R. Albritton: Marx´s Value Theory and Subjectivity (Inglés)
Marx's Value Theory and Subjectivity
Robert Albritton
One reason often given for dismissing Marx's theory of value as presented in the three volumes of Capital is its seeming failure to directly address issues of subjectivity (Barrett, 1991, 110). This failure becomes all the more glaring in light of current preoccupations with theories of subjectivity usually informed by some combination of psychoanalytic, phenomenological, or poststructuralist currents of thought. It is almost universal for theories of subjectivity to neglect marxian political economy, and those who do try to address subjectivities in direct connection with Marx's theory of capital's inner logic often tend to be drawn by the mere abstract structural character of the theory into class reductionism.1 Yet others propose theoretically vague balancing acts between structure and agency, or between the abstract laws of motion of capital and historical class struggle without taking into account the mediations that must be developed between any theory of capital's inner logic and historical analysis.
In my view Marx's Capital is indeed in the first instance a theory of capital in the abstract and in general, or, in other words, a theory of the necessary inner connections amongst the most fundamental social forms assumed by economic practice in capitalism. The gap between such a theory and subjectivities that are contextually and concretely conditioned might seem to be insurmountable. In this paper I shall argue on the contrary that at the present time no single theory has greater potential for advancing the theory of subjectivity than Marx's value theory. I do not for a moment believe that we can derive any kind of 'complete' theory of subjectivity from value theory, but rather, given the relative neglect of value theory's possible contributions compared to say psychoanalytic theory or discourse analysis, its unrealized potential contributions are truly exciting. Comparatively so little work has been done on this, that I will only be able to trace out certain general directions in this paper.
Following in the footsteps of Japanese Political Economists Kozo Uno and Tom Sekine, I shall use levels of analysis as a means to develop mediations between more abstract and dialectical levels of theorizing and more concrete and historical levels (Sekine, 1997). The theory of pure capitalism reveals the necessary inner connections amongst the fundamental socio-economic forms such as commodity, money, price, wage, profit, rent and interest. Mid-range or stage theory explores the configurations that result when these forms are articulated with stage specific economic, political, legal, and ideological patterns. Finally historical analysis explores actual contexts of historical process and change. My focus in this paper will be on the implications of the capitalist value-form for theorizing subjectivity at the level of pure capitalism, at the level of the stage of consumerism (post world war II), and at the level of American dominated global capitalism at the start of the twenty-first century.
In order to delimit and structure an otherwise unwieldy topic, I shall deal with three topics at each level of analysis. First, is the issue of the relationship between value and use-value, with emphasis on value's indifference to use-value in the context of a purely capitalist society. Second, is the tendency for value to homogenize and shrink space by subsuming it to a linear-sequential time bent on an unlimited increase in the speed of production and consumption. And third is a tendency to hollow out moral, political, and rational subjectivity and subsume them to legal subjectivity. The latter two are really more specific forms of value's indifference to use-value.
A. Pure Capitalism
In Volume Three of Capital Marx writes:
And even though the equalization of wages and working hours between one sphere of production and another, or between different capitals invested in the same sphere of production, comes up against all kinds of local obstacles, the advance of capitalist production and the progressive subordination of all economic relations to this mode of production tends nevertheless to bring this process to fruition. Important as the study of frictions of this kind is for any specialist work on wages, they are still accidental and inessential as far as the general investigation of capitalist production is concerned and can therefore be ignored. In a general analysis of the present kind, it is assumed throughout that actual conditions correspond to their concept, or, and this amounts to the same thing, actual conditions are depicted only in so far as the express their own general type (1981, III, 241-2) [my italics].
And later in the same volume Marx writes: 'The constant equalization of ever-renewed inequalities is accomplished more quickly, (1) the more mobile capital is…(2) the more rapidly labour-power can be moved from one sphere to another and from one local point of production to another.' (III, 298) Marx goes on to claim that capital mobility depends on: (1) free trade and competition; (2) a credit system to mobilize social savings for capital; (3) all spheres of production being subordinated to capitalists; (4) a high population density (1981, III, 298). Labour mobility depends on: (1) abolition of all laws preventing the movement of workers; (2) indifference of the worker to the use-value character of the production process; (3) the maximum reduction of skilled to unskilled labour; (4) disappearance of prejudices of trade and craft amongst workers; (5) the subjection of workers to capital (1981, III, 298).
A careful reading of Capital demonstrates that throughout Marx assumes 'that actual conditions correspond to their concept' and that among other things this implies for Marx the unimpeded mobility of capital and labour, or in other words a fully competitive capitalism. Indeed, value theory in Capital Vol. I, which is conceived as a relation between homogeneous labour and homogeneous capital, necessarily assumes unimpeded mobility since otherwise homogeneity could not be achieved. While Marx is fully aware that such an economy can never exist in history, Marx shows that it can exist in theory, and furthermore, that such a theory is justified by the fact that up to a point the laws of motion of capital in history do increasingly approximate their inner logic. In short, Marx's theory of capital reveals precisely what capital is when it operates unimpeded according to its own principles. This theory of unimpeded competitive capital that Marx introduces and Sekine refines, is what I refer to, following Sekine, as 'the theory of pure capitalism.'
It is clear that Marx believed that the law of value operates only to the extent that labour is mobile, but if we look at the history of capitalism, the law of value is continually compromised by the relative immobility of labour both within nation states and between them. This must be taken into account in any quantitative application of the law of value, and it would seem to make such applications difficult to make because no purely quantitative economic theory can grasp the political interventions that swirl around the mobility/immobility of labour-power.
Marx begins Capital with an analysis of the commodity form because this is the most simple and abstract social form of a capitalist economy. For this reason, the inner logic of capital can also accurately be called a 'commodity-economic logic.' The dialectical logic that unfolds the motion of value in a capitalist economy does so by continually overcoming obstacles that have a qualitative/material character, or, in Marx's language, the character of 'use-value.' It follows that the basic contradiction of the dialectic of capital is between value and use-value.
1. Indifference to Use Value
As something exchangeable a commodity is pure quantity, but in order to be exchangeable it must have distinct material properties differentiating it qualitatively from other commodities. As values all commodities are qualitatively the same, differing only quantitatively, and as use values every commodity differs qualitatively from every other commodity. From the point of view of capitalists in a purely capitalist society, commodities create a homogenous social world. All that matters to capital are prices and profits such that all commodities might as well be the same except for these numerical differences.
Capital in its simplest form is the use of money to make more money. In order to maximize profits a capitalist must be prepared to shift production from a less profitable commodity to a more profitable one, and this implies a stance of indifference to use-value. Whatever his personal attachment to vanilla ice cream, a capitalist will produce less vanilla and more chocolate ice cream if it is profitable to do so. Similarly the total commodification of labour-power in a purely capitalist society means that capitalists can hire or fire labour-power as required to maximize profits with total indifference to the human suffering that this may cause.
Indifference to use-value is also indifference to human values and human beings. Thus capitalists, if not constrained by outside forces, will have no concern for the working conditions of their workers or their lives. Unless constrained by law or by worker organization, capitalists will always try to get the most work from workers for the least pay.
In principle, capitalists will engage in any activity that will yield a higher profit unless constrained by outside forces. Indifference to use-value implies indifference to the possible destructiveness of both the production process and the commodity output to humans or to the environment. If it is profitable to adopt a production process that spews mercury into the environment or that exposes workers to toxic substances, then capitalists will do so if not prevented by law. Were it legal to produce and market heroin, then capitalists would do so. Were it profitable to clear-cut all of the world's forests, capitalists would do this as well. The profitability of marketing foods that are addictive because of being high in fats and sugars would certainly be pursued by capitalists despite creating unhealthy and obese populations.
It is apparent that an unimpeded capitalism would be a highly destructive economic system, and that capitalism is only tolerable because it is constrained in many ways. Thus, while pure capitalism with its total indifference to use-value would be inconsistent with the continuation of human life on this planet, we need to carry out a thought experiment, imagining that it does exist in order to explore in principle the impact of the purest forms of capital on the construction of subjectivities. This will help us to understand the impact less pure forms of capital have on subject formation.
2. The Collapse of Time into Space and the Homogenization of Space
In its pure form, Capital is only interested in linear sequential temporality, or, in other words, in quantitative time. Qualitative time implies being immersed in some activity to the extent that we ignore the passage of quantitative time. What is today called 'quality time' is usually time squeezed out of the passage of quantitative time, but such bits of squeezed time must be subsumed to quantitative time and hence their qualitative character is compromised. Similarly it is difficult even for leisure time to take on qualitative characteristics if it is rushed by an ever-increasing pace of life.
Because of the close tie between time and profit and because of its total fixation on short-term profit, pure capital will always try to decrease the time of production and the time between production and final consumption. The result is that other things being equal the pace of life would continually increase in a purely capitalist society. Indeed, given that the key variable are profit rates relative to the average rate of profit, there would be a tendency to need to speed things up at an every accelerating rate. Postone (1996, 289-91) refers to a 'treadmill-effect' such that the faster we go, the faster yet we must go in order to maintain profit rates. Over the long-run and without outside constraints, capital will speed up the pace of life until the stress levels become impossible to sustain. Speed, then, becomes a crucial consideration in considering the impact of capital's laws of motion of value on the formation of modern subjectivities.
From the point of view of time as speed up, space is reduced to nothing but distance that must be traversed more and more quickly or to resources that must be processed more and more quickly. In other words, indifference to use-value is also indifference to space except as potential resistance to speed up. Capital as self-expanding value would love to achieve a stance of indifference to space by subordinating its qualitativeness to an expanded reproduction machine that continually accelerates. The earth itself would then be commodified and indifferently fed into the giant maws of an ever hungrier capital. Every global resource would be reduced to a potential input into a profit-making production process or marketing scheme.
3. Legal Subjectivity
Hegel (1967, 40-6) begins his Philosophy of Right with the legal subject understood as the externalization of the will into private property. This is followed by theorizing the moral subject, who through a process of internalization develops a soul and conscience. Finally the ethical or political subject synthesizes the external and internal into institutions appropriate to the full development of both the legal and moral subjects. The synthesis of the legal, moral, and political subject can be called 'the rational subject.'
While this is no doubt a powerful dialectical way of proceeding, his efforts fall short because he fails to understand the extent to which the legal subject in its highest perfection is not only specific to capitalism but also as the dominant subject form in capitalism subsumes both the moral and political subject. Further, far from being universal, his moral subject is an idealized Christian subject, and his political/ethical subject depends on a capitalism constrained by 'organic' feudal institutions (supposedly to counter the atomizing tendencies of civil society) that were already passing away as Hegel wrote his book in the early years of the emergence of capitalism in Prussia.
Strictly from the point of view of capital in a purely capitalist society, only the legal subject must be recognized (Pashukanis, 1978). Moreover, capital's indifference to use-value implies a non-recognition of moral, political, or rational subjectivity. In a purely capitalist society all that is required is subjects capable of owning commodities, selling or buying commodities, or making contracts involving exchange transactions or transfer of ownership. Capital needs subjects who are totally free to enter contracts, to produce commodites and exchange them, and who can both embody and recognize property rights involving exclusive control over pieces of materiality. These legal subjects can have absolute rights over things and rights over the productive use of bodies limited by the rights of contract and exit that those bodies must have in order to be legal subjects. From this point of view the capital/labour relation is a relation between legal subjects who own and control the means of production and legal subjects that 'freely' (insofar as they are single-mindedly thought of as legal subjects as does capital in a purely capitalist society) sell their labour-power for the use of capital in return for a wage. From the point of view of pure capitalism, the only kind of subjectivity that need exist is free legal subjectivity: there need be no moral subjects, political subjects, rational subjects and certainly not class subjects.
The reason that I started this section with reference to Hegel is that I believe that he deftly theorizes the basic forms of legal subjectivity. Hegel's legal subject is the most abstract, formal, and externalized subject form. It is basically the will of a person manifested in that person's private property. As the most shallow and contentless subject, for Hegel, it must be filled in by the dialectical unfolding of the moral and political subject. But capital in its inner logic cannot do this and has no interest in doing this. Indeed, were we to imagine that a purely capitalist society actually came into historical existence, the result would be a general hallowing out of the soul and an extreme externalization of the self into a commodity world. Selves would be nothing but differently appearing bodies plus the commodity accoutrement that they possess. They would be only differentiated from commodities by their capacity for self-movement, by their capacity for exclusive property rights against one another, and by their particular commodity equipage and consumption patterns.
I say 'rights against one another' because a purely capitalist society is essentially atomistic and competitive, pitting individual against individual in the pursuit of profits or wages. Strictly speaking, other legal subjects are only of interest in so far as they can be used to improve one's economic position. It follows that legal subjects would gain recognition mainly by being productive or by capturing the outputs of other's productivity. 'Disabled' subjects or subjects considered unproductive for whatever reason would have no standing to be recognized in such a society. For capital, existence is either the production of wealth or the possession of wealth.
An externalized subject is inherently decentered, since having a center has always implied some kind of inner core whether called 'ego', 'soul', or something else. The legal subject of pure capitalism is radically decentered since such a subject is simply a collection of profit-making capacities without any center or inner connectedness. In this case the subject writ large is capital and individuals are only recognized as subjects insofar as they are useful to capital. It is the commodity form (and its variations) that provides the basic social connection, and it is the movement of commodities that ultimately determines the basic socio-economic outcomes. Thus the movements of legal subjects are ultimately determined by the movement of commodities in markets that through the quantitative movement of wages, prices, and profits provide the signals that determine their actions.
In his influential essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' Althusser (1991) argues that the most fundamental category of all ideology is the category 'subject.' He treats religion as the paradigm case of ideology since it is fundamentally through God as Subject writ large the each individual is called upon to be a subject. It is interesting to reflect that where Marx eschews theorizing 'production in general' in favour of historically specific modes of production, in contrast Althusser theorizes 'ideology in general' but not historically specific modes of ideology. Lacan also tries to develop a general or universal theory of subjectivity (1977, 1-7). While they use a mirror metaphor somewhat differently, in both cases it plays a fundamental role in identity formation. It may well be that we spend our whole lives either believing that we are whole or striving to become whole (at least within the alienation of capitalist society), but, in my opinion, the important thing about the mirror is that we first see an image of wholeness reflected in a capitalistically produced commodity and this produces the misrecognition that wholeness can be achieved through the possession of commodities or commodity-like persons. This suggests that a powerful starting point for understanding the human psyche under capitalism is not some imagined universal family structure or universal interpellation, but rather the historically specific capitalist commodity form.
Where capital in a purely capitalist society may be considered in some sense a Subject writ large, it is a different kind of Subject writ large than Althusser's god or Lacan's father.
Capital as subject has some distinct differences from Gods and Fathers or from God the Father. Capital collectivizes and quantifies individual actions sometimes pushing them along and sometimes blocking them, but in all cases it produces outcomes that no one intended and that can only be altered by powerful collectivist interventions. Capital is us, as we are objectified in the course of acting through the commodity form. It cannot act without our actions, but at the same time it adds up our actions into resultant prices and profits that drive the economy in directions that no one intended. Thus at the level of the individual, we are all supposedly free to engage in any exchange transactions that we wish, while at the level of the whole most people experience sharp constraints relative to their positioning in the economy. A freedom of the individual and tyranny of the whole specific to capitalist commodity-economic logics heavily impacts on the main tendencies of capitalist ideology. For example, Capitalist ideologues often play on the fact that for individuals in a capitalist society it is much easier for them to think of themselves as free than it is for them to understand capital's logic that can make a travesty of their freedom. Ideologically capitalism always celebrates the individual freedom that it presumably promotes while ignoring the determinism that in a purely capitalist society totally trumps all individual actions with the overriding laws of motion of capital.
To summarize, the basic subject form of pure capitalism is the legal subject. Legal subjects always relate to others instrumentally or simply as bodies that may be useful for self promotion. There is no process of othering since others are always already simply other. Legal subject as other has no being except as a body with a will that may be manipulated or may manipulate to advance profits. Such an externalization of the self implies that all selves are simply collections of external appearances without a soul. Such 'hollowed out' souls are indifferent to persons as quality, but instead relate to them as quantities or potential quantities.
Indifference to use-value, then, not only implies a general indifference to all human values except for profit, it also implies a spatialization of time that makes it strictly linear-sequential and in turn the subsumption of space to this time. And since time is money, the requirements of accumulation require a continual acceleration of the pace of life. Finally indifference to use-value is indifference to human beings except as profit or income maximizing legal subjects.
B. The Stage of Consumerism
In comparison to the rarified pure capitalism just analyzed, mid-range theory considers the way in which value makes the best out of a whole array of use-value opportunities and constraints that form the most typical hegemonic institutions of a particular stage of capitalist development. Thus it must consider a wide range of institutions whose basic character is not necessarily economic. The result is a mode of accumulation as a dominant or characteristic pattern or constellation, that has economic, political, legal, and ideological (dimensions). Because this extensive widening of political economy cannot be attempted in this paper, and because I focus primarily on three economic variables at each level of analysis, the presentation here will appear to be rather economistic. While this is unavoidable, I would refer the reader to my Japanese Approach To Stages of Capitalist Development (1991) for a fuller account of how I go about theorizing this important level of theory that mediates between the theory of pure capitalism and the study of capitalist history. Indeed, my main aim for developing three distinct levels of analysis is precisely to find the most accurate way to think the articulation between the economic and other modalities of social practice.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss in detail how both the theory of pure capitalism and historical analysis can be utilized to construct mid-range theory. I refer to the current stage of capitalist development as the 'stage of consumerism' and locate its golden age spatially in the US and temporally between 1950 and 1970. I call it 'consumerism' because of the elevated role of the consumer in the dominant economy type of this stage of capitalist development. Elsewhere I argue that the dominate modes of accumulation theorized as articulations of the economic, ideological, legal, and political are qualitatively distinct as between different stages even though they articulate the same underlying law of value. This is because value is externalized in different use value or institutional contexts requiring it to be extensively rethought as it articulates with a vast array of social forms specific to capital accumulation over a particular stage. These qualitative distinct articulations involve specific resistances, supports, and compromises.
A fundamental issue to theorize in connection with stages of capitalist development is the type and range of use values capitalistically produced and how capital itself is organized in order to successfully carry out accumulation in connection with such use values. When we consider the history of capitalist manufacturing we find that the first important use value to be extensively subsumed to capital's dynamism is cottage wool production. This was followed by light industry typified by cotton factory production. Next came the predominance of monopolistic heavy industry typified by steel production. And in the stage that I refer to as 'consumerism' the mass production of consumer durables, most typically the automobile, is carried out by 'multinational' capital.
Considering my three variables from the point of view of the stage of consumerism, I shall argue first that the mass production of consumer goods has subsumed an unprecedented array and quantity of use values to the motion of value, and that the resulting elevation of the consumer has necessitated strong ideological, legal, and political supports in order for capital accumulation to proceed smoothly. Second, in order to maintain profit rates and high rates of consumption capital ranges throughout the globe seeking cheaper inputs and markets for outputs. To some extent capital has always done this, only now it has the technological means and ever-expanding array of use value outputs that results in a more thorough-going search for control. In other words, a degree commodification is now penetrating every nook and cranny of the earth and of human life in search of new profit possibilities. Space is increasingly shrunk and homogenized by the commodity form. A part of this shrinkage is the speeding up of the pace of life and of consumption, again made more possible than ever before by new technologies. Thus time is increasingly reduced to pure quantity for the sake of being sped up. Third, capital would like legal subjects to identify themselves primarily as relatively passive and gullible consumers. To the extent desires can be directed toward the commodity world then this world can seem to offer endless pleasures, and the more disruptive potentials of desire can be distracted and absorbed into consumerism. Every stage of capitalism needs to rely either on means of coercion or means of subject formation that create relatively docile subjects. Today relative docility is achieved by fostering mass addiction to commodities (consumerism has replaced religion as the new opiate of the masses) some of which are inherently addictive like tabacco, alcohol, crack, fats, and sugar; some of which we are indoctrinated into believing we need for status or other reasons; and some of which we do need because alternatives are not sufficiently available (e.g private car versus public transporation). Of course, this docility is only relative given renewed signs of resistance to capital world-wide.
In summary then, at this level of abstraction 'Indifference to Use-value' is transformed into a peculiar form of massive commoditifcation. On the one hand, commodification becomes all-encompassing, and, on the other, it is compromised (from the point of view of the purely capitalist commodity form) by being dependent on numerous and significant political, legal, and ideological supports. The two most important quasi-commodities of this stage are the automobile and television. Thus the particular form that capitalistic indifference to use-value takes in this stage is perhaps best exemplified by the automobile and television. The indifference to use-value that surrounds the automobile mostly has to do with indifference to the earth while the indifference around the television mostly has to do with indifference to the human psyche. 'The Collapse of Time into Space and the Homogenization of Space' at this level becomes 'Global Apartheid and Fundamentalism.' And 'Legal Subjectivity' becomes most prominently 'The Legal Subject as Toy Collector.'
1. Automobiles and Televisions
The strength of the working class in the West and of so-called socialism in the East after World War II fuelled a cold war that stimulated the development of a welfare/warfare state. At the same time, the shear number and range of commodities increased astronomically as capitalism attempted to buy off the working class in the West with an incredible array of commodities, the most important of which were the automobile, the television, and the single-family dwelling. These were the rewards for the soldiers returning from World War II and their continuing loyalty was insured by indoctrinating them with a fear of communism that generated an insatiable need for security that not only prevented American politics from moving to the left, but also justified the continuation of a huge military establishment.
Western capitalism was able to flood working people with commodities because of a radically increasing inequality and productivity on a global scale. Low wages and low costs in the Third World and in First World sweat shops made for affordable commodities in the rich world. Consumption was further stimulated by debt expansion and by an advertizing regime that more and more channeled human desires towards the consumption of commodities as the path to happiness. Shopping became the number one 'leisure' activity in the First World.
In terms of its impact on human life, the automobile followed by the television are perhaps the most revolutionary commodities ever produced. Both of them represent the increasing mechanization and chemicalization of human life, particularly the automobile whose production requires a vast array of chemicals and whose use produces a vast array of chemical pollutants. It was not foreordained that transportation would take such an individualized and environmentally destructive form, though once off the ground, the auto industry developed around it deeply entrenched and immensely powerful vested interests. And of course, television helps to convince consumers that the automobile is a must-have commodity.
The elevation of consumer identities in the stage of consumerism tended to push class identities into the background. Trade unions all too often helped this along by maintaining a disciplined work force in return for increases in standard of living. Yet the threat of socialism and trade union militancy coupled with an expanding capital accumulation both pushed and enabled the capitalist state to expand the welfare state and the accompanying 'social wage.' Large funds were channeled towards health, education, and welfare as the caring professions that humanize capitalism also grew. The cold war fueled a military keynesianism that helped to maintain economic growth and stability. These trends led to rapidly growing indebtedness both for the state and the individual. At the same time, capitalism's inherent indifference to use-value seemed to be constrained by the welfare state and the growth of caring professions.
2. Global Apartheid and Fundamentalism
While in principle capital should not be committed to any spatial location since to be so would impede the mobility required to opportunistically pursue profit; in history the spatial development of capital is very uneven and the nation state develops in part to defend and promote the gains of one location at the expense of others. This uneven development along with capital's inherent expansiveness has produced throughout history a variety of colonialisms and imperialisms. Where the emphasis on quantity over quality reduces persons to numbers, thus essentially atomizing society, nationalisms, ethnicities, racisms and/or various religions convert numbers back into qualitative groupings. Capitalism cannot and would not always get rid of these qualitative groupings, so whenever possible it manipulates them for its own advantage. By creating or sustaining boundaried spatial arrangements ruled by states, various groups can be either oppressed or mobilized as needed by profit-making activity. Nationalist identifications have played a particularly important role in suppressing class conflict and mobilizing masses for war.
The atomizing character of capitalism sometimes generates reaction in the form of emotionally-based groupings whether families, religions, cultures, nations, or races. These reactionary groupings, as for example, the American 'moral majority' can sometimes be mobilized to support capitalism, but if this is not possible, they can always be vilified and turned into evil enemies (as in the case of islamic fundamentalism) thus supporting the more of less endless development of a capitalist military establishment.
In history, capital has been far less spatially indifferent than it would be were it able to fully realize a commodity-economic logic. It may well be that indifference to location accords with capital's self concept, but because of its historical uneven development and the development of the nation-state, more often than not it has set location against location generating either preparation for war or war. Furthermore, while the development of capital has fostered the increasing global mobility of capital, it has often placed obstacles in the way of the global mobility of labour. The result is an apartheid world characterized both by almost continual war or preparation for war and by reactionary groupings that are often labeled as 'good' or 'evil'.
After world war II the global inequality associated with the uneven development of capitalism resulted in a three world stratification that revolved around a superpower cold war. The cold war played a fundamental role in maintaining strong nationalist ideologies in face of a growing threat of internationalism. Mass media were used to instill deep fears and insecurities, requiring a strong military state able to contain or even roll back communism on every front. Hysterical anti-communist ideology often fed fear of all that was different (or other) including a vast array of racisms, ethnocentricisms, sexisms, and homophobia. The need for security became increasingly the primary need and it justified not only CIA and military interventions around the world, but also domestic policies that vilified the left. The narrow calculations of capitalist profit-making were accompanied by reactionary emotion-based groupings ('moral majority') with a boundless hunger for enemies to crush. America increasingly became the world's policeman with the power to ignore international law.
While capitalism has an inherent impulse to speed up the rate of production and consumption, it is in the stage of consumerism that transportation and communication technologies become available that both drastically shrink space and homogenize time as pure quantity. Henceforth, the entire globe is converted into potential raw material for profit-making. If trade unions are too strong in one place, capital will move to places were workers are cheaper and more docile. If environmental protection laws are too strongly enforced in one jurisdiction, capital will move to another where it can freely pollute. One might think that this increased mobility of capital would generate global equality, and while it has broken down the three worlds, they have been replaced by a global hierarchy of even greater inequality. One reason for this is that the speed up of capital mobility around the world has not been accompanied by the same mobility for labour.
The speed of life has increased enormously with faster transportation and communication technologies. By and large this increased speed has not enriched the quality of human life, but has instead increased a 'treadmill effect' that causes us to become more exhausted without getting anywhere. The increased speed serves primarily to maintain profit rates against their tendency to fall by squeezing more productivity and intensity of work out of people without significantly adding to their time for free creativity or for rest and relaxation. The impact of increased speed on the earth is similar, since the earth also needs recovery time without which environmental degradation will increase. Indebtedness, then, extends from consumer debt and state debt, to sleep debt, and ecological debt. And what is debt but present pleasure at the cost of future pain. Capitalism by its very nature encourages a short-term profit orientation, and by its very commitment to the market, long range planning is anathema.
The swelling of debt in every dimension of life has huge consequences for the future. First, it places enormous power in the hands of those who hold the debt and who decide who is credit-worthy. Second, the debtors to a large extent have given the creditors control over their futures. The debtors must work hard on terms dictated largely by creditors, and many people and institutions remain deeply in debt for life. It is not uncommon for individuals to hold two and three jobs just to make enough money to pay existing debt payments and have a little to live on.
And people are encouraged to go into debt by easy credit and by media that convince them that happiness is to be achieved by spending more money on present consumption. The slogan of the age becomes 'Buy now, pay later.' And when it comes to ecological issues, it will be future generations who will have to pay the price of a planet increasingly out of balance--poisoned and lacking recovery time. The relation of capitalism to time means that it simply cannot achieve the orientation that would be required to deal with long-term ecological questions. In the stage of consumerism time waits for no person as it becomes a linear-sequential treadmill exhausting both humans and nature.
3. Legal Subjects as Toy Collectors
'Whoever gets the most toys wins' could well be the slogan of the stage of consumerism. The capitalist equivalent of Lacan's (1977, Ch. 3) passage from the imaginary to the symbolic is the passage from relatively protected family life to the tough-minded world of competitive capitalist accumulation. Those who do not successfully maneuver through this transition, will end up among the unproductive refuse of capitalist society, and, of course this is much more likely for the people in the third world, for poor people, for people of colour, for women, or for disabled people. Lacan's so-called 'mirror stage' is simply the effort to try to center oneself in the radically decentering world of selves externalized into the evanescent speediness of commodities whose value is their price that continually changes with the movement of competitive pressures. The transition is not from a mother-centric imaginary to a father-centric symbolic, but instead it is from the caringness of family life (where it exists) to the strict profit orientation of pure capitalism. And where the force of capitalist accumulation penetrates family life, it will have a dissolving effect on care and tend to turn the family itself into a cash nexus. To turn all of this into a big joke, we can simply say 'whoever gets the most toys wins.'
Consider the 'captain of industry' as a capitalist ego-ideal or as a subjective type that would be favoured by capitalism. Capitalism implies preoccupation with quantity and detachment from the qualitative such that decisions must be made strictly in accord with prices and profits. But this kind of quantitative thinking is abstract, it shuts out the concrete particular which is always qualitative. If fixation on abstract quantitative thinking does violence to the qualitative, that violence is ignored from the point of view of capital. If it is profitable to shut down the single significant enterprise in a company town, thus destroying the livelihood of all town citizens, then this is the what capital would consider 'rational.' It follows that capitalistic 'rationality' implies a certain 'tough-mindedness' that splits reason off from the emotions. It is a calculating manipulative way of thinking that can never give in to sentimentality if it is to succeed capitalistically. Indeed from the point of view of a captain of industry, those who would impede his production processes because they damage the environment, are likely to be viewed precisely as bleeding-heart sentimentalists. Thus the split between quantity and quality and the privileging of quantity over quality is also a split between reason and emotion, between mind and body, and ultimately between male and female. Classically all captains of industry were male and their world of cold, tough, calculating reason would by itself be intolerable. Hence the need for a so-called 'private realm' where female nurturing and emotionality could heal the wounds of capitalist battle and nurture over-controlled and stifled emotions.
But the splitting off and belittling of the private realm of the family meant that this realm became sentimentalized and romanticized, and along with it the women who were identified with this realm. The ideal of femininity found its location in the realm of the family; hence there is a convergence between the implications of capital's logic and Freudian object-relations theory which emphasises the absent father as part of the dynamic of gender differentiation. Indeed, the 'abstract masculinity' referred to by Hartsock (1998, Ch.6) is precisely what is required for 'captains of industry' with their detachment from all that is qualitative. I believe that the most important underlying cause of 'abstract maculinity' is capitalism with its ideal family of the single bread-winning father and its need to split off reason from emotion.
In a capitalist society, it follows that men would tend to be the tough-minded profit-makers and women the caring and nurturing back-up. Strictly speaking this division cannot be logically derived from the law of value, but given that patriarchy already existed in
history, once we see the split between quantity and quality, we can begin to see a capitalist patriarchy shaped along these lines. .
The externalization of self characteristic of legal subjects in pure capitalism takes on particular forms in the stage of consumerism. The relationships between Hegel's legal subject, moral subject, and political subject assume a certain constellation typical of the stage of consumerism. The legal subject becomes more powerful than ever before with 'consumer sovereignty' lending its support to a certain kind of democracy, where presumably consumers' economic sovereignty consists in casting dollar ballots for commodities that they are confronted with and their political sovereignty consists in casting ballots for candidates that they are confronted with. The aim of the moral subject is the happiness achieved by maximizing want-satisfaction through the judicious spending of income. It follows that the moral subject and political subject tend to be absorbed into the consuming legal subject. This leaves a vacuum in the moral and political arenas that is inviting to emotionally-based fundamentalisms.
Hegel's property-owning subject primarily owned land, and in his theory this has the effect of giving the individual and family a rootedness or stable grounding. In the case of the modern consuming subject, the property in question is more like fashion with a high rate of turnover. What is 'in' one year may be 'out' the next. We can say that for Hegel the ideal was a landed property that was the stable basis of family life through generations, while for the current requirements of consumerist speed, the ideal is a continually changing fashion.
Capitalism makes it seem as though all legal-subjects as legal-subjects are equal. Thus consuming legal-subjects are free to spend their income as they please, producing legal-subjects are free to offer their labour-power for sale to any taker, moral legal-subjects can maximize marginal utilities, and political legal-subjects can vote as they please. All legal-subjects are free and equal. In practice this enables the well-off legal subjects of the stage of consumerism to feel comfortable with monstrous inequalities that from another point of view might be totally unacceptable. This ideology that takes in only one narrow dimension of human existence becomes so hegemonic, that in the stage of consumerism it is difficult for 'common sense' to see behind this many-layered curtain. Rapidly growing inequalities sometimes become the basis for organization and struggle, but it is always against an immensely powerful ideology of legal subjecthood and triumphant 'free' enterprise. Hegemonic legal subjecthood can stomach the fight for rights more than class struggle. Many struggles for rights have been very important and they offer greater possibilities for success in the short-run since they can be recognized more easily and dealt with by the dominant ideology. The most typical form of resistance in this stage of capitalism is the new social movement or NGO fighting to extend rights or to relieve the suffering associated with particular inequalities.
The consuming subject and the legal subject are mutually reinforcing. Since the legal subject is fundamentally a property owning subject, the consuming subject is perhaps the most obvious appearance that the legal subject takes on. Strictly speaking the identity of a consumer amongst other consumers is formed by a certain packaging and accoutrement of commodities. One's self is essentially externalized through one's commodities and through other persons related to as commodified selves. Desires are channeled through commodities converting needs into wants for specific commodities and commodified persons. Status in such a world is recognition by commodified others of the want-value of one's commodified world. It is in this way that one becomes valued. Thus needs are converted into desires and wants are channeled towards certain commodities or commodified life-styles by the mass media. Indeed, to a certain extent advertizing both creates and directs desire in a world where meaning and recognition is to be discovered through commodities. The consuming subject and the legal subject, thus appear, as simply two different sides of the property-owning subject.
C. Capitalism Today: Approaching Its Limits?
At the level of historical analysis, I use the theory of capital's inner logic and the mid-range theory of consumerism to inform my analysis of current trends of capitalist development and resistance to those trends. This level of analysis, were it fully articulated, would be much broader than mid-range theory. Thus, what I can present here is even much more truncated than what I have done for stage theory, lending even more appearances to what might be read as economism.
The analysis that I have presented indicates that capitalism may be approaching its limits, though projecting trends into the future must always be speculative to the extent that it depends on how people organize to transform a seriously compromised capitalism. When I claim that capitalism may be approaching its limits, I mean to call attention to fundamental structural contradictions that do not seem resolvable within capitalism in the sense that any structural change that would remain consistent with the continuation of capitalism could not successfully deal with these problems.
1. The Revenge of Use-Value
At the level of real historical life, use-value always forces itself upon capital's indifference, literally giving capital little choice but to take its eyes off profit for a minute to pay attention to some use-value that simply can no longer be ignored. Today the global economy is addicted increasingly to high levels of mass consumption in the richer countries. Many economic pundits have emphasized this point by claiming that high growth rates in the 90's depended heavily on high rates of spending by the American consumer, and that the future well-being of the global economy will also depend on this. At the same time, at least a fair portion of this high American consumption has been based on debt expansion, government subsidies, artificially high stock and bond earnings, an artificially high American dollar, and artificially low costs created by scouring the world for cheap and unprotected natural and human production inputs. The artificiality and limitedness of all this suggests that the American growth of the 90s was largely a fools paradise. Debt expansion and government subsidies are clearly limited, while world sourcing is also limited by political instabilities and the possibilities of organized resistance. The financialization of the global economy that has resulted in a considerable flow of world savings to the US, and hence a huge growth of US financial markets, is speculative and ultimately destablizing. Thus the same economic force that has fuelled the rise of the American financial markets and kept the American dollar strong could in another time send both the financial markets and the value of the currency tumbling.
Furthermore, the kinds of use-values being produced are increasingly destructive to human life. For example, the chemicalization of the environment has been a major cause of the exponential growth of cancer. While the richer countries may have some success in enforcing controls on the more extreme forms of chemical pollution, the careful study of long term environmental impacts of various chemicals has barely begun. Comparatively few resources are directed towards this problem, the solution of which would probably entail a radical shift in research priorities which in turn would lead to altering what is produced and how it is produced.
Chemicals in the form of pharmaceuticals are produced to treat the illnesses such as cancer, mental illness, and asthema caused to a large extent by other chemicals. By and large it is only the rich of the world that have access to these prescription drugs, and as a result health has become a commodity that increasingly is only affordable to the rich. This is compounded by the fact the pharmaceutical corporations can not make a profit from drugs that may cure the illnesses of the poor such as tuberculosis; hence, no research money goes in these directions though obviously each dollar spent here would obviously be most cost-effective in improving the health of the world's people.
Other chemicals in the forms of quasi-foods or drugs are ingested as escapes from stressful and painful lives or as fillers in empty lives. The full story of crack cocaine in the US is yet to be told, but it appeared to radically demoralize the poor, while making them subject to incarceration. The stresses resulting from the increased pace of life are dealt with by different classes in different ways. For the well-off the way is often the purchase of expensive but legal psychotropic drugs, while the drugs of choice of the poor are often illegal and addictive.
Given its short-run profit orientation, capitalism always prefers to find profitable ways to treat symptoms as opposed to dealing with long-term underlying causes. It would rather discover new expensive chemicals to treat cancer, than to explore in depth the environmental causes of it. It would rather sell new diet drugs rather than reduce its production of foods loaded with empty calories. The trend of the age is the production of more and more expensive commodities to relieve us of the sufferings caused by the previous production of commodities. To put it differently the trend of the age is for value to become more and more out of touch with use-value and quantity out of touch with quality. As value spins through the world at a more frantic pace, it becomes both more destructive of life and more indifferent to that destruction. Neo-liberals as the keepers of the budget have to make the 'tough' decisions to cut to the quick those humanizing innovations that had made capital seem to be more caring during the prosperous phases of consumerism. Thus the 'caring professions' are being cut back at precisely the time that capitalism is increasing the number of casualties that need care.
2. Hyper-speed as Exhaustion
The enormous transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector associated with neo-liberalism coupled with the need to speed up both production and consumption has resulted in a massive commercialization of public space. The amount of space and time given over to advertizing increases as an impoverished public sector attempts to gain funding from the private sector or struggling sports franchizes attempt to cash in on their captive audiences. This commercialization of space is often also a homogenization of space as the larger cities of the world come increasingly to resemble each other, their public spaces being filled up with the same brand names.
Just as the advertizing sector attempts to permanently mobilize consumers, the military-industrial complex permanently mobilizes support by instilling the population with deep seated and permanent insecurities. These insecurities are then mobilized to support wars against vague and boundless enemies. The war on drugs or on terrorism leave enormous discretionary power in the hands of those with the authority to pursue these wars. Since the enemy is vague and boundless, such wars can be more or less permanent and can always be utilized to mobilize citizens against imagined enemies either to stimulate the economy or win elections. Since pure capitalism cannot directly generate its own emotion-based communities, such mobilizing becomes particularly important against various 'fundamentalisms.' These are spawned partly as reactions against capitalism, but must also be controlled by or subsumed to the vary capitalism that spawns them.
As speed shrinks the world and increases the possibilities of rapid movement through space of the privileged few and of capital, the boundaries of the richer nation-states are becoming less permeable to immigration and thus the majority of the worlds working people find themselves increasingly imprisoned in the country of their birth. As a result the world is transformed into a hierarchy of ghettos, where the rich live in 'secure' gated communities and gated nation-states - gated against an inequality that has reached truly obscene proportions.
Hi-tech, which could in principle reduce working time, has had the opposite effect. In order to buy all of the commodities that consumers have been lead to believe will make them happy, they must either go deeper in debt or work longer hours. Leisure time itself becomes increasingly intensified as a time of continued consumption either of mind-dulling escapism or commercialism. High stress levels lead to ever greater social malaise that in turn generates every kind of social dysfunction.
3. Subjectivity and Resistance
If capital is fundamentally indifferent to use-value, including human beings and nature, then all of the caring dimensions of capitalism must have ultimately stemmed not from capital but from socialized human beings often resisting the tendencies of capital. But it must be understood that capitalism's reifying force always makes resistance difficult. Furthermore, it is moral and political subjects that are more capable of agency than legal subjects, who are hollowed out or externalized; and yet, capitalism has no inherent tendency to develop moral or political subjects. It follows that to effect change such subjects must be developed within capitalism despite capital's indifference. For this reason class formations are always heterogeneous and tenuous comings together with varying degrees of solidarity, organization, and radicalness.
In the past 20 years the class capacities within most advanced industrial countries have been seriously undermined. No doubt a combination of factors played a role, but surely among the most important would be the downfall of the USSR, the globalization of capital, and the relative impoverishment of the public sector. As a result, neo-liberal policies that have weakened the welfare state and all the caring professions have not yet been met with the resistance that they are likely to meet with in the future (not that there hasn't already been resistance). Through the power of modern advertizing, it is relatively easy for capital to promote consumerist identities, whereas class indentities, which clearly go against the grain of hegemonic neo-liberal ideologies, have to be born out of the hard struggle and dangerous work of resistance and opposition. The building of morally and politically informed subjectivities to counter the hollowed out legal subjects of pure capitalism is not easy. In this Gramsci, who advocated a socialist culture to counter the atomizing and demoralizing nature of capitalist culture, was surely thinking in the right direction. In the current setting, the anti-globalization movement is perhaps the beginning of a new oppositional force that as it grows will be able to at first challenge and eventually transform capitalism.
D. Conclusions
The fundamental categories of this paper are value and use-value since it is my claim that it is value's indifference to use-value that is crucial to clarifying some of the most important dimensions of subjectivity in our era. Because the paper is very condensed and contains many assertions that I could not back up with extensive argumentation, it may at times seem to be claiming too much causal efficacy for capital as self-expanding value. In fact I do not think that modern subjectivities are simply a function of capital, rather in this paper I emphasize the role of capital because it has been neglected in the past. Ultimately a much more fine-grained analysis is needed. My aim here has been to present configurations of connections that seem to be mutually supporting, though in many cases it would no doubt be possible to bring in other important causal factors.
On the one hand, Foucault is probably correct in a general way when he argues that our identities are largely constructed by the discursive formations that we engage with. On the other hand, Foucault tends to neglect the political economic discursive formations associated with capitalism. And this is probably one of the main reasons that most of his followers who write about discursive formations neglect political economy. It is not enough to analyze local political economic discursive formations when we have a powerful theory of capital's inner logic that can shed so much light on capitalism as an epochal global force. And it is not a question of deducing the particular from the general, but of using the general to inform our understanding of particulars that also have to be understood on their own terms.
Thus the way in which we attempt to rebuild moral and political subjectivities as part of a general resistance to capital will have international collective as well as local collective dimensions. We stand at an historical juncture when either our very biology will be increasingly degraded or we will find a way to work ourselves out of capitalism and towards some form of democratic socialism.
Endnotes
1. Class reductionism and class voluntarism is particularly characteristic of the school of thought that has labeled itself 'open marxism.' See, for example, the two volumes edited by Bonefeld, Gunn, and Psychopedis; and the volume edited by Bonefeld, Gunn, Psychopedis and Holloway.
2. I have argued elsewhere that the lack of attention to levels of analysis in marxian political economy is the most fundamental problem that needs dealing with (Albritton, 1991).
3. See my 'Superseding Lukacs' for a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Lukacs' treatment of the commodity form.
4. See Albritton, 1999, for a fuller account of the importance of the contradiction between value and use-value for the dialectic of capital.
5. See my book A Japanese Approach to Stage of Capitalist Development for more on the nature of stage theory.
6. See 'Capitalism in the Future Perfect Tense' in Albritton et. al. (2001) for an argument that the stage of consumerism is likely to be the final stage of capitalism.
7. In our fractal and mirrored world it is perhaps not surprizing that auto + mobile (self-movement) ironically mirrors the self-movement of capital. This was pointed out to me by Michael Marder.
8. While I do not agree with many of Virilio's (1977) specific positions, his emphasis on speed has informed my thought.
9. Such splitting off would tend to make reason itself 'irrational'.
10. See John McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism.
11. In the near future I plan to write a book in which I shall expand on many of the points in this paper.
12. I would like to thank Stefanos Kourkoulakos for his helpful comments
References
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Value and Subjectivity, Albritton
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