marx and the current

8/2/2019 Marx and the Current

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Marx and the current crisis of capitalismD. T. Cochrane

Last Modified: October 23, 2008

Issue:October 2008

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The latest upheavals in the global financial markets have revived interest in the politicaleconomic analysis of Karl Marx. Sales of Marxs opus Capital - which English media insists

on calling by its untranslated German title,Das Kapital - have reportedlyskyrocketed. The

UK Timespublished a lengthy commentary asking, did he get it right? This turn to Marx

makes sense, as he is the original theorist of capitalist crisis. The actual invocations of Marx

have been, in general, tentative and flippant. For example, Dr. Rowan Williams, the

Archbishop of Canterbury,pays Marx a backhanded complimentwhen he notes that Marx

observed capitalisms capacity for ascribing power to that which is not real and then says that

Marx was right about that, if about little else. Much of the commentary is snide, with itstongue firmly planted in its cheek. Marx is presented as a figure of historical ridicule and

commentators use him as a foil in reassuring people that capitalism is safe and sound.

Brendan ONeill, editor of the British online journalspiked, has aproblem with how Marx is

being used. However, his complaint is not that an important figure of intellectual history is

treated so shabbily. He complains that most commentary invoking Marx relates the currentcrisis to the inevitable collapse of capitalism that Marx foresaw. ONeill writes that it is a

fallacy that Marx considered the collapse of capitalism to be a necessary outcome ofprogress. He claims this belief is a fallacy based on a misreading of the first part of the

Communist Manifesto. To interpret Marx this way is alleged to be an attempt to turn him into

a prophet. ONeill claims that [t]hroughout his more profound works, Marx never talkedabout the inevitable collapse of capitalism. However, this simply is not true, and to deny the

teleology of Marx is to seriously misunderstand the inherited thought with which Marx was

grappling. More seriously, however, to deny Marx had a belief in historical necessity is to

miss why he is largely inappropriate as a means to understanding the current crisis.

ONeill appears to have grabbed onto Marxs well-known assertion that men make their

own history. Although, instead of this quote he selects and misrepresents an obscure

reference from The Holy Family, a Marx-Engels work critiquing the Young Hegelians.ONeills claim requires one to overlook numerous statements from Marx about the natural

laws of capitalist production. In theprefaceto the 1867 German edition ofCapital, Marx

refers to capitalist societies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. Marxconsidered himself a scientist, and his predictions were those of a scientist - in the same way

that Einstein made predictions based on the theory of general relativity. The reality is that, as

with all great thinkers, Marxs thought was full of aporias and paradoxes. For Marx, there

was an on-going tension between his realization that society is the product of nondetermined

human action and his desire to discover the laws of history and society. Cornelius Castoriadis

calls this the antinomy of Marx, and it reflects the paradox of the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment thinkers wanted to both articulate the rational policies of a society that is in

tune with nature and celebrate the free individual. However, if history is governed by rational

laws, then human agency is meaningless.

ONeill asks if those currently name-dropping Marx have readChapter 32 of Capital. This is

a puzzling question, given that it is precisely the chapter in which Marx offers one of his most
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widely quoted phrases about the inevitability of capitalisms collapse: The knell of capitalist

private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. This knell comes out of the

capitalist mode of production and it is coming with the inexorability of a law of Nature.

The laws of historical motion are akin to gravity in their necessity. As surely as the river

flows to the sea, history flows toward industrial communism. This was the outcome of

historical materialism. Marx focused on the mode of production because he saw it as theintersection of society and the material and, therefore, as the essential component for

understanding society scientifically.

This does not mean there is no anti-teleological element to Marx. There absolutely is, after all

he did write, Men make their own history. Especially in his early writings, Marx appears to

be wrestling with this insight, and the conflicting belief that there are laws of history and

society that can be discovered, explained and used to make predictions. One attempt to

resolve this antinomy is found in the proviso to his famous line quoted above: but they do

not make it as they please. The conflict can be seen in his description of the laws of

capitalist society as both natural and immanent. Castoriadis cites the on-going battle

between these two incompatible lines of thought as one of the reasons Marx failed to finishthe ambitious project he set about in writing Capital. Unfortunately, in Marxs most

important works, the search for the laws of society and history tended to win out over his

realization that we make our own societies and own history.

It is precisely Marxs realization that our societies and histories are the product of conscious

and creative people that renders his teleological analysis largely irrelevant in the context of

the current crisis. Marxs rationalist materialist political economy led him to claim that

financial instruments like those at play in the current situation are the perfect fetish. They

are hollow; a once-removed appropriation of surplus value. The current crisis is, from a

Marxist perspective, a fiction. It may be a fiction that has some real consequences, but it

ultimately remains a fiction. It has no roots in the material and, therefore, it is not real. The

crisis and collapse of capitalism as foreseen by Marx is a necessity of the system of

production. It is a crisis from within the nuts and bolts of capitalist-controlled industry. The

predicted crisis grows out of his metaphysical belief that labour is the source of value.

According to Marx, the accumulatory process that drives the capitalist involves both a

financial and a material accumulation. The financial has to become the material in the hands

of the functioning capitalist. This requires ever growing amounts of labour and draws upon

technological progress. This progress provokes increasing centralization of production and

capital: One capitalist always kills many. Proletarianization and centralization result in the

economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined,

socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point

where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst

asunder. The knell of capitalist. Well, you know the rest. Is this what is happening? No.

You would be hard pressed to find anyone who claims that labour is becoming increasingly

socialized.

This does not mean a Marxian materialist analysis has nothing to say about the current crisis.

Marx recognized well before other theorists that capitalism is not a smoothly operating

system. He certainly knew that capitalists were capable of turning crises to their own

advantage. However, he still regarded such crises as secondary to the primary operation of

productive capitalist accumulation. Marxs analysis was rooted in the heavily competitivecotton mills of newly industrialising Britain. The reality of contemporary capitalism is well
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removed from those heady days of full liability, low entry costs, frequent bankruptcies,

rapidly expanding demand, and a large quantity of available labour - turning man, woman

and child into wage-slaves. Where Marx once saw a distinction between productive capital

and finance capital with value only created and accumulated through the utilisation of labour

in production, a modern analysis makes it clear that such a distinction is impossible.

Consider just one corporation as an example. Caterpillar is as productive a corporation as

one could imagine. Their products are utilised by the primary industries. They make use of

smoke belching factories. They employ workers that are organised into assembly lines within

those factories. Yet, one of its most profitable business segments is Cat Financial. At just 7%

of revenue and sales, it generates 15% of profits. Most of its lending is to its dealers andcustomers so that they can buy Cat built machinery. The productive aspect of Caterpillar is

intimately dependent upon the financial aspect. How are we supposed to separate the

financial from the so-called real? The answer: we cant.

If Marxs analysis of the laws of capitalist economy cannot help us understand the current

crisis, then might his acknowledgment that we are responsible for our societies and historiesserve us better? The first thing we would conclude is that this crisis emerged, not because of

any inevitable historical necessity, but because of immanent decisions made by those who

have political economic power. The situation emerges from the actions of particular peoples

with their own subjective desires and capabilities. This is not the same as saying it was

planned and implemented. However, both policy and business choices were made that have

contributed to the crisis. There will be capitalists who benefit from the crisis and it is not

beyond belief to imagine that conscious actions were taken to provoke a situation in which

they would be able to differentially accumulate - that is, accumulate relative to other

capitalists. In fact, before Naomi Klein was talking about the Shock Doctrine or Disaster

Capitalism, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler demonstrated that the other side of

capitalist expansion is accumulation through crisis. This also means that, apart from a

challenge to the system of capitalism as a whole, all capitalist crises are merely a crisis for

one subset of capital. For others, such crises present an opportunity.

Most importantly, an immanent perspective on history and society make a necessity of

struggle. The current crisis is not the inevitable collapse of capitalism, as there will be no

inevitable demise written into the code of capitalism. If we wish to proceed beyond the

capitalist system, we will have to imagine alternatives and work toward them.

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