FOUNDATIONS OF A NOVEL CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM
The task of the capitalist is to accumulate capital, which can
be done only through “the theft of labour time” from the worker which, in turn,
can be achieved only through the forced separation (Trennung) of the
worker from his entitlement to the means of production and to the product. But
the separation of the worker from his objectified labour – this alienation in
the double sense, of the worker from his work, and of the worker’s product by
the capitalist – leads to the intensification and homogenization of the labour
process to the point where there can be an “exact calculation” of the labour
time and therefore of the value produced for the capitalist. When generalized
to most social interactions, this alienation leads to the widespread
mis-perception of living labour as a temporal experience into labour power as a
spatialized quantifiable entity.
This is the reification that Lukacs denounces: it is this
universal distancing of human beings in the objectification of their living
activity, in their work, from the process and the product of their work – this
reduction of concrete labour to abstract labour removes the
activity of the worker to mere contemplation, to his abstraction
(separation and removal) from his living activity. Deprived of this intimate
connection with the object of their living labour, human beings are drawn, are
encircled by and imprisoned within their “subjectivity” whereby the “object” is
not only separated from them in a sensuous dimension, but also it becomes
utterly in-com-prehensible, un-graspable by them as a separate reality
“standing against” them. The tragedy of Western philosophy is encompassed by
and encapsulated within this simple and devastating insight. The ubiquitous
transcendentalism and idealism of Western philosophy – its fatidic chorismos
- from Plato to Kant is all here. For Lukacs, it is the separation of human
living labour, living activity, from the object of this activity that is the
real historical source of the “dilemma…of bourgeois rationalism”:
This dilemma can be seen most clearly in the strange
significance for Kant’s system of his concept of the thing-in-itself…[According
to Kant] “the sensuous faculty of intuition…is in reality only a receptive
quality…The non-sensuous cause of these ideas [received by intuition] is wholly
unknown to us and we are therefore unable to intuit it as an object”…[Thus,
t]here is, firstly, the problem of matter…and there is secondly the problem of
totality and the ultimate substance of knowledge…(p.115)
If, indeed, the object of our knowledge is impenetrable and
inscrutable – if it is a qualitas occulta (Schopenhauer), a thing in
itself, incapable of being known to us except as mere appearance
– then it is clear that “we”, the Subject, will never be able to reconcile
rationally these appearances in a “totality” that can unify the various
branches of science as “substantial knowledge”, as properly-called science
rather than mere opinion or empeiria (empiricism). Through this
“separation” of human intuition from the real source of the ideas that
constitute our knowledge, Kant makes human knowledge entirely static or
“immediate”, and thereby also stultifies its undeniably historical-metabolic
character born of the real human interaction with the “object”, with the
life-world.
We know that in the Critique of Pure Reason it is
emphatically denied that [questions concerning the totality of knowledge] can
be answered… [and Kant even suggests in the Transcendental Dialectic that] they
are falsely put, and [seeks] to eliminate them from science. (p.115)
It is this transcendental schism in human knowledge between
purely subjective human science and the absolute knowledge that only the
penetration of the thing-in-itself could afford us that led to Schopenhauer’s
trenchant critique of the separation between thing-in-itself and “mere
appearances”. Schopenhauer demolishes Kant’s crucial distinction of the two, of
noumena and phenomena, by pitilessly exposing the futility of the “thing-in-itself”.
If indeed such a “thing” existed, the very fact that it is wholly unknowable
and imperceptible to us means that it is utterly redundant! In reality, given
that human knowledge is necessarily based entirely on “mere appearances”, then
there is no need to distinguish these “appearances” – which Schopenhauer calls
now “representations” (Vorstellungen) -from the entirety of our
“reality”! It is the appearances – the representations -, not the unknowable
“Thing”, that are our reality! Full stop! In other words, there is no
separation between Subject and Object because human beings are the
Subject-Object of the world. Clear is the debt, then, that Lukacs’s critique of
“the antinomies of bourgeois thought” - which he exemplifies with Kant’s
idealism – owes to the author of The World as Will and Representation. Even
more important, Lukacs inherited from Schopenhauer the notion of “individual
subject-object of history” which, to his mind, was embodied by the proletariat
as the true carrier (Trager) of that historical Marxian-Hegelian
Totalitat that alone could ultimately lead to the abolition of the Trennung
– of the separation of living labour from its object – and to the abolition of
alienation and reification and therefore to the complete emancipation of humanity.
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There are a few conclusions to be drawn from our critical
analysis of the Lukacsian notion of reification. First of all, reification is a
purely socio-psychological phenomenon that cannot give rise to any form of
“measurement” in economic terms, that is, in terms of the quantification of
human living labour. Second, the only quantification possible for human living
labour is as “labour-power”, as a marketable commodity that can be given a
purely monetary measurement (a price) on the labour market – where market is
understood not as an objective self-regulating mechanism but as a specific
political institution based on political coercion. Third, as Weber himself
establishes in the very locus quoted by Lukacs (the lecture Politik als Beruf
), the separation of worker from means of production is almost a constant in
history in all areas of social activity; it is not specific to capitalism; it
is not its discrimen or differentia specifica. Fourth, the mere fact
that workers produce products by means of their living labour does not in the
least establish (a) that they create the product, and least of all (b) that the
product belongs to them or that the capitalist employers engage in “theft of
labour time” (Marx).
We have established in our Schumpeter-buch that Marx
never took account of the environmental effects of capitalist industry, in part
because he presumed that environmental inputs (water, air quality, for
instance) were so plentiful as to have no exchange value (although they certainly
had use value for all classical political economists). All economic theories of
value and of development have either taken the metabolism of human production
with the environment as being exogenous to economic theories, or else they have
made allowances for environmental degradation as “externalities” (Alec Pigou,
The Economics of Welfare) notably in neoclassical economic theory – that is, as
costs that are “external” to economic theory and therefore irrelevant to it.
For all foregoing economic theory, classical and neoclassical, economics
concerns exchanges between human beings inter se (between or amongst
themselves); it is entirely irrelevant to the phylogenetic interaction of
humanity as a species with its environment. Our book on Schumpeter sought to
establish instead that human interaction with the environment is metabolic and
is therefore essential to the economic analysis of human productive activity.
Yet another aspect of Marx’s critique that contained an
insurmountable contradiction concerned the very notion of “exploitation”. In
Marx, this notion is tied to the difference between the surplus value produced
by workers and the value of the labour-power “embodied” in the goods paid to
workers as real wages – both of which are determined by “the socially necessary
labour time” needed for the reproduction of capitalist society which, in turn,
is determined by the technological level of the society. Of course, quite apart
from the fact that (as we saw earlier) it is impossible to determine what “socially
necessary labour time” is, this surplus value for Marx is the entire substance
of capitalist “profits” (in other words, profits are the monetary expression of
surplus value), and thus the difference between surplus value and the value
embodied in commodities produced represents the “theft of labour time” that is
the basis of capitalist profits and accumulation.
The evident contradiction in this proposition lies in the fact
that, given that for Marx, as for Rousseau and Proudhon, all property is theft
(see, among other works, his The Poverty of Philosophy), then the notion
of exploitation has no possible relation to the factual or scientific finding
that workers receive in wages less than what they produce. Even if we were to
concede the validity of Marx’s propositions and analysis, there is no intrinsic
connection between the notion of “theft”, which is a legal notion, and
therefore of “exploitation”, and the difference between surplus value and the
value paid in wages to workers which is a quantitative notion. The
insuperable difficulty with Marx’s critique of capitalism lies precisely in
this – that Marx saw his theory both as a politico-ethical or practical critique
and as a scientific analysis based on objective value-neutral
findings. To put it in his own words, Marx sought to judge the economic base
on which the legal, political and ideological superstructure depended –
on the basis of this very “superstructure” that could be the only source of any
“judgement” whatsoever!
This could be possible only on the ground of a “scientific”
inconsistency between the scientific foundations of the forces of production
and the politico-ethical nature of the social relations of production. Yet,
even assuming that such an inconsistency or “contradiction” exists, it is still
impossible to judge the “social relations of production” or superstructure on
the ground that it is doomed to be superseded by “the forces of production” or
economic base – because then this entire “supersession” would imply an ethical
value judgement based on the teleological (Hegel) and historical or biological
(Darwinian) “inevitability” of the
development of the forces of production! But an “inevitable” process, eo
ipso, by its very “scientific necessity”, negates the very value-based
assessment of its “inevitability”! “Inevitability” is a value judgement – a
prediction, a prophecy - that contradicts our “consciousness” or “awareness” of
it because no human being is capable of foretelling the future as a “destiny”.
And if indeed there could be any absolute certainty about such a destiny, not
only would any moral judgement in its regard be superfluous and irrelevant, but
also and above all else we could have no “awareness” or “knowledge” of it!
Awareness and knowledge necessarily imply not just contingency and possibility,
but also, as reflection and conscience (con-scientia), also the
possibility of averting what would be otherwise an inexorable fate. The notion
of destiny is incompatible with the aleatory character of human action, of
human history.
It follows quite demonstrably that Marx’s entire dissection of
human social history into a dialectical interaction between economic base and
political superstructure amounts to nothing more than an eschatology.
Essentially, as a true post-Hegelian and fervent admirer of Darwin (to whom he
intended to dedicate Das Kapital), Marx wished to turn history (Ge-schichte)
into destiny (Schick-sal). But destiny, unlike history, does not
allow for value judgements. Nor does it allow for free will. Marx suggests that
“men make history, but not through their will” (in the famous “Preface to A
Contribution”). This may be valid for individuals, - because they are
constrained by society (coercion) and by the environment (necessity); but it
cannot be true for society as a whole where coercion itself is a political
constraint, and therefore open to our collective will (cf. Rousseau’s volonte’
generale), and necessity is only an external, extrinsic constraint on the
will that in no guise can be said to negate its freedom to initiate action.
Once again, as we established earlier (following Hannah Arendt) the opposite of
freedom is coercion, not necessity. In the event, Marx managed
only to dress up a moral condemnation of capitalism as a scientifically
inevitable evolution.
Of course, Schopenhauer’s absurd suggestion (in On the Freedom
of the Will, seconded by Spinoza in the Tractatus, and recently re-affirmed by
Cacciari) that even our will is not free because we cannot be certain that our
“choices” are not the effect of prior causes is just a pitiful false infinite
(an argumentum ad infinitum).
If we accept the conclusions arising from our foregoing study,
what do they comport for the understanding and critique of capitalist industry
and society? Put bluntly, if we accept these conclusions which undermine much
of the Marxian critique of capitalism, what then can we say is “wrong” with
capitalism and how can we say it? In other words, why should we discard this
system and with what may we hope to replace it?
The first overall determination we may make from the set of
conclusions outlined above is that we cannot adopt Marx’s theory of
exploitation, from a material point of view, or that of reification, from a
socio-psychological one, as the ultimate bases for our critique of capitalism.
This is so for the overriding reason that Marx’s theory of exploitation – the
difference between “surplus value” and “real wages” or between profits and
money wages – is unfounded because it is quite impossible, categorically
impossible, to determine what is “socially necessary labour time”
without going into a definition of human needs. But any definition of
human needs, as Marx himself averred (notably in the Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy ) must involve – by definition! - social and
cultural elements that are “materially” impossible to determine quantitatively
in terms of “labour time”, that is, the time needed to produce the goods needed
to satisfy those needs even allowing for an accepted fixed technological level
of production. Once this is accepted, and given that there is no strict unique
or necessary link between (a) reification and capitalist production and, (b)
reification as a social and cultural phenomenon and material production of
goods – given these premises, neither the Marxian theory of exploitation nor
that of reification offer sufficient foundations for the phylogenetic critique
of capitalism (at the level of the human species) - although they are necessary
for its ontogenetic critique (at the individual level).
Where, then, should we look for these foundations of a critique
of capitalist industry and society? It is obvious that we can no longer rely
solely on the notion of exploitation because, first, this is confined to
workers taken as individuals - or, even if taken as a class (the working class
or the proletariat), as an entity whose exploitation can be quantified in
individual terms, or worse still as an entity that is extremely hard to define
in any precise sociological terms. Indeed, it is possible to argue that in a
capitalist society even capitalists are workers (managers and entrepreneurs,
for instance, excluding financiers and rentiers) and even workers can be
capitalists (as shareholders or small business owners). Because Marx’s critique
of capitalism is founded almost exclusively either on the “injustice” of
distribution of production (of “wealth” or “income”) and on the psychological
effects of alienation, it fails to address the phylogenetic impact of human
interaction with the environment, our metabolism with nature itself. As we
argued above, the notion of exploitation is strictly a moral one because it is
based on the premise of equal exchange or equal deserts – what are known
otherwise as commutative and distributive justice. Furthermore, as we also
argued earlier, we cannot rely on the notions of alienation and reification
because these are sociological descriptions that are not unique to capitalism
and that have psychological and cultural aspects that are impossible to
attribute to a particular system of production.
What is needed for the critique of capitalism, then, is first a
theory that identifies the specific difference, the essential characteristics
of capitalist production that distinguish it from other modes of production;
and second, a demonstration of how the specific essence of capitalism entails
and engenders the destruction of the environment, which is to say the
unsustainability of human social reproduction on earth. The merit of this novel
way of assessing capitalism is that it is no longer based on commutative and
distributive justice – equal exchange and equitable distribution of human
production – but rather on human interests – on the needs of being human, the
highest of which must be the sustainable reproduction of society. (On the
matter of human needs and interests, see J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human
Interests, and A. Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx.)