Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (39 page)

Capital cannot help but privatise, commodify, monetise and commercialise all those aspects of nature that it possibly can. Only in this way can it increasingly absorb nature into itself to become a form of capital – an accumulation strategy – all the way down into our DNA. This metabolic relation necessarily expands and deepens in response to capital’s exponential growth. It is forced on to terrains that are more and more problematic. Life forms, genetic materials, biological processes, knowledge of nature and intelligence in how to use its qualities and capacities and powers (whether of the artificial or distinctively human variety matters not a whit) are all subsumed within the logic of commercialisation. The colonisation of our lifeworld by capital accelerates. The endless and increasingly mindless exponential accumulation of capital is accompanied by an endless and increasingly mindless extension of capital’s ecology into our lifeworld.

This provokes reactions, revulsions and resistances. The joy of a sunset, the smell of fresh rain or the wonder of a spectacular storm, even the brutality of a tornado, cannot be reduced to some crude monetary measure. Polanyi’s complaint that the imposition of the commodity form upon the natural world is not only ‘weird’ but inherently destructive goes much deeper than the sense that natural forces and powers get disrupted and destroyed to the point where they become unusable for capital. What gets destroyed is the capacity to be human in any other way than that which capital requires and dictates. This is seen by many as an offence against ‘true’ nature and, by extension, against the possibility of another and better human nature.

This idea that capital mandates the destruction of a decent and sensitive human nature has long been understood. It early on produced an aesthetic revolt, led by the romantic movement, against a purely scientific approach to capitalist modernity. In deep ecology it produced a non-anthropocentric vision of how we should construe ourselves in relation to the world around us. In social and political ecology it produced severely critical forms of anti-capitalist analysis. In the critical work of the Frankfurt School it pioneered the
emergence of a more ecologically sensitive Marxism in which the dialectics and the ‘revolt’ of nature brooked large.
⁵
What is called ‘the revolt of nature’ is not that of an irate and out-of-sorts mother nature (as some indigenous thinking would now have it and as every presenter on the weather channels of the world likes to portray it). It is in truth a revolt of our own nature about who we have to become to survive within the ecosystem that capital necessarily constructs. This revolt is across the political spectrum – rural conservatives are every bit as outraged as urban liberals and anarchists at the commodification, monetisation and commercialisation of all aspects of nature.

The seeds are sown for a humanist revolt against the inhumanity presupposed in the reduction of nature and human nature to the pure commodity form. Alienation from nature is alienation from our own species’ potential. This releases a spirit of revolt in which words like dignity, respect, compassion, caring and loving become revolutionary slogans, while values of truth and beauty replace the cold calculus of social labour.

It is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that capital could survive all the contradictions hitherto examined at a certain cost. It could do so, for example, by a capitalist oligarchic elite supervising the mass genocidal elimination of much of the world’s surplus and disposable population while enslaving the rest and building vast artificial gated environments to protect against the ravages of an external nature run toxic, barren and ruinously wild. Dystopian tales abound depicting a grand variety of such worlds and it would be wrong to rule them out as impossible blueprints for the future of a less-than-human humanity. Indeed, there is something frighteningly close about some dystopian tales, such as the social order depicted in the teenage hit trilogy
The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins or the futuristic anti-humanist sequences of David Mitchell’s
Cloud Atlas
. Clearly, any such social order could only exist on the basis of fascistic mind control and the continuous exercise of daily police surveillance and violence accompanied by periodic militarised repressions. Anyone who does not see elements of such a dystopian world already in place around us is deceiving herself or himself most cruelly.

The issue is not, therefore, that capital cannot survive its contradictions but that the cost of it so doing becomes unacceptable to the mass of the population. The hope is that long before dystopian trends turn from a trickle of drone strikes here and occasional uses of poison gas against their own people by crazed rulers there, of murderous and incoherent policies towards all forms of opposition in one place
to environmental collapses and mass starvation elsewhere, into a veritable flood of catastrophic unequally armed struggles everywhere that pit the rich against the poor and the privileged capitalists and their craven acolytes against the rest … the hope is that social and political movements will arise and shout, ‘
Ja! Basta!
’ or ‘Enough is enough’, and change the way we live and love, survive and reproduce. That this means replacing the economic engine and its associated irrational economic rationalities should by now be obvious. But how this should be done is by no means clear and what kind of economic engine can replace that of capital is an even murkier proposition given the current state of thought and the lamentable paucity of imaginative public debate devoted to the question. In the analysis of this, an understanding of capital’s contradictions is more than a little helpful, for, as the German playwright Bertolt Brecht once put it, ‘hope is latent in contradictions’.

In excavating this zone of latent hope, there are some basic propositions that must first be accepted. In
The Enigma of Capital
, I concluded: ‘Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.’
¹
I still hold to this view and think it vital that others do too. It will obviously need a strong political movement and a lot of individual commitment to undertake such a task. Such a movement cannot function without a broad and compelling vision of an alternative around which a collective political subjectivity can coalesce. What sort of vision can animate such a political movement?

We can seek to change the world gradually and piecemeal by favouring one side of a contradiction (such as use value) rather than the other (such as exchange value) or by working to undermine and eventually dissolve particular contradictions (such as that which allows the use of money for the private appropriation of social wealth). We can seek to change the trajectories defined by the moving contradictions (towards non-militaristic technologies and towards greater equality in a world of democratic freedoms). Understanding capital’s
contradictions helps, as I have tried to indicate throughout this book, in developing a long-term vision of the overall
direction
in which we should be moving. In much the same way that the rise of neoliberal capitalism from the 1970s onwards changed the direction of capital’s development towards increasing privatisation and commercialisation, the more emphatic dominance of exchange value and an all-consuming fetishistic passion for money power, so an anti-neoliberal movement can point us in an entirely different strategic direction for the coming decades. There are signs in the literature as well as in the social movements of at least a willingness to try to redesign a capitalism based in more ecologically sensitive relations and far higher levels of social justice and democratic governance.
²

There are virtues in this piecemeal approach. It proposes a peaceful and non-violent move towards social change of the sort initially witnessed in the early stages of Tahrir, Syntagma and Taksim Squares, although in all these instances the state and police authorities soon responded with astonishing brutality and violence, presumably because these movements had the timerity to go beyond the boundaries of repressive tolerance. It seeks to bring people together strategically around common but limited themes. It can have, also, wide-ranging impacts if and when contagious effects cascade from one kind of contradiction to another. Imagine what the world would be like if the domination of exchange value and the alienated behaviours that attach to the pursuit of money power as Keynes described them were simultaneously reduced and the powers of private persons to profit from social wealth were radically curbed. Imagine, further, if the alienations of the contemporary work experience, of a compensatory consumption that can never satisfy, of untold levels of economic inequality and discordance in the relation to nature, were all diminished by a rising wave of popular discontent with capital’s current excesses. We would then be living in a more humane world with much-reduced levels of social inequality and conflict and much-diminished political corruption and oppression.

This does not tell us how highly fragmented though numerous oppositional movements might converge and coalesce into a more
unified solidarious movement against capital’s dominance. The piecemeal approach fails to register and confront how all the contradictions of capital relate to and through each other to form an organic whole. There is a crying need for some more catalytic conception to ground and animate political action. A collective political subjectivity has to coalesce around some foundational concepts as to how to constitute an alternative economic engine if the powers of capital are to be confronted and overcome. Without that, capital can neither be dispossessed nor displaced. The concept I here find most appropriate is that of
alienation
.

The verb to alienate has a variety of meanings. As a legal term it means to transfer a property right to the ownership of another. I alienate a piece of land when I sell it to another. As a social relation it refers to how affections, loyalties and trust can be alienated (transferred, stolen away) from one person, institution or political cause to another. The alienation (loss) of trust (in persons or in institutions such as the law, the banks, the political system) can be exceedingly damaging to the social fabric. As a passive psychological term alienation means to become isolated and estranged from some valued connectivity. It is experienced and internalised as a feeling of sorrow and grief at some undefinable loss that cannot be recuperated. As an active psychological state it means to be angry and hostile at being or feeling oppressed, deprived or dispossessed and to act out that anger and hostility, lashing out sometimes without any clear definitive reason or rational target, against the world in general. Alienated behaviours can arise, for example, because people feel frustrated at the lack of life chances or because their quest for freedom ended up in domination.

The diversity of meanings is useful. The worker legally alienates the use of his or her labour power for a stated period of time to the capitalist in return for a wage. During this time the capitalist demands the loyalty and attention of the worker and the worker is asked to trust that capitalism is the best system to generate wealth and well-being for all. Yet the worker is estranged from his or her product as well as from other workers, from nature and all other
aspects of social life during the time of the labour contract and usually beyond (given the exhausting nature of the work). The deprivation and dispossession are experienced and internalised as a sense of loss and sorrow at the frustration of the worker’s own creative instincts. Ultimately the worker stops being melancholic and morose and gets angry at the immediate sources of his or her alienation: either at his boss for working him too hard or at her partner for wanting dinner and sex and not sympathising with her exhausted state. In this totally alienated state, the worker either throws sand in the machine at work or the teacups at her partner at home.

The theme of alienation is present in many of the contradictions already examined. The tactile contact with the commodity – its use value – is lost and the sensual relation to nature is occluded by the domination of exchange value. The social value and meaning of labouring get obscured in the representational form of money. The capacity to arrive democratically at collective decisions gets lost in the perpetual battle between the conflicting rationalities of isolated private interests and of state powers. Social wealth disappears into the pockets of private persons (producing a world of private wealth and public squalor). The direct producers of value are alienated from the value they produce. An ineradicable gulf is created between people through class formation. A proliferating division of labour makes it more and more difficult to see the whole in relation to the increasingly fragmented parts. All prospects for social equality or social justice are lost even as the universality of equality before the law is trumpeted as the supreme bourgeois virtue. Accumulated resentments at accumulation by dispossession in the field of the realisation of capital (through housing displacements and foreclosures, for example) boil over. Freedom becomes domination, slavery is freedom.

The catalytic political problem that derives from all this is to identify, confront and overcome the many forms of alienation produced by the economic engine of capital and to channel the pent-up energy, the anger and the frustration they produce into a coherent anti-capitalist opposition. Dare we hope for an unalienated
(or at least less alienated and more humanly acceptable) relation to nature, to each other, to the work we do and to the way we live and love? For this to be so requires that we understand the source of our alienations. And this is exactly what the study of capital’s contradictions does so much to illuminate.

The traditional Marxist approach to the revolutionary transformation to socialism/communism has been to focus on the contradiction between productive forces (technology) and social (class) relations. In the lore of traditional communist parties, the transition was seen as a scientific and technical rather than a subjective, psychological and political question. Alienation was excluded from consideration since it was a non-scientific concept that smacked of the humanism and utopian desire articulated in the young Marx of
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
rather than through the objective science of
Capital
. This scientistic stance failed to capture the political imagination of viable alternatives in spite of the passionate beliefs of adherents to the communist cause. Nor did it provide any spiritually compelling and subjective (rather than scientifically necessary and objective) reason to mobilise arms in a sea of anti-capitalist struggle. It could not even confront the madness of the prevailing economic and political reason (in part because scientific communism embraced much of this economic reason and its fetish attachment to production for production’s sake). It failed in fact to fully unmask the fetishisms and fictions peddled in the name of the ruling classes to protect themselves from harm. The traditional communist movement was, therefore, in perpetual danger of unwittingly replicating these fictions and fetishisms. It fell victim in addition to the static and dogmatic views of the leaders of an all-powerful vanguard party. The democratic centralism that often worked well in opposition and at dire moments of violent repression proved a disastrous burden the closer the movement came to exercising legitimate power. Its search for freedom produced domination.