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The world is still staggering after the shock
that hit the global economy in 2008. Mathematical indices seem to demonstrate
the normalization of the economy but the lives of the people who were thrown
out of their jobs and houses haven’t been
normalized, and will never be so. After the subprime mortgage led the crash of
the American and global economy, Euro-zone experienced a gigantic crises, and
the people of the industrialized world fell into the trap of unstable jobs, low
wages, austerity in welfare system, high unemployment and ever-increasing debt
and poverty.
Once, I dreamed of becoming an economist who can
help the development of the
I read the book Capital Volume 1 several times. I spent extremely hard time at
first understanding basic concepts underlying the structural apparatus even
though I started reading the book in Korean. I couldn’t actually understand what Marx was exactly talking about when I
finished reading the book, with only glimpses of his insight. After several
times of reading, my Korean edition was ragged and filled with underlines and
memos. Even then, I had a great deal of misunderstanding about the book, and
had no idea how I could apply Marx in understanding the world. In fact, many
people who try to study Marx have prejudices about the book. Some, especially
many conservatives in
I believe it is impossible and also unnecessary to try to summarize the vast insights of Marx depicted in this book. Fellow readers who are interested in Marx’s structural apparatus would find better introductions and summarizations from other sources. Also, even if it would be very difficult to do so, the only way of getting insights to connect Marx’s concepts with everyday experiences or things going on around the world nowadays is to struggle with the book by ourselves, thinking and striving until we get glimpses of insights and discussing with various thinkers, those who are around us or are in the books, about the concepts and their practical uses. What I want to write in this essay is not a summarization that would surely fail in providing full analysis of Marx, but to talk about how this book drastically changed my thinking and views in every way I experience the world.
A great shock I got from Marx is that capitalism is not a natural system. We can’t even imagine these days how we can live outside the capitalist orders. Things around us go on under the capitalistic market order, and people take this system for granted, almost as a natural system. Many economists believe that trading and desire to get better things are human nature, and capitalism is a natural system since this human nature is a main engine of the system. However, we are missing the historical point that for thousands of years, capitalistic exchange has occupied only a very small proportion of our lives. Most of the population, except few pioneering merchants, spent their lives under feudal systems, getting things they need by producing by themselves or extracting from others through subordination system. Commerce in large scale around the globe or small scale in everyday lives expanded as time went on, but it was not until the industrial revolution that capitalism could wholly change our ways of living. It took many more years of blood and turmoil until capitalism conquered all parts of the world, which was mainly done by imperialist expansions. Commerce or desire to get better things may be our nature, but by themselves, they are not capitalism itself. If capitalism leads to a society of extreme inequality that most of the population cannot get what they need or live a satisfactory lives, it can never be considered natural. Also, Marx explains that the system that constitutes capitalism may be elaborate, but not natural. It has been made by human impulse and efforts for many years. If capitalism is not nature, it indicates that there are possibilities that capitalism may be transformed into another type of system.
Marx explains fetishism in Capital Volume 1 as a concealing mechanism of capitalism. When we go to a supermarket in search of something to eat, we only see the commodities filling the market. We can never see who are the ones produce such commodities, although someone certainly must have contributed to their production process. In fact, the reason we can get the things what we need is because there are people who produce the things. However, this relationship between people is always hindered in the capitalist system, and social relationship between people becomes disguised as relationship of men and commodity. In feudal societies, we could at least see that oppressive system of extracting serf’s labor for the favor of the lords is a man-made, social relationship between people. We can never see such mechanism of social relationship in capitalistic system, and surely it would be more difficult to understand that capitalism is not a natural system.
If we unclothe this veil of concealing fetishism, we can be led into Marx’s explanation of the basic mechanism of capitalistic system. Commodities have values, which is constituted with the amount of socially-necessary labor. The more labor we put into the commodity, the more value the commodity will have. If an invention causes the labor necessary to produce a commodity drastically decrease, than the value would get lower. We exchange commodities under the standard of value, and monetary system is the representation of value system, which enables efficiency in exchange. If a sum of value reproduces itself with bigger size, than the process of value’s reproduction is called capital. Merchants use capital to gain wealth by adding extra into the original value when they sell commodities, but the actual production process of capital cannot be like this. In order to make a value more sizable without snatching, capitalist can only buy labor and use it to enlarge the sum of value. Capitalists provide sum of money only enough to maintain the laborer’s basic life so that he or she can provide labor the next time, and then exploits the labor more than the sum he gave, which makes the original value grow. Capitalists try to decrease the wages and increase the labor time to gain more surplus value, and sometimes lower the basic wage standard by inventing new technology of production. Also, such invention can give extra surplus value to the pioneering capitalist in the competition order. During this flexible process of innovation and competence, technological advancement enables capital to hire less workers, which leave many proletariats workless, and these industrial reserve army can help capitalists restrain the wage. In the end, capitalism results in extreme wealth of the few, and poverty of the many.
We can see many cases of poor proletariats in the book, suffering under extreme exploitation and poverty. And unfortunately, the things happening nowadays is not very different from the mode of production depicted in this book, although it is written in the 19th century. After 1970s, waves of Neo-liberalism stormed the working class, which made the workers weak and capital ever-powerful than before. Workers labored for more hours with lower wages, and capital could extract more labor and successfully fulfill its greed of reproduction into upper-scale. The states of the exploited workers and unemployed poor in the Capital reappeared in enlarged scale. We can see these cases not only from reportage depicting states of working class in developing nations, but also in our daily lives filled with unemployment and irregular, unstable workers. In addition, technological advancement became ever-more apparent in the production area, which produced mass unemployment, and indeed, poverty. In the way Marx depicted in this book, capital could produce more value with more social poverty, but then, there came a problem of realizing the value into actual life. The poor proletariats could not provide enough demand to support the economic system, which made the capital hard to sell the products and realize the produced values. In fact, the problem of realizing the value, which is circulation process of capital is depicted mainly in volume 2, and the matter of economic crisis is depicted mainly in Volume 3, which makes it improper to discuss the capitalist system fully only with the aid of structural apparatus provided by volume 1. However, even in volume 1, we can see glimpses of insights that can be led to the understanding of circulation process and economic crisis, which is necessary in understanding the world today. If the unemployed, poor mass of people cannot provide enough demand, capitalism would certainly fall into crisis, which happened in the 1920s and 30s in the form of Great Depression. To avoid this and continue the accumulation process into a larger scale, capital began new expansions which we call globalization. Capital constantly moves to poorer and underdeveloped countries, filled with massive proletariats ready to get work and buy the products. In such process, the working class in developed countries became poorer due to outward movement of capital, while merchant capital and financial capital began to have bigger roles in the process of capital accumulation. But even this expansion of globalization cannot go on forever, and since the exploited proletariats in the developing countries are poor and can’t provide enough demand, capital began to count on finance. Credit cards were provided to the masses, and debt increased while the unstable and unreal demand of the people supported the accumulation process. The bubble economy based on debt couldn’t last long. Finally, when the basis of the system became too unstable, it collapsed into a crisis, which we sought in 2008. The value system, monetary system, and finance system are layers of a giant, but unreal and unstable pyramid built upon the human relations of labor. Fetishism conceals this unreality, but as the human relationship is hindered, the whole economy collapses as everything went wrong in 1930 and 2008.
In fact, capitalism can never be stable.
Constant unstable expansion process is ironically a stable state of capitalism.
Intrinsically, capital can never fulfill its equilibrium and stability of
supply and demand, since what capital produces is original value plus surplus
value, while surplus value has been deducted from the value of wages, which in
turn lead to the decrease of demand. In order to provide enough demand,
capitalists should consume extra commodities in the forms of means of
production, which means that capitalism should expand forever. Capitalism can
find equilibrium only in its imagination, and to reach its imaginative future,
it should constantly expand, never meeting its stability in actual, only
creating bigger gaps.
Marx always said that philosophers should think about how to change the world, not only focusing on interpreting it. Now, there comes a question about what should we do now. We can see that many people are suffering under the system, so what are we going to do to change the circumstances? In fact, Marx does not give much resolution in the Capital. Capital is a critical analysis of capitalistic economic system, not a political pamphlet like The Communist Manifesto. Many Marxists tried to overthrow capitalism to build a new system, but they failed with enormous tyranny, inhumane destruction of innocent lives and economic inefficiency. We can not, and should not try a route of building a communist central plan, which proved impossible in the past. Neo-liberalism is still a very powerful ideology in this global world, but it is being less and less supported by the people who were thrown out from the sweet dreams that neo-liberalists provided into the cold reality. Keynesians say we have to return to the system before neo-liberalism, building a sustainable and stable economy with welfare and government regulation. It sounds plausible, but is this a true solution to the problem? In fact, modified capitalist system being controlled under Keynesian doctrine faced capital’s rebellion after the brutal and ongoing recession following the crisis after oil shock. Huge governments showed great deal of inefficiency and capital met problem extracting enough labor to fulfill their greed of growth, which caused stagflation no one had ever witnessed before. In fact, crises wipe out a great deal of wealth created but it is necessary in capitalistic system since it enables capital to renewal its start by destroying the inefficient bubbles and over-production of the past. Under capitalism, inflation would take place during prosperity, only to be replaced by deflation during recession. However, when Keynesians tried to stabilize economy by hindering this destruction process, the crisis returned in a bizarre form. We should also note that capitalism has undergone tremendous global expansion, which caused the power of multinational capital even stronger than individual governments, which makes it politically impossible for individual states to get control over the capital. Whenever the governments try to do so, money would flee to other parts of the world easily, which would drag the economy downwards.
Just
like after the Great Depression, fascist demagogues are gaining more and more
power in the global politics. They are prospering throughout the West, and
diverse extremisms like Islamic extremism in the Middle-east also take
advantage of the regressing economic conditions. The people in the Middle-east
fought against the dictators who were subordinates of the multinational capital
during the recent revolution, but since the economic situation didn’t improve, extremism began to take control of the masses. Europeans
and Americans who are tired of the ongoing recession chose demagogues like
Repen and Trump who blames women, minority and immigrants for the crisis. These
fascist racism is completely inhumane and out of nonsense, since the minorities
are not the cause of the problem, but mutual victims of the accumulation
process. Capital moving all around the globe brought unstable lives for
everyone in the world, creating farmers of the Third world thrown out of their
homelands heading to slums or foreign lands and industrial workers thrown out
of their jobs in the industrialized world. Trump’s protective trade and hostility against the immigration would only
cause dissolution and longer recession. Immigrants are actually bearing huge
responsibility in the American economy and jobs wouldn’t get created much since the technological advancement which is
cheaper than the American laborers would replace human labor.
Traditional alternative parties like Social democrats couldn’t serve their role in this period of chaos. They were either washed with neo-liberalism ideology or couldn’t overcome outdated Leninist views about change. The Marxists who led the movement of building communist states focused on industrial working class as the leading class of the revolution. However, industrial working class is being diminished quickly nowadays in the industrialized world. Deindustrialization and technological advancement is leading this trend, and more and more people are working for finance capital and commerce capital. Finance and commerce are having larger roles in modern capitalism by helping capital collect and realize more sums of value quickly, but we can clearly see that those areas are also being encroached by new technology like artificial intelligence. Marx deals with the tendency of decreasing profit rate in Capital Volume 3 which is quite related to this matter. He argues that as the technology advances, means of production would constitute larger parts of the total capital and property of the living laborers would get lower, which would cause decrease of profit rate and following recession. In fact, this tendency has been criticized harshly, but here we can note his insight about technological advancement that would go on forever under the system. As new technology replaces living labor, the mass would get poorer and poorer and it would get harder to sustain the economy, causing serious crises and recessions.
We are witnessing the vanishing of the traditional industrial workers which Marx and his followers focused. However, it doesn’t mean that the people who can lead the revolutionary democracy are vanishing. Vast amount of proletariats are appearing all over the globe, mostly by the downfall of middle class in industrialized world and transformation of traditional farmers into proletariats in the Third world. Marx depicts the process of primitive accumulation at the end of the Capital Volume 1. In order to transform traditional farmers who own their means of production into proletariats working under the capitalists’ control, the capital needed to separate the traditional connection between the worker and the conditions of working. This was done by violent plunder and looting, and after this uneconomical compulsion was completed, economical compulsion was enough to keep regulation of the workers. The capitalists violently plundered land from the farmers, throwing them out of their traditional agricultural backgrounds into factories and cities. Financial plunder on the poor, commercial plunder, and plunder on colonies collected enough capital to engage in the industrialization. This kind of thing is still being done in the developing nations around the world, and multinational capital is gaining control over the agriculture, industry and even politics of those nations. This plundering process is also happening in the industrialized world, by finance and commerce capital. Since deindustrialization and ongoing recession made it harder for capital to gain profits from production process, it began focusing more on plundering process by deceiving the poor with credits in order to loot their properties, monopolizing the markets to unnaturally increase the prices, and increasing its power on copyrights or rights on seeds, genes, technology etc.
As capital becomes the strongest ruler of the globe, the more people are thrown into harsh life conditions not only in the poor parts of the world, but also in the richest and most developed parts. From those masses of people, new masses of proletariats, we can find hope for the true change. We sought massive movement against the greedy finance capital in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and rise of Bernie Sanders who demonstrated that the true change can only take place when people stand together. In order to form a new world order, we have to unite the power of these people suffering in the capitalistic system and form a powerful resistance movement all around the globe. We need to reject the capital’s logic that everything should be under market’s control, and say out loud that human lives and basic conditions for happiness should be prior to the accumulation of capital. We should not only focus on the national change, but also international change, since international governance with proper democracy and regulation on capital is necessary in this global economic system.
What I want to say out loud to the people working hard to change the world to make it a better place is that Marx’s structural apparatus should not be used in the way many Marxists used in the 20th century. They viewed men as instrumental for social change, and believed that destroying individual’s lives for the good of the society can be justified. This kind of basic misunderstanding about humanity led to tyranny and oppression, an awful experiment quite similar to Fascism. We in the 21st century who know this kind of mistake should clearly note that during the process of change and global revolution, human should be number one priority. If we put all the individual human lives in our priority and consider all of us as objectives themselves not means for something, we would be able to fully understand the meaning of peace and liberty from social structure’s oppression, and revolutionary humanism in democratic ways to resist the sophisticated mechanism of the modern world.
Many people refer today’s drastic changes as the fourth industrial revolution. However, I can’t believe it merely as another industrial revolution. In each flows of the revolution, we experienced great advancement in new technology and power of production, but it’s quite different this time. New technology drastically advancing are constantly throwing out men out of work not only in industrial areas but also in service areas, and many believe that almost all of the works can and will be replaced by the new technology in the future. If technology takes over the labor process and leaves the masses workless, the capitalistic system cannot maintain itself, because capital would find no demand for realization of its profits. Of course, it would take quite a great deal of time for this process to be finished, just like the industrialization and capitalistic development was rather a long-term process. However, we can clearly note that change is happening, and the major contradictions in the capitalistic system itself would realize themselves in sharper forms threatening the lives of almost all the people in the globalized world. More people would be workless or unstable workers, while low wage working class in the developing world would be exploited much more harshly, only to be replaced soon by the new technology which is becoming cheaper and cheaper day by day. Poverty, unemployment and constant recession would constitute the sharp disembodiment of the system. It’s time for us to think about the new future, a society that will democratically overcome contradictions of capital for the sake of humans’ better lives.
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