An American Landscape hewn and enclosed, with Native Americans canoeing (1793) by Patrick Campbell
“In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.” - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
The course of this development of Marx’s critique of political economy into a device of historiographic practice and interpretation has uncovered a concern I wish to more fully develop across a diverse range of literature, that of this intercourse between the social aspects of capital’s historical determinations and the materiality of social life in the social production process. This comes from the engagements with the subsumption of labor to capital as developing through not only social organization, but the interrelation between this organization of social form as an active relation between those conditions organic to the sociality of the species-being of humans and the teleological quality of their labor, and the inorganic conditions of their existence in nature transformed to suit social ends. The engagement with materiality is not a regression into a fetishized relationship to nature if we understand, as Hegel tells us, that matter is “not an existent thing” but “being in the form of a universal, or in the form of a Notion.”1 For Hegel, the initial and “instinctive” manner with which Reason makes this distinction occurs through the movement in which “just by testing the law on all sensuous being, it gets rid of the merely sensuous being of the law, and when it interprets the moments of the law as ‘matters’, their essential nature has become for Reason a universal, and as such is expressed as a non-sensuous thing of sense, as an incorporeal and yet objective being.”2
The character of universality as we understand it in the social totality of capital, as we have developed it through the specific form and practical activity of the labor process, may then inform our understanding of this relationship of social form to the varied appearances of capital’s social objectivity as in turn material transformation. Interpreting this dynamic on such terms as both condition and consequence of capitalism’s historical development not only may yield us an ecological critique, as may be initially apparent, but inform how we understand such specificities in the historical actuality of capital’s class antagonism as a process of global social and historical transformation of social life and that terrain which it inhabits. The interest in this as a historiographic practice is not merely a matter of establishing a Marxist critique of specific works, but an ongoing research program for the particular dynamics by which capital’s particular appearances of social necessity take on the character of material necessity independent of historical movement, as well as the passage of the logical derivation of capitalism’s ultimate transience as a mode of production from social to material necessity.
In the preceding posts, we have attempted a reading of specific sections of the first volume of Marx’s Capital in order to construct a foundation for understanding the determinations of his concept of the organic composition of capital. Through this, we have come to understand capital’s organic composition on the level of both its internally constituent determinations in the form of the capitalist production process as a unity of the labor and valorization processes, and the determinate movement of the factors of the labor process in their subsumption as functions of the valorization process, in the forms of constant and variable capital. With the understanding of these elements of the labor process as factors in the capitalist production process, through the form in which they operate as instruments of valorization, a dynamic of social and historical constitution has been revealed as essential to the logic of their abstract derivation, wherein the determinations of value as the social form of mediation through which the relations of production of capital are expressed and realized in turn marks the aspects of the historical process in which they are concretely produced and reproduced.
The logical procedure of abstraction conducted by Marx in Capital is not merely that of distilling an abstraction ready-to-hand, but a method of thought in which the simple categories of political economy serve as the basis for the concrete totality of their determination that is conditioned and articulated through their unity in the form and process of capitalist production. Where the initial exposition of value is presented in the first chapters, the derivation of its forms of appearance in commodity, money, and abstract labor as the determinant aspect of a general labor that subsumes its concrete dimension as a moment of the life process of value, circulation’s movements yield the specific forms of abstract labor’s appropriation of labor-time as the commodity labor-power and value’s movement beyond its simple representation as surplus-value. Labor-power’s existence as commodity is the parcelization of abstract social labor adequate to the temporal constitution of value relations in which socially necessary labor-time exists as the law-like mediation of socially-fragmented sites of commodity production, wherein the differentiation of labor-power’s exchange-value and that value produced by its valorization of capital in the metabolism with past labor that constitutes the capitalist form of the production process conceals within it a formally-determined already-surplus labor-time that generates the full social movement of total social capital. This is the movement of the logic of separation wherein the capitalist form of the production process is continually reproduced through a social reproduction where value constitutes a form of social wealth that acquires its existence through a mediation conditioned by dispossessed and self-dispossessing labor.
This is at the core of our present focus, and is confirmed as much by Marx’s answer to the problems of capital’s simple reproduction through the general law of capitalist accumulation, where the form of capital’s organic composition as a specific correspondence between capital’s value and technical compositions produces a determinate direction of capitalist reproduction, essentially identical to the multiplication of the proletariat, through the successive formation of conditions social and material that allow for the production and reproduction of the commodity labor-power. Summarized here, the movement of the organic composition of capital, as this coherence in the process of accumulation, has its most direct appearance in a tendency to concentrate ever greater powers of social production and labor’s productivity in the elements of constant capital while producing an ever greater quantity of potential labor-power in the forms of a relative surplus population that can function at various moments as an industrial reserve army of labor. The flexibility of the commodity form of labor-power as the instrumentalization of abstract social labor in capitalist production is revealed to be a historical form of the process of social production in which human labor appears in a social form through which its activity as objectification is expressed as a self-alienating reproduction of its conditions for life. This constitutes the antagonistic form of appearance of the capitalist mode of production, where the coexistence of ever-amassing social wealth and ever-expanding social misery are the essential movements of its process of accumulation-as-reproduction, the social actuality of surplus-value in the conditions of life that guarantee the command of surplus labor through its social substantialization.
The arrival of this moment in Marx’s analysis is the culmination of a movement in which the simple categories of political economy at the outset are successively shown to be themselves not the final reducibility of the capitalist mode of production, but elements of its social and historical process of formation that only become fully illuminated through the development of their concrete movement. The starting-point of simple categories characterizes Marx’s particular approach to the critique of political economy, where the totality of movement is not itself the basis for abstract determination, but rather the simple category is the abstract determination from which the relations of totality as a concrete actuality are to be reproduced in and through thought. On this concern of method and the movement of this notion of thought, Marx famously addresses it in the Grundrisse in this manner:
“It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations. The former is the path historically followed by economics at the time of its origins. The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.”3
In this method of critical engagement, Marx demonstrates how orientation towards universality as it is given in capitalist social life specifically operates in political economy, and the point of divergence that distinguishes his critique. Where political economy assumes the preservation of capital’s totality at the outset and thus seeks to distinguish its specific forms, Marx’s critical engagement with these forms as simple categories and abstract determinations that are themselves constitutive of the totality of capital is a truer representation of totality as concrete, where it is not an objectivity already made only to be fulfilled arbitrarily by its constituent parts, but an objectivity always in the process of its constitution, the abstract determination of its simple categories a means of constructing this social movement in actuality. The laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production, then, cannot be tautologically derived by assuming them at the outset, but through their social and historical processes of development that concretize its simple abstractions in their constitution of the totality, itself the starting-point of observation, but not of critique.
Jairus Banaji characterizes this method, in which “abstractions determinate to capitalism as a mode of production” are in turn “reconstituted as ‘concrete categories’, as historically determinate social forms”, as that “process of ‘true abstraction’” that is itself “simultaneously a process of ‘concretisation’, of the definition of specific historical laws of motion.”4 This systematic development of Marx’s, of which the critique of political economy begins not with the assumption of totality’s preserved objectivity, but of its objectivity as constitutive of its constituent categories, and thus the product of concrete social and historical determinations of practical activity, is the procedure of de-fetishization through the engagement of capital’s being as historical Becoming. It is here where Marx’s crucial arrival of his analysis of the “primitive” or original accumulation of capital can be understood in its place in the structure of Capital. The derivation of capital’s social totality in the determinate direction of capital’s organic composition in and through the process of accumulation leads to the more directly historical formation through which the concrete development of the capitalist mode of production can be apprehended, through an adequately concrete study of its exemplary historical achievement.
In fact, this concern with the social and historical development of abstract and simple categories as their concretization is never absent from Capital, where the many chapters on the production of surplus-value, in its absolute and relative forms, move from the abstract movements of forms of value in the process of production to their historical actuality in the successive methods of labor-power’s exploitation. The annihilation of space by time is a concrete expression of capital’s mode of developing the productivity of social labor in the form of a reproduction of material life antagonistic to the living labor that animates it. It is through the exposition of surplus-value’s forms, the struggle over the working day, the intensive expansion of time in forms of labor’s cooperation, division, and mechanization, that reveal the internally-constitutive motor of capitalist development that is class struggle. In the exposition of primitive accumulation, the means by which class struggle comes to form this social movement is developed in its originary forms in the English case, following the movement from the historical enclosures of feudal relations of communal property amongst the peasantry and its practices in relation to lordly appropriation, to the development of capitalist agriculture, the hiring of wage-labor, and the origins of the industrial capitalist and urban industrialization. However, it is important to keep in mind the limits and openness that Marx places on this exposition at the outset:
“In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in the course of its formation; but this is true above all for those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form.”5
From the beginning, there cannot be said to be any residue of a methodological nationalism in Marx’s conception, nor can it be said to ascribe the origins of capitalism to any specific point in time. Rather, it is here the case that England forms, for Marx, the basis for a classical study that is in continuity with the cases of capital’s social and historical development in the previous chapters. The engagement with capital’s historical origins is then, even on the terms of this work, still an open discussion, and one in which Marx’s own order of presentation throughout the text promotes a method of historicization where the present course of development serves as the basis for a reflexive engagement with history, where the full development of capital’s social movement in the general law of capitalist accumulation becomes the critical precondition for history as the mediation between past and present in an opening of Becoming to the future. The present is open to contingency through the recognition of that past which comes to constitute that very present’s determinations of necessity.
The question then becomes one of the exact nature of expanding upon the deployment of Marx’s Capital as a methodological guide for historiographic interpretation, critique, and synthesis. For this research program’s going forward, our interest lies in the knowledge of these movements of Marx’s critique of political economy, its method, and the procedure in the ongoing critique of history that proceeds from this work and through its successive re-engagements. The classical form of so-called primitive accumulation in the violent dispossession of the English peasantry introduces a latent conception of the explicitly political forms left rather implicit in Marx’s previous unfolding of capital’s moments in and through the form of labor’s exploitation in the capitalist mode of production as the movement of class struggle. For us, this aspect of the social and historical origins of the capitalist mode of production, in the modes of social practice which constitute the antagonistic character of social production as capital’s reproduction-as-accumulation, forms the basis for understanding the formation of the political forms of class struggle, and in turn the concrete life of capital’s abstract categories and the originary necessities born through their socialization. The life of these social and historical forms is not as the automatic developments fulfilling a pre-ordained objectivity, but the position of said objectivity’s present rational reconstruction that affords us the re-engagement with history’s given contingent necessities, the exigencies of capitalist development and its concrete totality as moments of the class antagonism that forges and develops itself within it. In his own summarization of the dynamics of this originary period of direct expropriation, addressing European history in general, Marx gives to us the matter of this historical relationship of historical and social determination in the modes of political and economic practice as such:
“Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour. It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus population keeps the law of the supply and demand of labour, and therefore wages, within narrow limits which correspond to capital's valorization requirements. The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the 'natural laws of production', i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them. It is otherwise during the historical genesis of capitalist production. The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it to 'regulate' wages, i.e. to force them into the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation.”6
The ascension of the bourgeoisie as a class capable of controlling the social production process is achieved through its coherence in and instrumentalization of the state, a preservation of the political apparatus of class domination that is transformed through this very reconstitution-as-seizure of the institution’s movements. This apparent divergence of the political and the economic here, at the same time as the political lines of conflict characterizing the original accumulation’s forcible advance of bourgeois production infuses this partisan social necessity with economic function and organization, characterizes the transformed appearance of class domination’s administration of exploitation. The cultivation of a working class that will sell their labor-power as a commodity, the social discipline of the form of wage-labor, is a necessary development, quite distinct from the mere appearance of a form of wage-labor in this or that instance. The divergence of the political and the economic, however, is merely an appearance of a unity still operative, a fetish form of social life in its constitution by class struggle given by a reproduction of material life through living labor’s self-alienating objectification.
This unity of the political and the economic in the process of the capitalist mode of production’s historical formation can be observed in Marx’s formulation of the determination not in the mere prevalence of possible wage-laborers, a class which “arose in the latter half of the fourteenth century,” forming “then and in the following century only a very small part of the population, well protected in its position by the independent peasant proprietors in the countryside and by the organization of guilds in the towns”, but in the exigency of class conflict promoted by this social presence that constituted the originating dynamic of capital and labor’s antagonism as the foundation for social production.7 As Marx tells us, this imperative from within the strain of feudal remnants proceeds from a point from which the initial emergence of commodity economy conditioned a “subordination of labour to capital [that] was only formal, i.e. the mode of production itself had as yet no specifically capitalist character. The variable element in capital preponderated greatly over the constant element. The demand for wage-labour therefore grew rapidly with every accumulation of capital, while the supply only followed slowly behind. A large part of the national product which was later transformed into a fund for the accumulation of capital still entered at that time into the consumption-fund of the workers.”8 Yet as we have observed through the development of capitalist accumulation’s general law, this situation constituted a direct opposition to the stability of pre-capitalist forms of labor’s exploitation, the character of this period as one of “transition” a reflexive engagement that allows us to see the development of the transformation of objective conditions of the laboring classes into capital against their appropriation as the originary imperative of the organic composition of capital’s determinate direction in the process of accumulation.
There is then an opening here to more fully elaborate on this openness of periodization that Marx offers, and to develop it critically as rather a dynamic of historical struggle yet unelaborated upon as it appears here. The form of the State, its role in the origins of the capitalist mode of production, and its construction in the modern form as a moment of capital’s constitutive class struggle, remain contested grounds for Marxist critique. Far be it from our intention to settle the matter here, the present objective and direction of our critique is more in line with a critical rediscovery of that critique of Marx developed by Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation of Capital, where “the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to the present day.”9 The form of the State as the organization of such deployment, the relative success of national capital formation in the transitional epochs in inter-state competition, and the composition of the State revealed through both its internally-constitutive social agents reveal a transformation of the social-political form of class domination through its occupation as the vehicle of the transformation of capitalist social relations of exploitation. The transformation of the modern State then also reveals itself as a social-relational imperative operative through global intercourses of trade and conflict, where the State form’s articulation in the national capital complex articulates the expansion of its powers through the hierarchical impositions of activity in the active differentiation of home market and colonial expansion, as not mere accompaniment to capitalist development but internally-determinant moment of its historical actuality.
The conjuncture of Luxemburg’s writing of this text, its publication in 1913, can place this concern in the context of a developed capitalism still relatively confined to industrial countries, expanding globally through an ongoing subsumption of labor in colonial peripheries, thus the frequent evolution of her critique from the engagement with the interaction between capitalist formations and “non-capitalist social units.”10 The full elaboration of the dynamics of so-called primitive accumulation as themselves constitutive of the ongoing process of capital accumulation accomplishes an advancement of Marx’s critique, and more explicitly unites the historical material that concludes Capital with the concrete determinations of capital’s social totality with the successive reproduction of its formal coherences as moments of class struggle’s crystallizations, moving in, through, and out of its maelstrom.
For Luxemburg, the practices of early 20th century modern colonial policy were in continuity with the forcible dispossession evidenced in the European histories of enclosure, declaring that the central importance of colonialism to the “transformation of means of production and labour power into capital” reveals as an “illusion” the “hope that capitalism will ever be content with the means of production which it can acquire by way of commodity exchange.” The acquisition and control of “productive forces”, to Luxemburg the most important being “the land, its hidden mineral treasure, and its meadows, woods and water”, demonstrates a dynamic of the accumulation process in which capital does not wait on “the process of slow internal disintegration” where the “means of production could be alienated by trading in consequence of this process”, but actively engages in dispossession by force in order to secure the transformation into capital through the direct practical construction of these conditions that are utterly necessary for the production of labor-power.11 This relation to the conditions of “natural economy” as they are encountered by capital as conditions of its development yields the result that:
“The method of violence, then, is the immediate consequence of the clash between capitalism and the organisations of a natural economy which would restrict accumulation. Their means of production and their labour power no less than their demand for surplus products is necessary to capitalism. Yet the latter is fully determined to undermine their independence as social units, in order to gain possession of their means of production and labour power and to convert them into commodity buyers. This method is the most profitable and gets the quickest results, and so it is also the most expedient for capital. In fact, it is invariably accompanied by a growing militarism whose importance for accumulation will be demonstrated below in another connection. British policy in India and French policy in Algeria are the classical examples of the application of these methods by capitalism.”12
The specificity of Luxemburg’s own critique, however, and the focus on the capitalist intercourse with “non-capitalist” forms, issues a challenge of the anachronistic designations of dynamics to which she draws attention, but need not be cause for their wholesale rejection. Accumulation is indeed “more than an internal relationship between the branches of capitalist economy”, yet it need not be “primarily a relationship between capital and a non-capitalist environment”.13 Marx’s own development of the constitutive movements that act as levers to the accumulation process, concentration and centralization, would refute this. Even so, the question then requires us to account for the possibility of capital accumulation in a fully developed global capitalism, as is the modern case, and its persistence of the uneven exploitation and development preserving a transformed iteration of colonial historical continuity. The challenge often posed by this is frequently realized in the attempts to either develop or resist the integration of the required abstraction of Marx’s critique with the internally-constitutive dimensions of capital’s global development in racial and geographic hierarchies of differential states of domination and rates of exploitation.
From this we can extract and discern another dynamic of social and historical determination from which our critique can elaborate upon as a challenge issued by Luxemburg’s clear articulation of the role of force and the ever-present relation of direct subordination and conquest as the practical activity of capital’s self-positing presupposition. There is both implicit here a geographic origination and organization of capitalism, of which the relation of development to racial and colonial modes of expropriation and subjugation are internally-constitutive of capital’s process of accumulation as historical actuality. This is part and parcel of the expansion internal to capital’s logic of separation as its law of expanded reproduction that is in turn actualized for Marx in the historical process by which a working class is integrated economically by both direct “extra-economic” force and the “silent compulsion of economic relations”. This question of the primacy of force or impersonal compulsion is less of an absolute answer as to one or the other, but a matter of relative historico-geographic intensity corresponding to the social and historically concrete engagements of the active construction of the commodity form of social production and its exploitation of labor-power, always in movement, but through initial contingencies of history through which capital developed the immediate appearances of its mediated necessities. The impersonal constraints of capital’s existence has its attendant actualization in the personifications of its forms, both inheritors and perpetuations of its development in generations of struggles across space and in time. Silent compulsion is a product of the conditioning afforded by forceful instantiation.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) trans. Miller, p. 154
Ibid.
Marx, Grundrisse (1973) pp. 100-1, emphasis mine.
Jairus Banaji, Theory As History (2010) p. 59
Marx, Capital Volume I (1976) p. 876
Ibid, pp. 899-900
Ibid, p. 900
Ibid.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1951) p. 371
Ibid, p. 370
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 371
Ibid, p. 417