Ainsi … apparaît
déjà le mal essentiel de l'humanité, la substitution des moyens aux fins.
Tantôt la guerre. apparaît au premier plan, tantôt la recherche de la richesse,
tantôt la production ; mais le mal reste le même. Les moralistes vulgaires se
plaignent que l'homme soit mené par son intérêt personnel ; plût au ciel qu'il
en fût ainsi ! L'intérêt est un principe d'action égoïste, mais borné,
raisonnable, qui ne peut engendrer des maux illimités. La loi de toutes, les
activités qui dominent l'existence sociale, c'est au contraire, exception faite
pour les sociétés primitives, que chacun y sacrifie la vie humaine, en soi et
en autrui, à des choses qui ne constituent que des moyens de mieux vivre. Ce
sacrifice revêt des formes diverses, mais tout se résume dans la question du
pouvoir. Le pouvoir, par définition, ne constitue qu'un moyen ; ou pour mieux
dire posséder un pouvoir, cela consiste simplement à posséder des moyens
d'action qui dépassent la force si restreinte dont un individu dispose par
luimême. Mais la recherche du pouvoir, du fait même qu'elle est essen
Simone
Weil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté
et de l’oppression sociale (1934) 42
tiellement
impuissante à se saisir de son objet, exclut toute considération de fin, et en
arrive, par un renversement inévitable, à tenir lieu de toutes les fins. C'est
ce renversement du rapport entre le moyen et la fin, c'est cette folie
fondamentale qui rend compte de tout ce qu'il y a d'insensé et de sanglant tout
au long de l'histoire. L'histoire humaine n'est que l'histoire de
l'asservissement qui fait des hommes, aussi bien oppresseurs qu'opprimés, le
simple jouet des instruments de domination qu'ils ont fabriqués eux-mêmes, et
ravale ainsi l'humanité vivante à être la chose de choses inertes.
It is true: the substitution of ends
with the means – or more prosaically
put, “the end justifying the means” whereby human goals are relegated to the
remote future while brutal exploitative means are employed – is perhaps a
chronic evil for humanity. Yet, Weil here curiously avoids, first, the obvious
fact that it is only under capitalism (as Weber sharply observed, following
Marx [see his lecture on Sozialismus])
that this substitution of ends with means comes finally to pervade the very
mode of production and reproduction of human societies in the shape of the end-less accumulation of capital; and
second, curiouser still in an essay largely dedicated to Marxism, the fact that
this realization is perhaps Marx’s greatest discovery. Or rather, Marx’s
greatest discovery is the enucleation of the process whereby the accumulation
of capital becomes possible – and that is, the social creation under capitalism
of the “double character” (Doppelcharakter)
of the commodity labour-power. It is the political violence of the bourgeoisie
whereby it turns human living activity (or living labour) into a homogeneous commodity that can be measured and be given a market price – as if it were a “quantifiable thing”, an
inert object -; it is this bourgeois violence that transmutes like alchemy
human living activity into a reified bazaar of dead products, of marketable commodities (or “goods” as bourgeois
economists have re-baptized them) – an alchemy that has come to pervade all of
our lives and that, as a result, “make
humans become the simple toy of the instruments of domination that they
themselves have built…and thus abases living humanity to be the ‘thing’ of
inert things”.
Weil’s macroscopic failure to remark
on the essential difference between capitalism and prior modes of production in
terms of its catastrophic impact on the ecosphere through the universal
reification of human social life – from production to consumption – engendered
by the commodification of human
living labour: - it is this historically specific inversion of human living
activity (the end) with the inert product of this activity (commodities or
goods or dead labour – the means) that Weil ought to have placed front and
centre of her analysis of social oppression – precisely the way Marx did.
In fairness to Weil, it is entirely plausible to construe her Reflections as an indictment of the apocalyptically
perverse reification and commodification of human living labour – from an end
in itself to a means for realizing profits in the irrationally end-less accumulation of money-capital
that capitalism has unleashed on our sorry planet (endless because as a purely
monetary cipher it has no limit and no rational substantive human goal). Her real shortcoming, however, is
the failure to locate the modality of
this apocalyptic perversion of human
living activity and destruction of
the ecosphere through the twin evils of overpopulation
and consumerism. It is to this modality and twin evils that we shall turn presently.
We start from the universally accepted notion that the very essence of
capitalism is to
generate profits for capitalists. Profit
is the monetary difference between total investment and total revenue. For a
capitalist enterprise to be profitable, the products it sells must amount to
more than the cost of producing them with the cost of capital added (interest
at the prevailing rate over the period of production and sale). This means that
in the process of production the inputs have been “valorised” - their value has
grown - and this is then reflected in the “realisation” of the value through
the sale process. But how can the components of production acquire value? After
all, objects (means of production - raw materials and machinery) are only inert
objects and they cannot possibly possess or acquire “value”. It is obvious that
value, and the value added in the process of production, can only be derived
from living labour.
We have therefore a
“double character” (Doppelcharakter)
of human living labour: - on one side, as living
activity, it is the only possible source of value in the form of dead
labour, as “produced goods”: in this consists the use value of living labour to the capitalist. Yet, on the other
side, the living labour of workers can be “purchased” as labour-power through
the violence of the wage relation “on the market” like any other commodity through its exchange with the commodities
or “goods” produced earlier by the workers themselves, in other words, with
“dead labour”! Thus, the capitalist “purchases” the living labour of workers as
if it were a commodity that can be exchanged like and with any other commodity
or exchange value. It follows that
value-as-capital can never be a “fixed” quantity – a “thing” - but must be
instead a social relation in constant circulation from production in the
workplace to sale in the market!Two things follow from this conclusion: the first is that the value of a particular commodity cannot be determined until after it is actually sold on the market - until its potential value is realised. And the second is that this value, once it is realized as money capital, is determined ultimately by the ability “to purchase” labour-power on the market as if it were a commodity or exchange value like any other. But this means that the supreme task of the capitalist, which is to maximize profit and therefore to optimize the accumulation of capital, must be, first, to reduce the labor time that workers need to reproduce themselves (necessary labour), and second, to expand thereby the labor time that workers take to produce the surplus value that will ultimately be realized in the market as profit by the capitalist. It follows that as the capitalist successfully reduces the necessary labour time for the workers to reproduce themselves, then, given that a worker can only work so many hours in a day, the capitalist must increase the number of workers employed in order to increase the amount of potential surplus value and profit realizable in the market. Marx himself reached this conclusion in the Grundrisse:
Capital
tends both to render human labour (relatively) superfluous and also to push it
beyond all boundaries. Value is nothing other than objectified labour, and
surplus value (the valourisation of capital) is nothing other than the excess
of objectified labour on the amount necessary for the reproduction of the
labour force. But living labour is and remains the fundamental requisite of
objectified labour and of surplus value, while surplus labour [disposable
labour] exists only in relation to necessary labour, and therefore only to the
extent that there still is necessary labour. Capital must therefore incessantly
create more necessary labour [in absolute terms] to create surplus labour [and
therefore surplus value]. It has to multiply surplus labour (by means of simultaneous
working days [by means of more individual workers]) in order to multiply
surplus value. At the same time, capital has to suppress necessary labour so as
to turn it into surplus labour…It is for this reason that the capitalist
seeks the increase of the working population. And it is the actual
process of reduction of necessary labour that enables the capitalist to employ
new living labour [new workers] (and therefore create surplus labour [that is,
surplus value]). (In other words, the production of workers becomes “cheaper”;
and therefore it is possible to produce more workers in the same measure as the
time for necessary labour decreases or the time needed for the reproduction of
the labour force decreases....) – K.Marx, Grundrisse,
3.2.25)
Profit in capitalist
enterprise, and therefore surplus value, makes absolutely no sense at all
unless it is seen as value that can be (a) increased through the process of
production or “valorisation”, and (b) “realised” through the process of market
sale. But once this profit or surplus value is “realised” through the sale of
produced commodities, this profit realised by capitalists in its monetary form
can have absolutely no meaning unless it can be expressed as purchasing power
over fresh living labour! This means that the process of realisation of
profit can have meaning only through the exertion of capitalist command over
fresh living labour, over an ever-expanding population of workers.
Money, to
the extent that it exists already as capital, is therefore simply a policy [a
legal claim] on future (new) labour. Objectively it exists only as money.
Surplus value, the added objectified labour, in itself is money; but money now
exists as capital, and as such it is a policy on future labour. Here capital
enters a relationship no longer with existing labour, but also with future
labour. It also presents itself no longer as consisting merely of its simple
elements in the process of production, but also as money; but no longer as
money that is simply the abstract form of social wealth, but again as a policy
[as a claim] on the real possibility of general wealth – on the labour-force,
or better on the labour-force in actu.
In this form as a policy or claim on potential labour-force, its material
existence as money is irrelevant and may be substituted by any other claim on
the labour-force. Just as with public credit, each capitalist possesses, in the
value already appropriated [as product or objectified labour, or as money
capital], a claim on the future labour-force; by appropriating living labour in
its present form as objectified labour, the capitalist has already appropriated
a claim on future labour-power…. Here is already revealed the ability of
capital to exist as a social power separate from its objective material
existence. Here is already implicit the existence of capital as credit. Its
accumulation in the form of money therefore is not at all an accumulation of
the material conditions of labour [of the means of production], but rather of
the legal claim to living labour [on workers]. This means posing future labour
as wage labour, as use value for capital. For the new [objectified] labour
created [the product] there exists no equivalent [that is, no existing exchange
value]; its possibility [to be valourised through new expanded production]
exists only in a new labour force. (K. Marx, Grundrisse, 3.2.21)
This conclusion is
certainly devastatingly simple – but its implications for our ecosphere are
much more devastating, as we are about to see! What it entails is not only that
to maximise profit and its accumulation capital must seek to exploit its
existing workers to the very utmost, but also that it must increase the number of workers it can exploit to the
limit of available social resources! And that is far from all. Capitalists also
need the presence of a reserve army of the unemployed workers that (a) provides
competitive tension on employed workers to drive down wages, and (b) provides a
repository of further investment for capitalists to expand their command over
society so that there may be what is called “capitalist accumulation”. In other words, capitalist accumulation
through surplus value and its monetary equivalent, profit, is nothing other
than the expansion of political claims over excess
labour-power through overpopulation.But overpopulation is only one pillar of capitalist accumulation and, therefore, of the systematic destruction of the ecosphere. As we indicated earlier, the other aspect is consumerism. We shall deal with this next.
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