The following text on “Capitalism on a forced march,” a follow-up to “The imperative need to move beyond capitalism,” is a summary of one of a long series of workshops organized by Chusma Selecta and Floréal Roméro to help us better understand our world. The complete series is entitled “The kingdom of money.” Each of these texts will therefore have a sequel…
i) Domesticating the proletariat
As Bookchin reminds us, we often confuse capitalism with industry, when in fact the latter predates capitalism. The big difference is that it was not yet subject to the imperatives of an already consolidated “market society.”1
Until the 16th century, industrial-type manufacturing, especially textiles, flourished in Florence, Bruges, Antwerp, London, Segovia, Lyon, etc., in the production of cloth for clothing and ship sails. From the late Middle Ages onwards, shipyards and blast furnaces for iron also developed. This took place in a context of booming overseas trade, wars, and an increase in the citizen population throughout Europe, although not comparable to that of London. Low-intensity industries located in a few mechanized areas operated largely on human and animal power. As Bookchin also points out, and contrary to Polanyi’s proposal, the “market society” was not the result of technological advances. Rather, it was developed by agrarian capitalism, which preceded capitalist industrialization, imposing its imperative to increasingly develop the productive forces. From that point on, it was not a break, as the term “Industrial Revolution” crudely suggests, but the beginning of a slow and tentative acceleration of the process of scientific research, generalized and supported by the state, for an unprecedented technological increase in the forces of production.
Indeed, to consolidate capitalist industrialization, a few scattered technical inventions are not enough; widespread progress is needed, encompassing a large number of sectors that dynamically support each other. It is this synergy, within a coherent set of techniques, that forms a technical system, i.e., a series of technical interdependencies between key economic sectors. In this constitutive process, what are called “human resources” could not escape the logic of integration into this technical system with a view to maximizing the forces of production. Beyond the simple brutal repression to force these “resources” to adjust, it was necessary to mold this multitude of recently expropriated peasants, crammed into cities and exploited in workshops (factories), into a domesticated “proletariat” for the factories, efficient in this key part of the modern technical system designed to maximize productive forces. The imposition of “clock time” to replace “nature time,” which had governed the working day, was therefore significant. Methodically applied, it proved to be a genuine ideological offensive launched by employers at the end of the 17th century against old working habits, instilling this new discipline of time through schools, installing clocks in public squares, homes, and churches, introducing timekeeping in factories, etc. With a puritanical and moralistic background, they imposed new morals, starting with “idleness is the mother of all vices” and ending with the famous “time is money.” From that moment on, the process inherent in capitalism has constantly sought to turn us into machines. Machines similar to the increasingly sophisticated ones that impose their own rhythms on us, both in our daily lives and at work, while controlling our ability to keep them in optimal working order.
j) From the internal market to the expansion of capitalism
Since the 17th century, while the rest of the European trading powers still had differentiated islands and internal barriers to slow down their national economies, even in the most centralized states such as France, the British state had already unified and centralized everything. While others relied on increasing trade with foreign countries, British capitalism, still agrarian at the time, relied on a competitive, vast, integrated, solid, and highly diversified domestic market, whose products were intended for a growing population that no longer worked in rural areas and could not do without basic necessities. And although London remained the major market, it extended its influence throughout the British Isles with an efficient distribution network, thanks to commission-based agents who granted loans.
To this end, unlike the rest of Europe, which continued to engage in currency exchange to promote international trade, the United Kingdom set up its own banking system, which consisted of promoting domestic trade and the sale of domestic products from the London metropolitan market.
The dynamics of this totally original commercial and financial system, which originated in agrarian capitalism and was specific to the English domestic market, spread and gradually took hold throughout international trade.
It was the competitive imperatives of industrialized England, with its enormous productive capacity, that forced other countries to stimulate the development of their economies to avoid bankruptcy. Thus, the other European states were unable to avoid contamination and had no choice but to follow the guidelines set by the model based on capitalist principles and adopt “modernization” measures at all levels.
Then, unlike countries such as Spain, which built up enormous “capital” (primitive accumulation) by extracting vast wealth from the subsoil of its South American colonies and using it for expansionist purposes, wars, and feudal-style extra-economic expropriations, England became richer through capitalist development in its own country than through its late colonial expansion. The wealth of the Spanish kings did not prevent the collapse of their empire. And as in other colonial countries, this wealth was not converted into industrial capital. Only in Great Britain did this colonial wealth, combined with the slave trade (still the famous primitive accumulation), lead to an industrial revolution. This was because the country’s economy had long been governed by capitalist social relations of ownership. It was these dynamics that, through feedback, gave new impetus to imperialism, with the English exporting the same imperatives that drove their domestic market, namely competitive production and capital accumulation. These were sufficient motives to awaken desires for wealth and systematic theft, to dispossess the natives. Moreover, these “colonists,” dispossessed of their own English lands and forming a huge useless class, would be the first to be sent to populate the nearest colonized country: Ireland.
Military force alone proved futile, and from the end of the 16th century onwards, the objective became to impose economic supremacy. To this end, the English imposed their agricultural model on the expropriated Irish lands, thanks to this multitude of expelled settlers, and the Irish peasants who remained had to follow the guidelines of “improvement” techniques. This “improvement” was not limited to agriculture. As in England, the aim was to impose a new economy based on new relations between lords and farmers and to spread this dynamic throughout Ireland. For if England could not annex the whole of Ireland, it could at least draw it into its economic orbit and subject the country to its economic imperatives, thus creating a historical precedent that would serve as an example for the great imperialist powers of the future. 2 The task was carried out by Cromwell with great brutality, resulting in the expansion of the British empire, but the greatest victory was above all in forcing the country’s leaders to adopt the new competitive economy. The latter, transformed into merchants, strengthened their position in the 17th century to the point of threatening the English economy. The English then imposed severe restrictions on them to break this development. One of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism was revealed: on the one hand, the need to impose its imperatives universally and, on the other hand, the need to preserve capital in the face of the threats posed by this universalization.
The “aggressive colonialism” pursued by the Tudors was Ireland’s main legacy during the colonization of the New World. By sending many settlers who had participated in the Irish colonial adventure to these “uninhabited” lands (following the genocide, without question), this new colonization proved to be much more effective than any previous European colonization. With virtually no government3 on the ground, it was possible to impose a new economic regime with its own obligations on the foreign population. 4
Although there were nuances depending on the location, this was the main axis of British capitalist imperialism, which made the United Kingdom “the workshop of the world” after the slow takeoff of the so-called “industrial revolution” of the 1770s and 1880s.
And the overwhelming efficiency of the capitalist market’s imperatives, backed by military force, reached its peak with the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India by the British Parliament in 1876. Despite losing 13 provinces in North America with independence in 1783, British economic hegemony was total, resting largely on the world’s largest colonial empire, which alone accounted for 92% of all European colonial territories. It was therefore through plunder and bloodshed that the economic imperatives of capitalism were exported throughout the world, and subsequent decolonization did nothing to change this. It was the nation states that took over the role of the colonizers, propagating capitalist imperatives and ensuring that the “laws” of the market were respected.
2. The State
a) Its creation
Throughout this brief history of capitalism, we have never been able to dissociate it from the State.
One might argue that in Europe, the nation-state5 appeared before capitalism, resulting from the concentration of power following feudal struggles between petty kings. Monarchies eventually annexed the powers of the aristocracy, the Church, and the bourgeoisie. But the unstoppable rise of the markets turned the bourgeoisie into a force that gradually put pressure on the monarchy to grant it more powers, or at least to put an end to the moral and structural protections established by traditional peasant societies, which were relatively autonomous and highly diversified and opposed to excessive commodification. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the nation-state in the hands of monarchies was still in its infancy and struggled against the autonomy of strong cities that were attempting to organize themselves into confederations, such as many Italian and German cities and the comuneros of Castile. However, after the victory of the European states and despite their absolutism and centralism, as in France, particularly after the bourgeois revolution of 1789, they had not yet realized their full potential, having not yet deployed all their faculties in relation to the English state.
Truly centralized, it would be the first and, for a long time, the only one to give rise to a capitalist system, starting in the early 16th century.
Then, the competitive demands of the international market, dictated excessively by English industrial capitalism, forced other countries to develop their economies and, consequently, to adopt the same capitalist principles in the face of this new threat. Neighboring emerging states had no choice but to promote capitalism by any means necessary, if only to ensure their own survival. Thus, all European states with a pre-capitalist logic would become, through their colonies, leading agents and vectors of transmission throughout the world, promoting the chain creation of other nation-states. In reality, both national and international capital rely on nation states to preserve private property and conditions favorable to the creation and accumulation of capital, resorting to repressive forces if necessary.6 The dream of a world state does not suit capitalism, because nothing works better for it than distributing administrative and repressive powers across more localized sectors.
b) More on its role and supposed usefulness
The state could not exist without capital, since all the power it wields can only function if the great chain of commodity valorization brings it money. As soon as the economy collapses, the state collapses.
But capitalism cannot survive without the state, because it acts as a mediator in various aspects of daily life, particularly due to the structural and functional antagonisms that divide us. One example is the unions that the state recognizes in order to minimize inevitable class conflicts. In a society deprived of its community, the logic of value is based on private producers with no social ties between them, hence the need to create a separate body to take care of the general aspect. Thus, the modern state is born out of the logic of commodities. This is the other side of the commodity; the two are linked like two inseparable poles.7But one of the reasons why the state retains its legitimacy in the eyes of most people is that, in the popular imagination, it is confused with the “public good,” such as parks, health care, roads, etc. But this “public good” is not what it seems; it has been usurped from us. It belongs to the state, which is also a business, and when the state sells it off to other private companies, it is not committing an act of treason; it is acting within the capitalist logic, since this good has a market value from the outset. If it were truly a public good, it would be beyond the reach of value and managed by the users themselves. This is a major source of confusion.
Moreover, the state is also the armed wing of capital, both for “soft” or “hard” repressive operations against the internal enemy, i.e., the people, and for “defending” the interests of “its capital” abroad (companies, including multinationals). Natural or man-made disasters are often used for this purpose8, always through the state, to provide secret agents, finance bribes and other mafia-like operations with a view to increasing its economic and financial control (see footnote 22).
c) The assault on the “sky”
This retroactive view allows us to verify that the State is Capital, or more precisely that Capital hides behind the curtain that is the State. Consequently, any attempt to storm the latter, by force of arms or at the ballot box, would be nothing but a decoy, as absurd as trying to attack Capital.9
In reality, it is the entire political sphere, removed from social and public life, clinging to the State and its organs, that adjusts the workings of the mega-machine, without ever questioning it completely, since it is entirely dependent on the economy10. In the political arena, the discussion therefore revolves around the distribution of the poisoned fruits of the market system, with politics residing in capitalism and boiling down, in an increasingly exclusive manner, to economic policy and debates concerning the “above-ground,” autonomous “fetish” represented by the economy. In fact, raising other crucial issues in these spheres that could call into question the “welfare state” would be political suicide. So we don’t talk about peak oil and its consequences, or degrowth, the TTIP, the risks of nuclear energy, etc. “Let’s not risk losing votes…”
Just as the state is the other side of the coin of Capital, the ballot paper of the political “subject” (for a few seconds every four years) is the other side of the human commodity for sale.
In conclusion: “Far from serving as a springboard for human emancipation, or even as a means of expression for those reduced to mere citizens, ‘electoral farces’ (to use Marx’s term) are nothing more than a derisory feature of our society of spectacle.”11
3. The “triumph” of capitalism
a) From Marxism “to come soon”
1 As Karl Marx so aptly put it, “Capitalism finishes imprinting its mark on the social body when it definitively transforms all natural relations into money relations.” www.palim.psao.fr
2 In particular that of the US, the direct heir to British capitalism, which has now succeeded in realizing the dream printed on its first banknotes in 1776: “The new order of the century,” with just under 7 million inhabitants. Following the genocide committed against the Indians, who were freed from British rule in 1784, they attempted to invade Canada, still under British rule, in 1812, but without success. Having learned lessons from the British in Ireland, the American state used the “soft” weapons of seduction and bribery against its neighbor, buying lawyers, media, and politicians to avoid public and parliamentary debate so that the latter would adopt measures in favor of a free trade market. The second major step took place in 1950 with the literal creation of the European Community, whose founders were “submarines” from the US. And the current TTIP treaty is just another step in American colonization, as was the enlargement of Europe before it.
3 The role played by the first colonists in exporting economic obligations now falls to each state, which propagates capitalist imperatives and enforces the “laws” of the market.
4 “This was certainly the first structural adjustment program in history.” The Origin of Capitalism, p. 245.
5See Machiavelli’s The Prince on this subject.
6“Until now, no more effective support has been found than that of the old nation-state,” to which capitalism is historically linked, even if it did not create it.
7 Anselm Jappe: “Politics is not the solution,” May 6, 2009 www.palim.psao.fr
8 Noami Klein: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Ed. Actes Sud 2010
9… “The existence of the state as a separate or distinct entity is a constant call to us, an attempt to seduce us into the separate sphere of politics”… John Holloway p.222. Crack Capitalism
10 Lacking autonomous means of intervention, politics must always resort to money, and every decision it makes must be financed.
11 On man as a being-for-voting. Dialectic of democratic emancipation. Gérard Briche www.palim.psao.fr
Translated by TerKo using a free tool.
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