ON CAPITALIST "DECADENCE" -Sander

[자유로운 영혼]

ON CAPITALIST "DECADENCE"

(This is a reply to a critique by Will Barnes of Internationalist Perspective' s position on capitalist decadence. The text is reprinted below.)

Dear Will,

We agree in our critique of the productivist tradition in Marxism, with its Hegelian teleological view of history, in which everything new is the inevitable result of what was before, in which history is already written before it unfolds, in which everything, including communism, is ineluctable.

We do not deny that humans' struggle to survive, to reproduce and improve their lot stands at the center of historical change, but we also see that different spheres of human activity have various degrees of autonomous development under different historical conditions, that contingency often plays a game-altering role, that consciousness is never a mere reflection of the state of the productive forces, that the class struggle can behave like quantum-mechanics: the same causes may have radically different results.

To formulate this that way is at once a declaration of intent, an expression‎ of a desire to understand, and a confession that we, the pro-revolutionaries , still have a lot to think about.

Without taking into account the complexity of our situation, we would be stuck in vulgar Marxism, which is more a hindrance than help for revolutionary change. Dissatisfaction with the shallowness of Marxist mantras is a necessary starting point but the challenge is to ground fresh thinking in an historical materialist framework.

I think you would agree on that. Still, you see a residual productivism in IP's use of the concept of "capitalist decadence," since it is "logically relating capitalism to socialism in the dialectical sense of supercession" . Indeed, it implies that, before capitalism became "decadent" (or "socially retrogressive" ), it played an historically progressive role, by setting the stage for socialism. This view cannot be based solely on capitalism's development of labor productivity, or capitalism would still be progressive. While the development of productivity was absolutely necessary to create the conditions for a future communism, and capitalism was far more efficient in doing so than any earlier system, it can be argued that this does not prove that the road to communism inevitably had to pass through capitalism. But who then would be the revolutionary subject? Capitalism's main progressive role was the creation of its own (potential) gravedigger, the "collective worker."

But did the "collective worker" as we understand that concept, exist in 1914, the year world war One began, which according to us and others, was a manifestation of capitalist decadence? Were the socialization and globalization of the labor process advanced enough for the working class to act as a revolutionary subject? Does the revolutionary wave after the war not show that it might have worked, despite initial conditions of "backwardness" ? Or was its defeat inevitable because productivity was not advanced enough? The latter would indeed be the productivist view, but you seem to agree. You argue that in 1914, "abstract labor's productivity" was not yet "great enough to transform the world in its entirety according to the old Marxist notion of universal abundance". Indeed, if the concept of decadence is based on the productivist idea that it begins at the point at which productivity is high enough for universal abundance, 1914 seems way too early. And if decadence is equated with the preval‎ence of the real domination of capital, the date is wrong too. Indeed, many facts and figures show the limits of real domination at that point. However, we equate decadence neither with reaching a level of productivity that allows universal abundance, nor with a substantial completion of the transition to the real domination of capital.

We have argued in other texts that the transition to real domination, even in its early stages (towards the end of its first phase or in its second phase, depending on the periodization chosen) changes the conditions of capital accumulation in such a way that massive deval‎orization becomes a periodic requirement for its continuation (see my text: "A crisis of value" http://internationa list-perspective .org/IP/ip- discussions/ crisis_of_ value.html ). That this became manifest in 1914 cannot be explained by economic factors alone. From the point of view of the needs of capital accumulation, world war one was pre-emptive, and also not very successful. It should be clear that we're not talking about a mechanical crisis-war-recovery cycle. Nevertheless, the connection between the wars and other forms of destruction of capital that has occurred since 1914, and the need for capital as a whole to eliminate value in this period, seems fundamental to us. The function of this destruction is not, as you suggest, to lower productivity, but to deval‎ue the hoarded capital in order to reduce its claims on new value, and to deval‎ue the productive forces in relation to the surplus value their mobilization creates.

When the capitalist states turned the world into a slaughterhouse, engaging in the massive destruction of superfluous variable capital (whatever their subjective intentions), the working class faced a new reality. This made revolution a necessity for the working class. The question, whether a successful world revolution became a possibility at that time too, is more difficult to answer. I am not going to try to answer it here. I don't think it is something we need to agree upon to recognize the potential and the dangers of our own times.

Whatever the limitations that existed in 1914 in regard to the maturation of the conditions for socialism, the hallmark of the period that it opened is in our view the irreconcilability between the continued existence of capitalism and the interests of the working class and of humankind in general. That defined the stakes for the struggle of the working class. Meanwhile, the extension of real domination led to the gradual integration of trade unions and workers' mass parties into the fabric of capitalist society. In some countries, that happened even before the end of the 19th century, in others, several decades later. Labor productivity has continued to grow throughout the decadence of capitalism (its retrogression) , which is not defined by any cessation in the growth of the productive forces, but rather by the capitalist law of value having become an irretrievable obstacle to the growth of real wealth. Capitalism has itself broken the link between the law of value and the growth of "real wealth" (as explicated by Marx in the Grundrisse) that constituted any basis for having seen that mode of production as "progressive. " The very growth of the productive forces today, necessary to the capitalist valorization process, proceeds along lines that are incompatible with the growth of real wealth. In your opinion, it appears that since the 1950's the growth of the productive forces had reached the point at which socialist abundance would be possible. But meanwhile, real domination, the penetration of the law of value into all spheres of human activity, has affected the subjectivation of the working class in ways we haven't yet quite understood, but it's clear that they have had a decomposing impact on human relations and on the cohesion of the working class.

What can explode this subjectivation? How can we encourage it? These seem to me the crucial questions before us.

Sander

Capitalist Retrogression: Decadence[1]

, the argument for a socially progressive role of capitalism in its early (or ascendant) phase contains a residue of a productivism. More precisely, it, this argument, is a product of the precognitive assimilation in daily life of the culture of capital. As suggested, the characterization of capitalism as decadence is strictly "correlated" to an earlier

ascendant phase (which, in turn, is described in terms of the era of formal and real domination.

A connection between the two senses of formal and real domination (as designations of forms of surplus value extraction counterposed to signification in terms of eras of the history of capitalism) would allow us to specify a moment at which the one passed over to the other. In fact, a date at which capitalism entered its decadent phase, namely, 1914, is generally assigned.

Such a specification (or assignment) has two meaningful references, one explicit and the other tacit.

Explicitly it has the sense that capitalism, as a system of social relations develops through a wrenching movement of expansion and contraction, only re-equilibrates itself through the periodic destruction of the mass of objectively embodied values (plant and equipment, human labor-power, the mass of commodities especially as they enter as inputs into the means of production). In capitalism's ascendant phase, this deval‎orization was carried out through a deflationary collapse beginning with agriculture; in its decadent phase, through destruction of the means of production . as in imperialist world war.

A test of this theorization, then, would be a demonstration that the last imperialist world war resulted in an unprecedented destruction of the means of production (as distinct from urban and humanized natural landscapes that did not embody fixed capital, which were often devastated) creating a serious decline in and restriction of productivity in the capitalist sense. But what is demonstrable is that in most of the capitalist combatant countries, the capacity to produce remained unchanged (or actually surpassed that at war's outset) at the end of the war. It would take us too far afield to show this (though it can be shown), but the problems that confronted capital in the war's immediate aftermath were bottlenecks in fuel provision, transportation of raw materials and finished goods, distribution of food, and, less immediately and less narrowly economic, the return and reintegration of returning political prisoners and slave laborers. Productivity was not lost as a result of so-called destruction of the means of production (killed in combat, murdered en masse as genocides deliberately carried out, even with the destruction of human beings as "productive forces"). The failure to assess that moment at which real domination (it was not 1914), hence capitalist retrogression so-called, becomes effectively actual in the sense of an era of real domination exhibits a propensity toward a theorization for which historical contents do not enter into it and shape it. Tacitly this dating assignment refers to the historical moment beyond the immediate process of production at which all other domains of social existence and spheres of activity no longer possess the internal coherency to maintain a considerable degree of autonomy from the law of value, but are instead subject to it: Social relations of all kinds (for example, in educational institutions the relations between student and teacher) tendentially find their model in the relation between wage earner and capitalist and more and more become directly subordinate to the imperatives of capital.[2] But the overriding import of real domination and the more significant sense of decadence is that, on the basis of the transformation of immediate production processes, it has become effectively actual in large parts of the developed capitalist world, that is, abstract labor's productivity has become great enough to transform the world in its entirely according to the old Marxist notion of universal abundance. It is at that moment that capitalism is truly "redundant," that, in an older language, the material presuppositions for socialism had fully matured. However, real domination did not hold sway over production even in the most advanced citadels of capitalism at this moment (1914), if we take this domination to mean effectively actual in the sense just formulated, a sense that forms a precise, practically ascertainable determination of what it means for capitalism to be decadent.

This too can be demonstrated beginning from an account of the reorganization of labor processes (capitalists directly intervening to reorganize work, its rhythms and tempos; scientific and technological inputs, especially continuous flow production) in the metropolitan centers of capitalism.

Recall the concept of real domination as Marx ("Results of the Immediate Process of Production") originally developed it: At a certain point, a point different for each industry and at least initially in the historical sense for each capitalist, an increase in the volume of production commits the capitalist (who had previously merely supplied means and materials of production to "his" laborers) to directly taking control of the process of production itself. He actually intervenes in and organizes the forms labor takes in the workplace, transforming the means of production by reorganizing product flow, the forms of cooperation in work, or bringing to bear new technological inputs (machinery) on the work processes. The emergence of the factory system is the historical point of departure for the appearance real domination in production. But with a view to the structure of work, the factory system circa 1830-1840 cannot be identified with the mass production assembly line in the United States exemplified by Ford some eighty years later. That is, real domination has existed in difference forms in the immediate production processes. Yet it has not been just any form of real domination that has made capitalism "redundant," socialism in the narrow sense (i.e., with a view to its material presuppositions so-called) really pregnant within the extant configuration of production. It has only been continuous flow production based on sequentially arranged, specialized machinery and machine complexes that has raised abstract labor's productivity exponentially, and in so doing created real domination as a periodizing determinant of the history of capitalism as such.

Real domination based on this form of organization of production was, not to overstate the case, socially isolated in 1914: Ford's Highland Park facility, the first mass production complex in the world, opened in . 1914. Until the early twenties in the U.S. it was confined to steel, automobiles (from whence it expanded into production of agricultural means of production, tractors, combines, reapers, trucks, etc., and manufactured durables such as radios and refrigerators) and light manufacturing final assembly (e.g., G.E.'s Schenectady light bulb plant), while the weight of technological inputs had begun (by the time of U.S. entry into the world war) to reorganize other, highly advanced sectors such as mining in Butte, Montana, though not along the lines of continuous flow production. In Germany, the new production economy of fixed costs, an internal time economy based on continuous flow production was developed by the great cartelized capitals at the heart of rationalization movement that seriously began in 1925. For all Lenin's late life rants about the necessity of "applying" Taylorist methods to Soviet production, in the early thirties Soviet technicians could be found inside the Ford's Detroit River Rouge plant as observers monitoring assembly lines in an effort to unlock the secret of continuous flow production. In 1946, the massive Renault works at Boulogne-Billancour t was the sole major plant and facility in France that, fully rationalized, was systematically organized along lines of continuous flow production.

In line with the tacit sense of this specification, we can fix a date, about 1950, as that moment at which a revolutionary proletariat could have leveraged the world to socialism (never mind that proletariat would have been productivist, and that socialism constructed on a productivist model of endless development of productive forces and technologies of capital aimed at nature domination forecloses on a genuine general human emancipation) , that moment in which real subsumption of labor under capital had become effectively actual in large parts of the world, capitalist productivity great enough, to transform the world according to the old Marxist notion of universal abundance. It is at that moment that in principle a fundamental tendency of capitalist development under conditions of real domination became necessary and unavoidable, even though it did not become historically real for over another decade. This is the tendency of capital to expel labor from production while simultaneously incorporating strata "outside" the waged labor-capital relation (especially petty producers in the capitalist periphery) into that relation, suggesting at this point that one specific and important sense of communism, communism as the suppression of work, had an actual foundation in the production process of capitalism at the level of the world.

The concept of decadence does not adequately theorize the historical periodization on which it rests. But the problem goes well beyond this: If the "old mode of production" (capitalism) was "ripe" for supercession in 1914, the only socialism working class revolution would have made possible would have been productivist (i.e., the conscious layers of the working class aimed at restarting capitalist production on a councilar basis without the bosses, at overcoming the blockages in production ground down by world war): The project these worker vanguards and communists embraced was a forced march to capitalist modernization, that is, real domination, a vision of socialism that those who hold a concept of decadence as it is discussed here otherwise resoundingly reject.

------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- --------- -

[1]The following is excerpted from a larger work, and has been edited, pared back. The larger work is entitled Nature, Capital, Communism accessible at www.instcssc. org.

[2]In this regard, I would note that Alan Milchman, writing for Internationalist Perspectives, affirms the distinctions between formal and real dominations not merely as modes of surplus extraction but as eras in the history of capitalism, and bases his understanding of the exponential growth in abstract labor's productivity not so much on technical innovation (which can be understood narrowly) as on the systematic incorporation of science and technology into production. While I am sympathetic to his qualitative determination of the meaning and significance of real domination (which is the sense offered at the point in the text where this note has been inserted) as an era in the history of capitalism (which, for him, is fundamental) , on the central issue of abstract labor's productivity he constructs his argument ("How Capital's Progress Became Society's Retrogression, " International Perspectives, 42) to preclude criticism in principle: His determination of real domination offers no way to validate this affirmation, no way in which to measure it against social and historical developments, no way in which to connect that two senses in which formal and real domination are utilized.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]