The reason
why we are taking this long detour in our theorization of totalitarianism with
this examination of Marxist political theory is that we are trying to show how
totalitarianism is a tendential development, and indeed the tragic denouement,
of the statality of capitalism. It follows that before we can trace this
contentious link between the statality of capital and its ultimate catastrophic
collapse into totalitarian dictatorship we must enucleate the theoretical
nature of this statality of capital. Statality differs from all other
determinant and therefore essential properties of capitalism in the sense that it
is the one property that tendentially grows into its preponderant characteristic
as capitalism develops. Our aim here is to trace the trajectory of capitalist
statality from the inception of capitalist enterprise and industry to the advanced
development of the society of capital.
For this
purpose, we shall begin with its differentia specifica, what
distinguishes this mode of production from all others, which is the “exchange”
on the part of capitalist “employers” of dead labour – the products of human
living labour – with the use value living labour of “employees” or workers. Clearly,
such an “exchange” must be the result of coercion by employers on employees
because it is absurd to think that human beings would trade or “exchange” freely
their living activity with the already-produced products of their own living
labour, with their objectified labour. Not only are living labour and dead
labour incommensurable entities – one being a living activity and the other its
objectified form -, but also they exist in different time dimensions, the one
being present or potential or future activity whilst the other represents past
or objectified or dead labour. From this viewpoint, it is simply false to say
that workers “offer their labour” to the capitalist; the contrary is true: it
is the capitalist or “employ-er” who offers labour intended as abstract
labour or work to the “employ-ee” or worker: in other words, the “labour”
or “work” that is the essence of capitalist production is living concrete activity
reduced by the capitalist employer to alienated abstract activity – to
politically coerced activity under the command of the capitalist. The German words
for employer and employee are more figuratively explicit in this regard: the
capitalist is the Arbeit-geber, the work-giver, whereas
the worker is the Arbeit-nehmer or work-taker!
Again, the
form of political coercion specific to capitalism is that the capitalists command
the present living labour of workers by means of an “exchange” with their past
or dead or objectified labour. It follows that the profitability of capitalists
is dependent entirely on their ability to command future living labour. Profit
is surplus value that represents a mortgage – the dead hand of the past
over the future – on future living labour. (Keynes had an inkling of this
insight when he declared in The General Theory that “money [as a store
of value and as credit finance] is a bridge between the present and the
future”.) But there is one rider to this definition – one that distinguishes
capitalism from the slave mode of production. After all, slavery can also be seen
as an “exchange” for the living labour of slaves with their past dead labour.
The difference between capitalism and slavery is that the capitalist does not legally
own the worker: what defines capitalism is that the living labour of
workers “exchanged” for their dead labour is legally free to work
or not to work for the capitalist – yes, on condition of starving, perhaps, but
if workers starve the capitalist does not make a profit, which means that a
political compromise must be reached between workers and capitalists.
The
political compromise consists of this: - that in exchange for their living
labour being paid with their own past labour – that is, in accepting that this
“exchange” is really a political coercion forced on them by the fact that
capitalists own the means of production and their ownership is enforced by the
monopoly owner of the means of violence, the capitalist State – the workers retain
the legal right to withdraw their labour and thereby compel the capitalists to
improve their living standards materially by increasing their wages and raise
the productivity of living labour. Of course, increasing the productivity of
living labour serves merely to reduce the real cost per worker of living labour
because the capitalist now needs to employ fewer workers to be able to exchange
the present dead labour paid in wages for their future living labour. This
would certainly create excess living labour, and therefore unemployment because
capitalists could not be expected to raise productivity only to see it absorbed
into higher wages – except that the capitalist can deploy the excess dead
labour derived from the higher productivity of workers to employ more workers
from the reserve army of the unemployed or else from new supplies of living
labour from other countries and their populations. This entire process is
called “relative exploitation” or “relative surplus value extraction”.
Alternatively, where capitalists are not forced by workers to increase
productivity through innovation, the only way for them to accumulate more
profits or surplus value is simply to employ more workers with the existing
means of production or to force existing workers to work longer hours. This is
called “absolute exploitation” or “absolute surplus value extraction”.
There
obviously comes a time when the entire present and potential army of workers (reserve army plus new
populations) is nearly exhausted and the capitalists cannot find new outlets
for profitable investment of their excess output or dead labour. It is at this
stage that the overall rate of profit of capital begins to decline, interest
rates begin to sink and approach “the zero bound” and unemployment begins to
rise without any improvement in the living conditions of the employed labour
force. At this stage, capitalists have two choices: one is to accept that a
large part of their accumulated capital or “assets” is worthless because it is
incapable of being profitably invested – this is called a deflation or,
when the term structure of loan finance and credit is considered, debt deflation.
The other “solution” is to keep employing workers and capital at present levels
by means of collective capitalist or state creation of fiat money, that is to
say, by means of the extension of credit through the artificial printing of
money that essentially involves, depending on “the transmission mechanism” of
money supply, either the transfer of social resources to workers, or else the inflation
of the “assets” or excess capital that capitalists already own – which then
leads to the growing income and property inequality between the owners of
“assets” on one side and the working population and the reserve army of
unemployed or proletariat on the other.
It follows from
all this that the fundamental, ineluctable and irresolvable antagonism at the
core of capitalism is this irreducible political class conflict between living
labour, the working class, and dead labour owned by the bourgeoisie. By seeking
to bestow upon his critique of political economy and of capitalism the aura of
“science”, Marx first and then the rest of Marxism came to obfuscate the political
essence of the wage relation and of capitalism itself – that is, the coercive
and therefore false “exchange” of dead labour for living activity imposed by
capitalists on formally free workers. By insisting on the objective identification
of value as a measurable quantity made up of “socially necessary labour time”,
Marxism turned the capitalist process of production into a politically-neutral technological
process whereby “exploitation” referred merely to “the theft of labour time”,
of value understood as “socially necessary labour time”, by capitalists against
workers. The Marxist critique turned thereafter into an ethical argument
about the distribution of income in capitalism instead of the production
process – what is produced, when and how. This blanket
identification of Value with Labour opened the door to the “ethical socialism” of
social democracy from Bernstein to Kautsky and to the present day. Ever since,
the diatribe between the Kommunismus of Marxist-Leninists and the Sozialismus
of social democrats has been confined to squabbles over whether socialism would
be achieved by violent revolutionary or evolutionary reformist
methods, with the further rider that communists insist on the scientific and
planned determination of Value in social production whereas socialists deny the
possibility of such scientific determination for economic planning thereby
placing reliance on “markets” rather than central planning to
ensure the co-ordination of economic activity.
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