Join the Cosmonaut Ecocrew as they discuss Andreas Malm’s piercing 2016 text Fossil Capital and attempt to dispel the myriad of myths that have been erected around the energetic transition to coal. The fateful intertwining in mid-19th century British cotton districts of capital and fossil fuels is examined in the context of class struggle, the ascendancy of the steam engine, and alternative futures that were incompatible with the logic of capital.
Check the previous episodes of this series:
James W reviews McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead.
Nearly a year has passed since the publication of McKenzie Wark’s short book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? More than half of that time has been spent in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis which has impacted the course of history in ways that cannot yet be fully understood. Simultaneous mass uprisings against racism and police brutality have brought the brutality of the state into stark relief against the transparent unwillingness of the ruling class to deploy its financial resources to mitigate the effect of the pandemic on the public. The novelty of our present historical circumstances are worthy of radical investigation, and the hypothesis of Wark’s book certainly aspires to such radicalism. Caught between algorithmic policing and contact tracing, the time is ripe for rethinking what “information” really means to communists. Unfortunately, the rhetorical content of the book is a stubborn refusal to actually say anything radical. Capital is Dead spends its most of its pages trying to justify its own existence by attacking any dialectical method which might seek to venture onto Wark’s terra sancta, the realms of science and technology in the purely empirical sense which she chooses to conceive them. Seen in retrospect, Wark’s thesis (that we have actually been living through a new and brutal mode of post-capitalist production for quite some time) appears to have been dead on arrival. However, if we proceed from an immanent critique of Wark’s postivistic treatment of information theory, we can recover the critical Marxist insight that a radical understanding of the present can make the past itself seem brand new.
It is disappointing then that in the months immediately following the book’s release, responses to Capital is Dead mostly took the book at its word and agreed to the terms set out by Wark’s “thought experiment.” Engagement with the book purely on its own terms, however, inevitably produced little more than golf-clapping affirmation from a critical theory industry more interested in asking questions than seeking out answers. If the book were as radical as the title would have us believe, one would have expected more responses like the scathing anonymous polemic published in Homintern, which excoriates the book as a self-serving exercise in critical theorizing in which Wark makes “Marx a poet, technology a feeling, class a job, and herself a joke.” The review is funny, concise, and devastatingly accurate, but it still grants (albeit minimally) that Wark’s attempt to “turn techno-positivism into a critical instrument is, taken alone, the start of something promising.” On the contrary, it is precisely Wark’s positivist epistemology which pulls the rug out from under anything radical she might have had to say. Only once we approach contact tracing and social media surveillance from a Marxist direction can we situate them in a radical theory of information, liberated from the confines imposed, ironically, by the false radicalism of Capital is Dead.
Accordingly, we must see Capital is Dead as a proposed solution to a proposed problem. As of the late 20th century, the global system of production and exchange has relied on information science and data harvesting in ways that seem to bear very little immediate resemblance to the capitalism which Marx originally described. Wark argues that this state of affairs demands a response, and to the limited extent she believes such responses exist, she finds them woefully insufficient because of two assumptions that supposedly result from a religious and ahistorical fidelity to Marx’s original analysis. The first is what we will loosely call the diachronic assumption that capitalism must necessarily last until communism. The second assumption is the dialectical assumption that there is a gap between the “essence” and the “appearance” of a given mode of production—that the way capitalism looks could be different from the way capitalism is. Combined, the result is an inability to think of capital as historically contingent: although the present mode of production appears to be something other than capitalism, it must still be capitalism, because it is not communism. Wark sums up the problem-solution structure of Capital is Dead herself: “how then can a concept of capitalism be returned to its histories? By abandoning the duality of its essence and appearance.”1
Capital is Dead identifies these two related assumptions as the main theoretical shortcomings for the critical theorists who’ve gotten “stuck trying to explain all emerging phenomena as if they were always expressions of the same eternal essence of Capital.”2 These “academic” Marxists have been reduced to merely chronicling capitalism’s development through a diverse set of appearances, such as “disaster, cognitive, semio, neuro, late, biopolitical, neoliberal, or postfordist capitalism, to name just a few options.”3 Wark might be amused to know that, as of July 2020, “Pandemic Capitalism” is in fact already the title of several articles and at least one forthcoming book. In light of the radical changes to our lives recently, it is easy to understand where Wark is coming from when she asks the reader if “the capitalism that we have all agreed that we live in, has […] become too familiar, too cozy, too roomy an idea?”4 Wark’s corrective, however, has far-ranging theoretical implications which demand careful consideration.
The dialectical assumption which Wark first proposes to jettison is in fact very deeply rooted in what she calls the “received ideas and legacy language”5 of orthodox readings of Marx. Wark’s critique of this assumption relies heavily on the heterodox Marxism of Louis Althusser, who uses the terms “expressive causality” or “expressive totality” to criticize those theories of history which proceed from an opposition between “phenomenon and essence.”6 In a general sense, theories of expressive causality take each superstructural phenomena to be only expressions of the same essential economic base or mode of production. As a consequence, each superstructural element, being each at once identical to that social totality yet superficially non-identical to each other element, must logically be a false appearance. Althusser radically broke with this theory of causality, and Wark follows him by reading theories of expressive causality as theories of eternal capitalism: “The essence of Capital is eternal. It goes on forever, and everything is an expression of its essence. Capital is the essence expressed everywhere, and its expression is tending to become ever more total.”7
Wark does not simply take Althusser as the only point of departure for her analysis, however. For her, Althusser’s thought is in a certain sense still too dogmatic and genteel: he does not go far enough in his anti-dialectical approach to Marxism. Even though “political and cultural superstructures were not mere appearances,” to Althusser, he still saw them as relegated to “the reproduction of the essential economic form of capitalism.”8 His inability to take the final steps towards empiricism is for Wark symptomatic of his insistence on Marxism as a “philosophical method” for which philosophy is the “sovereign form of knowledge.”9 If it cannot be contradicted by the vulgar empiricism of day-to-day experience, Althusserian Marxism is just as dogmatic as the “Hegelian” Marxism it criticizes, insistent on the diachronic assumption instead of the dialectical one. For Wark’s Althusserians, there isn’t an ontological gap between the appearance and the essence of capitalism, but there is a sort of epistemic one, bridgeable only by a privileged form of abstract knowledge.
Therefore, Wark suggests that theories of adjective-capitalisms are actually also based on the structuralism of Louis Althusser to the extent that his analysis decenters the relations and forces of production. Althusser conceives of the social totality as a structure in which each element (economy, culture, government, etc) has a relatively horizontal relation to the others, with the economic dimension only taking precedence in the last instance. In Wark’s account, Althusser’s Marxism “was like catnip to academic Marxists looking for ways to fit into conventional academic disciplines, because it allowed for three distinct objects of study: the economic, the political, and the ideological (or cultural.)”10 Each element gains just enough autonomy from the economic “base” to allow endless “Marxist” analyses of cultural life without anyone having to question the historical assumption that we still persist in a capitalist mode of production.
The net result is a prevailing belief among university professors and theorists that an essential capitalism must persist despite apparently bearing little resemblance to the steam-hammer and spinning-jenny of Marx’s time. As a corrective, Wark proposes a new approach that proceeds by “describing relations of exploitation and domination in the present, starting with the emerging features, and work back and out and up from that.”11 Such a project, the construction of a new theory of history, however, is preempted by Wark’s theoretical commitment to empiricism: where Althusser seems to have erred by privileging philosophy as a sovereign form of knowledge, Wark attempts a corrective by privileging all forms and fields of specialist scientific knowledge.
Capital is Dead is founded on this shaky theoretical premise: there must always be some element of science and technology which can “only be known through the collaborative production of a critical theory sharing the experiences of many fields,”12 and is therefore impossible to fully theorize and incorporate into the “essence” (base) or “appearance” (superstructure) of this or that mode of production. Such an empirically available residue is definitionally excluded from expressive totalities. However, it must also lie beyond the Althusserian social totality as well to the extent it is not available to purely philosophical inquiry and remains the subject of only the more particular fields of knowledge.
In setting out to defend Capital’s continued “function as a historical concept,”13 Wark first intentionally forfeits the most readily available theoretical means for thinking the technological or scientific in the context of any totality (either structural or dialectical.) Totalizing theories, Wark argues, cannot ever fully accommodate the results of the empirical sciences: “where the relations of production can be understood theoretically, the forces of production cannot. They don’t lend themselves to an abstract, conceptual overview by a master thinker within a genteel high theory.”14 The totality is, by its definition, not empirically available to the individual observer, encompassing more than they could ever hope to measure, and as such appears to be beyond the horizon of Wark’s Marxism.
When Wark heavily qualifies her book as only a “minimally plausible”15 thought experiment aimed at re-historicizing capitalism against belief in the “eternal essence of Capital,” her idea of history must be necessarily limited insofar as it excludes the privileged results of scientific inquiry regarding technology, nature, or the inorganic world writ large. At the very same time, her idea of history must also exclude elements of the classical dialectical formulation to the extent that such constructions rely theoretically on expressive causalities (and therefore rejecting any dialectical relationship between base and superstructure and, consequently, most non-Althusserian theories of totality).
We end up with a bit of a bait-and-switch. What started as a thought experiment becomes instead an everything-must-go reimagining of Marxism as a method for organizing scientific inquiry, which requires starting over entirely from only the most basic empirical precepts. Wark states that Capital is Dead attempts to “think a materialist history in a really quite “orthodox” way,”16 but that is not what happens. We end up with a superficially Althusserian concept of non-dialectical history for which the stages of production are more of a heuristic for organizing the various relations and forces of productions as we observe them in daily life, but lack a sovereign form of knowledge that can order them or relate them all to each other.
But are these concessions even necessary for her thought experiment? One can certainly entertain the possibility of non-capitalist, non-communist futures without discarding the dialectical content of Marxist thinking. The “common ruin of the contending classes”17 is a theoretically permissible outcome of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. She even gestures in this direction herself in Chapter 4, suggesting that neither capitalism or socialism survived the Cold War, and from their mutual ruin emerged a new mode of production. With that in mind, the attack on dialectical materialism seems more so aimed at pre-empting any other readings of the significance of information to production. In reality, Marxists actually are free to develop a new total history into which a new mode of production could be incorporated (were such a thing justified). That said, such a history would have to be fully theorized in ways which Wark would resist.
Having clarified Wark’s theoretical commitments, we are now safe to temporarily grant Wark’s premise. She has in fact cleared the way to introduce new terminology and class relations to see how they fit the data, even if she insisted on first sandblasting every other possible option. In her proposed schematic, the emerging locus of class domination is control of the vector, a threefold object18 encompassing (1) data itself, (2) the computational and telecommunications infrastructure used to interpret and transmit that data and (3) the actual path or direction that (1) follows through (2). For Wark, the vector is related to but entirely distinct from capital as Marx understood it: the vector is “the material means for assembling so-called big data and realizing its predictive potential.”19 Ownership of the vector, then, becomes the means of realizing surplus value for the new ruling class.
Wark posits the existence of this new “vectoralist class,” a sort of neo-bourgeoisie which owns the vectors, alongside the new “hacker class”, a class that primarily produces the novel data for which the vector is the sole means of realizing value. Distinct from the proletariat, who were tasked with “having to make the same thing, over and over,”20 the hacker class must produce the “new” information for the vector. By Wark’s new definition, hacking is often unpaid work: the vectoralist class is able to squeeze value from the information collected passively from hackers via FitBit and Alexa in much the same way as they squeeze it from the brands, patents, and programs which hackers are tasked with producing during their paid workdays.
For its part, Capital is Dead does convincingly argue that the realization of value in the imperial core increasingly relies on control of supply chains, logistical data and intellectual property. Such a thing scarcely needed to actually be argued, though. The problem for Wark’s conclusion is that despite her attempt to “conceptualize the problem synchronically,”21 her theory for the production and control of information, novelty, and networks can only function in the context of this single proposed mode of post-capitalist production.
If the relations of production can only be theorized on the basis of empirically available forces of production, which cannot themselves be theorized, we have a very serious theoretical problem for trying to think about capitalism, feudalism, or really anything other than vectoralism. We can conceive of a theory of capitalism which is derived purely from empirical results, and we can also think of a theory of feudalism which is derived purely from empirical results, but to relate these theories in anything resembling a totality would also necessarily entail theoretically relating the empirical results of “semi-autonomous” fields of study to one another, which Capital is Dead forbids. In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson proposes a corrective to Althusser’s social totality, emphasizing that “the notion of ‘semi-autonomy’ necessarily has to relate as much as it separates. Otherwise, the levels will simply become autonomous tout court, and break into the reified space of the bourgeois disciplines.”22
That’s exactly what happens to Wark’s analysis when she cuts Althusser’s “sovereign knowledge” lifeline, and then she presents it as a good thing. The full autonomy of the sciences rapidly metastasizes to the full autonomy of the historical stages of production, and consequently previous or future historical stages are no longer available to Wark’s methods except insofar as they remain available for empirical study in the present. Synchronic modes of production only can exist as either unlabeled bones of extinct species or as crashed spaceships from the distant future, but Wark does not have a way to tell which is which without breaking her own rules, which she does often. When she concedes that “many of the world’s peoples are not even workers but still peasants who are being turned into tenant farmers by the theft of their common land by a landlord class […] much of the world is also a giant sweatshop,” she engages in a Marxist analysis that is built with the theoretical tools that she supposedly rejects. For that reason, her analysis of “older class antagonisms” can only be to simply add “a new layer on top.”23
Such shortcomings are inevitable because a meaningfully synchronic view must see classes and modes of production as more than categories for empirical data points. We can only see them as emerging or disappearing if they’re indexed by historical time. Historical time requires a totality; not even necessarily a dialectical totality, but a totality all the same. Althusser says as much in his treatment of the topic, arguing for the construction of a “Marxist concept of historical time on the bases of a Marxist conception of the social totality.”24 It is not possible for Wark to situate the vectoral mode of production within an Althusserian social totality, being derived from empirical principles to which a sovereign form of philosophical knowledge would not have actual access. However, it is also not possible for her to situate her the vectoral mode of production within a traditionally dialectical totality because such a theoretical construction would, to a greater or lesser extent, require an expressive causality which is also forbidden by the premise of Wark’s thought experiment.
Rather than pushing us to “think synchronically about a matrix of antagonistic classes that includes emerging ones,”25 as she intended, we are instead forced into a theoretical position which is itself antichronic. In order to say anything about history, Wark asks that we first assume it to be arranged in a certain way, which is exactly the diachronic mistake we were trying to correct. Capitalism becomes what is trapped in our museums26 and vectoralism is what we live in now. Feudalism can only be something that came before capitalism on the road to vectoralism. If our academic Marxists can only conceive of capitalism as the pre-history of a future communism, then Wark is only able to theorize past modes of production to the extent that they might be mere pre-histories to her hypothetical vectoralism. As for communism, well, “Communism is dead.”27
Capital is Dead presents itself as being all about getting down and dirty on the cutting edge of technology. It is an appeal to Marxist readers to re-center the forces of production and get started working with them hands-on. However, we have to do it in the way that Wark wants and come to the conclusions that she’s already decided on. Otherwise, we risk becoming like those scary Soviet dogmatists who tried to figure out how “Marxism could be interpreted as having been compatible with modern physics even before it existed.”28 Wark doesn’t want us to think about Marxist theories of technology and nature which would attempt to extend the totality to the non-human, the geological, the more purely scientific. Such a move would require entertaining the possibility of Marxism as an explanatory worldview which, if perhaps not capable of making direct ontological claims, would at least be able to make descriptive claims about the ways the sciences actually work in class society without fear of treading on their toes. When Mckenzie Wark admits that “climate science has to be addressed as being, for better or worse, a science of the totality”29 one is forced to wonder why the same concession is not extended to Marxism.
In his corrective to Althusser, Fredric Jameson offers a version of History-as-totality, providing a Marxist framework which can both respect and incorporate the results of the sciences. To differentiate fields of inquiry at all, to see physics, computer science, climatology, biology or information science as distinct domains, would require the assumption of a prior totality within which and from which they could be seen as autonomous. Jameson proposes that the value of Althusser’s criticism is only recovered if one sees “difference as a relational concept, rather than as the mere inert inventory of unrelated diversity.”30 Both structural and expressive totality are reliant on a form of mediation that relates either its semi-autonomous parts or its false appearances (respectively) by either difference or identity (respectively.) Mediation establishes “initial identity, against which then (but only then) local identification or differentiation can be registered.”31
So let us instead chart such a path: neither adjective-capitalism nor vectoralist production, but a vision of History as the horizon onto which no metaphysical categories can be forced, not even “man” or “machine” or “nature.” It is this horizon to which Marxist theories of totality always aspire but always fall short: in his commentary on The Political Unconscious, William C. Dowling explains that “to think the totality is thus to see in a sudden flash of insight that an adequate notion of society includes even the notion of an external universe, that society must always function as the whole that includes all things, the perimeter beyond which nothing else can exist.”32 We should, for better or worse, try to think the totality all over again.
To see development of the productive process in a truly synchronic sense would then be to trace its contours against the entire backdrop of History, which remains the “absent cause” for the diachronic differentiation of the various social forms. When Wark describes information as “a relation between novelty and repetition, noise and order” which can be extracted and valorized “even from free labor,”33 she is pointing to a model of enclosure and control that cannot and should not be confined to the present but must instead be radically projected backwards and forwards. We may even need to see information not as a new form of commodity but instead, perhaps at first only speculatively, begin to see the commodity form as an older and less general expression of the principles of the information sciences as we now understand them.
In that direction, we should follow Wark when she hints at the strange “ontological properties”34 of information. If it is too random, it is indecipherable static. If it is entirely predictable, it is redundant and conveys nothing new to the recipient.35 When Wark limits Marxism to a mere empirical method for analyzing the specifics of this or that mode of production, she misses that information could itself be productively conceived as a unity of opposites, containing the very “sameness” and “difference” that supposedly divides the hacker from the proletarian. If one unbinds the contradictory nature of information through the whole of history, one can begin to see the individuation of the rationalized proletarian or the enclosure of previously undifferentiated Commons into numbered plots of land as a production of the difference necessary for the production of sameness in the universally exchangeable commodity form. Primitive accumulation and capital accumulation become legible in terms of information. What’s more, one can identify such processes of division and individuation as accelerating at all scales, from the individual to the international, in tandem with the overproduction of commodities and the decline of the rate of profit.
French philosopher Cecile Malaspina presents a dialectical account of information that fearlessly bridges the gaps between statistical physics, information theory, critical theory and thermodynamics in ways that point towards the big-picture approach Marxists should take to the sciences. In unfolding information, Malaspina finds the components that not only make it work but also which bring it into conversation with the theories of History we have been concerned with. For instance, to be intelligible, a unit of information relies on an “a priori restriction on the ‘freedom of choice’ in the message”36 in the form of redundancy. It necessarily must contain information which the recipient already has about language and structure and is therefore not free to choose. “Redundancy is the part of a message that imposes a constraint,”37 writes Malaspina, and “without redundancy, the pure novelty of information would be absolutely incomprehensible and equivalent with noise.”38 The structure is redundant because it is certain; the message is novel because it is uncertain. For Malaspina, information is the “progressive unfolding of this relation between certainty and uncertainty.”39
These dialectical notions of “constraint” and “uncertainty” slide naturally into Jameson’s notion of History as the totality. He concludes the first chapter of The Political Unconscious by definining such a History to be “the experience of Necessity,” where Necessity is the “the operation of objective limits.”40 One cannot help but hear something of a pessimistic rhyme with Malaspina: Necessity is the part of History that imposes a constraint, that part of History which exerts non-local causality on subjects when it “refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.”41 Necessity is the container and History is its shape, nowhere immanently present yet everywhere making itself known through its effects.
In this sense, the “history of class struggles” is also a History of information warfare, where the ever-present but uncertain potentiality of Communism must always be precluded by Necessity— what Malaspina identifies as that which “cannot not be, or cannot be otherwise.”42 It marks the degree to which the future is predicted in advance, the degree to which it is certain. Freedom of choice is eliminated in the structure of redundancies which are constantly made more complex to ensnare each new avenue of collective possibility. Though this fractionalisation and individuation occurs at every level of society, the city in particular is the site of a dramatic expansion of surveillance under the guise of “contact tracing.” Writing for Failed Architecture, Kevin Rogan identifies the “impenetrable system of rational control” that so-called “smart cities” would impose on collective spaces in the name of stopping the spread of the coronavirus as not itself new in principle—“The first factories were spaces under surveillance, as were colonial holdings, and the tactic was absolutely essential in maintaining slavery at every stage, from ship’s hold to plantation.” What is actually new is the degree to which “every facet of life has been made quantifiable in order to make this all possible.” The (re-)rationalization of the individual becomes the predicate for the (re-)rationalization of the city, and both are subject to new re-divisions as necessary.
Perhaps that’s part of the reason for Wark’s fidelity to empiricism. She very clearly identifies liberatory potential in the hacker class’ capacity to produce novelty and difference. Extending the notion of information and its component parts of sameness and difference through a totalizing History would mean dealing with the uncomfortable truth that producing the “new” is not only not unique to hackers but also has often been the task of the ascendant ruling classes at the moment of their victory. Building the new Republic meant not only beheading Louis XVI but also heading off that possibility for a deeper collective liberation which has accompanied the poor, the unemployed, the landless and the marginalized since the fall from primitive communism. The Herbertists were beheaded, too.
For all its apparent pessimism that this might not be capitalism anymore but Something Worse, Wark’s arc of history still bends towards a future defined by the liberation of information from the constraints of the vector by the hacker class. When Wark declares “Communism is dead” it is because she herself actually misunderstands Communism as a telos. But Communism isn’t just in the future, it’s also our past. At every juncture of the historical process the impetus for collective liberation has been present, always existing as a potentiality—something that could happen—from slave revolts to Peasant Wars to Reconstruction. Wark is right to see the predictive power of big data as a threat: prediction means the pre-emption of the possibility that things could be otherwise, the death of a potentiality.
When we understand capital as “dead labor,” we can begin to see it in the terms of History and Necessity. Dead labor is labor that no longer has the capacity to be other than what it is—it is now crystallized in the form of capital by Necessity. Capital is, in its most basic terms, the time the oppressed classes could’ve spent doing something else but were instead forced to work for the benefit of the ruling classes. It is in this way that the increasingly perfect knowledge of the ruling class about our locations and trajectories is a sort of enclosure of the future itself, turning it into capital by analogy with dead labor—our time which can no longer be spent otherwise. It is in these terms that capital itself is also continuous with pre-capitalist systems of control. The processes of enclosure which created capital are themselves paradoxically legible in terms of capital via our expanded concept of information.
From our 21st century perspective we can see that capital isn’t dead, it’s actually much worse. It has built an informational time machine and has headed back to the first divisions of labor so that it could become what it was always going to be. Maybe in this sense, it really is eternal: caught in a loop of constant re-enclosure and re-division to chop up our potentialities and wall them off into so many individual subjects or labor markets until the environmental bottom falls out. But, to quote Jameson, again: “History is what hurts.”43 As long as the ruling classes perpetually try to force us back into the meat grinder of primitive accumulation for another go-round, we can know for sure that we are still alive, History hasn’t stopped, and other futures are still open to us if we aren’t afraid to theorize them.
Discourse related to the concept of emotional labor can highlight the way capitalism distorts our humanity or merely naturalize capitalism, argues Richard Hunsinger.
I spend most of my days at a front desk, staring at a window with a grate over it. I watch the light change as the hours crawl. The room is an icebox, but since I am the first face anyone sees, I must be warm. My work can be summed up as an extra layer of emails that others must go through for scheduling with my superiors, processing payments, and ordering food and arranging rooms for meetings. I smooth out the tasks that others formerly had to do themselves. This role is designed to maximize the efficiency of the office functions of the organization. I have nearly perfected the process for email responses and calendar surveys, and reliably make payments on time. In down moments, I read the news or talk to people on Twitter. The 9-5 consistency and the chance to have the most pay I have ever been offered was something I knew I wanted, at least to avoid the precarity of other jobs. But between this schedule and living on the other side of town for lower rent, I’ve been kept from time with friends. The internet is often where I feel closest to anyone. I have never uploaded a picture to my work email because I am not there.
Here and there, complications come up that ruffle the smoothness expected from my performance. Sometimes there is not enough food at meetings. People might want hotel rooms booked for a large group with less than a week in advance to a popular location, and to add extra people at the actual last minute. Often I am sent payment information with incorrect routing numbers, delaying the transaction. Important people show up for meetings hidden from my calendars, asking about details not shared with me. When they sense my confusion, their brows furrow. I smile and think of something charming to say, hoping to see the tension in their facial muscles relax. When these moments happen, I do what I can to assuage concern and I keep things going.
The other day, this did not go as planned and food went pretty quickly. Someone important commented on my unsanitary handling of food. Others sat where it had been served, and getting more in the room ended up being difficult, so it was a distraction. My boss called me in for a meeting, asked what I thought went wrong, and gave me more precise directions on how to avoid this in the future. A professional development class is suggested. I am asked if I think this job is still a good fit for me. I think they are trying to see if I would quit on my own. There is a brief and quick flash of what I think is fear, as I immediately think of my rent, cost of food, other job prospects. That I am burdened with knowing these difficulties, while the present moment depends on me not betraying this, brings a lump to my throat, and I feel the pressure behind my eyes. Is this really about to make me cry? I hold it back, I smile, I assure them that I want to be successful. I take the notes down, I listen to suggestions for how I can order food better. I think about going home, and the next 5 hours until my partner gets home and I can see her again.
I realize that I am expected to perform an emotional ideal much of the time at my work. This has been true for all of my working life. This is not a unique experience in the life of the collective worker today and has given rise to a growing discourse on the subject of emotional labor. It spills out into new avenues of discussion of what exactly it comprises, and where the line between our exploitation and our personal lives exactly lies. In this discourse, it is not at all unusual to come across a wide range of positions, experiences, and reactions. Some attribute the discourse on emotional labor to an ideological basis, that this is simply a form of liberalism gone amok. There are those who see this as a symptom of the most recent, cogent reformation of capitalism’s development, neoliberalism and see it as a totality of marketizing emotional relations between social peers. This appears more accurate, yet more often than not glosses over exactly why the exploitation of labor now increasingly relies upon an assurance of the emotional presentation of the worker, and worse tends to display a tenuous grasp on what “neoliberalism” means except as a bogeyman for today’s ills.
What I seek to achieve here is a grounding of emotional labor as such within the context of Marxist political economy. We must see the discourse surrounding this phenomenon as a process in motion interrelated with the development of labor’s exploitation in an economy that has seen a dramatic rise in its consumer service sector. This acts as an arena of exploitation where the laborer’s access to the wage is increasingly under the watchful eye of every consumer and supervisor. From this, we can see what the growth of emotional labor as a discursive regime reveals to us about the state of alienation in the development of capitalism of late.
We have to begin this analysis with the understanding that, as proletarians and wage-workers in a capitalist mode of production, we have nothing to offer in order to reproduce ourselves except our capacity to sell labor-power as a commodity to the capitalist. This labor-power, as a commodity, must possess both a use-value for its buyer and an exchange-value for its seller. The use-value here is the capacity to perform a given amount of labor within a given amount of time. We must do this in order to earn our wage, the exchange-value for labor-power expressed as a price. We do this in order to use said wage to purchase our means of subsistence, sold to us in commodity form. The key here is that, for the proletariat in a society where the capitalist mode of production prevails, a basic survival and a guarantee of some quality of life depends upon the capacity to sell labor-power and to find a buyer. We must search for a master even if there exists no desire for such.
To this end, what is to be understood of the exploitation of emotional labor as pertains to the working life of wage laborers? Emotional labor is a term coined by Arlie Russell Hochschild, to give a name to the experience of the worker in managing, and through this, suppressing, their expressions and behavior in order to fulfill the emotional demands of a job. Hochschild finds three common elements to employment that require the use of emotional labor by the worker: “First, they require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public. Second, they require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person — gratitude or fear, for example. Third, they allow the employer, through training and supervision, to exercise a degree of control over the emotional activities of employees.”1
These can be seen every day in almost any job that requires some form of interaction between the worker and a consumer or superior. The use-value of labor-power as a commodity in these jobs is reliant upon the capacity of the worker to both give an emotional performance and induce a specific affect in those they engage throughout. The worker is alienated not only from their labor-power, but also from their genuine emotional expression. We need not look far to find examples in gig economy jobs, work supposedly “autonomized” by a decentralized coordination of services via app, many of which impose a customer ratings system for every transaction made.
This is made even more clear when taking into account the rapid growth of employment in the service sector, encompassing a wide variety of professions and requiring constant interaction with the public as consumers. The growth of employment in service-based industries is far outpacing that of employment in direct manufacturing and production in the United States, and is expected to keep doing so over the course of the next decade.2 The stability of the wage in US capitalism of today, and thus the use-value of labor-power, is increasingly reliant on a capacity of the worker to perform an emotional labor in transactions: satisfy the boss and constantly ease the conscience of the customer, thus reifying the commodity in its exchange, transforming it into money, and allowing for capital’s reproduction to proceed accordingly. Though in Hochschild’s original research, published in the early 1980s, she found a prevalence for this type of employment in the clerical office and retail-oriented work of what then constituted the so-called middle classes, she offers a prescient observation for the future of this phenomenon:
“If jobs that call for emotional labor grow and expand with the spread of automation and the decline of unskilled labor — as some analysts believe they will — this general social track may spread much further across other social classes. If this happens, the emotional system itself — emotion work, feeling rules, and social exchange, as they come into play in a ‘personal control system’ — will grow in importance as a way through which people are persuaded and controlled both on the job and off. If, on the other hand, automation and the decline of unskilled labor leads to a decline in emotional labor, as machines replace the personal delivery of services, then this general social track may come to be replaced by another that trains people to be controlled in more impersonal ways.”3
The US economic situation of today is one of a rapidly deindustrializing imperial core. As a site of capital-intensive production that has shed living labor from its processes and automated many jobs out of existence, US development to date has given rise to a growing relative surplus population whose primary objective as a labor force is the circulation and consumption of commodities through sale and purchase. The privileged position of the US as a site to capture extracted surplus value from more labor-intensive production chains in global peripheries no longer supports the buffer from class struggle that the construction of a middle class once provided. As capital accumulation has intensified and reached new limits that pose as barriers to capital’s expanded reproduction, more avenues for circulation must be opened up. Over the past 40 years, during what can be understood as the neoliberal regime of accumulation, even the imperial core has seen the slashing and gutting of social support services from governments. This has led to increased privatization of that which used to sustain a state-supported social reproduction of the workforce and a degree of class mobility in the so-called middle classes. This onset of privatization and the accompanying deregulation of the financial industry that aided it can be seen as a period where capital accumulation outstripped the limits on profitability imposed by state-supported services towards social reproduction, as the organization of capital and labor underwent structural transformations on a global scale.4
It is important to contextualize this historically. The very reason that we see growing awareness of the exploitation of emotional labor, the fundamental coercion of this performance, is structured by the wage relation in this specific historical trajectory. This moment brings us upon convergence between, on the one hand, a stagnant, deindustrializing manufacturing sector placing the US proletariat more and more into jobs involving interpersonal social interactions, and, on the other, an era where the social reproduction of the proletariat as a workforce has increasingly failed. The expectation of emotional performance in the work environment, as well as the increased dominance of working life over personal life to accommodate for decades of suppressed wage growth to maintain profitability5, has led to an exhaustion of emotional capacity in personal life. The awareness of this has become a defining characteristic to the way that we understand alienation in capitalist society today.
At the base of all processes of capital accumulation is a separation, as in Marx’s “primitive accumulation” and Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession,” that acts to form the constitutive social relation between classes of production for exchange that is capital. In the instance of the worker’s emotional capacity as use-value of the commodity labor-power, a further separation is occurring. No longer is it simply the alienation of the worker from their labor-power, but now from emotional expression in this capacity as worker. Affect is commodified, and its appropriation as such here is with the intent to subvert the emotional capacity of the worker to the aims of capital. But as stated above, in the context of this period of capitalism’s countertendencies to declining profitability deployed with an intensifying aggression, we are approaching a severe limit to capital’s reproduction process. To this end, the commodity of labor-power, now as a commodified capacity to provide emotional labor in working life, is pushed to a limit in accordance with the demands of capital’s continued reproduction, and only moves to continually reach beyond that limit as capital stands on the verge of another crisis once again. We, as an increasingly debt-encumbered proletariat, sense this crisis every day. Every day at work is another day we must bear a false smile and perform positive emotional well-being if we are to stave off the looming threats of eviction, starvation, and immiseration that losing our job entails. The alienation of ourselves from autonomy over our emotions as the use-value of emotional labor is thus not only for the benefit of any given customer, but for the stability of the whole of capitalist society.
This brings us to Hochschild’s ominous foretelling of a “personal control system” above, as we have seen this degree of social alienation drastically restructure social life today. Susan Willis posits in discussing the political economy of domestic labor, in the example of the use-value of the married mother at home that in this instance does not fold the laundry, “it is only the failure to create use-value that can be made visible.”6 For the use-value of emotional labor, it is vital that the veneer of the laborer’s emotional state exists for the smooth realization of commodity value in exchange, and thus accumulation, to proceed uninterrupted. The failure to provide this exposes a dissatisfaction that reveals that the worker’s emotional performance is just that, a performance, and exposes all to the coercive regimes of personal control that we are all subject to under a life structured by the need to work for a wage. To this end, we find ourselves simultaneously existing at the other end of Hochschild’s prediction, where now a growing number of service-related jobs are also being automated out of existence. We need look no further than the growth of cashier-less lines at grocery stores and commodities delivered by Amazon drones. These systems themselves will never be free of human labor, though they certainly train us to internalize the fact that under the domination of the class relation of capital all human life is effectively disposable. The exploitation of living labor is merely a problem of geographic reorganization to areas where another section of the proletariat will bear the burdens of production.
We are now faced with a situation where, on the one hand, we are under the duress of an increasingly alienated and impoverished social life. This is carried out in exploitation of increasing intensity that pits us smiling, unwillingly, in front of any passing stranger that wishes to make a purchase. We are thus less emotionally reliable than any machine that may take our place. On the other hand, capital can not exist without our pliable consent to its processes and must sustain us. But this is now only possible in an environment where we are increasingly deprived of the time for the most emotionally fulfilling, deeply personal moments necessary for our own reproduction. The immobility of this immanent contradiction to capital’s expanded reproduction has driven us to a new discursive terrain for emotional labor, as we are increasingly aware of the contradiction and its effects.
There is the understanding that emotional labor, as contextualized within the working environment, is coercion of sentiment from the worker to induce a specific emotional affect in the consumer. This is fundamentally different from the role emotion plays for us in daily life, untethered to the demands of a job. To a social life amongst people outside of work, the use of our emotions is to be of authentic expression, fundamental to all communication. The labor of emotion in a context free of the wage-relation is not inherently a coerced act but part of our metabolism with ourselves and each other in social life for our own ends, for both pleasure and pain alike. To experience this as alienated labor for the drive of capital is to subvert this to the demands of the economic dictums of a mode of production that sells us back to each other in dead, objectified forms.
There is also the reaction of those who see emotional labor as coercion in life outside of the wage: the application of an awareness of the exploitation of emotional labor as a process to be mediated through an exchange where one previously did not exist. This has resulted in the notorious phrase “venmo me for my emotional labor,” a phrase that today is not always clearly situated in a space of either sincerity or irony. Phrases like “venmo me for my emotional labor” tend to draw severe ire in many online circles, and I can be sure many reading this have witnessed and participated in moments where they’ve seen this phrase used. The phenomenon to which this is a reaction to is certainly real. As seen above, it is also clearly rooted in a material situation of the prevalence of the exploitation of emotional labor. However, the application of the framework of emotional labor to interpersonal communication outside of waged work, if it aims to be a position that seeks to challenge oppression, does so by further naturalizing capitalist social relations, and thus fails.
It is certainly healthy and important to have emotional boundaries and to operate on the basis of consensual interaction in social life, but to do so by formalizing the emotional and making further transactional interpersonal experience amongst each other is to reify the customer-worker dynamic that prevails under wage labor. In the more vulgar iterations of this, we may see demands of monetary compensation for emotional labor. To seek to address emotional labor in this manner is to take up a rigidly economic line of reasoning that abandons the possibility of redeeming the social significance of the emancipatory use of our emotions for ourselves and each other while in the process merely affirming exchange-value as the basis for struggle and the measure of all value. There is no possibility here beyond a grafting of our exploited life onto the social, and falls prey to the same misgivings of those that call for the payment of labor its “full value” in the wage; a far cry from the emancipation of labor and the self-abolition of the proletariat, leading only to momentary placation until the next wage battle.
The quickness to invoke the issue of interpersonal emotional labor is, however, part of our collective rage at present — the era of human feeling being ripped from its bearers so we can buy and sell commodities more efficiently as the ship goes down once again. The displacement of this rage onto each other can appear a sound move, as such action amongst our own class is less prone to incur a retaliation that may have an immediate effect on needs such as food and shelter. It is the condition of having to sell one’s labor for a wage to purchase these means of subsistence that stands as the primary cause of our emotional exhaustion. The hegemony of work-life prevents us from critiquing these conditions deeply; from realizing that the wage is a scam for a rote labor of performative friendliness, politeness, denial of our free-time, emotionally taxing work-relations of sociability, or, at worst, dealing with the verbally abusive treatment common to the service industry. It is all incredibly draining, and it is no wonder that this current discursive trend exists. Insisting on a transaction to mediate emotional support might be the most revealing symptom of the domination of capitalist social relations. But bearing resentment towards friends needing emotional support should be recognized as a symptom of this. It obscures the origin of our dissatisfaction in the domination of our lives by the irrational demands of capital. If you’re looking for a target for the rage, take on the boss, the landlord, the capitalist, and abolish their class, for it is only through this conquest and transcendence of the capital relation that we may see the end of this exploitation of our emotional labor.
Colin Drumm reviews McKenzie Wark’s latest book, ‘Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse’ (Verso Books, October 2019).
“How wearisome / Eternity so spent in worship paid / To whom we hate.” So grumbles Milton’s Mammon at the council of angels, fanning the flames of their incipient revolt. Even the failure of rebellion must, surely, be preferable to the indignity of mouthing endless praises to an enemy who holds us in subjection — so why not throw the dice? To play the part of Mammon at the council of Marxists is a task that only an especially brave or reckless individual could take up, but that is exactly what McKenzie Wark, in her new offering from Verso, has done. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? is an intervention into the political-economic discourse of the so-called “critical humanities” which is not so much timely as it is long overdue: those who read it should, in the opinion of this reviewer at least, hurry up and listen to what Wark has to say before they waste any more of their time (which is to say, any more of our time, which is precious and dwindling rapidly) chasing the ghosts of dead ideas. If Wark is right — which she surely is, at least in broad outline if not in every proposition or detail — then the “critics of capitalism” are, and have been for some time, laying siege to a heavenly fortress whose treasury has long since been secreted away, elsewhere. Perhaps it is time to pack up our theoretical cannons and redeploy. We should, as Wark almost begs in the book’s opening pages, “at least entertain the thought experiment that this is no longer capitalism at all. Curiously, the attempt to make this thought experiment meets with strong resistance. Even critical theory seems very emotionally attached to the notion that capitalism still goes on, and on.”
Wark’s argument proceeds from this point along two interwoven trajectories, the first of which entertains the “thought experiment,” while the second analyzes the “curious” resistance with which it is met. The claims of the first line of argument are fairly modest, and this modesty is a strength of the book: Wark has some speculations about how we might theorize the “new mode of production” whose existence the thought experiment hypothesizes, but these have more the feel of thinking aloud than of authoritative pronouncements. The stakes of agreeing or disagreeing with Wark’s precise formulations of the “Something Worse” in which we now live are, therefore, fairly low: while there are a lot of interesting and generative ideas here, which I will discuss in more detail below, the most important point is that we feel with Wark the freedom to think beyond “heirloom concepts like ‘capitalism’” which we “did not make ourselves” and thus “have come to take for granted.” If we begin to think in this way, if we burn the inheritance of our received ideas and strike out into the future without them, then we will surely be told “by some professor who has tenure… that Marx already explained everything in some obscure footnote in Volume 2 of Capital and that [we] should read the distinguished professor’s very long exegesis of it” — but what if we just… don’t? What if we resist the demands of what Wark calls the “genteel Marxists” of the university to pay obeisance to their archive, and instead have the courage to think again from scratch? In doing so, of course, we would only be following in the footsteps of the Old Man himself: “Marx,” as Wark notes, “was not a professor, did not have tenure, and was trying to explain both continuity and change in his own historical time.” To anyone truly committed to the ruthless critique of everything existing, there are no concepts and no figures so sacred that they cannot be abandoned like so much ballast, should the need arise: our fidelity to the tradition might demand that we abandon its every letter. Do not think, then, that McKenzie Wark has come to abolish Marxism. She did not come to destroy, but to fulfill.
In contrast to the modesty of its positive political economy, the book’s analysis of the resistance which greets the mere attempt at performing such a thought experiment is incisive and daring — or at least as daring as any attempt to speak open secrets aloud must necessarily be. This open secret is, of course, that Marxism has the structure of a theology:
The end of the dominance of capitalism as a mode of production is not a subject that has received much attention. For its devotees, it has no end, as it is itself the end of History. For its enemies, it can only end in Communism. If Communism — a state that exists mostly in the imaginal realm, always deferred into the future — has not prevailed, then this by definition must still be the reign of Capital… the present is defined mostly in terms of a hoped-for negation of it. Some theology!… The concept of Capital is theological precisely to the extent that questions of its possible surpassing by other exploitative modes of production remain off limits.
Even Marxists who think of themselves as materialists, Wark argues, have become committed to an idealist view of history (which she traces to to the influence of Louis Althusser) envisaging “an eternal essence to Capital” which “until the moment of negation… can change in its appearances but never its essence.” This possibility for a constant play of appearances around an eternal essential core of Capital was “like catnip to academic Marxists” who went on to build an industry of theorizing ‘capitalism plus adjective’: “necro capitalism, communicative capitalism, cognitive capitalism, platform capitalism,” and so on. But this vast terrain of modifications is ‘theologically closed’ in Wark’s terms insofar as it is structured around a negative concept of emancipation: “Emancipation is thought negatively as emancipation from capitalism. Therefore, the negative of emancipation must be capitalism.” What this philosophically idealist conception of history forecloses from the outset, however, is the possibility that capitalism itself has already become historical; that it has already been put into the past but by something other than what we had been expecting. What if the Messiah didn’t come… but somebody else did? “God is dead,” writes Wark. “Communism is dead. It is, at best, the legacy code of the Chinese ruling elite.” Pronouncements which will earn her some derision and hate mail, to be sure. But at the same time, is there not something exciting, something perhaps even a bit liberatory, in being given permission to think anew?
To cross the boundaries of theological closure is to become a heretic. What happens, then, if we become heretics against Marxism by abandoning its most fundamental set of historical-eschatological coordinates? If we cease to believe in the God whose name is Capital and decline to spend eternity in a worshipful critique of its totalizing power and infinite mutability? One possibility would be to become like the “former Marxists” who, as Wark puts it, “made a good living in the ‘free world’ coming up with… alternative epic poems” to the narrative about capitalism and its theological negation being forwarded by the orthodoxy of the Soviet Union:
These former Marxists would sing the glories of the ‘managerial revolution’ of the ‘postindustrial society’… What these epic narratives all had in common was that they accepted the basic Marxist combinatory of terms for understanding History. They conceded its power, its poetry. But they changed the ending. Rather than negation, the story ends with Capital resolving its own contradictions.
It is surely, in large part at least, experience with such ‘post-capitalist’ apologetics for an exploitative and violent social order that explains the fact that “when people hear the beginnings of a story about this no longer being capitalism, their resistance generally rises. Unless you happen to be worth several million dollars, the chances are you do not perceive [our current social order] as something better than capitalism or a capitalism that always improves on itself.” We do not need to spend any time entertaining right-Hegelian apologetics of this kind: obviously, to any intellectually serious and politically engaged observer, contradictions and antagonisms abound. But we can and should, Wark insists, at least explore the option of taking “the other fork of possible epic-poetic combinations of terms. Instead of the line that this is not capitalism, it’s better, what if we explored the line that this is not capitalism, but worse?” We would then find ourselves within the conceptual terrain of an atheism against the God of Capital, a pessimism against the optimism of Cold War revisionists, and an “a-communism” against the messianic expectations of the thesis according to which anything that is not-yet communism must still-be capitalism.
Once we have become willing to entertain the possibility of such a heresy, what is there to say about its content? What would our new pessimistic political economy look like? Wark’s basic thesis is that the late 20th century marked the emergence of a new mode of production, coexisting alongside others, whose constitutive class antagonism centers not around control of the means of production but around control of “the infrastructure on which information is routed, whether through time or space,” which Wark calls “the vector.” Marx theorized a mode of production based around the accumulation of assets in the form of fixed capital, or machines, the exclusive control of which gave the owner access to an arbitrage play between what Marx called “price” and “cost-price,” or the difference between the average socially necessary labor required to produce a commodity and the actual labor costs of particular producers, who might be able to lower their cost-price below the general market price by investing in machines that gave their production process a technological (by which Marx meant, axiomatically, a labor-saving) advantage. This depends upon the assumption that all instances of a given commodity are identical and substitutable for one another: the argument depends upon the claim that all commodities of a given kind must sell at the same price: a nail is a nail is a nail. What a worker produces, when they produce a commodity, is something that is characterized at an ontological level by absolute identity: “The workplace nightmare of the worker,” as Wark puts it, “is having to make the same thing, over and over, against the pressure of the clock.”
But things are different if we consider not capital but the vector, or the ability to manufacture, control, and exploit situations of information asymmetry. The informational economy, according to Wark, is marked not by an original scarcity which must be overcome by production (a lack of nails solved by the making of nails) but by an original abundance: “Information wants to be free but it is everywhere in chains. Information is no longer scarce, it is infinitely replicable, cheap to store, cheap to transmit, and yet the whole premise of the commodity is its scarcity.” What Wark calls “the vectoralist class” must, therefore, in order to become the class that it is, develop “the legal and technical protocols for making otherwise abundant information scarce.” Part of this set of “protocols,” or what Wark at one point analogizes to the operating system upon which a regime of elite power and accumulation runs, is the legal apparatus of intellectual property, in which the key ontological dimension is not identity, as in the case of the commodity, but difference: “The hacker class produces new information. But what is ‘new’ information? It is whatever intellectual property law recognizes as new… the workplace nightmare of the hacker is to produce different things, over and over, against the pressure of the clock.” This new mode of production, Wark’s thought experiment speculates, has given rise to a new owning class, the vectoralists, who have subordinated the industrialists in the same way that the industrialists subordinated the feudal landlords, and has done so by means of their ability to exploit the hacker class’s production of new information.
Wark’s point is not that the hacker class should replace Marx’s industrial proletariat in its role as the protagonist of history. She does not claim, at any point in the text, that the hacker class carries with it any inherent revolutionary potential. Her point is merely that it exists, and that we might have some good theoretical reasons to believe that what we are looking at is a system quite qualitatively distinct from that which our tradition has been in the habit of theorizing. While Capital, Wark points out, theorizes an ideal-type system with two classes, “in his political writings it is clear that he understands social formations as hybrids of combined and overlapping modes of production… So here I’m simply taking my cue from the political writings and thinking a matrix of six classes, three ruling and three subordinate.” Wark’s sketch of a theory of political economy entails three dimensions of antagonism which are really three different ontologies of labor: “Where the farmer grows crops through a seasonal cycle and the worker stamps out repetitive units of commodities, the hacker has to use their time in a different way, to turn the same old information into new.” Each of these ontologies of labor can be seen as producing its own, qualitatively distinct class antagonism, around which form multiple and socially distinct owning classes: landlords, capitalists, and vectoralists, respectively.
Wark locates the historical rise of the vectoralist class in the crisis of the seventies, when the technological development of a “vast, global infrastructure in which information enabled the control of flows of money, machines, resources, and labor” formed the material basis for the process generally known as neoliberalization “to globalize banking and build vast international supply chains to combine components of a manufacturing process from all over the world.” The development, Wark suggests, marked a transformation by which “the state form of the former East prevailed in the former West. The vector is not just a means of transforming production. It is also a way of transforming state power… The new model worldwide uses the vector to realize the dreams of the KGB of old.” With this transformation, Wark intones, we now find ourselves in a West which has become a “former West,” our economy transformed by the rise of the vector and its owners into something that is no longer capitalism, but worse. “To the vector the spoils.”
Whatever one thinks of the precise details of Wark’s positive argument, the fact that it is presented as a mere thought experiment, in a book of only 169 pages, tends to disarm any impulse to dismiss the book based on disagreement with any particular proposition. The story that Wark tells in the book is, for example, completely devoid of any attention to the macroeconomic and geopolitical context of the structural transformation of the 70s in which she locates the rise of our new vectoralist oppressors, but at the end of the day, this simply does not matter. What does matter about the book is that she demonstrates the possibility, and indeed the immense value, in thinking aloud a possibility which we have thus far generally not permitted ourselves to think: that capitalism might be over even if communism didn’t come. This is, as Wark correctly diagnoses, a theological problem, a conflict between heresy and orthodoxy, and such disputes are not known for their resolution through rational debate and elaboration of evidence. The real value of the book lies in the fact that those who have already found themselves thinking along similar lines might find in it the permission to think freely. Can we, as Wark exhorts us, unleash our “inner punk rock goddesses” and finally, at long last, relinquish Marx? Well. Maybe. It’s at least a possibility.
Richard Hunsinger argues that migrant concentration camps represent a descent into fascist barbarism and are related to the inherent tendencies of capitalism.
Today the left has come to a common acceptance that the detention centers in which migrants are incarcerated are concentration camps. Despite its truth, this claim has been reduced to a popular point of partisan contention in the spectacle of institutional political theater. While it is important and necessary to expose the routine abuse and murder of those incarcerated in these camps, track ICE raids across the US, and organize legal support to confront these abuses in court, this is not enough. We also need an understanding of how these concentration camps are not merely an aberration of fascism alone but an organic development of late capitalism’s crisis management.
What we are witnessing is not a phenomenon that can be divorced from capital accumulation and the global production process in the imperial epoch. This brutal reality in the last instance is a product of capitalism in its stages of crisis. What we see in the border concentration camps and the privatization model implemented through them is a sustainability measure for capital in its spiraling descent into a new global fascism from which no extant faction of US institutional politics is exempt.
Private incarceration is often framed as a particular abuse within capitalist society so that it may serve as a point of contrast between the two major political parties. Yet from this perspective the crucial role private incarceration plays in the expansion of capital is obscured. A Marxist view of the situation reveals privatization to be an increasingly important mechanism for the appropriation of surplus-value created in production, especially in the past 40 years. It is a further development of the private-property relations fundamental to the capitalist mode of production and the reproduction of capitalist society. In its reproduction, capital overtakes and seizes conventional state functions. Capital here does not eclipse or obliterate the state but merely changes its form. Capital realizes its totalizing logic in the state, exceeds the state, and re-appropriates it as a mechanism for accumulation and concentration.
It is no surprise to see the familiar villains of this industry at work behind these atrocities. 72% of incarcerated migrants are held in privately-owned camps, the bulk of them owned by CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group, two of the US’s most enduring and powerful figures of the private-prison industry. The contracts these private entities have with ICE are extremely lucrative, the two companies earned a combined $985 million from them in 2017 alone. Even greater capital investments lie in the many other privately-contracted services necessary to the overall function of the camps, from telephone services to healthcare and everything in between.
The further integration of the concentration camp as a model for capitalism’s sustainability is these prison corporations’ function as sites for the accumulation of finance capital through bank investments, a practice in which many major banking institutions take part. Some have pulled out this year due to public pressure generated from direct action efforts, but they may just as easily creep back into the game. The finance capital that has already been accumulated is now strategically reserved in the form of money-capital as these corporations weather the PR crisis. We can be certain that they are ready for us to stop paying attention.
CoreCivic and GEO Group also heavily involve themselves in political lobbying. The proximity of these corporations to Trump and the GOP often takes center stage in public discourse, but left out are the many contributions they make to Democrats. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee received $350,000 in contributions from private-prison industry lobbyists during the 2018 midterm election cycle alone, and there are still instances of individual Democratic candidates accepting gifts and contributions from lobbyists for the industry. What is clear is that capital’s investment in the infrastructure for genocide has bipartisan support and that the false politics represented by the electoral spectacle must not cloud that reality.
America’s failing representative democracy is now infected with a resurgent nationalism that erects itself as a psychological support to the contradiction between capital’s free global movement across borders and the simultaneous restriction of similar movement of labor. Today, the stirrings of a new industrial revolution are already underway and, combined with the looming threat of climate-driven scarcity, are producing a fractured consciousness. People fall back on secure notions of identity and self found in the nation-state.
The political buzzword now adopted by Republicans and Democrats alike is “economic nationalism.” The old rallying cry of “American jobs for American workers” is also a bi-partisan talking point, revealing the reactionary one-party state that has always dominated the US working class. In the case of the concentration camps on the border, then, we should not be fooled by either party’s posturing in addressing the matter. The dual crises of capital and ecology, as well as the descent into fascism, is well out of the hands of any managerial bureaucracy. Behind their blithe opportunism, we must understand that any party will easily maintain the existence of these camps. The nomadic proletariat made real in the Global South’s displacement to the imperial core become a relative surplus population (or industrial reserve army) for the servants of capital, to be absorbed and managed, but not without the creation of an apparatus which can still capture surplus-value. Capitalist society must not waste a chance to further capital’s self-valorization, regardless of its current political commitments.
This holds true for the current upswing in popular support for social democratic reforms in US politics. Social democratic policy prescriptions for capital’s crises and growing racial and class conflict is gaining traction on the right. For example, Tucker Carlson, on his Fox News show, now engages with critiques of free-market capitalism previously foreign to US conservatives, even inviting Angela Nagle, a so-called leftist cultural critic, on as a guest. The manifesto of the El Paso shooter similarly criticizes the failures of American capitalism while supporting social democratic reforms, such as UBI and universal healthcare, to mitigate class conflict while also advocating for an increasingly popular ethnonationalism. In the politics of the nationalist project, to which social democracy unquestionably belongs, the left side of this debate deploys much of the same rhetoric and critiques of “corporatism,” and similarly will not be able to evade the question of border protection and immigration policy that its politics demands of it. Let us not forget that Bernie Sanders too reaffirmed in the last Democratic primary debate his commitment to “stronger border protections.” The project of social democracy, or more generally that of the welfare state, is situated in an imperialist world economy that relies on the exploitation and underdevelopment of the Global South, though it dare not say so out loud.
Furthermore, left projects organizing support on a grassroots level to support these reformist initiatives must remain conscious of the limitations of the nationalist project. Whether there is a claim to reject American nationalism or not, this is the sphere of political action these projects occupy. As Medicare For All gains traction and continues to poll well, dangerous coalitions will form. The migrant as nomadic proletariat here serves a dual function for nationalist politics.
On the one hand, the migrant is that from which the national subject itself must be separate from in order to constitute itself. This separation creates a sense of lack, which is supported by the need it institutes. This psychical manufacture of need supported by a lack finds its material mirror in capitalism’s “original sin” of primitive accumulation, the act of separating laborers from their means of production, initiating the productive consumption of means of subsistence in commodity form. This displacement is the base of capital accumulation and the origin of the proletariat. For capital accumulation to continue, this displacement must continually occur, and it is that which we see functioning in the nomadic proletariat’s creation. But this nomadic proletariat’s existence and movement to the imperial core is contradicted by the core’s reliance on the increasingly fragile social ties of nationality and citizenship wrought by internal displacements for capital accumulation. The nomadic proletariat as migrant becomes a visible sign of these weakening ties, and national identity disintegrates if it absorbs them. The social organization of citizenship must remain separate from the core’s global economic entanglements if displacement as a base of capital accumulation is to continue to function. To that end, it becomes a useful development for the bearers of capital to be able to point to that which is other from the national subject, to then displace the migrant psychically as well as materially, to make them a symbol of that which is lacking in the national subject and use the need thus manufactured to maintain the drive of productive consumption towards accumulation. The political fiction of the nation, therefore, relies on the construction of such lack, and the US national citizen of today is only constituted in so far as it is not the migrant.
This is where a further need for reform is injected. “American capitalism must be reformed, look at what it is doing to our jobs!” But, as we are not materially separate from a global production process, this return of the need for social democratic reform is then directed towards the consumption of the Global South, its people and its raw material, at the service of the imperial core’s appetite. We are comfortable, then, to see an infrastructure of state support as what we lack, and in turn to see the migrant as the visible manifestation of the state’s failures. This is the implication that the bi-partisan refrain of “economic nationalism” relies upon, for the ability to symbolize lack as such conceals the real process of production that truly directs the phenomena and the relations of which the nationalist project must conceal in order to sustain its fantasy.
This brings us to the other hand of this dual function. Forming amongst the anti-corporate strains of US politics is an understanding of the mutual share of responsibility that Republicans and Democrats possess in their inability to counter the tide of corporate influence, instead taking part in the full transformation of the state into a model of realization for capital. For both the rational actors of the right and the left, the clear reality is that the influence of corporations in politics has utterly compromised all positions on immigration, as many of these large corporations are reliant to some degree on the exploitation of cheaper labor from a nomadic proletariat. This is to an extent correct, but they fail to extend the analysis to encompass capital’s reproduction on a global scale and its role in producing the nomadic proletariat.
Considering the origin of these displacements that have created this nomadic proletariat, we must take into account the long history of US military and political intervention in the affairs of Latin American states which lays a foundation for current waves of migration. Latin American intervention, the intentional and violent arrangements of political power in those countries for the benefit of US interests, is a history with a clear end-goal, and that has been the dominance over the claim to ownership of surplus-value created in production by multinational corporations, that have in turn enforced monocultural agricultural production, super-exploitation, and further alienation of those laborers from that which they produce.
The agricultural production of Latin American countries is now being affected by climate change as well. This will continue to be a crucial contributing factor to the rise in migration to the United States. The ensuing displacement of these countries’ domestic labor populations is now already exacerbated by the hegemonic relationship, exercised through imperialist foreign and economic policy, between the United States and other such Western liberal democracies over said countries’ production. The result is an increasingly dispossessed and immiserated proletariat in frequently unstable social, political, and economic situations. Such trade agreements as NAFTA and the new USMCA consolidate private ownership of sites of production in Latin American countries, facilitating the capture of surplus-value and further strengthening the property and class relations that global capitalist society relies on for its continual and ever-expanding reproduction.
As capital is mobile on a world scale but labor is not, greater rewards are offered for labor in the core than in the periphery. With the ensuing concentration that the general law of capital accumulation demands, as well as the implementation of dispossession as a means of achieving this accumulation, the core increasingly becomes a site of convergence for the nomadic proletariat, the eye of capital’s global hurricane. But within the core, generations of internal accumulation by dispossession, mostly facilitated by the mechanism of privatization and histories of racialized terror and violence, have fomented unstable conditions and outbursts of revolt. Capital always produces a surplus, and the capital of a global production process in the imperial epoch produces a global relative surplus population. With the situation being as it is in the core, however, what must be done?
The concentration camps here are thus crucial to maintaining the stability of an economic nationalist political program. If “American jobs” are to be maintained for “American workers,” then these relative surplus populations must in turn be utilized so that capitalist society does not forego the opportunity to extract surplus-value from their exploitation. For-profit concentration camps are thus the productive consumption of the relative surplus population produced by capitalist accumulation in the imperial epoch. Privatization as a model of realization for capital here finds its critical place in the scheme of things. The state is merely a series of connective arterial passages for the infrastructure of capital. The concentration camp of today, therefore, is critical infrastructure for valorizing capital by absorbing displaced populations. The incarceration of migrants indefinitely produces absolute surplus-value, as does the indefinite lengthening of the working day.
This can also help to explain the statistics we find currently for ICE removals reported by ICE over the last two recorded fiscal years. In FY 2017 and 2018, total ICE removals numbered 226,119 and 256,085, respectively. These are not insignificant declines from much of the Obama era’s numbers, with ICE removals for FY 2013 and 2014 reaching such heights as 368,644 and 315,943, respectively. FY 2015 and 2016 saw relative declines to 235,413 and 240,255, respectively, as a result of minor reformist initiatives undertaken at the time. This period too, however, saw a solidifying hold on privatization for ICE detention. The Trump administration’s numbers retain the average closely, and it may very well be a result of the minimum necessary population levels that these privatized models of ICE concentration camps require for their functioning and stable capture of surplus-value in their incarceration. Some analyses often discuss these declines as a result of an overloaded immigration court system unduly burdened by the escalation of ICE raids of increasingly dubious legality. It is rather more likely that indefinite detention and procedural dysfunction are vital to the continual production of absolute surplus-value and give it the elasticity that it requires.
To see how profitable indefinite incarceration in the concentration camp model is, we can look at the cost per night of maintaining detainees. According to ICE’s FY 2018 budget, the average cost of a single bed is $133.99 a day, though this figure is disputed. For mothers and children together in so-called family residential centers, it is $319.00 a day. For the beds in the tent city camps made to hold children separated from their families, they are $775.00 a day. These costs are supported by federal contracts with the corporations that own these camps, and costs are re-evaluated per annum with the potential of increasing federal funding if deemed necessary and in turn supported by Congress’ allocation and at the same time being continually bolstered by private investments made from other corporations seeking to in turn valorize their capital through consumption of products in the concentration camp. The whole apparatus is one designed for the ruthless exploitation through dispossession of the migrant’s agency and movement. It is no surprise then that, as capital seeks its expanded reproduction within this model of realization, ICE’s body count climbs and climbs.
Any illusions as to the capacity possessed by the US state or capitalist society at large to address this current monstrosity must be extinguished. So long as migration intensifies on a global scale and the more developed core countries retain their trajectory of hyper-development by means of capital accumulated through the Global South’s continual exploitation and dispossession, the migrant concentration camp will be a stabilizing mechanism for the crisis of capital. The state machine, in pursuit of the stability of the nationalist project, seeks out structures to adapt our desires to the needs of capital and its drive towards accumulation, seen in the affirmation of the importance of the “American” worker. Even as left projects seek to better the lives of the US proletariat through social democratic reform, they are acting in the interior of the state machine in lock-step motion with the rise of fascist ideology. The incompatibility of this politics with a goal of universal emancipation that includes the abolition of the incarceration of the nomadic proletariat, therefore, necessitates a rupture with this procedural left so that we may combat the suicidal ideation of fascism. The project of border abolition is bound up with the self-abolition and emancipation of the proletariat, and affirming the importance of a national proletariat over the nomadic only sustains the lifeblood of capital.
History shows us that the only sufficient course of action to be taken then must be the liberation of these camps and the dismantling of their supportive infrastructures, and strategies to this end are still taking shape. In the fearless example laid for us by Willem Van Spronsen, we saw transportation vehicles of the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center taken out of commission. We must seek to continue to reproduce such models of direct action on a more expansive, mass scale, with the further coordination of such with the efforts of the incarcerated. Protests and direct actions organized on banks investing in the concentration camps have made said banks pull out of their contracts with them. Direct actions on massive corporations like Amazon and other tech companies are aiming to disrupt the critical data infrastructures that are being invested into and developed in the concentration camps, and this is a crucial space of engagement. We must continue to build the capacity, scale, and mass support for these actions that will become necessary if we do indeed succeed in impeding the concentration camps function as a model of realization for capital value.
This is where we find the kinetic movement of fascism forming, its material basis for potential genocide in capitalism’s organic adoption of the concentration camp as a model of realization. We may hear the right’s racialized rhetoric on immigration and criminality as a rejection and demonization of the migrant. Rather, this rhetoric is that which wills the caravan into existence, both as a result of and a driving force of capital accumulation. As a result, this relative surplus population is made into a model of capital’s realization by means of its bodily dispossession and a psychological support for nationalism. The transition to fascism is seamless, because the progression is inherent in capital’s crisis in the US where the capitalist mode of production is so highly-developed with heavily ingrained institutions of White Supremacy. Capital’s tornado reaches an intensity in magnitude of crisis to make the qualitative shift to the black hole of fascism’s suicidal state. The movement is not yet complete, and we may yet have time to prevent a new American holocaust. Its death will only be real if we act.
M.K. Owen provides an analysis of capitalism as a historically specific mode of production and provides a vision towards what an alternative to this system would look like, calling for democratic planning of the economy that carries on the work of Project Cybersyn.
Much ink has been spilled on the question of capitalism: not only on its definition, but whether it can be abolished, and how one would go about doing that. If we contrast capitalism with anything which came before it, and therefore anything which might come after it, we find that not only do commodity markets exist, but a very specific market—the market for labor-power—defines it. This results in the existence of classes of buyers of labor-power—the bourgeoisie, and by extension any employer—and sellers of labor-power—the proletariat. As Friedrich Engels put it in the 1888 English introduction to the Communist Manifesto:
By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.1
What is this unique commodity—labor-power—which is bought and sold under capitalism?
Marx and Engels provide the basis to understand not only labor-power but also the historical specificity of capitalism, in Chapter 6 of Capital, Vol. I: “The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power”. As this will provide the basis of much of what is to follow, let us quote the opening passage of this crucial chapter at length:
The change of value that occurs in the case of money intended to be converted into capital, cannot take place in the money itself, since in its function of means of purchase and of payment, it does no more than realize the price of the commodity it buys or pays for; and, as hard cash, it is value petrified, never varying.
Just as little can it originate in the second act of circulation, the re-sale of the commodity, which does no more than transform the article from its bodily form back again into its money-form. The change must, therefore, take place in the commodity bought by the first act, M-C, but not in its value, for equivalents are exchanged, and the commodity is paid for at its full value. We are, therefore, forced to the conclusion that the change originates in the use-value, as such, of the commodity, i.e., in its consumption. In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend, Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find, within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment of labour, and, consequently, a creation of value. The possessor of money does find on the market such a special commodity in capacity for labour or labour-power.
By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use- value of any description.
But in order that our owner of money may be able to find labour-power offered for sale as a commodity, various conditions must first be fulfilled. The exchange of commodities of itself implies no other relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature. On this assumption, labour-power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if, and so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers it for sale, or sells it, as a commodity. In order that he may be able to do this, he must have it at his disposal, must be the untrammelled owner of his capacity for labour, i.e., of his person.
He and the owner of money meet in the market, and deal with each other as on the basis of equal rights, with this difference alone, that one is buyer, the other seller; both, therefore, equal in the eyes of the law. The continuance of this relation demands that the owner of the labour-power should sell it only for a definite period, for if he were to sell it rump and stump, once for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. He must constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and this he can only do by placing it at the disposal of the buyer temporarily, for a definite period of time. By this means alone can he avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it.
The second essential condition to the owner of money finding labour-power in the market as a commodity is this – that the labourer instead of being in the position to sell commodities in which his labour is incorporated, must be obliged to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-power, which exists only in his living self. 2
Let us tease a few implications out of this passage:
This therefore politically defines capitalism: a system in which power must be sold for a paycheck. This definition lays bare the relation of capitalism to democracy: they are mutually exclusive. Either one or the other must triumph if it is to survive. It also reveals how to politically abolish capitalism: replace it with democracy. This is exactly what happened, in a very specific context, during the Paris Commune of 1870–71 and the Soviets of 1905 and 1917.
Among other things, it also reminds us of the extreme difficulty of the task: the Commune and the first Soviet Republic failed to spread from the capital cities to the rest of the country; the second Soviets didn’t expand from Russia to any advanced capitalist country, leaving them with the impossible task of building socialism—as understood by Marx—in a peasant rather than proletarian country.
Let us first examine efforts to abolish capitalism economically rather than politically, for it is here that we first meet that which bedevils our effort: the collective capitalist. Note that the first iteration of the collective capitalist was invented by the capitalists themselves: the corporation. Workers employed by a corporation work not for an individual capitalist, but for the corporation, charged with securing the interests of its shareholders. Already, the form of ownership is social—or rather, a social way to appropriate the surplus-value the workers produce.
What if, however, the workers own the corporation and manage it democratically? This—the cooperative—was very prevalent in Marx and Engels’ day, and has as its modern flagship the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation of the Basque Country.
On the one hand, Marx offered this in Vol. III of Capital:
The co-operative factories run by workers themselves are, within the old form, the first examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them. But the opposition between capital and labour is abolished there, even if at first only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalists, i.e., they use the means of production to valorise their labour.3
This illuminates why the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation wasn’t able to abolish capitalism, even within itself: in order to survive in a capitalist economy, the cooperative itself is forced to become a collective capitalist! It is the markets, not the workers, which determine what to produce, how to produce it, and what must be done with the proceeds from the sale of products. This is why workers at Mondragon found it necessary early on to elect a second body—the “social council”—to check and balance the board of directors. Although the board was elected, they were forced to act like any other such board. The problem became particularly acute when Fagor, the flagship cooperative which produced household appliances, suddenly found itself without its largest customers: home-builders. After strenuous efforts to adjust the operations of Fagor to the situation without selling out its workers, it was finally forced, by forces beyond its control, to shut its doors.
What if, however, workers do seize the means of production on a massive scale? What if the problem is solved politically rather than economically? What is to be done next? This was how Marx looked at the problem as faced by the Paris Commune:
“If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if the united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production—what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, “possible” Communism?” 4
After the fall of the Paris Commune, Marx dealt with this question in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, juxtaposing to the various socialist notions floating around at the time a very specific formulation: “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” exemplified by the Paris Commune. While this was the minimum required to break with capitalism, Marx acknowledged that it would inevitably inherit much of capitalism’s defects, and these would have to be overcome in a process of post-revolutionary communist development. It also reveals a major problem: if a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is the only possible transition between capitalism and communism, what happens if the preceding class struggle—that of the world’s peasants to avoid being reduced to proletarians—is still going on in much of the world?
This question which dogged the Paris Commune and the Soviets is why Marx, Engels, and subsequent Marxists insisted that the path to communism would have to include advanced capitalist countries: otherwise, peasant revolutions would result not in communism, but in state-capitalism: the final form post-crisis capitalism takes in order to stave off revolution. Lenin, in particular, was quite up-front about this when he characterized the New Economic Policy as a conscious and deliberate retreat into state-capitalism, pending the spread of socialist revolution into advanced capitalist countries—which came very close to happening in Germany, particularly during the hyperinflation of 1923. Such forthrightness has been unmatched since.
State-capitalism is a political economy in which a bureaucracy rather than the market determine what to produce, how to produce it, and what to do with the products. Since a bureaucracy is based on the same employer-employee relationship specific to capitalism, it is premised on the existence of a labor-power market, and hence is inherently capitalist. This formed the basis of Marx’ critique of Ferdinand Lasalle’s state socialism as state-capitalism and has been the basis of the Marxist understanding of state capitalism ever since.
If we look at the revolutions Marx, Engels, and Lenin took as their examples, we see that they were the products of extreme crisis: war, defeat, military occupation, etc. Those extreme crises could only be ended by an even more extreme revolution. But they happened in cities surrounded by a peasant countryside—where the previous struggle over the means of production (land) was still being fought—so that a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat as a realization of democracy was impossible.
What if such an extreme crisis were to occur in an advanced capitalist country? In many countries, the proletarianization of the peasantry has resulted in societies where revolutions to end extreme crises have the potential to develop into revolutionary dictatorships of the proletariat. These have greater potential to spread to neighboring countries: from Venezuela to Colombia, Catalunya to Spain and France, etc. It is this potential which drives the gendarmes of international capital to defeat any such revolutionary potential, and to back any regime—including fascists—to crush such potentials.
So daunting is the political project of abolishing capitalism that the economic development of communism may seem at first blush a utopian project. Yet if we lose sight of that goal, we mistake the present for the future, and any political victories the working class wins risk being hollowed out.
How would a free association of producers increase its own freedom? Marx provided this insight in Vol. III of Capital:
they accomplish this task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise.
Hence we see illuminated the distinctive goal of communist development: the shortening of the working day and week. How might communist economic planners go about engineering that?
One would have to have a way to scientifically determine the mix of means of production which would most rapidly reduce the time needed in production; if in the sector that produces means of production inputs and outputs were proportional to one another, one could theoretically reinvest all such production into that sector.5 One would never do this, of course, given that this sector was responsible not only for its own production but for all production; but if inputs were not proportional, one could not even theoretically reinvest means of production into its sector! Reinvestment would be constrained by a bottleneck industry, holding the entire economy back like a single-track block constipating a railway. It follows that, in order to shorten the working day and week as quickly as possible, socialist economic planners would have to be able to find the bottleneck industry in order to direct investment into it.6
A serious effort was made by the government of Salvador Allende in Chile to undertake such an effort, which produced an early version of the internet called Project Cybersyn. While Allende’s government was overthrown in a right-wing coup before the potential fruits of this project could be fully explored, the legacy of Project Cybersyn can help give us a vision of what a democratic form of planning may look like.
Cybersyn aimed to construct a distributed decision support system—a system that could help process complex levels of information for decision making. Given the difficulties faced by Soviet planners, the use of a distributed support system seemed to point a way beyond their bureaucratic system of the USSR for a more democratic form of planning that directly engaged the needs of workers. Based on the theories of Stafford Beer, Cybersyn aimed to put the most advanced scientific knowledge in the field of cybernetics to work in making an effective and democratic planned economy.
Project Cybersyn consisted of a national network of telex machines in nationalized enterprises and an operations room to which they were all linked. Information from each enterprise would come in through the Cybernet and fed into statistical modeling software, allowing a bird’s-eye view of production indicators for the Operations Room in Santiago. This meant that workers had a way to directly communicate their needs to the planners, and planners had the ability to adjust accordingly. The government also used economic simulation software to forecast the outcomes of economic decisions. Cybersyn was basically reactive: it took in data from the various enterprises and transmitted it to workers in the system in order that demands would consistently be met.7
In order to facilitate communist development, a Cybersyn-type planning mechanism would need:
Unlike under capitalism, communist development has as its object the shortening of the socially necessary working day and week, growing the realm of freedom at the expense of the realm of necessity.
Once the political transition from capitalism to communism is underway—because the domain of workers’ control would be confronted from the outset, even while still under capitalist rule—the process of communist development must be immediately begun. A scientific understanding of communist development is indispensable to that process.
