The Roaring Silence

A Critical Commentary on Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion

Eternal Resemblance 1 (2017) by Omar Ba

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“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 mute 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 limit 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.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1¹

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In Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, an account of his first trip to Africa in 1953 to witness the Ghanaian independence movement in the Gold Coast, Richard Wright articulates a curious contradiction amongst his many observations of this setting of momentous historical import. The cultural admixture of a capitalism that “here reaches surrealistic dimensions” and “tribal customs” that possess a “seeming preference for direct cash dealing,” the passion amongst the people of Accra’s marketplaces for “visible, tactile methods of exchange of goods,” produces a flurry of activity that “reveals that the whole process of buying and selling is anarchy calling for the sharpest wits imaginable.” In his speculation upon the origins of this “petty financial game of wits,” Wright briefly considers that this “innocent chicanery” could likely have been gleaned during the five centuries of trade with Europeans, the inculcation of such practices from the “pretty sharp and unsavory methods of trading cheap trinkets for gold dust, a transaction which allowed for a wide leeway of bargaining” amidst the backdrop of the so-called Triangular Trade in enslaved Africans and colonial plunder. Here, however, he decides to “leave this question of accounting for the ‘economic laws’ [...] of the Gold Coast to other and more astute minds,” for, he says, “I don’t believe that there’s any such thing!”² 

Shortly thereafter we find Wright observing stevedores unloading freighters along the seashore of Accra, a scene where the coordinated activity of this “army of men, naked save for ragged strips of cloth about their hips,” moved “parts of machines, wooden crates, sacks of cement” with their heads put together, some four at a time, as “scores of canoes, each holding twelve men who paddled like furies against the turbulent surf” moved towards the freight vessels to eventually follow suit. These “wet and glistening black robots,” moving from the harbor to the shore at breakneck speed, did so because the harbor was too shallow to allow for ships to dock, but the port of Takoradi, some 170 miles away, would have meant a cut into profits of shipping companies that would have had to factor in the costs of sending their freight by rail to Accra from the less labor-intensive harbor. Talking to a young black clerk dressed in Western clothes, Wright learns that these men make, at best, 7 shillings a day each, and each boat earns 12 shillings a trip to a freight vessel.³ Clearly struck by the scene he had just witnessed, this productive force of social relations in motion at such scale, Wright’s dissonant reflection is provocative:

I’d seen men tending machines in frantic haste, but I’d never seen men working like machines. . . . I’d seen River Rouge and it was nothing compared to this hot, wild, and hellish labor. It was not only against exploitation that I was reacting so violently; it frightened me because the men did not seem human, because they had voluntarily demeaned themselves to be spokes in a wheel. I walked toward the exit, then paused and stared again at the fantastic scene, seeing it but not believing it. I felt no hate for the shipowners who had contrived that this should be; there was something here amiss deeper than cheating or profit. . . . My reactions were elementary; the ships could have remained at anchor until they rotted, I wouldn’t have cared. There are circumstances in which human life is no longer human life, and I’d seen one of them. And for this particular barbarity I had no answer, no scheme; I would not have gone on strike if I had worked there; I simply would not have worked there in the first place, no matter what. . . .⁴

This moment of Wright’s contemplation of radical refusal is in the face of a scene that appears to transcend mere exploitation, in which this reduction of human life to an automaton injects into the image of the living body the truth of capital as dead labor’s animation. It is not only dead labor set in motion by living labor, but the domination of this living labor by the imperatives set by past trajectories of accumulation; a nightmare that has obtained social objectivity, life that can only fulfill itself through such toil. The violation of their humanity, to Wright, is not solely in the activity itself, but the apparent consciousness of the subjects of that activity; that this appears voluntary, that they might not need to be directly forced to be here every day, to risk life and limb in order to save a shipowner some costs of enterprise. Where do we find ourselves in this radical antinomy of the alien power that Wright witnesses taking hold of the stevedores and the consciousness of its rejection that he expresses to himself?

 Søren Mau’s new book, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, takes up the challenge of directly theorizing the kind of phenomenon that Wright described on the shores of the Gold Coast, a kind of movement that occurs everywhere, every day. That is, it is an attempt to theorize a form of power that has sustained capitalist expansion and entrenchment amidst crisis and unrest, one that “replaces” violence, and is not “immediately visible or audible as such, but just as brutal, unremitting, and ruthless as violence; an impersonal, abstract, and anonymous form of power immediately embedded in the economic processes themselves rather than tacked onto them in an external manner – mute compulsion, or [...] economic power.”⁵ Mau structures this intervention as one which aims to address the failings of previous assumptions about the nature of power, that it comes in “two fundamental and irreducible forms: violence and ideology.” This violence/ideology couplet, borrowed from Nicos Poulantzas, is a duality that maintains a separation between these tasks in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. However, Mau wishes to show us that “there is more to the power of capital than that. Violence, as well as ideology, are forms of power that directly address the subject, either by immediately forcing bodies to do certain things or by shaping the way in which these bodies think. Economic power, on the other hand, addresses the subject only indirectly, by acting on its environment. Whereas violence, as a form of power, is rooted in the ability to inflict pain and death, and ideology in the ability to shape how people think, economic power is rooted in the ability to reconfigure the material conditions of social reproduction.”⁶

To this end, Mau establishes as the basis of his analytical presentation a concern with what Marx refers to as the “‘core structure’ of the ‘ideal average’ of the capitalist mode of production – that is, the logics, structures, and dynamics that constitute the essence of capitalism, across its historical and geographic variations.” Central to this is an intervention in “economistic” conceptions of the economy as “an ontologically separate sphere of society governed by its own distinctive ‘economic’ logic or rationality.” The aim of this de-reification of the “economic” is to reveal that Marx’s critique of political economy is, through and through, an unraveling of the “social relations hidden in economic categories,” that these “social relations are relations of domination” and that “the characteristic thing about the power of capital is precisely that it has an ability to exercise itself through economic processes,” making it possible to “view the capitalist economy as a system of power.”⁷ 

In order to show “how capital manages to hold on to its status as the social logic everyone has to obey in order to live,” Mau structures the book according to what Marx calls “the method of rising from the abstract to concrete,” which Mau understands to mean “a gradual increase in conceptual complexity as a result of more and more concepts and the specification of their interrelations; by being situated within a more and more elaborate theoretical structure, the methodological abstraction of the earlier stages of the theoretical progression is gradually sublated.” In this approach to method, Mau clarifies that while “it is possible to analytically isolate and identify the core structures that make capitalist societies capitalist,” this “does not imply the claim that there exists such a thing as a logic of capital which operates independently of its particular social context.” As Mau tells us, “capitalism in its ideal average is a theoretical abstraction,” a concession not to any unreality of capitalism, but a clarification of the process of abstraction in thought. This approach is promised to allow us to grasp the theory offered here, of “how the power of capital is operative even when ideological and coercive domination is absent.”⁸ These methodological statements, found in the introduction of the text, will be crucial in our eventual assessment here of the book’s overall argument, and an intervention to begin within the situation of this intervention. Namely, the ongoing crisis of the problematic antinomies of capital’s formal logic and political history, a reconciliation whose mediation perpetually haunts the rafters above the dialogue between theoretical critique and revolutionary praxis on history’s stage.

Mute Compulsion consists of an elegant presentation in three parts, Conditions, Relations, and Dynamics, which here will be briefly summarized for the sake of adequately reproducing Mau’s argument. In the first part, Conditions, the basis for a social ontology of economic power and its elements in and constitutive of a dialectical metabolism of human beings in their social and natural life is constructed. This starts with conceptualizations of “power” and “capital,” taking previous iterations of Marxism to task for reducing “Marx’s analysis of power in capitalism to a question of the existence of a social elite with the ability to dominate workers in the workplace and influence the actions of the state, making no attempts to engage with Marx’s analysis of how class structure is connected with the underlying logic of capital.” For Mau, this ignores “one of the most crucial aspects of Marx’s analysis, namely that the power of capital includes mechanisms of domination which transcend class.”⁹ The question of power is one of the presupposition of a human agency, its directions and aims, and the critical survey of Foucault’s analysis of power relations and earlier Marxist engagements with capital’s power, namely capital’s fetishized appearance as an automatic subject, leads to Mau’s conclusion that the question of subjectivity in Marx is one of the sublation of Hegel’s conception of self-relating negativity, where “Marx extracts its essential core and excavates it from its idealist shell by reconceptualising it as a social, material, and productive practice.”¹⁰ Capital’s being as self-valorising value in motion means that “capital can never free itself from the subjective praxis that undergirds it.”¹¹ Yet capital’s abstraction arises as an emergent property of social relations in practice, and the question of its power becomes “not only a relation between social actors; it can also be a relation between actors on the one hand and an emergent property of social relations on the other,” and while these emergent properties are purely social, “they cannot be grasped as relations among social actors, even though the latter are necessary conditions of their existence. The power of capital can thus be defined as capital’s capacity to impose its logic on social life,” as “the ‘power to’ of capital is always a ‘power over.’”¹² 

The wide and studied engagement with prior Marxist theories of power critically dissects the ways in which the violence/ideology couplet fails, according to Mau, to address the way in which mute compulsion operates as an expression of capital’s economic power, and thus necessitates a social ontology of economic power. While finding it important and necessary, Mau states that the contemporary and historical breaks with orthodox historical materialism encounter an inadequacy in “simply [insisting] that all the categories of the critique of political economy are only valid in relation to the capitalist mode of production,” that “there is no way out” from the question of social ontology, a question neglected by value-form theorists.¹³ Mau finds in Marx a register of historical engagement in which “difference and identity presuppose each other,” in which “the emphasis on the specificity of capitalism implies the identification of the difference between capitalist and non-capitalist societies, and this, in turn, implies the identification of elements common to capitalist and non-capitalist societies.”¹⁴ To bridge this historical scission, the debate on Marx’s conception of the human being is taken up in a surprising, yet satisfying way. Althusser’s notion of the “epistemological break” in Marx with the “romantic humanism” of the 1844 Manuscripts is upheld, but not as the defense of an anti-humanist science in Marx (as historically unintelligible as that would be), but as a break that calls “for the development of an improved concept of the ‘essence’ of the human being,”¹⁵ that Mau locates in the notion of the human being’s “corporeal organization.” This corporeal organization of the human is derived from Marx and Engels’ arguments on human species-being and life-activity in The German Ideology, where they say that

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the corporeal organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature . . . Humans can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their corporeal organization.¹⁶

Thus, as Mau says, Marx and Engels “now point to production as the specific trait of the human being. Humans produce rather than merely consume their means of subsistence.” The ensuing sets of corporeal abilities and corporeal constraints that emerge lead Mau to the most crucial aspect of this specifically human metabolism, “the use of extra-somatic tools.”¹⁷ This development on Marx’s adoption of Benjamin Franklin’s definition of man as a “tool-making animal”¹⁸ is extended to explain how “tools are an integral part of the human body,” a “prolongation” of the body, that “are at the same time a part of the body – an organ – and separated from it.”¹⁹ This constitutive separation of the specifically human metabolism is the presupposition of the social nature of human production, where “already at the level of their ‘corporeal organization,’ human individuals are caught up in a web of social relations mediating their access to the conditions of their reproduction.”²⁰ This is “an immense space of possibility founded on a necessity,” where no one form of the social organization of production is inherent to human social life, but their determinations are instead subject to the “translation of this possibility into actuality – the processes that decide on the specific social relations under which people live – [and this] is what we call politics.”²¹ Thus relations of production “are nothing but the relations through which people reproduce their lives [...] an immediate part of daily life” where these relations “exert a very powerful influence on other aspects of social life by virtue of their absolutely fundamental role in the reproduction of the very existence of social life.” And it is here, in the corporeal organization of human social production and the possibility of economic power as the relational restructuring of the material conditions of social reproduction that “the fateful capacity of human beings to produce more than what is necessary for their own survival,” i.e. the ontological fact of surplus labor, takes shape as the possibility of metabolic domination, as “power can weave itself into the very fabric of the human metabolism.”²² 

The foundation in social ontology for the possibility of economic power and relations of domination of part one is the basis for part two’s analysis of the constitutive relations of capital’s particular form of economic power. Here, what is exciting in the possibilities opened by the openness of the social ontology’s logic to the historical development of the capitalist mode of production begins to give way to self-imposed limits of analysis, and, at worst, equivocation. As Mau states, while capital has existed in various forms for centuries in the form of the exchange of goods with the aim of making a profit (the work of Jairus Banaji is particularly sophisticated in developing this problematic), the capitalist mode of production is marked as novel for the “social significance” of capital in its constitution, as “only in this peculiar mode of production is the accumulation of abstract wealth the basis of social reproduction.” This is taken up by Mau to illustrate how the capitalist mode of production constructs a form of “transcendental class domination,” as a form of distinction between pre-capitalist forms of personal dependence and class domination and the mute compulsion of capital’s economic power, in which the logic of valorisation injects itself into the metabolism of human social reproduction is what acts upon and takes up the presupposition of class domination. Taking up Robert Brenner’s distinction of the vertical relations between immediate producers and exploiters and the horizontal relations among producers themselves and exploiters themselves, and Brenner’s conception of capitalism’s specificity in “market dependence,” Mau focuses on the conditions under which labor power “continues to be available on the market and not the conditions under which it originally became available.”²³ 

Thus an initial problem emerges as capitalism’s historical development is taken as a given assumption from one (contentious) element of the transition debates. This, however, is not itself a jeopardisation of Mau’s analysis, as the conception of class domination proves fruitful to the insight that “the relation of exploitation is premised on a broader class domination rooted not in the extraction of surplus labour but in the relation to the means of production,” and class domination is defined as “the relation between those who control the conditions of social reproduction and those who are excluded from the direct access to the conditions of social reproduction.” This notion of “class” as “the relation of a group of people to the conditions of social reproduction” is an attempt to articulate a “shared relation” that “allows us to broaden our notion of class struggle and see how struggles across the entire social field can be a part of the same political project: wrenching the conditions of life from the grip of capital.”²⁴ The porous fragility of the human being’s metabolism in production’s actualization through externalization is also the means by which the proletarian may become defined by its exclusion from the conditions of social reproduction, and “the worker exists as a mere possibility,” a “conjunction of potentiality and actuality” through which capital inserts itself as the social mediation as such.²⁵ The proletarian enters the world already constituted as “not merely a nothing,” but as a “less than nothing,” and its conditions and commitments to surplus labor encounter the imperative of surplus valorisation as a presupposed “transcendental debt,” a configuration of temporality such that the power of capital reveals itself as “based upon a temporal displacement in which the past appropriates the future in order to subjugate and neutralise the present.”²⁶ Thus the impersonal class domination takes on a transcendental character, for this is a form of community based on the negative self-relation of the “amputated proletarian body” where proletarians are separated from their conditions of existence in order to be reconnected to them by the very same relations that conducted the amputation, now entangled in the logic of valorisation.

The radical promises of this notion of the proletarian as a negative universality within the economic power of capital’s transcendental class domination begins to lose ground however, in the immediate betrayal of this expansive notion of class and its struggle that occurs in Mau’s chapter on “Capitalism and Difference.”²⁷ Ultimately, what we begin to see is an equivocation over the distinction between the history of the political contents of struggle, and the formal presentation of an analysis of capital’s logic, in a manner that Mau was earlier far more cavalier about vaunting in the earlier conceptual development. The problem of gender, analyzed through the historical relegation of women to reproductive labor, takes the rout of identifying the non-essentiality of biology to the assignment of gender to a subject, rather than further sublating the category within the notion of class as the relation of a group of people to social reproduction. All we are allowed to conclude from this examination is “that some of the activities required for the reproduction of labour power will most likely remain outside the immediate circuits of capital, and that someone will have to do this work.” The assumption of a prior historical experience of gender oppression means that it is included in the roster of “social forms which do not arise from the logic of capital, even if they are in practice completely entangled with the latter.” It is in this mass that Mau first introduces the jeopardization of his project, as now, instead of attempting to deploy a unifying conceptual apparatus (this being merely a concern of politics), we are asked if we should not rather “question the idea that political strategies can be immediately derived from abstract theory?”²⁸

This line, in a darkly comical irony, is what immediately precedes the section of this chapter titled “Capital and Racism.” Again, rather than any serious engagement with the matter, we encounter another equivocation and resistance to conceptual synthesis. Apparently we are allowed the freedom of thought to think that the “acknowledgment of the deep entanglement of racism and the valorisation of value does not oblige us to locate racism in the core structure of the capitalist mode of production.”²⁹ Of course, an immediate problem is that, if we are indeed “rising from the abstract to the concrete,” we have just experienced quite a dislocation in the continuity of thought as it confronts the concrete outside of the unification of its determinations in the lofty realm of abstraction. The humor of Mau’s shirking from his own theory’s capacity for totalization, one which its core claims at the outset cited above were quite predisposed to, is most apparent as we are told that “the difference between the position which holds that there is a necessary relationship between racism and capitalism and the position which denies this does not necessarily correspond to a difference in anti-racist and anti-capitalist strategy.” Of course, if one were to think there to be no problem in this conception of the form of logical relationships and their content, then I would be forced to agree with Mau that indeed, “we should not take our political prescriptions from a formal analysis of capital.”³⁰ However, one should find it ridiculous that we are not already talking about the identification of political prescriptions by virtue of the exploration of a formal analysis. The explicit denial of this is merely a rejection to pursue such, and one must then ask Mau, why hold back on what you are already thinking about? And further, why not admit that there is reason to be considering these categories within our formal logic of capital? Namely, that we recognize them to be critical axes of contemporary and historical struggles.

As we leave this chapter, the argument concludes with the notion of the production of difference, that “in the end, it all boils down to the fact that antagonisms among proletarians tends to neutralise opposition to the power of capital. By organising the scission of the capitalist totality – such as the split between wage labour and superfluity, or the split between sectors, job types, and wage levels – around social differences, capital fortifies its power: capitalists and governments find it easier to discipline and control proletarians, impose austerity measures, violently crack down on resistance, and so on.”³¹ And so on. What we are seeing here is a classic Marxist line in the face of the opposition of so-called identity politics, that it is all merely a distraction or false consciousness against an intrinsic proletarian unity. Mau’s own claims about logical consistency are here reduced to the elaboration of an effect, absent a connection to his own presuppositions, as a tendency, and one that appears to betray the adherence to the intense subjectivization of capital that he earlier rejects. Differentiation has not actually been located here within the constitutive relations of capitalism. This is not a defense of the essentializations of categories like race and gender, but an admonition to us all that if we continually reproduce this same line on such topics, we are forfeiting any notion of how to address these barriers to political organization within the capacities of proletarian self-activity itself. And it is this, the criteria of the potential subjectivity that lurks within capital’s economic power of mute compulsion at all times, that increasingly disappears over the course of the book’s remaining argument, into the murky abyss of “impersonal domination.”

As we come to the rest of the elaboration of the relations of capital’s economic power in mute compulsion, Brenner’s concept of horizontal relations is imputed into Marx’s analysis of value and competition, as we come to understand that labor is socially validated through the relations of the privately and independently organized production of commodities. We examine the interplay of relations between units and their internal structure, the distinction and interrelation of the two aspects of this movement. It is through this process that “the peculiar unity of social and private labour in capitalism transforms social relations among producers into a quasi-autonomous system of real abstractions imposing themselves on everyone by means of an impersonal and abstract form of domination.”³² Yet, “to ask why labour takes the form of value-producing labour is to see value as a product of historically specific circumstances.”³³ What of these historically specific circumstances? If they are a feature of the formal logic of this presentation, might they not be a particularly essential content to this universal aspect of value’s social form? The law of value may impose itself on everyone, and Mau may concede that it does so “differently,” but is not the manner in which class and subjective positions of proletarian life inhabit and constitute this social form vital to the political coordinates of its economic power? 

Mau seeks to bridge this chasm by another imputation of Brenner into Marx, arguing that what “Marx’s dialectical analysis reveals, however, is that a certain class structure was, in fact, a necessary presupposition from the very beginning.”³⁴ For Marx, the engagement with political economy’s mythic original sin story of so-called primitive accumulation only takes up England as “the classic form.” For it is the case that “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.”³⁵ Brenner’s argument³⁶ in the transition debates is one of a pervasive methodological nationalism, a “No True Scotsman” of capitalism, where the English variety and its national construction of a home market and modern capitalist polity is taken as the ideal average. Here, Marx is clear that it is not solely the case, and that it is not the exclusive property of any one historical epoch. In fact, the temporality of primitive accumulation is not the linear pre-history that Brenner assumes, but a pre-history that is successively reconstituted in the course of capital’s reproduction as the accumulation process, something Rosa Luxemburg articulated in her work The Accumulation of Capital. 

Thus we can readily agree with Mau that “value presupposes class,”³⁷ this is not an issue at all, but it becomes problematic to then argue that “class cannot be reduced to an effect of value relations, nor can value be reduced to a result of class domination,” if the opposite, that the separation of producers from means of production does not presuppose value, is not true.³⁸ What we have here is the confusion of Mau’s own earlier social ontology, namely that the externalized objectification of human metabolism does not contain any distinct telos or direction. We may easily say in the abstract, of course it does not, but we are dealing with a dialectical unity of the abstract and the concrete, and the historical content of this social ontology is a product of the historical consciousness of the advent of the capitalist mode of production and its constitutive social form of human labor in abstract labor. To say that “value presupposes class, but class does not presuppose value” is to make an analytical claim in a historical vacuum. We can entertain it as a notion, but it evaporates when we step outside and engage our life as historical experience.

My engagement with the rest of the book will be by way of an elaboration of this intervention in the problematic separation of the formal logic of capitalism and the content of political history. Mau does something curious in addressing the dialectical progression of categories that Marx undertakes in Capital. He claims that it “is not a linear series in which every category is constructed, rounded off, and closed down before we move on to the next.” In taking up what Endnotes breathlessly refers to as the “bi-directionality of systematic dialectics,” what he then says we are doing is that there is “always a retroactive constitution of meaning at play in the development of categories; we thus have to continually reinterpret earlier categories in the light of subsequent conceptual developments.”³⁹ While Mau does this to relate back to “value” from the position of the conceptual development of “competition,” what he is also describing is the process of rational reconstruction, one that is also at play implicitly in our revisitations of conceptual clarity in relation to the history of its thought, as Mau also does in reference to prior works of Marxist theory. It is competition that brings Mau to the conceptual conclusion that “when capitals compete, they are confronted by their own essence. When workers compete, however, they are confronted with the essence of capital.”⁴⁰ May there not also be an element of this logical process by which workers come to confront their own essence as themselves?

It is the final third of the book, Dynamics, which most reveals the inability of Mau’s theory of capital’s economic power as mute compulsion to overcome the ongoing crisis of revolutionary theory. This crisis may be best characterized as the inability of theory and praxis to converge in a substantive way, most immediately pronounced in the dual movements of theory’s confusion of logic with description and praxis’ absence of yet cohering a dominant alternative political vision to liberalism. On the theoretical side of this revolutionary labor of the negative, we have the persistent confusion of Marxism with sociological investigations of phenomena. This is most pronounced in the uni-directional focus of Mau’s examples of real subsumption and its most pronounced global iterations in the entrenchment and reproduction of capital’s economic power, through nature and ecology, the logistics counterrevolution, and the phenomenon of surplus populations and engagement with crisis theory. Within these accounts and the historicity offered, all subjectivizations within the struggles constituting vanish into a cloud of vague utterances of “the reconfiguration of the material conditions of social reproduction,” and capital retains a subjective historical agency.

The real subsumption of the labor process is indeed that process by which “capital as a social form materialises itself,” as both a “material process transforming raw materials into use values and a process of valorisation creating surplus value for the capitalist.”⁴¹ While Mau may mention that a crucial cause of this is the resistance of workers, the incorporation and emphasis on the dynamics of competition, and the commitment to the impersonal character of domination as a defining feature of capitalist social relations leads to quasi-tautological statements of what capitalism is in the name of illustrating the circularity of its logic, as if this was not an error that Marx detected in the course of capitalism’s reproduction as an accumulation process. As Mau says “the very exercise of this power [of real subsumption] tends to reproduce it, and for that reason, the capitalist production process is not only the production of commodities endowed with surplus value – it is at the same time the production of power.” Yet for the totalizing nature of this claim, and the essential character of production to human social ontology, Mau seeks to limit previous conceptions in Marxist thought that see the permutation of capital’s logic in further examples of daily experience by adding the caveat that capital “has no need to subsume other spheres of society in a similar manner.”⁴² So much for the expansive conception of what constitutes class struggle.

The studies of ecology, logistics, surplus populations and crises are, frankly, unremarkable, and this portion of the book will be nothing new to those that have read Andreas Malm, Endnotes, Aaron Benanav, or Simon Clarke. What we merely receive here is a setting in motion of what has previously been elaborated, but as a regrounding into the ways in which “mute compulsion” is effected, as moments where capital reconfigures the material conditions of social reproduction through the separation of the proletarian from them in order to recombine these elements of labor and means of production according to the logic of self-valorizing value. The emphasis on these moments as mechanisms of impersonal and abstract power turns sociality into a suicidal tumult. The theory of economic power here becomes its own kind of economistic determinism. It is, quite frankly, a tired retreading of the pessimism in the face of neoliberal counterrevolution that we have all endured for decades already. The most radical statement of political possibility that can be mustered here is a conclusion to the objective movement of crises as retrenchments of capital’s economic power that “affects everyone,” where crises are said to be “the best example of the impersonal power of capital: as an outcome of anarchic yet patterned myriads of individual actions, a crisis is the systemic effect par excellence. When a crisis hits, it becomes clear just how much a society in which social reproduction is governed by the valorisation of value is a society which has lost control. No one is in control, and there is no centre from which power radiates; instead, capitalist society is ruled by social relations morphed into real abstractions whose opaque movements we call ‘the economy.’”⁴³

Perhaps it is best to approach this from the incredible characterization of crises as the “anarchic yet patterned myriads of individual actions.” It would completely violate all the presuppositions of class domination, even its transcendental character as Mau calls it, to reduce these phenomena to a monadic interplay of individuals. They are individuals that obtain their social validity through determinate social relations that are reproducing themselves within a definite historical context. The temporality of capital, subject as it is to constraints of nature and spatial configurations, is also acting on a definite historical content. The trajectory of accumulation may have an abstract dynamic, but it is one given shape by the definite concrete unity of many determinations, and its abstraction is derived from the concrete unity in thought of these practical determinations such that it bears the name of a tendency. Crises are lapses in the stable trajectory of accumulation, and one whose acute contours correspond to the pervasive logic of capital’s constitutive class domination. Everyone may be subject to a crisis, but they are subject differently, and can only exploit it differently, according to the determinations of their conditions and relations to the totality of social reproduction. To say that “no one is in control” is meaningless when we can also identify who benefits, as Mau himself does.

The focus on mute compulsion here as an antidote to the failings of previous Marxist theories of violence and ideology does indeed produce some striking novelty. This is very much a work of great conceptual clarity, and an introduction as decent as any. But it is also exemplary of the milieu it is emerging from in its failings. Let us take, as another example, the manner by which Mau takes up the agricultural Green Revolution and Structural Adjustment Programs across the Global South in the post-WWII years. This is all done with absolutely no mention of the wave of decolonial revolutions that took over the old imperialist order. These, in addition to the explicitly communist revolutions of the 20th century, account for one of the greatest waves of global class struggle in the history of the capitalist mode of production, no matter if one wishes to class them as peasant revolutions or not. The development of agricultural technologies, financial mechanisms, and logistics infrastructures that can be categorized as, in Mau’s words, weapons, and the uneven and combined global recomposition of imperialism through neocolonialism would obviously imply that there is an essential content to this political history that a formal logic of capital should be able to address. That we must ascribe these processes to merely a theory of capital’s economic power and disregard the content of political history is to uphold the prior reification of the separate and distinct sphere of the “political” and the “economic” that Mau’s own social ontology tears asunder. These are distinctions we can only retain in thought that does not allow itself to realize that it has already left the mind.

Ultimately, a theory that disavows what it has to say about political content is a theory that cannot admit to itself what it is already doing. Marx’s formal logic of capital was one that at all stages laid bare the dynamics of class struggle constitutive of the capitalist mode of production, and it is in this sense that the “mute compulsion of economic relations” that appears as a novel stage in the pages of his writing on primitive accumulation must then be subject to the revelation of the historical and logical necessity of the “expropriation of the expropriators,” the “negation of the negation” that lies as the implicit counterpart to this incorporation of violence and ideology into the material force of capital’s subsumption of social reproduction. With the “inexorability of a natural process,”⁴⁴ this is the negation of itself that is the necessary actualization of capitalism’s self-relating negativity. But, as Marx knows well, it is not a mechanical process, but one where the historical self-consciousness of the oppressed in the experience of their own struggles comes to inform the strategic sensibilities of that activity that may carry through this determinate negation. Capital is a formal logic that is its own weapon, and can illuminate history to those who are already reconstructing it every day, for it is for them as it was for Joyce’s Stephen, “a nightmare from which they cannot awake.”

And it is with this we can return to the question of the historical trap we are caught in, between the personal relations of dependence of feudalism and the impersonal domination of capitalism’s real abstractions. Is there not a reconciliation of this antinomy that we can speculate upon, as it is also lying in the middle of our problem of the human being’s transhistorical essence in the constitutive separation of corporeal organization and the historical specificity of the domination of this essence by capital? Mau glimpses it at once and shies away. To the notion of the possibility of an interpersonal aspect of these social relations, we are brought back to the line that “the capitalist only holds power as the personification of capital.” Well and good, but as we can see, and as is implicitly accepted by the adoption of Brenner’s historical argument on transition, we have no capitalism without the historical formation of a class of capitalists. We are not able to divorce these two moments, and this inseparability that is defined by the analytical distinction that can be made is resolved in the interpersonal dependency of material life’s social reproduction, already given in Mau’s social ontology of production as always already social production. Interpersonal relations of life are the social substance of historical experience, and it is this from which we abstract that gives form to our logic, just as logic's abstractions form our reconstruction of historical experience into the concrete, from which we rise, and we will continue to rise.

Let us return one last moment to Richard Wright in Accra standing on the shore, watching those stevedores unload freight ships with the regularity and inhuman propensity of machinic tasks. What occurs here is something of what Fredric Jameson identifies in Sartre’s tension of coexistence, a “basic dissymmetry between the personal and the class experience,” where in my own own life it appears there is no “built-in priority of subject to object, and that I am both in succession,” whereas in “history, however, each rising class is initially an object for the dominant one, and learns itself in shame before it arrives at the stage of becoming a subject in turn.” Only through this does the proletariat see itself suffer at the hands of the bourgeoisie, and thus “begin to see the bourgeoisie in its turn, and to furnish the latter with yet a new image of self to live in guilt and fear.”⁴⁵ This ontological justification of the concrete situation of judgment is at work in the interpersonality of our experience of social relations, whether they dominate us as abstractions or not, and we are inexorably drawn into their recognition through our relations with and to others. Wright makes his own judgment, one that ends in perplexity and refusal of the same for himself. And this is an evaluative claim on the character of that history. Wright knows perfectly well why this is happening on the coast of Ghana in the early 1950’s, as do we. We are engaging in interpersonal life with a prior knowledge that is not abstractly given, but a condition of our social life’s mutual intelligibility in interpersonal and interdependent relationships. This recognition occurs as soon as we look outward and aim to reason with what we experience, and situate it within the abstractions that give shape to our life in thought. Through this, a social reproduction of class antagonism bears with it intrinsic moral and ethical prescriptions to political practice; we come to learn history as a plane of contention. I do not know these impersonal abstractions to be an error in my life until they are situated within my life that I live with and owe to others. As Sartre said of his own experience in gravitating towards Marxism, how it was not only the look of the other, but the look of the other upon him:

By its actual presence, a philosophy transforms the structures of Knowledge, stimulates ideas; even when it defines the practical perspectives of an exploited class, it polarises the culture of the ruling classes and changes it. Marx wrote that the ideas of the dominant class are the dominant ideas. He is absolutely right. In 1925, when I was twenty years old, there was no chair of Marxism at the University, and Communist students were very careful not to appeal to Marxism or even to mention it in their examinations; had they done so, they would have failed. The horror of dialectic was such that Hegel himself was unknown to us. Of course, they allowed us to read Marx; they even advised us to read him; one had to know him “in order to refute him.” But without the Hegelian tradition, without Marxist teachers, without any planned program of study, without the instruments of thought, our generation, like the preceding ones and like that which followed, was wholly ignorant of historical materialism. On the other hand, they taught us Aristotelian and mathematical logic in great detail. It was at about this time that I read Capital and German Ideology. I found everything perfectly clear, and I really understood absolutely nothing. To understand is to change, to go beyond oneself. This reading did not change me. By contrast, what did begin to change me was the reality of Marxism, the heavy presence on my horizon of the masses of workers, an enormous, sombre body which lived Marxism, which practiced it, and which at a distance exercised an irresistible attraction on petit bourgeois intellectuals. When we read this philosophy in books, it enjoyed no privilege in our eyes. A priest, who has just written a voluminous and very interesting work on Marx, calmly states in the opening pages: “It is possible to study [his] thought just as securely as one studies that of any other philosopher or any other sociologist.” That was exactly what we believed. So long as this thought appeared to us through written words, we remained “objective.” We said to ourselves: “Here are the conceptions of a German intellectual who lived in London in the middle of the last century.” But when it was presented as a real determination of the Proletariat and as the profound meaning of its acts – for itself and in itself – then Marxism attracted us irresistibly without our knowing it, and it put all our acquired culture out of shape. I repeat, it was not the idea which unsettled us; nor was it the condition of the worker, which we knew abstractly but which we had not experienced. No, it was the two joined together. It was – as we would have said then in our idealist jargon even as we were breaking with idealism – the Proletariat as the incarnation and vehicle of an idea. And I believe that we must here complete Marx's statement: When the rising class becomes conscious of itself, this self-consciousness acts at a distance upon intellectuals and makes the ideas in their heads disintegrate. We rejected the official idealism in the name of “the tragic sense of life.” This Proletariat, far off, invisible, inaccessible, but conscious and acting, furnished the proof – obscurely for most of us – that not all conflicts had been resolved. We had been brought up in bourgeois humanism, and this optimistic humanism was shattered when we vaguely perceived around our town the immense crowd of “sub-men conscious of their subhumanity.”⁴⁶

Theory obtains meaning by enfolding praxis as one of its moments, as does life in the process of self-recognition in the other. The history of revolutionary theory is filled with such inciting moments of consciousness. Wright witnessed his stevedores. Marx saw the German peasants forced out of the lands from which they foraged firewood. Sartre saw the proletariat. Let us turn outward.

1. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin In Association With New Left Review. Pp. 899-900

2. Wright, Richard, and Cornel Ronald West. 2008. Black Power: Three Books from Exile: Black Power, the Color Curtain and White Man, Listen! New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Pp. 143-144

3. Ibid, pp. 153-154

4. Ibid, p. 155

5. Mau, Søren. 2023. Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. Verso Books. Pp. 3-4

6. Ibid, pp. 4-5

7. Ibid, pp. 5-6

8. Ibid, pp. 11-18

9. Ibid, pp. 30-31

10. Ibid, p. 41

11. Ibid, p. 44

12. Ibid, pp. 45-47

13. Ibid, p. 72

14. Ibid, pp. 72-72

15. Ibid, p. 85

16. Quoted in ibid, pp. 93-94

17. Ibid, pp. 94-95

18. Marx (1990) p. 286

19. Mau (2023) pp. 97-99

20. Ibid, p. 100

21. Ibid, p. 108

22. Ibid, pp. 113-115

23. Ibid, pp. 123-129

24. Ibid, p. 129

25. Ibid, p. 134

26. Ibid, pp. 134-135

27. Ibid, pp. 152-173

28. Ibid, pp. 162-166

29. Ibid, p. 167

30. Ibid, p. 167

31. Ibid, p. 171

32. Ibid, p. 185

33. Ibid, p. 179

34. Ibid, p. 202

35. Marx (1990) p. 876

36. Please see my more extensive engagement with Brenner’s work for the citations I am not filling out here in https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/10/the-constitution-of-necessity/

37. Mau (2023) p. 204

38. Ibid, p. 209

39. Ibid, p. 212

40. Ibid, p. 217

41. Ibid, p. 235

42. Ibid, pp. 249-251

43. Ibid, p. 314

44. Marx (1990) p. 929

45. Fredric Jameson. 1971. Marxism & Form. Princeton. Pp. 301-306

46. From “The Search for Method” in the Introduction to Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre1.htm I have my dear friend James Crane to thank for referring me to the works by Sartre and Jameson that I came to use here.