The capitalist leviathan cannot be reduced to class struggle alone! The spectre of value haunts us all!
March 15th, 2009Originally published in French as Whose Fault Is It? - By Anselm Jappe
This time, all the commentators agree: what is taking place is not a simple passing turbulence of the financial markets. We are really in a crisis considered as the worst one since the Second World War, or since 1929. But whose fault is it, and where do we find the exit? The answer is nearly always the same: ‘the real economy’ is healthy, it is the unhealthy mechanisms of finance which has escaped all control to put in danger the world’s economy.(1) Then the most immediate explanation, but also the most widespread, by attaching the responsibility to ‘greed’ of a handful of speculators who have played with everyone’s money as if they were at the casino. But to reduce the arcana of the capitalist economy to the intrigues of a conspiracy of evil people, has a long dangerous tradition. It would be the worst of all possible solutions to name scapegoats once more – such as ‘Jewish high finance’ to the condemnation of ‘honest people’ in the form of ‘workers and savers.’
It is not even more serious to oppose ‘bad’ Anglo-Saxon capitalism, predatory and without bounds, to a more responsible ‘good’ Continental capitalism. It has been seen these last weeks that they are set apart by nuances. All those who now call for ‘more regulation’ of the finance markets, from the ATTAC Association to Sarkozy, only see an ‘excess’ in the stock exchanges, an outgrowth on an otherwise healthy body.
But what if this financialization , far from ruining the real economy, had on the contrary, helped it to survive beyond its expiry date? If it had breathed life into a dying corpse? Why is one sure that capitalism itself could be exempt from the cycle of birth, growth and death? Could it not contain intrinsic limits to its development, limits which do not only lie in the existence of a declared enemy (the proletariat, oppressed peoples) but in the depletion of natural resources?
At present, it is fashionable once again to quote Karl Marx, but the German philosopher has not only spoken about class struggles. He had equally forecast the possibility that one day the capitalist machine will come to a halt all by itself, that its dynamic will run out of steam. Why? The capitalist production of commodities contains, from the start, an internal contradiction, a veritable time bomb situated in its very foundations; capital only grows, and thus accumulates, by exploiting labour power. But the worker, in order to generate a profit for his employers, must be equipped with the necessary tools, and today with leading technologies. A constant race results from this – competition oblige – in the use of technologies. Each time, the firm that has recourse to new technology wins. But with this, the entire system loses, because technologies replace human work. The value of each particular commodity therefore contains still smaller parts of human labour – which is however the only source of surplus value, and thus profits. The development of technology diminishes profits in their totality. However, during a century and a half, the broadening of the production of commodities on a world scale has been able to compensate this tendency towards the shrinking of the value of each commodity.
During the 1970s this mechanism – which was already nothing more than a relentless pursuit of the same policy in spite of all the evidence – has jammed. The gains of productivity permitted by micro-electronics has, paradoxically, put capitalism into crisis. Investment always more gigantic than before were necessary in order to make work the few remaining workers according to the standards of productivity of the world market. The real accumulation of capital was threatening to stop. It is at this moment that ‘fictitious capital’, as Marx called it, took off. The withdrawal of the convertibility of the dollar into gold, in 1971, has eliminated the last safety valve, the last anchoring to real accumulation. Credit is nothing other than an anticipation of hoped future gains. But when the production of value, and thus surplus-value, in the real economy stagnates (which has nothing to do with the stagnation of the production of things – but capitalism revolves around the production of surplus value, and not of products insofar of use-values) there is only finance which allows proprietors of capital to make profits - now impossible to obtain in the ‘real’ economy. The rise of neo-liberalism starting in 1980 was not a dirty manoeuvre from the most avid capitalists, a coup d’Etat engineered with the help of obliging politicians as some of the ‘radical’ left want to believe (which must now make up its mind: either move towards a critique of capitalism, even one that does not call itself neo-liberal anymore, or participates in the management of the emergence of a capitalism which has incorporated a part of the critique which has been leveled towards it’s ‘excesses’) Neo-liberalism was, on the contrary, the only manner possible to prolong the capitalist system a little longer. No-one seriously wanted to challenge its foundations, neither on the Right, nor on the Left.(2) A great number of enterprises and individuals have been able to maintain an illusion of prosperity, thanks to credit for a long time. Now, this crutch has also been snapped. But this return to Keynesianism, evoked a little everywhere, will be altogether impossible: there is not enough ‘real’ money at the disposal of states. For the moment, the ‘decision makers’ have referred a bit more to the MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN by adding another zero behind the fantastic numbers written on the screens and to which nothing corresponds. The loans granted recently in order to save the stock exchanges are ten times superior to the deficits which shook the markets ten years ago – but the real production (let’s call it casually ‘the GDP’) has increased around 20-30%! Economic growth no longer had an autonomous basis but was due to financial bubbles, but when these bubbles burst, there will be no ‘rehabilitation’ from which everything will be able to start again.
Although there won’t be a ‘Black Friday’ like in 1929, a ‘day of judgment’- there are good reasons to think that we are living through the end of a long historical period. The epoch when productive activity and its products do not serve to satisfy needs, but feed the unceasing cycle of work which valorises capital and of capital which employs work. The commodity and work, money and statist regulation, competition and the market: behind the financial crises which have reoccurred during the last twenty years, each time worse, looms the crisis of all categories, which, it is worth recalling, are not part always and everywhere of human existence. These categories have taken hold of human life during the last few centuries, and they will be able to evolve towards something else: for better or even worse still. But it is not the kind of decision that one adopts at a G8.
November 2008
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
(1) The mainstream leftist discourse ranges from the left liberal press to the ‘marxist’ critics: “Public funding of the arts is not like putting money into toxic banks - it is value for money.” - Art World braced for ‘hurricane’ as recession hits‘, The Guardian, 14 March 2009. “Climate jobs would mostly be work for manual workers. They would be real investments in the future - not throwing money at the banks” Jonathan Neale, Socialist Worker, 9 March 2009.
(2) The orthodox marxisms of all varieties continue to avoid engagement with the problem that ‘failure to expand surplus value would indeed result in severe economic difficulties with great social costs.’ Time, Labor and Social Domination (p313) by Moishe Postone (1993, Cambridge University Press.)
This article was translated from the French by M Prigent and N Holliman, London 13 March 2009, ahead of the London G20 summit. It was distributed at The Idea of Communism conference, Birkbeck College, London, on 14 March 2009.
