Capitalism is a social system. This means that it operates according to
rigid rules that preserve its existence (reproduction) and do so on an expanded
scale (accumulation). But how can such a system function, not just in actual
fact, but as a co-ordinated, organised system? In other words, how is capitalism
even possible? This question requires a socio-theoretical framework that is as
much epistemological as it is political. – Which is why we are calling these
theoretical explorations “Prolegomena”, just as Kant did entitling his
propaedeutic work in answer to Hume’s scepticism to explore the possibility and
boundaries of all metaphysical speculation.
The inadequacy of all bourgeois exegeses of capitalism as a system are
revealed by the very contradictoriness of their description of this system as a
“market mechanism”. For how can a “market”, which is implicitly based on the
free will of its participants, ever give rise to a “mechanism”, which is
obviously independent of free will? And is not the “freedom” of the “free
market” defined by all equilibrium economic theories from Adam Smith to Kenneth
Arrow as a series of conditions that must result in economic equilibrium – and thus
in the notion of a “self-regulating market”? But then, if so, the entire
ideological legerdemain of bourgeois economic theory is revealed! The “market
mechanism” is either “free”, and then it cannot function as a “self-regulating
mechanism”, or else it is a “mechanism” in which it can be neither “free” nor”
self-regulating”!
SMITH AND HOBBES
And upon this it was,
that when I applyed my Thoughts to the Investigation of Naturall Justice, I was
presently advertised from the very word Justice, (which signifies a
steady Will of giving every one his Owne) that my first enquiry was to
be, from whence it proceeded, that any man should call any thing rather his Owne,
than another man's. And when I found that this proceeded not from
Nature, but Consent, (for what Nature at first laid forth in common, men did
afterwards distribute into severall Impropriations), I was conducted
from thence to another Inquiry, namely to what end, and upon what Impulsives,
when all was equally every mans in common, men did rather think it fitting,
that every man should have his Inclosure; And I found the reason was, that from
a Community of Goods, there must needs arise Contention whose enjoyment should
be greatest, and from that Contention all kind of Calamities must unavoydably
ensue, which by the instinct of Nature, every man is taught to shun. Having therefore
thus arrived at two maximes of humane Nature, the one arising from the concupiscible
part, which desires to appropriate to it selfe the use of those things in which
all others have a joynt interest, the other proceeding from the rationall,
which teaches every man to fly a contre-naturall Dissolution, as the greatest
mischiefe that can arrive to Nature; Which principles being laid down, I seem
from them to have demonstrated by a most evident connexion, in this little work
of mine, first the absolute necessity of Leagues and Contracts, and thence the
rudiments both of morall and of civill prudence. (De Cive, Dedication.)
Two forces exist
for Hobbes, then; one opposed to the other – one natural that involves
irrepressible self-interest, and one rational that seeks to avoid the
internecine civil “war of all against all” that will lead to mutually
assured destruction. All human laws and “rights” are strictly conventional because
they are the result of human rational consensual agreement. But these conventions
arise from the realisation that not having them, that failure to agree and
decree such laws will result in the complete irreversible dissolution of
society. The Euclidean axiomatic logic that leads Hobbes to this conclusion is inconfutable.
Hobbes here uses Logic to establish an Iron Law – a Hypothesis – on which
all human Conventions must be founded and from which they can be derived
or deduced. Here Hobbes’s Euclidean geometric logic, invariant and inflexible,
is brutally candid: it amounts to pure mechanical physics. With a few,
pitilessly calculated propositions – more geometrico, like Spinoza -,
Hobbes ruthlessly slashes and fells the pathetic apologetic assumptions of what
was to become the “liberal ideology” first outlined by John Locke in terms of the
“political regulation” of bourgeois society and then assimilated and extended
to its “economic expanded reproduction” by Adam Smith.
Convention and
Hypothesis. These are the two epistemological poles of the political strategy
that makes the tyranny of capital systematic. Capitalism is a system,
in the sense that it is political, yes, and therefore conventional in
the sense that it relies on consensual institutions; but also in the
sense that it is organised because it sets itself an external inflexible
operational rule. This operational rule or hypothesis is also “conventional”
in the broad sense that it is not an objective entity independent of human will
and purpose, of human decision. But unlike convention, hypothesis is not consensual
because it does not depend on agreement, because it is set unilaterally
by specific human historical agencies such as the capitalist bourgeoisie that
then impose it on other historical agencies such as the working class and the
broader population.
The most essential,
most crucial question surrounding the existence of capitalism as a
socio-economic system was always this: how can a society organise itself around
the seemingly independent, autonomous decisions of its individuals? How can the
discipline of the capitalist factory be reconciled with the apparent free-dom
of the market mechanism? And even there the oxymoron becomes apparent: how can
the so-called “free” market function as a “mechanism”? Market and factory. Free-dom
and co-ercion. Parliamentary democracy and liberal economy. Liberty and tyranny.
Choice and necessity. Finally, Convention and Hypothesis. How to
reconcile these opposites? How can capitalist “free” market enterprise become
systematic?
A hypothesis is
the ground zero of human decision-making. It is the rule that is set up in the
event that social consensus breaks down, and that must be imposed once social
consensus has broken down. In other words, a hypothesis is conventional
in the sense that it is not objective, and yet it is not conventional because
it is a Grundnorm, the Basic Norm or Law that guarantees the enforcement
of the conventions on which a social system operates and functions even when
these conventions have lost legitimacy and effectuality. Except that a
hypothesis is not a “law” or a “norm” as such. Rather, a hypothesis is exemplified
in the words of Carl Schmitt, “Sovereign is he who decides on the Exception”.
A hypothesis is the conventional framework that takes effect when the breakdown
of a social system requires a state of exception. Consequently, a hypothesis
is also the convention on which the effectuality of all other
conventions is founded, and from which all other conventions derive
their effectuality. A hypothesis is the Iron Law of the bourgeois society of capital.
The question
that Hobbes confronts is to examine how “self-interested individuals” in the
state of nature can agree to reach a “social contract” that protects their
“natural rights” under the law. In reviewing
the theoretical foundations of the state of nature, Hobbes follows the pessimistic
premises of the state of nature to their “scientific” natural conclusion. If in
fact individuals are already self-contained, “self-interested” atoms in the
state of nature, it is simply impossible for them to agree to the drafting of a
social contract that erects a status civilis regulated by laws - for the simple
reason that their “irreconcilable” egoistic interests would prevent such
individuals from reaching any agreement at all! To argue otherwise is to
postulate the ability of individuals in the status naturae to have the
necessary requisite “faculties” (reason or some other inclination) that allows
them first to discern and identify
their “natural rights”, and second to
agree to observe them.
But if such
faculties already existed in individuals, then they would no longer be merely
“self-interested”, in that they would implicitly be able to conceive of “the
common good” in respecting their individual “natural rights”, and therefore the
contractual establishment of a “civil society” would be quite superfluous. (Cf.
Rousseau in Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, p.235.) In other words,
for Hobbes the positing of a contractual “civil society” by “self-interested
individuals” governed by laws that protect their “pre-contractual natural rights”
is simply either a contradictio in adjecto
(“status naturae” is antithetical to the notion of “right”) or else a petitio
principii, in that erecting a State that protects “natural rights” under
the law presupposes a “society” of individuals capable of accepting the
legitimacy of those “natural rights”, which begs the question of why the
State is needed in the first place, because in that case both “the contract”
establishing the “civil society” as well as the State erected to enforce the
laws would be simply redundant, superfluous.
This is the
implicit and devastating critique that ought to have quelled once and for all
the future confabulations of liberalism, starting with those of its founder,
John Locke. Indeed, it is a measure of the British bourgeoisie’s self-confidence
that Locke could erect his presumptuous fabrication of liberalism in the face
of Hobbes’s devastating earlier critique! In Hobbes’s reasoning, no “self-interest”
of individuals could justify or urge or prompt them to agree to the contractual
establishment of a “civil society” except the metus mortis, the “fear of
death” at the hands of other humans, the fear of being overwhelmed by other
self-interested individuals in the state of nature. Either individuals
are able to protect themselves from others in the state of nature, in which
case they do not require a “civil society” or State, or else they are
not, in which case it is simply impossible to speak – as all liberal theories
do after Locke - of “natural rights”. Although the “conception” of such
“rights” may be possible in foro interno by reference to some religious
or ethical norm that all or most individuals may hold, in foro externo, in
the reality of the status naturae, no such “rights” exist simply because
there is no “power” that can apply “force” to have such “rights” observed by
all individuals. (Koselleck, Kritik und Krisis, p.29, according to whom Hobbes
proceeds “from the outside to the inside”, adapting the mediaeval Scholastic
separation between ‘fora’.)
In other words,
“natural rights” are mere “velleities” - empty and pious wishes existing “in
foro interno”, they are a mere flatus vocis - in the status naturae.
Only in a state of law or status civilis can “rights” exist in foro
externo and acquire “positive” reality. The inescapable outcome is that “natural
rights” cannot have any “social” reality except as “positive laws” enforced by
a social political “power or sovereign” – the State. What can bring individuals
together to agree to the contractual establishment of such a State is the only
“right” that all “self-interested individuals” can possibly recognise: - the right
to self-preservation. But it is essential to understand that this “right” for
Hobbes exists only as a “scientific” description of the reality of the state of
nature: in no guise is Hobbes attributing any ethical or moral validity to
“self-preservation” as a “right”, because that is simply “inconceivable” in the
state of nature.
Hobbes’s reductio
ad absurdum consists in this:- that in the state of nature the only “right”
conceivable and apparent is the brutal fact of self-preservation. And this is a
fact that human reason, seen by Hobbes as a mere “instrument”, can recognise and
act upon. For it would be impossible otherwise for individuals to let their
reason prevail over their passions and therefore to agree to the “formation” of
a contract or “league” in the status civilis founded upon the total
“alienation” of the freedom of their passions in the state of nature. But above
all it would be impossible for self-interested individuals to agree to any
definition of “right” whatsoever, “natural” or otherwise! (Thus, Hobbes exposes
ab initio what Koselleck called “die Pathogenese” of bourgeois society.
But see also Arendt, Totalitarianism, c. p.45ff.)
Hobbes draws a
distinction similar to Vico’s between the natural sciences that are based on
empirical observation and experimentation by way of hypothesis and
induction, on the one hand, and on the other the moral sciences that are
based on human conventions and deduction – with the inference
that, given that human beings are able to reflect by introspection into the
workings of their own minds, they are far better able to determine
“scientifically” the outcome of their “institutions”, political, economic and
social, than they are to divine the regularity of natural events by experiment
and induction (Piazzi cites Negri at p.16, also comments on link to Vico).
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