenth century, “the navy not only grew in size but became an instrument of a national policy of commercial aggrandizement”.81 This is a central part of John Brewer’s argument in his brilliant book The Sinews of Power. By the early eighteenth century “the entire British fleet amounted to a capital investment of nearly £2.25 million”,82 half the value of the total capital invested in the Atlantic trade in the 1770s. Cromwell’s “foreign policy was dominated by economic considerations”, and “[f]rom the interregnum, commercial interests acquired a primacy in the formation of foreign policy”.83 Both French and English mercantilism had grown up in the shadow of Holland’s crushing commercial superiority in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century. Montchrétien’s Treatise of Political Economy (1615) shows both his admiration for as well as the profound influence of the Dutch. A major conclusion of his tract was the need to expand the pool of skilled labour and learn from the more advanced organisation of the Dutch manufactories.84 In England, Thomas Mun demolished the illusion that money was an independent force in the economy. He wrote, “It is not therefore the keeping of our Money in the Kingdom which makes a quick and ample Trade, but the necessity and use of our Wares in Forreign Countries and our want of their Commodities…”.85 Money mattered to the mercantilists of the seventeenth century chiefly as means of circulation, as a way of boosting liquidity and increasing the velocity of circulation to expand the flow of trade. By the late seventeenth century, as the Navigation Acts and the rapid expansion of English merchant shipping tilted the balance decisively in England’s favour, commercial wealth and naval power came to be seen as “mutually sustaining”. “The object of all three Anglo-Dutch Wars was to destroy Dutch trade and shipping”,86 but the broader assumptions behind this new-found aggressiveness were precisely those of any mature mercantilist state, the need to enforce a “national monopoly of the international carrying trade and of colonial markets”, to encourage import-substitute manufactures,87 and to convert the mass of the destitute and the unemployed into a productive labour force, not least, Bacon suggested in 1625, to contain sedition among the poor.88 It was left to Christopher Hill to note that “[a]ccumulation through monopoly trade was more rapid than in industry”, and that once large sums of capital were available for industrial investment by the late eighteenth century, “the navigation system itself became superfluous”.89

France, England and the United Provinces all had strong states and even if they differed radically in form, in substance they were essentially geared to promoting the needs of capital, since the strength of the state itself was increasingly seen as a function of the strength of “national capital”, as Marx called it in the passage I cited from volume 3. Thus Nicolas Mesnager in his mémoire to the Council of Commerce dated 1700 claimed, “Monsieur the cardinal de Richelieu did not find any means more effective to increase the power of the king and the wealth of the state than to increase navigation and commerce”.90 In the Netherlands, William of Orange agreed “Commerce is the pillar of the state”, but insisted, “if the security of the state was destroyed by French territorial expansion, the ruin of Dutch shipping and trade would assuredly follow”.91 And both there and in England the growth of the national debt depended crucially on excise duties, since “debt issues were underwritten by substantial increases in the excise on items like malt and beer”,92 and the greater part of tax revenue went into servicing the debt. As Brewer says, the term “mercantilist” “does provide a useful characterisation of an era in which the relationship between state power and international trade was seen as a problem of exceptional importance”.93 In short, the growth of capitalism was as much a function of governments and their financial needs as it was of the emergence of powerful groups of capitalists in international commerce and government finance, and it is this mutuality between state and capital which best defines the era of primitive accumulation. This was as true of French absolutism as it was of the Dutch Republic and of Britain’s fiscal-military state. Indeed, one of the most striking features of his pages on primitive accumulation is that the precise form of the state scarcely seems to matter to Marx.

Gerschenkron claimed “Marxism in general found it difficult to place the mercantilistic State within its conceptual framework”, and argued that this was because “Marxism at all times had difficulty with explaining dictatorial power. Even when, as in the case of Napoleon III, the State that was not dominated by a certain class could be presented as originating from an equilibrium of class power, the problem still remained that once the dictatorial State was established, it was able to pursue an independent policy of its own, because it had become an independent power in its own right… When it comes to Russia”, he said, “[t]he overriding consideration is that it would make little sense to regard the autocratic State as emerging from [an] equilibrium of class power”.94 There is a moment of truth in this criticism, but firstly, mercantilism was not confined to the absolutist states and in England, in fact, received its strongest expression in the Interregnum. Secondly, there have been significant attempts within the more creative strands of historical materialism to address this issue of the autonomy of the state. In his last, unfinished piece of writing called “The Historical Problem” Hilferding regarded the state’s existence as a machine aware of its own special interests as the state-power as the major problem of theory confronting Marxists. Indeed, in a paradoxical but I think perfectly true formulation he argued, “State power was objectively stronger in the heyday of liberalism than it ever was in the age of Absolutism”.95 “Under mercantilism the economy is not subordinated to the State”, he writes, “on the contrary, the State becomes a means of encouraging or establishing those economic interests and tendencies that simultaneously satisfy its own needs”.96 This is essentially the view I suggested in the preceding paragraph. Thus for Hilferding the “struggle to establish the absolute monarchy and with it the modern state” was a “struggle of the State-power [ein Kampf der Staatsmacht] against the ruling class”, one that was “supported by the bourgeoisie or sections of it”.97 For his part, Sartre has a similar if less extreme view in volume one of the Critique. He argues that “the State constitutes itself as a mediation between conflicts within the dominant class”,98 “constitutes itself as the organ of the contraction and integration of the class”, but crucially it “cannot take on its functions without positing itself as a mediator between the exploiting and the exploited classes”; “it affirms itself as a deep negation of the class struggle”. “The State therefore exists for the sake of the dominant class, but as a practical suppression of class conflicts within the national totalisation”.99 This, he says, is not pure mystification, because “the State really does produce itself as a national institution … it takes a totalising view of the social ensemble”, “it already posits itself for itself in relation to the class from which it emanates: this united, institutionalised and effective group … tries to produce itself and to preserve itself in and through itself as an essential national praxis, by acting in the interests of the class from which it emanates and, if necessary, against them. One need only look at the policies of the French monarchy between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries to see that it did not confine itself to providing mediation when forces were evenly balanced, but rather created this balance by perpetual changes of alliance, so that the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy would control each other, so as to produce itself, on the basis of this deadlock … as an absolute monarchy”.100

Whatever we think of these views, it is clear that the prevailing instrumentalist views of the nature of the modern state will simply not work in trying to describe its role in the era of primitive accumulation. There was no coherent mercantile interest for the state to be simply a pawn in the hands of this or that sector of capital. Moreover, as Wallerstein says, the growth of the national debt “reflected the growing autonomous interests of the states as economic actors”.101 In the case of Stalin’s Russia, arguably the last great episode of primitive accumulation in modern history, it is even less possible to derive the decisions of the state from any preformed classes. Under Stalin the “methods” of primitive accumulation ranged widely from dispossessing millions of peasants and breaking the resistance of an organised working class, even forcing it back into seriality, to the use of mass repression and terror as instruments of accumulation, the paroxysm of violence in 1937, the banning of abortion and revival of the cult of the family, the personality cult, manipulations of public opinion, and so on. Much of this has been brilliantly documented in Don Filtzer’s series of monographs which covers a very wide span of Russia’s industrial experience.102 The more abstract elements of analysis are given in volume two of Sartre’s Critique, and interestingly there he cites what must remain one of the more vivid images of Stalinist primitive accumulation, namely, John Scott’s account of the monstrous squandering of labour and production that occurred at the giant metallurgical complex at Magnitogorsk in the Ural industrial region, where between 1928 and 1932 “nearly a quarter of a million people came”, the vast bulk of them voluntarily, “seeking work, bread cards, better conditions”.103 Here Scott, who worked as an electric welder for five years in the thirties, saw those masses of uprooted peasants create “a gigantic plant and city” within five years. Under Stalin, he wrote, the “tempo of construction was such that millions of men and women starved, froze, and were brutalized by inhuman labor”.104 This had nothing to do with socialism, of course, since it presupposed the disarming of the factory committees which had occurred under the Bolsheviks very soon after the Revolution;105 presupposed also the silencing of the Opposition and suppression of a free press, and later, in the 1930s, that peculiar “reciprocity of incarnations” between Stalin and the bureaucracy which Sartre tries hard to fathom in his second volume. If there were limits to Stalin’s control of the Soviet bureaucracy, it remains true nonetheless that the bureaucracy saw itself as an incarnation of Stalin and of his frenetic drive to make Russia catch up with the west at any cost.

1. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol.2, pp. 49, 188.
2. This paper was presented as a keynote at the conference on primitive accumulation organised by the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in May 2019.
3. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Chapter 2, e.g., “Original accumulation of capital was not a prerequisite of industrial development in major countries” (p. 46).
4. Perrotta, “Early Spanish Mercantilism”.
5. Hamilton, “Spanish Mercantilism”, p. 234.
6. Struzzi cited Perrotta, “Early Spanish Mercantilism”, p. 37.
7. Zarinebaf, Mediterranean Encounters seeks to qualify this picture for the Ottomans, but fails to establish the presence of an influential class of merchant capitalists among the Turks.
8. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, First Modern Economy, p. 129.
9. De Vries and van der Woude, First Modern Economy, p. 677.
10. Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, p. 200.
11. Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, pp. 245–6.
12. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes, pp. 255, 215.
13. Cf. Saville, “Primitive Accumulation”, p. 265.
14. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 928.
15. Marx, Capital, vol.1, p. 875.
16. Semmel, Rise of Free Trade Imperialism, Chapter 4.
17. Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital, p. 272.
18. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 327; italics mine.
19. Serra, Short Treatise on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, ed. Reinert.
20. Poni, “Fashion as Flexible Production”.
21. Hauser, La modernité du XVIe siècle, with the extract translated in Kitch, Capitalism and the Reformation, p. 72.
22. Porter and Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers.
23. Chandler, Visible Hand.
24. Stern, Gold and Iron, pp. 164, 181.
25. Marx, Capital, vol.3, pp. 446–7.
26. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 328.
27. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-headed Hydra, p. 149.
28. Milne, Trade and Traders, p. 96.
29. Mueller, Venetian Money Market.
30. Preobrazhensky, New Economics, p. 85.
31. Mehring, Absolutism and Revolution in Germany 1525–1848, pp. 1, 3.
32. Preobrazhensky, New Economics, p. 87.
33. Rubin, History of Economic Thought, esp. Chapters 1 and 2.
34. Barber, Soviet Historians, p. 61, citing A. Malyshev.
35. Lefebvre, “Some Observations”, p. 125.
36. Roland Mousnier, Les XVIe et XVIIe siècles, fifth edn (Paris, 1967), p. 98.
37. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, p. 209.
38. Thus in the late 17th century the great English mercantilist Charles D’Avenant saw foreign trade essentially as a source of capital accumulation, cf. his view “as money that circulates at home begets money to private men, so bullion circulating abroad begets bullion to a country”, cited Lipson, The Economic History of England, vol. 3: The Age of Mercantilism, sixth edn. (1956), p.85. Cf. Hilferding, “The Early Days of English Political Economy”, p.486: “money is here regarded in its constant process of circulation, where it only goes out in order to come back in, each time in increased amounts”, from his essay on Mun and the early mercantilists.
39. Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, p. 321.
40. Wolfgang von Stromer, Revue Historique, 1991 .
41. Beier, “Engine”, p.161, citing Dobb, Studies, p. 145.
42. Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, p. 42.
43. Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730, p. ??.
44. Veyssarat, Négociants et fabricants dans l’industrie cotonnière suisse, p. 205.
45. Bythell, Sweated Trades, p. 13.
46. Bythell, Sweated Trades, p. 249, citing Mendels, “Proto-industrialization”, Journal of Economic History, 32 (1972), p. 244.
47. Berg, Age of Manufactures, first edn. pp.76–77; second edn., p. 65.
48. Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, p. 273.
49. Drescher, Econocide, p. 24.
50. Drescher, Econocide, p. 25.
51. Drescher, Econocide, p. 30.
52. Hill, Reformation, p. 186.
53. Nash, “Organization”, p. 124.
54. Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, pp. 65, 167.
55. Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, p. 173.
56. Cited Inés Roldán de Montaud, “Baring Brothers and the Cuban Plantation Economy, 1814–1870”, p. 239.
57. Foner, Business and Slavery, p. 191.
58. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 210.
59. Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, pt. 2, pp. 302–3.
60. Nash, “Organization”, p. 98.
61. Nash, “Organization”, p. 103.
62. Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, p. 279.
63. Checkland, “Finance for the West Indies”, p. 467.
64. Chayanov, Theory of Peasant Economy, p. 257.
65. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes, p. 36.
66. Fieldhouse, Merchant Capital and Economic Decolonization.
67. Banaji, Brief History of Commercial Capitalism.
68. Bharadwaj, Production Conditions, pp. 49, 64.
69. Stewart, Jute and Empire, p. 44.
70. Chen Han-Seng, Industrial Capital and Chinese Peasants, p. 23.
71. Hossain, Company Weavers, p. 51.
72. Marfaing, Evolution du commerce, pp. 177ff.
73. Marx, Capital, vol.3, p. 344.
74. Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange.
75. Von Schmoller, The Mercantile System, p. 64.
76. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 920.
77. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 921.
78. Marx, Capital, vol.1, p. 915.
79. Rubin, History of Economic Thought, pp. 25–6.
80. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 61.
81. Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 11.
82. Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 34.
83. Hill, Century of Revolution, pp. 142, 143.
84. Lublinskaya, French Absolutism: The Crucial Phase, Chapter 3.
85. Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (1628), cited Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England, p. 40.
86. Brewer, Sinews, p. 169.
87. Brewer, Sinews, p. 168.
88. Hinton, “Mercantile System in the Time of Thomas Mun”, p. 281.
89. Hill, Reformation, p. 160.
90. Cited Cole, French Mercantilism, p. 238.
91. Israel, Dutch Primacy, p. 340.
92. Brewer, Sinews, p. 119.
93. Brewer, Sinews, p. 169.
94. Gerschenkron, Europe in the Russian Mirror, pp. 79–80.
95. Hilferding, “Das historische Problem”, Zeitschrift für Politik, 1 (1954), pp. 295–324, at 296.
96. Hilferding, “Das historische Problem”, p. 296.
97. Hilferding, “Das historische Problem”, p. 316.
98. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol.1, p. 638.
99. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol.1, p. 639.
100. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol.1, p. 640.
101. Wallerstein, Modern World System, p. 139.
102. Especially Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization (1986); Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia (2010).
103. Scott, Beyond the Urals, p. 61.
104. Scott, Beyond the Urals, p. 54.
105. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control.

Primitive Accumulation and the State-Form: National Debt as an Apparatus of Capture

 

Gavin Walker 

October 29, 2014

The moment has come to expose capital to the absence of reason, for which capital provides the fullest development: and this moment comes from capital itself, but it is no longer a moment of a “crisis” that can be solved in the course of the process. It is a different kind of moment to which we must give thought.

– J-L. Nancy ¹

Commencement and Crisis ²

In a brief moment of his theoretical work, the great Japanese Marxist critic Tosaka Jun deployed a decisive and crucial phrase, a phrase that I believe concentrates within it the historical conjuncture we have been experiencing on a world-scale in the recent years of crisis: he calls this ultimate crystallization of politics “the facts of the streets” or “the facts on the streets” (gaitō no jijitsu). ³ I would like to excessively develop or overwrite – in other words translate – this phrase into a concept in the strong sense, to raise this seemingly marginal choice of words to the level of a principle, and to utilize this principle itself as a lever through which to force into existence a certain theoretical sequence. What Tosaka essentially reminds us of is the literal factuality (or more specifically, in Alain Badiou’s terms, the “veridicity”) of the streets, the “fact” that the streets themselves express the dense sociality that capital’s tendency towards the socialization of labor must necessarily-inevitably produce. In other words, what we have seen in the political energies that have been widely unleashed around the globe in the last year, is that the streets themselves recurrently-continuously testify or bear witness to their own “facts.” These “facts” are precisely the verso or underside of capital’s mapping on a world-scale. Or, to put it in another way, a way that I would like to develop here, “the facts of the streets” is the center of the volatile “absence of reason” or (im)possibility that is always “passing through” in between two polarities of theory that I will call capital’s logical topology and its historical cartography.

The logical topology of capital’s inside is always paradoxically searching for a way to trace out and mirror itself in the historical cartography, always attempting to make itself a world. Since the beginning of the capitalist mode of production, the primary lever through which to force the capture of labor has always been the form of the state amalgamated together with the form of the nation, sutured together in the process of primitive accumulation. Using this building-block, capital tries incessantly-recurrently to translate its logical structure into the territoriality of the earth, to inscribe itself into the actual surface of the world. For this task, an entire sequence of “mechanisms” or “apparatuses” are necessary. But today, the “facts of the streets” are showing us more and more that, as capital’s logical topology oscillates itself into new, hazardous and volatile concentrations of its unstable core, these mechanisms, that for so long had guaranteed or legitimated capital’s forcing of the historical process, are themselves descending-ascending into delirium. The delirious and demented logic of capital today confronts the dignity and refusal that lines the streets. Engels, in his stark and forceful style, reminds us of what is essentially at stake:

The relation of the manufacturer to the worker has nothing human in it; it is purely economic. The manufacturer is ‘Capital,’ the worker is “Labour.” And if the worker will not be forced into this abstraction, if he insists that he is not “Labour,” but a man, who possesses, among other things, the attribute of labour-power, if he takes it into his head that he need not allow himself to be bought and sold in the market as the commodity “Labour,” the bourgeois reason comes to a standstill. ⁴

When the streets erupt against this commodification, and the bourgeois reason is halted, capital must modify its equilibrium, it must determine how this “absence of reason” can be “passed through,” because capital cannot solve the crisis, but merely traverse it without resolving it. But how does this seemingly improbable or excessive (il)logic operate? Here we must literally “go back to the beginning.”

The Erasure of Violence by Means of Violence

Today, the crisis is not simply reducible to the financial crisis, nor can it be said to be a purely political crisis of legitimation of the state apparatus. Rather, the crisis today is one centered on the violent-volatile amalgam between capital’s limits and the limits of the state-form, particularly, the limits of the mechanisms that have allowed this amalgam to primarily organize social relations since the advent of capitalism itself. In order to think the ways in which our moment, and the moment of the advent of industrial capital converge, we have to think the question of the beginning, the origin. This is also a question of crisis as such, of the theory of crisis. Today, there is a constant tendency to see this crisis as an exception, as a permanent state of exception, as a making-permanent of something contingent, and so forth. But this in turn obscures the systematic and cyclical nature of crisis, which occurs only insofar as the systematic order in which it is placed is itself in question. Crisis, it must be said, cannot be simply and easily summed up in its typical underconsumptionist reading and its political consequences. If underconsumption is the motor-force of crisis, it would appear merely as a contingent question of national policy. But the specific nature of capitalist crisis can never be explained on such a basis, precisely because the underconsumptionist explanation treats every crisis as a surprise. But nothing about this crisis is surprising – or rather, if there is a surprising element in our current situation, it is the rebirth of the politicality of the “facts of the streets” that capital has suicidally let loose. Crisis is always a repetition, but a cyclical motion in which difference emerges within this repetition. That is, every time the circle has to be traced back to its starting point or commencement, the tracing itself always exhibits microscopic divergences. These divergences themselves, because they are exposed to the figurative or creative dimension of repetition, always contain within them the possibility for another arrangement: “From time to time the conflict of antagonistic agencies finds vent in crises. The crises are always but momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions. They are violent eruptions which for a time restore the disturbed equilibrium.” ⁵ But the “disturbed equilibrium” is not itself a state of harmony and peace. Rather, the disturbed equilibrium is an undertaking of “violent eruptions” that have been covered over in new forms, and made to violently erase their own violence. But where does this violence emerge from?

As is well-known, the problem of the “so-called primitive accumulation,” centered in the 24^th chapter of the first volume of Capital, originates from Marx’s recognition of the fact that his own analysis of the logical structure of capital requires an endlessly regressing series of presuppositions: the movement of accumulation presupposes the existence of surplus value, surplus value presupposes that capitalist production is already established, the existence of capitalist production presupposes a stock of capital sufficient for the cycle to begin, and so on. Thus he argues, the whole movement requires that we assume what Adam Smith called the “previous accumulation,” a period of accumulation which precedes capitalism’s established functioning, and from which it itself begins to move. But primitive accumulation does not mean a smooth transition that establishes the “good society,” nor the moment when mankind falls from an idyllic state. Rather, it is an irruption of violence, an instant in which what was previously untethered, undefined, and unbound is violently concatenated into a sequence that furnishes the basic material conditions for capitalist production. Thus, in this moment, it is “notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly, force, play the great part.” ⁶ It is not simply that the peasantry is “freed” to become the wage-labor required for the formation and rotation of the circuit of capitalist accumulation, it is also at the same time the inverse: this process also indicates the closure of heterogeneity in order to produce equivalences which can then “encounter” each other: the owner of capital and the owner of labor power.

In this sense, the process of primitive accumulation (which is not a period, but a cyclically reproduced logical moment) describes the installation of “real abstraction” into history, and the fact that this moment is repeating everyday shows us the paradoxical nature of the historical temporality that characterizes capitalist society. More than anything however, we are immediately made aware of the violence of the production of the conditions of possibility for capitalist relations of production, for the “encounter” between buyers and sellers of labor power. Here we are reminded that “there is a primitive accumulation that, far from deriving from the agricultural mode of production, precedes it: as a general rule, there is primitive accumulation whenever an apparatus of capture is mounted, with that very particular kind of violence that creates or contributes to the creation of that which it is directed against, and thus presupposes itself.” ⁷ As Marx incisively pointed out, in capitalist society, which is never at rest, but rather a circuit in constant motion, we must recognize that the “original sin is at work everywhere” (die Erbsünde wirkt überall). ⁸

There is a long debate on the translation of die sogennante ursprungliche Akkumulation as the so-called primitive accumulation. But I would like to give this debate an added dimension: what we must consider today is how the originary accumulation is incorporated into capitalist development as primitive accumulation, as a repetition of the origin that is also concerned with the division or “separation” (Trennung) of historical time between the “primitive” or “backwards” and the “on time” or “normal” course of development. The trick of primitive accumulation is to work on these two dimensions at once, as part of the same social motion, to divide the earth on the basis of “forms” in the same way as the abstraction of the exchange process is divided between “two sides.” In other words, this moment of the beginning, which is cyclically-recursively repeated within the sphere of crisis (and in every capture of the worker’s body to secure the grounds for the labor-power commodity), is repeated in relation to a volatile historical exterior, repeated in terms of the form-determination of the “nation-form” (Balibar) and the “historical and moral factors” for the determination of the value and price of labor power, the “naïve anthropology” (Althusser) that lurks in the interior of capital’s logic. Capital’s schema of the world divided up into “national capitals” is itself profoundly linked to the historical formation of so-called “homo economicus,” in the form of the two figures of exchange, buyers and sellers. In other words, the figure of “Man” – as Deleuze and Guattari importantly point out, this figure of humanism is not simply “white man” (l’homme blanc) but rather “White Man” (L’Homme blanc) – is not an “exteriority” or “cultural supplement” to the economic field: it is rather the presupposition always-already at the very core of the circulation process.

The image of the world that capital presents to itself, by presupposing a certain accomplished history, also presupposes the production of the individuals that would furnish the “needs” upon which “rational” exchange would emerge. But the very production of these individuals itself presupposes the unitary and eternal area, or gradient which could legitimate those individuals as individuals by means of the form of belonging, typically to the nation-state. Thus, the whole circuit constitutes a “vicious circle,” one which never adequately returns to its starting point, because the whole sequence of presupposition forms an abyssal and regressive chain, in which something must always be given: “the homogeneous given space of economic phenomena is thus doubly given by the anthropology which grips it in the vice of origins and ends.” ⁹ The field of “interest,” which is supposed to represent therefore the pure or immediate expression of “need,” separated from any extra-economic coercion, direct violence, and so forth, reveals itself as the ultimate expression of this “vice of origins and ends,” insofar as it must always erase or cover over the production of this figure of “Man” itself. When Marx discusses the figures of the “guardians,” the “bearers” or “owners” of the labor power commodity, he refers to them specifically as “this race of peculiar commodity-owners” (diese Race eigentümlicher Warenbesitzer), ¹⁰ effectively reminding us that “the schema of the West and the Rest” is co-extensive and co-emergent with the dynamics of capital itself.

In other words, the “naïve anthropology” that is supposedly excluded from the circulation process or the “total material exchange” between “rational” individuals, is in fact located at its very core. Exactly as Deleuze and Guattari point out in their identification of the nation-state as the ultimate model of the capitalist axiomatic, the form of “the nation” is already contained at the very origin of the supposedly “rational” and “universal” process of exchange, a process that acts as if it represents the smooth and perfect circle of pure rationality, but that is permanently suspended between its impossible origin, which it is compelled to cyclically repeat, and its end, which is equally impossible, because it would relativize the circuit of exchange, and expose it to its outside, which it must constantly erase. Thus the social body or socius itself must remain in its state of insanity or “derangement” forever pulled in two directions of the production of subjects. It cannot exit this “deranged form,” but must try perpetually to prove its “universality” simply by oscillating between these two boundaries, two impossibilities: its underlying schema of the world, which “seems absent from the immediate reality of the pheonoma themselves” because it is permanently located in “the interval between origins and ends,” a short-circuit that incessantly reveals to us that “its universality is merely repetition.” ¹¹ The paradox of logic and history in the apparatus of capture thus is contained in the following problem: “the mechanism of capture contributes from the outset to the constitution of the aggregate upon which the capture is effectuated” (le mécanisme de capture fait déjà partie de la constitution de l’ensemble sur lequel la capture s’effectue). ¹² This paradox, however, is “no mystery at all” (pas du tout de mystère), precisely because it is a mechanism or schema that exists out in the open, on the surface of society. The historical accident, the moment of capture for which there was no apparent necessity or pulsion, produces a form of torsion back upon itself. Once capture has been effected, it loops back onto its own contingent origins to once again derive itself, to anticipate and “conjure” itself up as if it were the necessary outcome of its own schema. In other words, the forms of capture, enclosure, and ordering are not simply distinguished by their appearance as always-already prior; more fundamentally, they are distinguished by this paradoxical and demented structure in which the contingent historical event cycles back to itself, once again “discovering” its own hazardous origins, but does so precisely to “recode” its emergence so as to appear as if what ought to be an accident was always in fact a necessary outcome. Thus, the historical accident of primitive accumulation is constantly “becoming what it is” neither through its contingent foundations nor its inner drive to pretend it is necessary; this schema operates precisely by cyclically repeating its origin in capture in order to harness its hazardous flux retrospectively, to conjure itself up as if its origin were a mere testament to its necessary emergence.

In this system of the violence of inclusion, the violence of the schema itself “hides in plain view,” it operates immediately before our eyes, yet “it is very difficult to pinpoint this violence because it always presents itself as preaccomplished.” ¹³ The seeming double-bind contained in the violence of the apparatus of capture might appear to disable any conception of political intervention, to be a closed circle, but we could also say precisely the opposite. In the process of primitive accumulation, “the concept of ‘determined social formation’ has become the concept of ‘class composition’: it restores, in other words, the dynamism of the subject’s action, of the will that structures or destroys the relations of necessity.” ¹⁴ In other words, paradoxically it is the fact that our forclosure into the social field has taken place that opens the possibilities of politics. We have always-already been included into this systematic expression of capture, but this inescapability of the repetition of the beginning does not mean something disabling.

Capital, as the fundamental concretization of social relations, and therefore as the apex of the social relation’s violent verso, cannot rid itself of this fundamental “condition of violence” (Gewaltverhältnis), ¹⁵ located in its logical alpha and omega, the labor power commodity, whose “indirect” production is located paradoxically outside commodity relations. An excess of violence is haunting capital’s interior by means of this constantly liminalizing/volatilizing forcible “production” of labor power. Precisely by this excessive violence, capital endangers itself and opens itself up to a whole continent of raw violence, and it is exactly this point that shows us something important in terms of the question of how capital utilizes the “anthropological difference” to effect the “indirect” production of labor power. The primal violence, sustained as a continuum or “status quo,” appears as a smooth state, a cyclical reproduction cycle without edges. But this appearance or semblance of smooth continuity is in fact a product of the working of violence upon itself: the violence of the historical cartography must erase and recode itself by means of violence as the smooth functioning of the logical topology. In other words, when we encounter the basic social scenario of capitalist society, the exchange of a product for money, we are already in a situation in which the raw violence of subjectivation, whereby some absent potentiality within the worker’s body is exchanged as if it is a substance called labor power which can be commodified, is covered over by the form of money, which appears as a smooth container of significations that can serve as a measure of this potentiality. But in order for labor power to be measured and exchanged as money, there must be a repeated doubling of violence. What must remain on the outside of capital as a social relation is paradoxically what must also be simultaneously forced into its inside, perpetually torn between the forms of subjectivation that produce labor power as an inside, and the historical field of reproduction in which the worker’s body is produced on the violent outside of capital.

The National Debt as a Conduit

Every time capital requires the commodification of labor power, it must in effect repeat at the level of the logical topology the process of the transition, the “so-called primitive accumulation.” But the historical process simultaneously forces capital to undertake the transition at a microscopic level, in the form of the shrinking commodity-unit, and therefore in an even more paradoxical form than the historical “beginning.” That is, capital must capitalistically undertake a microscopic version of the transition to capitalism. At the “beginning” capital could rely on direct force, on a structural violence that would enable or set in motion a field of effects that would generate a general order of capture. But how can the transition be undertaken over and over again, in particular after the historical transition is assumed to have already occurred? Marx gave us an essential clue when he reminded us that the so-called primitive accumulation in effect reappears or takes up a second logical position in capital’s interior, in the form of the national debt.

The original sin at the beginning of the capital-relation might as well be understood as an “original debt,” an historical appearance of something given, a gift. The process of primitive accumulation and its historical acts of enclosure cannot simply be understood as an excessive violence that is then superceded by a more “rational” or “decent” and “restrained” order. Rather, what the process of primitive accumulation reminds us of, is the necessity for capital of the given, the form of “supposition” (Setzung) and “presupposition” (Voraussetzung). But how does this originary debt-gift operate? In what sense is this a problem of actuality for us? In this sense, what exactly is the national debt itself?

The national debt is a mechanism. A very special type of mechanism, and one that capital relies on intimately. Uno Kozo gave us a critical clue to this type of mechanism as follows:

Through the law of population, capitalism comes into possession of mechanisms or apparatuses which allow the (im)possibility of the commodification of labor power to pass through (‘muri’ o tôsu kikô). This is precisely the point on which capitalism historically forms itself into a determinate form of society, and further, is what makes it independent in pure-economic terms. Like land, this is a so-called given for capitalism, one that is given from its exterior, but unlike land it can be reproduced, and by means of this reproduction becomes capable of responding to the demands of capital put forward through the specific phenomenon of capitalism called crisis. ¹⁶

Uno locates this mechanism in the form of the “law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production” (der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise eigentümliches Populationsgesetz), ¹⁷ a law that is central to the questions of crisis and debt, because it concerns above all the management of personhood, the management of the physical-moral aspects of the material existence of the body, so as to maintain the “rational individual,” the form which would furnish adequate labor power for capitalist production. But this structure of such an apparatus is not limited to the form of population; rather the “law of population” is one moment of the overall taxonomy of these mechanisms for the traversal of the nihil of reason that capitalism necessitates from the outset. If at the beginning, there is a debt or gift, capital cannot ever truly “begin.” That is, it is impossible to “start from the first instance” if the first instance is always-already delayed or deferred by means of something that must be there already. In other words, if capital can only expand on the basis of its originary debt/gift, then capital is permanently or eternally crippled and restrained by the nature of this given element, it can never extract itself from what is given in order to fully realize its image of a circle with neither end nor beginning. In order therefore, to overcome or at least avoid this problem, capital must formulate all sorts of these “apparatuses for the traversal of (im)possibility.” That is, capital must discover ways in which something that should restrain or even expose its limitations can be traversed or passed through. But precisely in constantly requiring mechanisms or apparatuses outside its interior logic, capital demonstrates its relatively volatile functioning, in which precisely its excessive aspects (the reliance on the state, the enforcement of the nation-form, the violence of the exterior allowed into the interior and once more erased as violence by means of violence), its paradoxical and even “demented” aspects, appear as the central principles of its operation. When we confront this “demented” or “deranged” aspect of capital, we are also immediately alerted to the fact that this aspect of capital is also where an immense political breach exists, and it is on this point that we must clarify the current scenario of debt.

Marx recalls this problem for us at an early historical moment, reminding us that the system of national debt was generated in the “forcing-house” (Treibhaus) of the colonial system: thus “National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state (Veräusserung des Staats) – whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked with its stamp the capitalistic era.” ¹⁸ In this sense, already we are acquainted with the national debt as the “mark” or “stamp” (Stempel) of the entry into capitalist society on a world-scale, as the initial moment in which the originary accumulation of capital is at one and the same time the formation of the mechanisms that will install a cartography onto the surface of the world.

The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions (Gesamtbesitz) of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven. The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers (energischsten Hebel) of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. ¹⁹

The logical topology of capital’s origin and maintenance, and the historical cartography of the modern world order, based on the unit of the state, are volatilely amalgamated together in the form of the national debt. But Marx also alerts us to something critically important: here the national debt is not so much a separate motion of violence, but rather one of the most “powerful” or “energetic” “levers” for the continuation or maintenance of primitive accumulation. But why would capital need yet another exteriority? Primitive accumulation itself, its raw violence, its “extra-economic coercion,” is already to an extent exterior to capital. Yet what capital always requires are ways and means of taking the raw violence on which it secretly rests and reinserting this violence into a new modality, in which its violence can appear in another form. This is exactly why the national debt, as a mechanism, allows capital to avoid “exposing itself to troubles and risks.” Marx goes one step further, by connecting the national debt as primitive accumulation to the nation-form itself:

With the national debt arose an international credit system, which often conceals one of the sources (Quellen) of primitive accumulation in this or that people (Volk). […] A great deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without any certificate of birth, was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children. ²⁰

In other words, capital’s enclosure of the earth appears both within and by means of national borders – by extension, Marx essentially reminds us here that the nation-form itself allows for the concealing within an organized and bordered system of entities, of capital’s originary-primitive violence, and yet erases this violence precisely by allowing it to vanish into the nation as an apparatus for the traversal of this gap, “vanishing in its own result, leaving no trace behind.” But this theoretical and historical problem is by no means simply an interesting episode from the past.

Let us recall here a peculiar historical moment characteristic of our current conjuncture. In the German “gutter press” (Bild and the like) in 2010-2011, an entire series of discussions of the Greek national debt (and by extension the ongoing Eurozone crisis) took place. The essence of the national debt was finally blamed on the Greek “national character” (supposedly “lazy,” excessively enjoying holidays, corrupt, incapable of “rational competition,” and so forth). ²¹ This moment of the German-Greek opposition on the question of the national debt exposes to us the recent history of this mechanism. The era of imperialism in the strict sense consisted in the formation of “debt traps” for the peripheral and underdeveloped countries: the central imperialist nations export the domestic surplus to the colonies, the periphery, and so forth, by creating and enforcing demand, maintained by the national debt. Thus the poorer nations end up not only importing from the imperialist nations but also effectively in an endless spiral of debt, a mechanism that then forces the periphery to accept the political and economic directives of the imperialist nations for the plunder and expropriation of raw materials, cheap labor power, border controls, subordination to political regimes, and so forth. Today, this same logic persists. If the old modality of imperialism consists in the macroscopic formation of monopoly capital and super-profits in the peripheral violence, the new modality of imperialism financializes this violence into the miniature and dense concentration of capital’s interior. It is no accident that today we see a “return of the origin,” “a moment when wage constriction is violently manifested, exactly like the 16th century enclosures where access to land as a common good was repressed with the privatization of the land and the putting of wages to the proletariat.” ²² This is why we should overlap capital’s historical threshold with the moment we are living through today:

The logic of ‘governing through debt’ has its origin in the fundamental relation between capital and labor. Financial capitalism has globalized imperialism, its modus operandi that operates through the form of ‘debt traps’, both national and private indebtedness, in order to realize and sell the surplus value extracted from living labor. In the imperial schema, debt is the monetary face of surplus value, the universal exploitation of labor power, and constitutes a trap precisely because it prevents living labor from freeing itself from exploitation, from autonomizing the relations of dependency and slavery that are proper to debt. ²³

The national debt allows the “reckless terrorism” of primitive accumulation to be maintained as if it were absent by redirecting it to the market. The national debt is a mechanism that “conducts” or forces the situation onto a new site of the curve of capitalist development, but it is not a mechanism that “resolves,” it is a mechanism that “defers” or “displaces” the sharpening of political struggles. The national debt therefore is precisely the “dangerous supplement” of capitalism as a historical force: the national debt exposes the fact that capital itself can never resolve the situation that emerges when the relations of production come into conflict with the development of the productive forces. Capital is always trying to create mechanisms that allow it to transcend its own limitations, while simultaneously permitting it to avoid making the political leap past its own boundaries. Yet, this inevitable limit of capital’s self-deployment is paradoxically the source of capital’s own dynamism. Without this tense multiplication of its wounds, capital would never develop – that is, capital requires a certain risk or recklessness, but the more it defers this leap, the more spaces of political intervention are opened up in capital’s austere movement. This movement keeps the elements of primitive accumulation circulating on the surface, a mechanism by which to traverse the impossibility of the commencement as such, precisely by beginning the commencement over and over again. In turn, this element of the national debt returns our focus to the role played by the nation-state in allowing this “first return to origins” – the element of the national is exactly deployed in and within the movement of capture in order to guarantee labor power’s “elasticity” (Elastizität). ²⁴ Without the nation, the malleable elements of labor power cannot be recirculated as if they were directly graspable, by means of the reproduction of the worker’s body on the outside. The nation – the original fictitious “substance” – conjures up its own little images of its pseudo-substantiality precisely in order to then “re-derive” itself from their existence. In this way the elasticity of labor power is simply the microscopic or “micrological” extension of the elasticity of the nation, the form by which capital attempts incessantly to territorializes itself. Labor power’s impossibility is a microscopic image of the gap or chiasmus between the logical and the historical: the historical origin and the logical commencement, and this is the point on which “the insanity of the capitalist mode of conception (die Verrücktheit der kapitalistischen Vorstellungsweise) reaches its climax.” ²⁵

Facing the crisis today, the form of the national debt alerts us to a crucial fact: “The crisis is neither an economic nor a political crisis: it is a crisis of the capital relation, a crisis made inevitable by the inherent contradictions of that relation. The crisis inevitably involves a restructuring of the capital relation, a restructuring which necessarily takes on economic and political forms. What is involved on both levels is an assault by capital to maintain the conditions of its own existence.” ²⁶ In this sense, the problem of the national debt as a mechanism for the continuation of primitive accumulation within the capital-relation, cannot be solved on the level of the nation-form – we might say polemically that the national debt is in fact the origin of the nation itself. It itself is a technology of drawing a border around the form of the nation, something that cannot be rigorously bordered. The nation itself is a form of credit: it must be traced as if it could be located. But it must be traced by capital itself. Because the nation cannot be bordered in any strict sense, it forces a coherence economically where there cannot be one historically. But because this technology continuously exposes it to the historical exterior, it is therefore always being undermined by its own inability to escape the historical process. At the origin there is already a debt, because something has been presupposed as given, something that utilizes this presupposition as a lever for its own functioning. The illogical logic of capital’s origin or beginning is recoded as the illogical history of the state. This “intercourse” between capital and the state is concentrated or compressed into the insanity of the supposedly rational exchange process, this “Verkehr” at the beginning which appears precisely as “Austausch” in the logical interior. This is exactly what Lenin meant when he famously emphasized that “politics is the concentrated expression of economy.” ²⁷

The Facts on the Streets

Today, it behooves us to state the matter clearly and without pretense: capital can only “overcome” its own crises by passing through them without resolving them. And it can only undertake this traversal or passing by placing the burden of violence, suffering, and immiseration onto the backs of the world – the world working class – the facies totius universi, or “face of the entire universe.” Capital itself formulates these apparatuses – the state, the national debt – to overcome or traverse what it cannot solve. Our task lies in the relentless and unending exposure of its raw violence, covered over and hidden by the form of finance. Labor power is an internal outside to capital manifested in its pure outside, the worker’s body. But the body is under the control of the state. Thus, when contemporary global police power is employed against the concrete bodies of the young, the unemployed, the old, the sick, the dropouts, those who are torn between an inability to function in the expected style as the “self-conscious instruments of production” for capital, or to be smoothly integrated into the state’s order, we are witnessing the raw and violent historical exterior’s incapacity to “reset” or “restart” the cyclical return of the origin. In thinking through the contemporary “facts of the streets,” let us pay close attention to a famous passage from Marx:

The specific economic form (Form), in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled (Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhältnis), as it grows directly out of production itself and in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form (Gestalt). It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers – a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity – which reveals the innermost secret (innere Geheimnis), the hidden basis of the entire social structure (verborgene Grundlage der ganzen gesellschaftlichen Konstruktion), and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis – the same from the standpoint of its main conditions – due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances (empirisch gegebenen Umstände). ²⁸

These “empirically given circumstances” furnish us with capital’s “factual” limits, limits that are being tested today by a new generation of political upheavals. The tenuous and searching existence of the upsurge in the “facts of the streets” today, under the aspect of the mutations of the state, returns us to the commencement. Not only the commencement of capital, in which the violence of capture must masquerade as the smooth operation of the interior, but also the (re)commencement of politics. This would not seek to produce a “stable” and therefore easily-assumed subject of our moment. Rather, it would assume that, as the “guardians” of labor power, the “bearers” of this fragile and ambiguous commodity, we are incapable of fully “being,” but only a sort of “para-being.” The aleatory or contingent dimension which always enters into the element of “composition” in class struggle is profoundly manifest today. But this aleatory undercurrent is not something that undermines or that holds us back from politics:

“Let us para-be,” that is our war cry.

And better yet: “We are nothing, let us para-be the Whole.” ²⁹

The International today, that is “springing out of the ground of modern society” ³⁰ is not the old fantasy of the stable subject of the discourse of “civilizational difference,” but rather a fragile hazard that capital itself can no longer effectively police through its external “mechanisms.” This “composition” (in the sense that Negri and others have given to “class composition”) indicates the whole logic by which the mechanisms of capital and the state attempt to effect a specific logic of the social dimension of separation (Trennung), but this “separation” is something profoundly different than the theory of alienation. It shows that where capital has “forced” an amalgam, there is a “slippage” or “décalage.” Where the amalgam seems most perfectly sutured is also where this décalage can be raised as a social antagonism and transformed into a political contradiction. The suicidal nature of the capitalist mode of production is expressed in its need to internalize, to financialize, its violent exterior, to include within its “count” the “uncountable” and savage process of primitive accumulation, recoded as the apparatus of the national debt. The paradox is however that we, the debtors, are transformed into a permanent reserve of debt, yet hold a social power over capital, by occupying the position of the “guardians” (Hütern), the “bearers” (Träger) of labor power, the location of capital’s “original sin,” its primal debt. ³¹ This is the social antagonism that today we find in the streets: when this antagonism is raised to the level of a political contradiction, the groundwork is prepared for a new opening against capital’s supposed indifference to the world.

In the face of this crisis – this repetition of the original debt in the form of the national debt – we have to be able to say bluntly and openly: capital and the state cannot resolve this crisis. They can only formulate mechanisms to traverse its “absence of reason.” These mechanisms of bourgeois insanity can only operate by transferring the violent spasms of crisis onto the back of the working class, the unemployed, the poor and oppressed strata of the world. Increasingly, these “mechanisms” themselves are also failing to support capital’s leap to a new basis of accumulation. The state can only undertake such a leap through the increasing control of the bodies, the “guardians” and “bearers” of labor power, that clash with its logic, that lie just outside its strict sphere on influence. Historically, the state has utilized “apparatuses for the traversal of the nihil of reason” such as the “nation-form” (Balibar) to suture and cover over this incapacity. But today, the nation-form cannot hold back or restrain the fact that “the conditions for the capitalization of surplus value clash increasingly with the conditions for the renewal of the aggregate capital” ³² on a world-scale. There is no option today except to emphasize that our only hope lies in precisely these “facts of the streets” that cannot be fully erased from capital’s image of the world. But rather than simply conclude with famous assertion from Marx that communism is the “real movement that abolishes the present state of affairs,” a familiar reference that has been recently revived in a number of discussions, ³³ we might instead appeal to another moment in The German Ideology that, facing the crisis this time, returns to us today with a vital force:

In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact (eine empirische Tatsache) that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity (Tätigkeit) into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them, a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market (in letzter Instanz als Weltmarkt ausweist). But it is just as empirically established that, by the overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution and the abolition of private property which is identical with it, this power will be dissolved. […] Only then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers (nationalen und lokalen Schranken), be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy (Genußfähigkeit) this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man). ³⁴

This “empirische Tatsache” of the world of capital, linked above to the “empirically given circumstances” within which capital attempts to make its most “fatal leap” between the logical topology and the historical cartography, lays the groundwork of “facticity” or “factuality” in the historical world, the “given” that is implied in this “empirische.” In turn, this “Tatsache” re-emerges paradoxically as the original revolutionary weapon of the people in the form of the “facts of the streets.” These “facts of the streets” that Tosaka alerted us to are at work today in the streets of the historical world, where the demand for a reinvention of socialism – of modes of life beyond the stranglehold of austerity, debt servitude, and an image of social relations found in the “world market” – responds to the original residue or remainder, the “empirical fact” of the originary debt at capital’s origin, which we carry within ourselves, and which can open a new era of affirmative politics and critical thought.

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