When capital achieves real domination over society, it becomes a
material community, overcoming value and the law of value, which
survive only as something "overcome." Capital accomplishes this in two
ways: 1) the quantity of labor included in the
product-capital diminishes enormously
(devalorization); 2) the exchange relation
tends increasingly to disappear, first from the wage relation, then
from all economic transactions. Capital, which originally depended on
the wage relation, becomes a despot. When there is value it is assigned
by capital.
Capital
is capital in process. It acquired this attribute with the rise of
fictive capital, when the opposition valorization/devalorization still
had meaning, when capital had not yet really overcome the law of value.
Capital
in process is capital in constant movement; it capitalizes everything,
assimilates everything and makes it its own substance. Having become
autonomous, it is "reified form" in movement. It becomes intangible. It
revitalizes its being - that vast metabolism which absorbs ancient
exchanges or reduces them to exchanges of a biological type - by
despoiling all human beings in their varied activities, however
fragmented these may be (this is why capital pushes human beings
to engage in the most diverse activities). It is humanity that is
exploited. More than ever the expression "exploitation of man by man"
becomes repulsive.
In
its perfected state, capital is representation. Its rise to this state
is due to its anthropomorphization, namely to its capitalization of
human beings, [1] and to its supersession of the old general equivalent, gold. Capital
needs an ideal representation, since a representation with substance
inhibits its process. Gold, if it is not totally demonetized, can no
longer play the role of standard. Capitalized human activity becomes
the standard of capital, until even this dependence on value and its
law begin to disappear completely. This presupposes the integration of
human beings in the process of capital and the integration of capital
in the minds of human beings.
Capital
becomes representation through the following historical movement:
exchange value becomes autonomous, human beings are expropriated, human
activity is reduced to labor, and labor is reduced to abstract labor.
This takes place when capital rises on the foundation of the law of
value. Capital becomes autonomous by domesticating the human being.
After analyzing-dissecting-fragmenting the human being, capital
reconstructs the human being as a function of its process. The rupture
of the body from the mind made possible the transformation of the mind
into a computer which can be programmed by the laws of capital.
Precisely because of their mental capacities, human beings are not only
enslaved, but turned into willing slaves of capital. What seems like
the greatest paradox is that capital itself reintroduces subjectivity,
which had been eliminated at the time of the rise of exchange value.
All human activity is exploited by capital. We can rephrase Marx's
statement, "Labor, by adding a new value to the old one, at the same
time maintains and eternizes [capital] " [2] to say: all human activity "eternizes" capital.
Capital as representation overcomes the old contradiction between
monopoly and competition. Every quantum of capital tends to become a
totality; competition operates between the various capitals, each of
which tends to become the totality. Production and circulation are
unified; the ancient opposition between use value and exchange value
loses its raison d'être.
Besides, consumption is the utilization of not only material products
but mostly representations that increasingly structure human beings as
beings of capital and revitalize capital as the general representation.
Prices no longer have the function they had in the period of formal
domination of capital, when they were representations of value; they
become mere indices or signs of representations of capital. Free goods
are not impossible. Capital could assign a specific quantity of its
products to each programmed individual; this quantity might depend on
the required activity imposed on this individual. Such a despotism
would be more powerful than the present one. Human beings would wish
they had the money which had "given" them free access to the diversity
of products.
During
its development capital always tended to negate classes. This has
finally been accomplished through the universalization of wage labor
and the formation - as a transitional stage - of what is called the
universal class, a mere collection of proletarianized men and women, a
collection of slaves of capital. Capital achieved complete domination
by mystifying the demands of the classical proletariat, by dominating
the proletarian as productive laborer. But by achieving domination
through the mediation of labor, capital brought about the disappearance
of classes, since the capitalist as a person was simultaneously
eliminated. [3] The State becomes society when the wage relation is transformed into a
relation of constraint, into a statist relation. At the same time the
State becomes an enterprise or racket which mediates between the
different gangs of capital.
Bourgeois
society has been destroyed and we have the despotism of capital. Class
conflicts are replaced by struggles between the gangs-organizations
which are the varied modes of being of capital. As a result of the
domination of representation, all organizations which want to oppose
capital are engulfed by it; they are consumed by phagocytes.
It is the real end of democracy. One can no longer hold that there is a class which represents future humanity, and a fortiori there is no party, no group; there can be no delegation of power.
Advertising
crassly reflects the fact that capital is representation, that it
survives because it is representation in the mind of each human being
(internalizing what was externalized). Advertising is the
discourse of capital: [4] everything is possible, all norms have disappeared. Advertising
organizes the subversion of the present for the sake of an apparently
different future.
"We now face the problem of letting the
average American feel moral when he flirts, when he spends, even when
he buys a second or third car. One of the basic problems of this
prosperity is to give people sanction and justification to enjoy it, to
show them that making their lives a pleasure is moral and not immoral.
This permission given to the consumer to freely enjoy life, this
demonstration that he has a right to surround himself with products
that enrich his existence and give him pleasure, should be one of the
main themes of all advertising and of every project designed to
increase sales." [5]
The disintegration of consciousness which can be seen in manifestations
like the women's liberation movement, the gay liberation movement and
anti-psychiatry (which are only possible after the work of Freud,
Reich, and the feminist movement at the beginning of this
century) is not part of the simultaneous emergence of
revolutionary consciousness, but only reflects the end of bourgeois
society based on value, on a fixed standard which affected all levels
of human life. The disintegration began when the general equivalent
conflicted with circulation. If the former general equivalent gave way,
it was lost. The State had to force all subjects to respect a normalcy
based on a standard which established the values of society. The law of
value imprisoned human beings, forcing them into stereotypes, into
fixed modes of being. The highest development of morality appeared in
Kant's categorical imperative. By engulfing the general equivalent, by
becoming its own representation, capital removed the prohibitions and
rigid schemas. At that point human beings are fixed to its movement,
which can take off from the normal or abnormal, moral or immoral human
being.
The
finite, limited human being, the individual of bourgeois society, is
disappearing. People are passionately calling for the liberated human
being, a being who is at once a social being and a Gemeinwesen.
But at present it is capital that is recomposing man, giving him form
and matter; communal being comes in the form of collective worker,
individuality in the form of consumer of capital. Since capital is
indefinite it allows the human being to have access to a state beyond
the finite in an infinite becoming of appropriation which is never
realized, renewing at every instant the illusion of total blossoming.
The
human being in the image of capital ceases to consider any event
definitive, but as an instant in an infinite process. Enjoyment is
allowed but is never possible. Man becomes a sensual and passive
voyeur, capital a sensual and suprasensual being. Human life ceases to
be a process and becomes linear. Aspired by the process of capital, man
can no longer be "himself." This aspiration evacuates him, creating a
vacuum which he must continually satisfy with representations
(capital). More generally, capital in process secures its
domination by making every process linear. Thus it breaks the movement
of nature, and this leads to the destruction of nature. But if this
destruction might endanger its own process, capital adapts itself to
nature (by anti-pollution, for example).
The
non-living becomes autonomous - and triumphs. Death in life:
Hegel had intuited it, Nietzsche described it, Rainer Maria Rilke sang
about it, Freud almost institutionalized it (the death
instinct), Dada exhibited it as buffoon art, and the "fascists"
exalted it: "Long live death." The U.S. feminist movement has
individualized it:
"The male likes death - it excites him sexually and, already dead inside, he wants to die." [6]
The autonomy of form affects all aspects of life dominated by capital.
Knowledge is valid only if it is formalized, if it is emptied of
content. Absolute knowledge is tautology realized; it is dead form
deployed over all knowledge. Science is its systematization;
epistemology is its redundancy.
In the era of its real domination, capital has run away (as the cyberneticians put it), it has escaped. [7] It is no longer controlled by human beings. (Human beings in the
form of proletarians might, at least passively, represent a barrier to
capital.) It is no longer limited by nature. Some production
processes carried out over periods of time lead to clashes with natural
barriers: increase in the number of human beings, destruction of
nature, pollution. But these barriers cannot be theoretically regarded
as barriers which capital cannot supersede. At present there are three
possible courses for the capitalist mode of production (in
addition to the destruction of humanity - a hypothesis that cannot be
ignored):
complete autonomy of capital: a mechanistic
utopia where human beings become simple accessories of an automated
system, though still retaining an executive role;
mutation of the human being, or rather a
change of the species: production of a perfectly programmable
being which has lost all the characteristics of the species Homo sapiens. This would not require an automatized system, since this perfect human being would be made to do whatever is required;
generalized lunacy: in the place of
human beings, and on the basis of their present limitations, capital
realizes everything they desire (normal or abnormal), but
human beings cannot find themselves and enjoyment continually lies in
the future. The human being is carried off in the run-away of capital,
and keeps it going. [8]
The result is ultimately the same: the evolution of the human
being is frozen, sooner in one case than in another. These
possibilities are abstract limits; in reality they tend to unfold
simultaneously and in a contradictory manner. To continue on its
indefinite course, capital is forced to call on the activity of human
beings, to exalt their creativity. And to secure its permanence,
capital has to act quickly. It runs into barriers of time and space
which are linked to the decrease of natural resources (which
cannot all be replaced by synthetic substitutes) and the mad
increase of human population (which causes the disappearance of
numerous forms of life).
It
becomes clear that raising the banner of labor or its abolition remains
on the terrain of capital, within the framework of its evolution. Even
the movement toward unlimited generalization of desire is isomorphic to
the indefinite movement of capital.
The
capitalist mode of production is not decadent and cannot be decadent.
Bourgeois society disintegrated, to be sure, but this did not lead to
communism. At most we can say that communism was affirmed in opposition
to bourgeois society, but not in opposition to capital. The run-away of
capital was not perceived; in fact this run-away was realized only with
the rise of the fascist, Nazi, popular front movements, the New Deal,
etc., movements which are transitions from formal to real domination.
It was thought that communism was emerging from the socialization of
human activity and thus from the destruction of private property, while
in fact capital was emerging as a material community.
[1] This does not exclude an opposite movement: capital forces human beings to be human.
[2] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, London: Pelican, 1973, p. 365.
[3] Here we see a convergence
with the Asiatic mode of production, where classes could never become
autonomous; in the capitalist mode of production they are absorbed.
[4] See the book of D. Verres, Le discours du capitalisme, Ed. L'Herne. interesting material will also be found in the works of Baudrillard: Le systéme des objets and Pour une critique de l'économle politique du signe, Ed. Gallimard.
[5] Dichter, cited by Baudrillard in Le système des objets, pp. 218-219.
[6] Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto (The Society for Cutting Up Men), New York: Olympia Press, 1970.
[7] We analyzed the autonomization of capital in Le VIe chapitre inédit du Capital et l'oeuvre économique de Marx (1966), particularly in the notes added in 1972.
In
a future article we will analyze this subject more thoroughly by
showing that Marx had raised the problem without recognizing it in its
totality, and by analyzing the capitalist mode of production of today.
This will also lead us to define labor and its role in the development
of humanity. G. Brulé already began such an analysis in his article in Invariance No. 2, Série II: "Le travail, le travail productif et les mythes
de la classe ouvriére et de la classe moyenne." (Labor,
productive labor and the myths of the working class and the middle
class).
In
general we can say that the concept of labor is reductive: it
encompasses only one part of human activity. But the call for its
abolition is a call for the destruction of this remainder of activity,
which is a utopian demand of capital. The project of communism inserts
itself into the context of human life, activity being no more than a
modality of expression. Love, meditation, day-dreaming, play and other
manifestations of human beings are placed outside the field of life
when we trap ourselves within the concept of labor. Marx defined labor
as an activity which transforms nature or matter for one or another
purpose, but the concept of nature can no longer be accepted as it is.
In the period of domination of capital, the human being is no longer in
contact with nature (especially during work). Between
nature and the individual lies capital. Capital becomes nature.
On
the other hand, in his so-called "philosophical" works, Marx clearly
refers to all human activity and asserts that communism cannot be
reduced to the liberation of labor. This position does not completely
disappear from the rest of Marx's works, and survives alongside the
"revolutionary reformist" conception expressed in Capital.
For the Marxists the problem is subsequently simplified: they
exalt labor, pure and simple. In Trotsky's work, for example, there is
no longer a trace of Marx's complex analysis, but rather a display of
the language of domestication, the language of capital: "The
entire history of humanity is a history of the organization and
education of social man for labor, with a view to obtaining from him
greater productivity." (Terrorism and Communism (French ed.: Paris: Ed. 10/18, 1963, p. 2181.) [8] This possibility is described and exalted in Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.