Thus economists, who always give the example of servitude, preach it to others under the title of the Law of the Market.
“Did you dream of those days (…)
When, your heart swollen with hope and valor,
You would whip all those vile merchants with all your might” (Baudelaire)
Here, ‘we recognize our old enemy who knows so well how to appear at first glance something trivial and self-explanatory, when on the contrary it is so complex and so full of metaphysical subtleties, the commodity.’ (Debord)
For in capitalism (which its supporters prefer to call “liberalism”) we fully recognize what the ancient Greeks, more than 2500 years ago, identified as Pleonexia (πλεονεξία), the growth of things at the expense of others. This destructive principle was opposed by Diké, the movement that tends to restore the balance perpetually threatened by the struggle of opposites. This notion linked society to the universe (the Cosmos) as well as to the individual.
Thus, “the Pythagorean physician Alcmæon of Crotone likened the body to a city where the equality of forces (isonomy) corresponds to health, with disease being due to the monarchic preponderance of one of the elements over the others: the democratic ideal of isonomy thus established itself as a cosmic regulatory principle.” (Kostas Papaioannou)
As far as we are directly concerned, socially, it must be said that this regulatory principle, which then materialized in democracy, has been reduced to pure representation, emptied of any real content. Leaving the Pleonexia of commercial reason to drag us towards nothingness.
The following presentation of works makes no claim to be exhaustive. It would be entirely possible to add a number of other valuable works that would also have their place here. We simply hope to be able to offer a revealing picture of what we are facing in a certain historical continuity. It would be more than desirable to extract ourselves from this continuity.
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Modeste proposition pour empêcher les enfants des pauvres d’être à la charge de leurs parents ou de leur pays et pour les rendre utiles au public (A modest proposal to prevent the children of the poor from being a burden on their parents or their country and to make them useful to the public) by Jonathan Swift (1729)
“I recognize that this edible will prove somewhat expensive, in which it will be perfectly suited to landowners who, having already sucked the marrow from their fathers, seem best qualified to eat the flesh of their children.”
With this ironic and virulent pamphlet, Jonathan Swift, at the very beginning of the expansion and applications of the capitalist religion, demonstrated that he had already fully grasped its essence and intentionality. The course of time, alas, only served to demonstrate the truth of his words.
La guerre des forêts : Luttes sociales dans l’Angleterre du XVIIIe siècle (The Forest War: Social Struggles in Eighteenth-Century in England) by Edward P. Thompson
In the early 1720s, a veritable “forest war” pitted small farmers against the local oligarchy, which sought to deny them access to its reserves and hunting grounds. The result was a terrible law, the “Black Act”. Property damage was thus criminalized to the extreme, and this law was not repealed until a century later, in 1827. This episode is part of the long history of peasant resistance to agrarian capitalism, which gradually eroded all the old collective usage rights and reduced the weakest to misery. The masterful analysis of this episode by the great British historian E. P. Thompson shows how the defense of individual property against traditional solidarities and customary rights imposed itself in the legal arena.
Thompson discerns the central issue of property: what is at stake is the defense of collective rights against a more absolute and exclusive definition of property, opening the way to possessive individualism that capitalism will soon make triumphant. (Philippe Minard)
La révolte luddite (The Luddite revolt) by Kirkpatrick Sale
With the advent of industry, the question tended to become essentially materialistic, with technology identifying with the machine-object. (…) That the technical question should rest entirely on the advancement of material performance, that work should be cut off from experience, that the profession should become “employment”, this is emblematic of what we can call “technology”, and which arose precisely in the form in which we know it at the time of the industrial revolution. (preface by Celia Izoard)
Manuscrits de 1844 (Manuscripts of 1844) by Karl Marx
“The economist tells us that everything can be bought with labor and that capital is nothing but accumulated labor. But he also tells us that, far from being able to buy everything, the worker is forced to sell himself and his humanity.”
“Under the guise of recognizing man, political economy, whose principle is labor, is therefore nothing more than the logical realization of the denial of man.”
La Situation des classes laborieuses en Angleterre (The Condition of the Working Class in England) by Friedrich Engels (1845)
“This brutal indifference, this callous isolation of each individual within his particular interests, is all the more repugnant and wounding the greater the number of such individuals confined in this small space.”
“Competition is the most perfect expression of the war of all against all that rages in modern bourgeois society.”
“The whole difference between this and the slavery of ancient times, practised openly, is that the modern-day worker appears to be free, because he is not sold outright, but little by little, by the day, by the week, by the year, and because it is not a master who sells him to another, but he himself who is obliged to sell himself in this way.”
Le Caractère fétiche de la marchandise et son secret (The Fetish Character of the Commodity and its Secret) by Karl Marx (1867)
“A commodity appears at first glance to be something trivial and self-explanatory. Our analysis has shown, on the contrary, that it is a very complex thing, full of metaphysical subtleties and theological quibbles.”
“So where does the enigmatic nature of the product of labor come from, as soon as it takes the form of a commodity? Obviously from this form itself.”
“The form of the wood, for example, is changed if it is made into a table. Nevertheless, the table remains wood, an ordinary and self-evident thing. But as soon as it presents itself as a commodity, it is a completely different matter. Both graspable and ungraspable, it is not enough for it to rest its feet on the ground; it stands, so to speak, on its wooden head in front of the other goods and indulges in more bizarre whims than if it were to start dancing.”
Indian words
See, my brothers, spring has come; a promise of freedom and shared joy. Each seed awakens and likewise each animal comes back to life. Thus is reproduced the miracle of this life that we have received. This is why we grant to all our fellow men and even to our animal neighbors the same right as us to inhabit this Earth. However, listen to me, all of you, we are now dealing with another race and it is not the color of its skin that makes it stand out. Small and weak in the days of our ancestors, their boundless greed, their fever to possess and destroy, have made them masters of this Earth that belongs to all. These people have established many rules that the rich can break but not the poor. They have managed to lock the multitudes into loneliness and despair. They levy taxes on the poor and the generous to support the rich who govern. They treat this Earth as their property. They ruin everything through their stupidity and their selfishness, then barricade themselves against those whose lives they have ruined. They disfigure our land more and more with their buildings and their rubbish. This race is like a torrent of mud that destroys everything in its path. We cannot live side by side. We cannot share the same world with them.
In the words of Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Sioux chief. (1875)
L’age de l’ersatz et autres textes contre la civilisation moderne (The Age of Iron and Other Essays on Modern Civilization) by William Morris (circa 1885)
Meanwhile, and beneath the veneer of this culture, the great commercial system, the cornerstone of this society, is bustling about, which the cultured people believe is at their service, but which in reality dominates them and destroys social relationships. For this system is essentially a war, and only its death will change it; this war, man against man, class against class, whose motto is: “What I gain, you lose”, will last until the great upheaval whose final goal is peace.
But it is a waste of time to try to express the extent of the contempt that can be inspired by the productions of this cheap age, the merits of which are so highly praised. It will suffice to say that the cheap style is inherent to the system of exploitation on which modern industry is based. In other words, our society includes an enormous mass of slaves, who must be fed, clothed, housed and entertained as slaves, and whose daily needs require the production of servile commodities, the use of which guarantees the perpetuation of their enslavement.
Yes: the workers must also lend a hand to the great industrial invention of the time: falsification, and use it to produce for themselves a derisory simulacrum of the luxury of the rich! For the wage earners will always live as their paymasters dictate, and the way of life they have is that imposed on them by their masters.
If they could, these people would rid the streets of street vendors, organ grinders, parades and lecturers of all kinds, to transform them into respectable prison corridors, through which the people would trudge to and from work.
Let us now consider what the future might hold for education, which is currently completely subject to commerce and politics. No one is educated to become a man, but some are educated to own property and others to serve it.
Alexandre Marius Jacob, voleur et anarchiste (Alexandre Marius Jacob, thief and anarchist) by Jean-Marc Delpech (circa 1900)
You call a man a “thief” and a “bandit”, you apply the full force of the law against him without wondering if he could be something else. Have we ever seen a rentier become a burglar? I must admit that I don’t know any. As I am neither a rentier nor a landlord, but just a man who has only his arms and his brain to ensure his survival, I have had to behave differently. Society only allowed me three means of subsistence: work, begging and theft. Far from being repugnant to me, I like work. Man cannot even do without working; his muscles and his brain have a sum of energy to expend. What repulsed me was to sweat blood and water for the pittance of a wage, it was to create wealth from which I would have been deprived. In a word, it repulsed me to engage in the prostitution of labor. Begging is degradation, the negation of all dignity. Every man has the right to the banquet of life.
The right to live is not begged for, it is taken.
Theft is restitution, repossession. Rather than being cloistered in a factory, like in a prison camp, rather than begging for what I was entitled to, I preferred to rise up and fight my enemies tooth and nail by waging war on the rich, by attacking their property. Of course, I understand that you would have preferred that I submit to your laws; that as a docile, slumped-over worker I would have created wealth in exchange for a derisory wage and, when my body was worn out and my brain was numbed, I would have killed myself on a street corner. Then you would not have called me a “cynical bandit” but an “honest worker”. Flattering me, you would have awarded me the labor medal. The priests promise a paradise to their dupes; you, you are abstract, you offer them a piece of paper.
Le capitalisme comme religion (Capitalism as Religion) by Walter Benjamin (1921)
Capitalism is probably the first example of a cult that is not atoning but guilt-inducing. This religious system is driven here into a monstrous movement. A monstrously guilty conscience that does not know how to atone seizes the cult, not in order to atone for this guilt within it but to make it a universal guilt, to saturate consciousness with it (…). It is part of the very essence of this religious movement that is capitalism to persevere until the end (…), until a universal state of despair is reached. The unprecedented aspect of capitalism on a historical level lies in the fact that religion is no longer the reform of being but its devastation.
The men who are corralled within the perimeter of this country have lost the perspective that alone enables them to discern the contours of the human person. In their eyes, any free man seems an original.
Viande à brûler (Meat for burning) by César Fauxbras (1934)
1934-1935, following the “crisis” of 1929, mass unemployment appeared in France. A large number of workers and employees found themselves dependent on the meagre benefits that a nitpicking administration, on the lookout for “free riders”, bitterly disputed. Survival for all these people is once again a daily problem in the face of the implacable logic of the “liberated” market. César Fauxbras knows what he is talking about, having often lived in their company, sharing their misery and their rare moments of happiness. But his gaze is uncompromising and does not indulge in miserabilism. It is not in his manner to hide what is disturbing. This frankness earned him the censure of “L’Humanité” when the book was published; which will surprise no one after reading it, given the little illusion he nourishes there about the emancipatory value of the Stalinist party, whose cadres seem to have no other ambitions than to replace the bourgeoisie in the hierarchical structure of society.
And then even further:
But don’t the worst enemies of the people come from the people? Since it came to power, hasn’t the bourgeoisie recruited its supporters from among the proletariat? Would capitalism survive for a single day if the police, the mobile guard and the professional army, all of which came from the plebs, defected?
Sans valeur marchande (Without market value) by Michel Bounan (2001)
As for the excessive social inequalities that, far from having been reduced to nothing as promised in the last century, our era has spread on a global scale, it has long been argued that the principle of profit, which fundamentally drives any market society, leads to an ever greater accumulation of wealth, and the power that it confers, in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and to such impoverishment of the rest of the world that one in four people are currently suffering from malnutrition.
Chemical and radioactive pollution, massive deforestation, accelerated desertification of land and disappearance of living species at a hitherto unknown rate, global poisoning of air, water and food, endemic famines and new epidemics are not “blunders” that could be prevented or corrected. They are clearly the result of the normal functioning of our mode of production at its current stage and of the market demands in our civilization.
Catastrophism, disaster management and the lasting submission(Catastrophisme, administration du désastre et soumission durable) of Réné Riesel and Jaime Semprun (2008)
By completely undermining all the material and non-material foundations on which it was based, industrial society has created conditions of insecurity and precariousness in which only increased organization, that is to say, enslavement to the social machine, can make this aggregate of terrifying uncertainties seem like a liveable world.
Des fins du capitalisme : Possibilités I (Ends of Capitalism: possibilities I) by David Graeber (2007)
How did capitalism come to impose its way of life to the point where it seems natural? Can we describe its ends? Can we imagine its end? What would happen if hierarchy were not a necessary structure for social life? If wage labor were the direct heir of slavery? If the notion of “consumption” expressed an ideal of destruction? What if fetishism was stronger and more rigid in capitalism than in so-called primitive societies?
To achieve its ends, capitalism has never done anything other than set boundaries to circumscribe human activity within its own ideological logic, that of the possessors of capital; that of their narrow-minded views and petty selfishness, the disastrous effects of which can now be measured on a global scale. To the point that the “end of capitalism” seems increasingly to be equated with our own end.
All this has obviously contributed to establishing the defining structures of capitalism: namely, an engine of infinite production that can only maintain its equilibrium through continuous growth. Infinite cycles of destruction then seem to be the necessary flip side of this process. To make way for new products, this waste must be gotten rid of; destroyed or at least dismissed as old-fashioned or uninteresting. And this is precisely the defining structure of the consumer society: a society that dismisses all lasting value in the name of the endless cycle of the ephemeral.
Le sens du vent : Notes sur la nucléarisation de la France au temps des illusions renouvelables (Wind direction: notes on the nuclearization of France in the time of renewable illusions) by Arnaud Michon (2010)
The current era, not short on truly dramatic information, shows that knowledge of the nuisances that assail us does not necessarily lead to revolt, but more often to denial or a kind of overwhelmed passivity.
A minor ecological nuisance when compared to nuclear energy, the industrial exploitation of renewable energies nonetheless represents a major ideological nuisance. As concrete as it is illusory, an “alternative solution” already adopted by an alternuclear citizenry ready for any accommodation, it occupies the field and contributes to repressing the expression of a more coherent anti-nuclear critique.
In short, it is a question of showing that a consistent critique of the nuclear power industry and its so-called renewable alternatives cannot exist without criticizing the whole system of needs which, in the present social organization, imposes a massive production of energy.
Of all the tangible disasters brought about by industrial capitalism, climate change appears to be both the culmination and the emblem. The capitalist system has invested in and devastated almost everything in the world, right down to the weather.
Caliban et la sorcière (Caliban and the Witch) by Silvia Federici (2014)
With the disappearance of the subsistence economy that prevailed in pre-capitalist Europe, the unity between production and reproduction, typical of all societies based on production for use, came to an end. (…) In the new monetary regime, only the production of value for the market was defined as a value-creating activity, while the reproduction of the worker began to be perceived as having no value from an economic point of view, and even ceased to be considered as work. (…) The economic importance of the reproduction of the labor force carried out in the home and its function in the accumulation of capital became invisible, mythologized as a natural aspiration and referred to as “women’s work”.
Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities opened up by the anti-feudal struggle. Had these possibilities become realities, they would have spared us the immense destruction of human lives and the natural environment that has marked the progression of capitalist relations throughout the world. This must be emphasized, because this belief in an “evolution” from feudalism to capitalism, held to be a superior form of social life, has still not disappeared.
We can also see that the state’s promotion of population growth goes hand in hand with the mass destruction of life: on many historical occasions (see the history of the slave trade), one is the condition for the other. In a system where life is subject to the production of profit, the accumulation of labor power can only be achieved with the maximum amount of violence, so that violence itself becomes the main productive force.
Manuel de l’antitourisme (Anti-tourism manual) by Rodolphe Christin (2017)
This book is a lucid account of how globalized market domination has killed travel and all it promised in terms of discovery and experience. How the traveler has been transformed into a tourist and consumer at the service of the economic machine. How tourism itself has become a machine for destroying what remained of original cultures, natural spaces and, even worse, authenticity in human relations.
“Over time, there was talk of the democratization of travel, without realizing that, many years later – today – democracy would become soluble in consumption for many. And tourism became consumption, a major element in the world’s becoming-economy. From now on, the initial liberation, which has become the norm, is becoming oppressive: it is tormenting nature and human societies, oppressing the spirit of travel and transforming the hospitality of places into services, the inhabitants into service providers, and landscapes into backdrops. This is where we have arrived.“
”The consumption of the world is said to serve our individual fulfillment and, therefore, to justify the tourism system by establishing its virtues for everyone.
This assumes that our life here is not enough. Tourism is the indispensable industry of a mobilizing capitalism that fuels demand by playing on the permanent dissatisfaction inherent in the desire to consume. This form of frustration drives movement. (…) Tourism offers a way to forget one’s worries, if not to solve one’s problems.”
“Tourists have a hard time dealing with long-term situations and commitments, so they surf, channel hop, navigating according to their geographical desires. His psychic fuel is dissatisfaction. He is driven by a vague desire to renew his sensations through movement in space, which must bring its share of strange novelty, on condition that it is harmless and that his experience is duly lined with safety cushions and well-marked distress routes.”
However, and this is where we find the old internal logic of capitalism, tourism “is the luxury of a minority whose impact affects a majority. (…) With its righteousness and clear conscience, tourism draws a subtle divide between those who have the means to enjoy the world and the others who are there to serve.”
But then “what remains of the links between tourism and travel, precisely? (…) the tourist, that other self that the traveler would like to forget for a moment, that tourist, in front of him wherever he goes, means the ruin of his journey, the annihilation of his discovery. So anything goes to keep this anti-hero of travel away from his subjective universe: to escape him by visiting places that tourists have not yet invaded, to despise him, to pretend to have nothing in common with him.”
An interesting picture, through this particular issue, of this schizophrenia into which commercial logic constantly makes us fall in a world reduced to its economic sphere and where human realities in their diversity are constantly flouted and knowingly concealed. It is not surprising that alongside this deplorable figure of the tourist appears, as a complement or a negative, that of the migrant, fleeing wars and killings, famine and misery. Another traveler, quite unwillingly, rejected and despised everywhere because he is destitute. Yet a direct consequence of the same organization of the world that has chosen the cold value of profit and money over the human and the common.
La Fabrique du Musulman (The Muslim factory) by Nedjib Sidi Moussa
Are we not doing everything we can to separate the French proletariat of Algerian origin – starting with its youth – from the rest of the proletariat in France?
And, therefore, to use this group to blow up the working class, its organizations and its conquests?
The extreme confusion of our contemporaries, fed to the teeth with infomercials and infotainment, owes much to the programmed liquidation of all historical consciousness.
Let us instead make sure that we are allowed to prefer, to the obscurantisms old and new, the quatrains of a skeptical epicurean:
“In spring, on the bank of a river or on the edge of a field
With a few companions and a female companion as beautiful as a houri,
Bring the cup… those who drink the morning drink
Are independent of the mosque and free of the synagogue.
Rebounds:
- Essays on Late Capitalism in the Third Millennium #01
- Essays on Late Capitalism in the Third Millennium #02
Critique of Logic and Market Reason
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.