Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece

[Ralph Johansen <michele@xxxxxxxx>]

Maybe this is helpful, for those who haven't read it, in analyzing causes
for continuing moderate/conservative success, a short, thoughtful and
well-grounded article by Michael Lebowitz on the mystification of capital
and how that systemic obfuscation enhances the perception of dependence on
capital among members of the working class.

Ralph

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0604lebowitz.htm


Monthly Review
Volume 56, Number 2

June 2004

What Keeps Capitalism Going?
by Michael A. Lebowitz

Michael A. Lebowitz is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser
University, in Vancouver, and is the author of Beyond Capital: Marx’s
Political Economy of the Working Class (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). He is
currently living and working in Venezuela.

This essay is based on an address to the Rebuilding the Left Conference at
Simon Fraser University on September 23, 2003.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

I want to address a very simple question: What keeps capitalism going? or,
in the somewhat more technical language of Marxists, How does capitalism as
a system reproduce itself?

Of course, the first point that we need to establish is what I mean by
capitalism. People mean a lot of different things when they use the term.
They may have in mind a market economy or an economy with wage-laborers—or
maybe only an economy in which corporations dominate. Naturally, then, what
they mean by anticapitalism will also differ—it may mean, anti-markets,
anti-wage-labor, and it may simply mean anti–large corporations.

My definition is the one that Marx developed: capitalism is a relationship
in which the separation of working people from the means of work and the
organization of the economy by those who own those means of work has as its
result that, in order to survive, people must engage in a transaction—they
must sell their ability to work to those owners. But, the characteristic of
capitalism is not simply that the mass of people must be wage-laborers. It
is also that those who are purchasing that capacity to perform labor have
one thing and only one thing that interests them—profits (and more profits);
that is to say, the purchasers of labor-power are capitalists, and their
goal is to make their capital grow.

What the capitalist gets as the result of purchasing that ability of workers
is the right to direct workers in production and the right to all they
produce. It is a set of production relations quite different from the case,
for example, of the cooperative or collective where workers direct
themselves in production and have the property rights in what they produce
themselves. Within capitalist relations, the capitalist has purchased the
right to exploit workers in production. He pays them, on average, enough to
meet their customary needs, but he has purchased the right to push them to
produce more than it costs him for the use of them. As a result, the worker
produces additional value, more money, profits, for the capitalist—the
worker produces more capital for the capitalists. And that capital, the
result of the exploitation of workers, goes into the accumulation of more
means of production. What you see when you look at capital is the result of
past exploitation.

This was the central message that Marx was attempting to communicate to
workers. What is capital? It is the result of exploitation. It is the
workers’ own product which has been turned against them, a product in the
form of tools, machinery—indeed, all the products of human activity (mental
and manual).

But, turned against them how? Before talking about how this system keeps
going, how it reproduces itself, we need to understand why this question is
even important to ask. Think about the drive of capitalists to expand their
capital, the drive to increase the exploitation of workers. How can they do
this? One way is by getting workers to work more for the capitalists, for
example by extending the workday or intensifying the workday (speedup).
Another is to drive down the wages of workers. And, still another is to
prevent workers from being the beneficiaries of advances in social knowledge
and social productivity. Capital is constantly on the search for ways to
expand the workday in length and intensity—which, of course, is contrary to
the needs of human beings to have time for themselves for rest and for their
own self-development. Capital is also constantly searching for ways to keep
down and drive down wages, which of course means to deny workers the ability
to satisfy their existing needs and to share in the fruits of social labor.
How does capital achieve this? In particular, it does so by separating
workers, by turning them against each other.

The logic of capital has nothing to do with the needs of human beings. So
practices such as the use of racism and patriarchy to divide workers, the
use of the state to outlaw or crush trade unions, the destruction of people’
s lives by shutting down operations and moving to parts of the world where
people are poor, unions banned, and environmental regultions nonexistent—are
not accidental but the product of a society in which human beings are simply
means for capital. We could go on about the character of capitalism, but I
think the point is clear.

So, back to the topic—how is it that this continues? What keeps capitalism
going? How is such a system reproduced? Let me suggest a few answers.

First, the exploitation of workers is not obvious. It doesn’t look like the
worker sells her ability to work and that the capitalist then proceeds to
get all the benefits of her labor. The contract doesn’t say—this is the part
of the day you are working for yourself (reproducing your requirements), and
this is the part that you are working for the capitalist and adding to his
capital. Rather, it looks like the worker sells a certain amount of her time
(a day’s work) to the capitalist and that she gets its equivalent in money.
So, clearly the worker must get what she deserves—if her income is low, it
must mean that she didn’t have anything very valuable to sell, nothing much
to contribute to society (certainly, very little compared to the
capitalist); in fact, she should be happy she got anything. On the face of
it, in short, there is no exploitation. Marx was very clear on this
point—the very way that wages are expressed as a wage for a given number of
hours extinguishes every trace of exploitation—“all labour appears as paid
labour.” This disappearance of exploitation on the surface, he noted,
underlies “all the notions of justice held by both the worker and the
capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production”
(173).* Note that it is not only the capitalist who will tend to think there
is no exploitation; it is also the worker. If that’s the case, when workers
struggle, they are struggling not against exploitation but against unjust
wages or working conditions—they are struggling for a better wage or shorter
day, for what they see as fairness: a “fair day’s work for a fair day’s
 pay.” In short, they do not see themselves as challenging the system, only
some of its unfair results.

Second (and closely related), if it doesn’t appear as if there is
exploitation of workers in the process of production, then capital cannot
appear as the result of exploitation—it cannot be recognized as the workers’
own product. So, where does all that wealth come from, then? What is the
source of machinery, science, everything that increases productivity? It
must be the contribution of the capitalist. Having sold to the capitalist
their ability to work (and thus the property rights to all they produce),
the social productivity of workers necessarily takes the form of the social
productivity of capital. Fixed capital, machinery, technology, science—all
necessarily appear only as capital. Marx commented, “The accumulation of
knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social
brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence
appears as an attribute of capital” (156). What I am describing here is the
mystification of capital. The more the system develops, the more that
production relies upon fixed capital, on the results of past labor which
take the form of capital—the more that capital (and the capitalist) appear
to be necessary to workers. It is no accident, in short, that workers would
see themselves as dependent upon capital. Marx made a very significant
comment in this respect:

The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by
education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of this 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.(157)
Given the hidden nature of exploitation and the mystification of capital, we
obviously already have a strong basis for the reproduction of capitalism as
a system. But, there is more.

A third reason why capitalism keeps going is that society does not only
appear to be dependent upon capital and the capitalist for all advances. As
individuals within capitalist relations, workers really are dependent on
capital to meet their needs. As long as they are separated from the means of
work and need to sell their ability to work in order to get the money to buy
the things they need, workers need the capitalist, who is the mediator
between them and the realization of their needs. For the wage-laborer, the
real tragedy is not the sale of her labor-power; it is the inabilityto sell
it. What can be worse for one who must sell a commodity than to find no
buyer? Workers, it appears, have an interest in the health of capitalists,
have an interest in expanding demand on the part of capitalists for their
labor-power—by education, tradition, and habit, they come to look upon the
needs of capital as self-evident natural laws, as common sense. The
reproduction of workers as wage-laborers requires the reproduction of
capital.

Do we need any further reasons for the continuation of capitalism as a
system? Let me throw in just one more before we consider some of the
implications. Workers are not simply dependent upon the state of capital in
general for their jobs and thus their ability to satisfy their needs; they
are dependent on particular capitals! Precisely because capital exists in
the form of many capitals, and those capitals compete against each other to
expand, there is a basis for groups of workers to link their ability to
satisfy their needs to the success of those particular capitals that employ
them. In short, even without talking about the conscious efforts of capital
to divide, we can say that there exists a basis for the separation of
workers in different firms—both inside and between countries. In other
words, we can easily see how workers may see other workers as the enemy and
will make concessions to their employers in order to help them compete
better.

Is it hard, then, to understand why Marx could say that capitalism produces
a worker who looks upon its requirements as “self-evident natural laws”?
When we think about the dependence of the worker on capital, is it difficult
to grasp why capitalism keeps going? After all, Marx not only proposed that
capitalism “breaks down all resistance”; he also went on to say that capital
can “rely on his [the worker’s] dependence on capital, which springs from
the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by
them” (899). Capitalism tends, in short, to produce the workers it needs.

Well, you might say that I’m presenting a rather distorted picture of
capitalism. That I’m making it seem as if capitalism is a system without
contradictions, a stable economic system that delivers the goods. What about
economic crises? Doesn’t capitalism inevitably come up against crises,
crises inherent in its nature? Some people predict the collapse of the
system once a week. I don’t think too much of arguments that suggest that
the permanent crisis of capitalism began in the hour of its birth. But, the
system does have crises—periods in which profits fall, production drops,
people are unemployed. Don’t those crises demonstrate that a new system is
necessary?

Without question, an economic crisis brings the nature of the economic
system to the surface. When there are unemployed people, resources,
machinery, and factories—and at the very same time people with the need for
those things that could be produced—it is pretty obvious that production in
capitalism is not based on human needs but, rather, only on what can be
produced for a profit. This is a time when people can be mobilized to
question the system. However, so long as people continue to think capital is
necessary, then the solutions they look for will not be ones which challenge
the logic of capital. (The same will be true in the case of the
environmental crises that capitalism produces.) So long as they see capital
as the source of jobs, the source of wealth, the source of all progress,
then their answer will be that they don’t want to kill the goose that lays
the golden eggs.

The same point needs to be made in relation to the struggles of workers
against capital to reduce the workday, improve working conditions and raise
wages—both directly against specific employers and also in the attempt to
capture the state and to use it in their own interests. So long as workers
do not see capital as their own product and continue instead to think of the
need for healthy capitalists as common sense (and as in their own interest),
they will hold back from actions that place capital in crisis. As long as
workers have not broken with the idea that capital is necessary, a state
under their control will act to facilitate the conditions for the expanded
reproduction of capital. Here, in a nutshell, is the sorry history of social
democracy—which, despite the subjective perspective of some of its
supporters, ends by reinforcing the rule of capital.

So, we return to our question—what keeps capitalism going? How is capitalism
reproduced as a system? I think you can see the answer that I am offering:
capital tends to produce the working class it needs. It produces workers who
look upon it as necessary—a system that is unfair, one that requires you to
struggle constantly to realize your needs, a system run by people out to get
you, yet a system where the reproduction of capital is necessary for the
reproduction of wage-laborers. What keeps capitalism going? Wage-laborers.
The reproduction of workers as wage-laborers is necessary for the
reproduction of capital.

Note that I haven’t said anything about patriarchy or racism. Some people on
the left argue that patriarchy and racism are necessary conditions of
existence for capitalism. I think we need to distinguish between what is
necessary and what is useful for the maintenance of capitalism. When we
speak of necessity, we are saying that without x, capitalism could not
exist. I don’t think this is true of patriarchy or racism. Capital certainly
uses racism, patriarchy, national, and ethnic differences to divide the
working class, to weaken it and to direct its struggles away from capital.
But, it can find many ways to divide and weaken workers. And, it can, if
forced, do without racism or patriarchy just as it can, if forced, live with
higher wages or shorter workdays. (Just as it has been able to do without
apartheid and white rule in South Africa.) What capital cannot live with,
however, is a working class that both understands that capital is the result
of exploitation (i.e., that the wealth that confronts it is the product of
the collective workers) and is also prepared to struggle to put an end to
that exploitation.

Obviously, a working class with this characteristic does not drop from the
sky—not when capital produces workers who look upon the requirements of
capital as self-evident natural laws. Is the answer, then, the vanguard
party which brings a socialist consciousness to ignorant workers? Why should
the workers who are the products of capital pay any attention to these
messages from the outside? This picture seems like a scenario for inevitable
irrelevance and isolation.

Let me propose, however, that the picture is not necessarily as bleak as it
seems. Workers are not simply the products of capital. They are formed (and
form themselves) through all the relationships in which they exist. And,
they transform themselves through their struggles—not only those against
capital but also against those other relations like patriarchy and racism.
Even though these struggles may take place fully within the confines of
capitalist relations, in the course of engaging in collective struggles
people develop a new sense of themselves. They develop new capacities, new
understandings of the importance of collective struggle. People who produce
themselves as revolutionary subjects through their struggles enter into
their relations with capital as different people; in contrast to those who
are not in motion, they are open to developing an understanding of the
nature of capital.

But, they are merely open to this understanding. All those actions,
demonstrations and struggles in themselves cannot go beyond capitalism.
Given that exploitation inherently appears simply as unfairness and that the
nature of capital is mystified, these struggles lead only to the demand for
fairness, for justice within capitalist relations but not justice beyond
capitalism. They generate at best a trade union or social-democratic
consciousness—a perspective which is bounded by a continuing sense of
dependence upon capital, i.e., bounded by capitalist relations. Given that
the spontaneous response of people in motion does not in itself go beyond
capital, communication of the essential nature of capitalism is critical to
its nonreproduction.

For those within the grasp of capital, however, more is necessary than
simply to understand the nature of capital and its roots in exploitation.
People need to believe that a better world is possible. They need to feel
that there is an alternative—one worth struggling for. In this respect,
describing the nature of a socialist alternative—and analyzing the
inadequacies and failures of 20th century efforts—is an essential part of
the process by which people can be moved to put an end to capitalism.

To the extent that those of us on the left are not actively attempting to
communicate the nature of capitalism and working explicitly for the creation
of a socialist alternative, we are part of the explanation as to what keeps
capitalism going.

Notes

* Parenthetical numbers refer to Michael A. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx’s
Political Economy of the Working Class (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)


All material © copyright 2004 Monthly Review



----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Remick" <carlremick@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 16, 2004 4:58 AM
Subject: Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece


> >From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> >
> >(Thomas Frank's new book "What's Wrong With Kansas" argues implicitly
> >that the Democrats lose elections because they are identified with the
> >wrong side of the "culture wars". This is the same sort of position that
> >Michael Moore argued in the Nation Magazine in 1997 and that Richard
> >Rorty put forward in "Achieving Our Country". You get a more strident
> >version of this in Todd Gitlin's "The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why
> >America Is Wracked by Culture Wars". Moving directly into the enemy's
> >camp, you get  Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s "The Disuniting of America:
> >Reflections on a Multicultural Society" and Jim Sleeper's "Liberal
> >Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream". Somehow, this
> >kind of economism that panders to white workers has been associated with
> >Marxism in some circles. Frank himself would probably describe himself
> >as a Marxist, but not on the Charlie Rose show--I don't imagine. In any
> >case, this has little to do with the outlook of Lenin who urged that
> >socialists act as a "tribune of the people".)
>
> I think _What the Matter With Kansas?_ is a great book, but Frank doesn't
> really provide any explanation for conservatives' amazing, Lamont
> Cranston-style ability to "cloud men's minds" and substitute preposterous
> cultural issues for economic concerns that have life-and-death
significance.
>   Why *are* so many Americans so easily gulled, so mulish, so spiteful, so
> effing perverse?  I was born in this country and have lived here for over
a
> half century, but the basic weirdness of this place never fails to
astonish
> me.
>
> BTW, just heard that Martha Stewart got a sentence (a phrase, really) of
> just five months.  Guess she'll be out in time to offer decorating tips
for
> Christmas.
>
> Carl
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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