book 1 postscript

Once you get to the end of Capital, Volume I, it is a good idea to go back to the beginning and read the first chapter again. You will almost certainly find yourself reading it in a different light. You should, by now, find it a lot easier to follow. When I went back the first time, I also found it much more interesting and even downright fun to read. With the tension out of the way as to whether I would ever manage to get to the end of this huge tome, I relaxed and really began to enjoy what Bertell Ollman calls “the dance of the dialectic” and all the nuances (including the footnotes, the asides and the literary references) that I had missed first time through. Skimming back over the whole text schematically is also useful. It helps consolidate some thematic understandings. When I used to set examination papers, I would sometimes take a basic concept and ask students to comment on how it would weave into and out of the fabric of the book. How many times, I would ask, do you encounter the concept of fetishism? Commodities and money are obvious. But why do capitalists fetishize machinery, and how come all those inherent powers of labor (cooperation, divisions of labor, mental capacities and powers) appear so often as pure powers of capital? (And does the word “appear” always signal a fetishistic moment?) There are all sorts of themes that can be followed throughout, such as alienation (on this one, try beginning at the end with primitive accumulation and working backward through the text!), process-thing relations, logic-history intersections (confusions?) and the like.
Here, however, I want to look forward to some of the arguments that Marx takes up in the other volumes and elsewhere, by extending the logical implications of the framework set up in Volume I. I think it fair to do this because, as I indicated at the outset, Marx plainly intended much of his argument in Volume I to lay a theoretical and conceptual basis that would carry him forward onto a broader terrain. The occasional invocation of the omnipresent contradictions of capitalism and the possibilities they foretell of crises provide signposts as to where he might be headed. From this it is also possible to gain some political sense as to what a capitalist class politics is likely to look like and what some of the key terrains of political struggle are going to be.
Volume I of Capital examines a circulation process of capital that looks like this:


The starting point is money, armed with which the capitalist goes into the marketplace and buys two kinds of commodities, labor-power (variable capital) and means of production (constant capital). The capitalist simultaneously selects an organizational form and a technology and proceeds to combine the labor-power and the means of production in a labor process that produces a commodity, which is then sold in the market for the original money plus a profit (surplus-value). Impelled onward by the coercive laws of competition, capitalists appear (and I use that word in Marx’s sense) to be forced to use part of the surplus-value to create even more surplus-value. Accumulation for accumulation’s sake and production for production’s sake become the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, producing compound rates of growth forever, unless capital encounters limits or insurmountable barriers. When this happens, capital encounters a crisis of accumulation (simply defined as lack of growth). The historical geography of capitalism is littered with such crises, sometimes local and at other times system-wide (as in 1848, 1929 and 2008). The fact that capitalism has survived to this day suggests that the fluidity and flexibility of capital accumulation—features that Marx emphasizes again and again—have somehow allowed limits to be overcome and barriers to be circumvented.
Close inspection of the flow of capital allows us to identify some potential points of blockage that can be the source of serious disruptions and crises. Let us go over these one by one.
(1) WHERE DOES THE INITIAL MONEY COME FROM?

This is the question that Marx’s account of primitive accumulation is primarily concerned to answer. Primitive accumulation is invoked at several points in the text at large as well as in part 8, which deals directly with origins. But as more and more of the surplus-value created yesterday is converted into fresh capital, so more and more of the money invested today comes from yesterday’s surplus. This does not rule out, however, the possibility of additional increments of money from the continuation of primitive accumulation, or what I would prefer to call in its modern context “accumulation by dispossession.” If it were only the accumulation from yesterday that could be capitalized into expansion today, then over time we would surely see a gradually increasing concentration of money capital in individual hands. But as Marx points out, there are also methods of centralization, mainly achieved with the help of the credit system, that permit large quantities of money power to be brought together very rapidly. In the case of joint-stock companies and other corporate organizational forms, enormous quantities of money power are amassed under the control of a few directors and managers. Acquisitions and mergers have long been big business, and activity of this kind can entail new rounds of accumulation by dispossession (asset stripping of firms laying off workers, as practiced by the private-equity movement). Furthermore, there are all sorts of tricks whereby big capital can drive out the small (state regulation is frequently used as an aid, as Marx presciently notes). The dispossession of the small operators (neighborhood stores or family farms) to make way for large enterprises (supermarket chains and agribusiness), frequently with the aid of credit mechanisms, has been a long-standing practice. So the question of the organization, configuration and mass of the money capital available for investment never goes away. It acquires an added significance because of the “barriers to entry” that exist—the scale of certain activities, like building a steel mill, building a railroad or launching an airline, requires an immense initial outlay of money capital before production can even begin. Only relatively recently, for example, has it become possible for private consortia of associated capitals rather than the state to undertake massive infrastructural projects, like the Channel Tunnel that links Britain to continental Europe. As Marx notes in the chapter on machinery, such infrastructural projects become increasingly necessary as a capitalist mode of production comes into its own. Processes of centralization and decentralization of capital define a terrain of struggle between different factions of capital as well as between capital and the state (over questions of monopoly power, for example). Massive centralization of money power has all manner of implications for the dynamics of class struggle, as well as for the trajectory of capitalist development. If nothing else, it endows many elements in the privileged capitalist class (itself consolidating with centralization) with the capacity to wait, because their sheer money power gives them control over time in ways that small producers and wage laborers are often denied. But the contradictory element lies in the fact that increasing monopoly power diminishes the power of the coercive laws of competition to regulate activity (innovation in particular), and this can lead to stagnation.
(2) WHERE DOES THE LABOR-POWER COME FROM?

Marx pays a lot of attention to this in Volume I. Primitive accumulation releases labor-power as a commodity into the marketplace, but thereafter the extra labor required to expand production with a given technology comes from either mopping up the floating reserve released by previous rounds of labor-saving technological change or by mobilizing latent and in extremis elements within the stagnant reserve army. Marx several times mentions the ability to mobilize agricultural laborers or peasants from the countryside, as well as previously excluded women and children, into the labor force as crucial to the perpetuation of capital accumulation. For this to happen, there has to be a continuous process of proletarianization, which means continuous primitive accumulation by one or another means throughout the historical geography of capitalism. But labor reserves can also be produced by technologically-induced unemployment. Perpetual accumulation requires, Marx shows, a perpetual surplus of labor-power. This reserve army of labor is positioned more or less like a bow wave in front of the accumulation process. There must always be sufficient and accessible labor-power available. It not only needs to be accessible, it needs to be disciplined and in possession of the requisite qualities (i.e., skilled and flexible when necessary).
If, for any reason, these conditions are not met, then capital faces a serious barrier to continuous accumulation. Either the price of labor goes up, because this does not interfere with the dynamics of accumulation, or both the appetite and capacity for continuous accumulation slacken. Severe barriers in labor supply, arising either out of conditions of absolute labor scarcity or from the rise of powerful organizations of labor (trade unions and left political parties), can create crises of capital accumulation. One obvious answer to this barrier is for capital in effect to go on strike by refusing to reinvest. This amounts to the deliberate production of a crisis of accumulation so as to produce unemployment sufficient to discipline labor-power. This solution is, however, costly for capital as well as for labor. Capitalists would obviously prefer an alternative path, which brings us to the politics of the problem. If labor is too well organized and too powerful, then the capitalist class will seek to command the state apparatus either by a coup of the sort that killed Allende and the socialist alternative in Chile in 1973 or by political means in the US and Britain, in order to do what Pinochet, Reagan and Thatcher all did, which was to smash labor organization and crush left political parties. That is one way to get around the barrier. Another path is to make capital more mobile, so it can move to where there is an available proletariat or an available population that can be easily proletarianized, as in Mexico or China over the past thirty years. Open immigration policies or even state-organized immigration strategies (as in many European countries toward the end of the 1960s) provide yet another alternative. One consequence of circumventing barriers to labor supply this way is to push organized labor (and segments of the public more generally) into the position of opposing offshoring of jobs and opposing open immigration policies, culminating in domestic anti-immigrant movements among the working classes.
The contradictory aspects of labor-supply politics arise around questions not only of the value of labor-power (set by the conditions of supply of wage goods to satisfy the reproduction of labor-power at a given standard of living, itself vulnerable to definition by the state of class struggle) but also of the health, skills and training of the labor force. Capitalist class interests (as opposed to those of individual capitalists, who typically practice the politics of Après moi le déluge!) can rally around both subsidizing the supply of cheaper wage goods to keep the value of labor-power down and investing in improvements of the qualities of labor supply; in this latter regard, the military interests of the state can play an important supportive role. So the politics of labor supply have all manner of ramifications. They have been a central focus of struggle throughout the historical and geographical development of capitalism.
Out of this, some Marxists have distilled a distinctive theory of crisis formation. The so-called profit-squeeze theory of crisis hinges on the perpetually fraught problem of labor relations and class struggle, both in the labor process and in the labor market. When these relations pose a barrier to further capital accumulation then a crisis ensues unless some way (or, more likely, mix of ways) can be found for capital to overcome or circumvent that barrier. Some analysts, such as Andrew Glyn (see his impressive account, written with Bob Sutcliffe, in British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze1), would interpret what happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s (particularly in Europe and North America) as an excellent example of the profit-squeeze theory in action. Certainly, the management of labor resources and the politics of labor organization and supply dominated the politics of the period. It is also true that the survival of capitalism has been contingent on the perpetual overcoming or circumvention of this potential barrier to accumulation. But at this time (2008), there is very little sign of a profit-squeeze situation as massive labor reserves exist everywhere, and as the political attack on working-class movements has reduced serious worker resistance to modest levels almost everywhere. The crisis of 2008 is hard to interpret, except in a roundabout way (and there are some versions of the theory, such as that of Itoh, that do this), in profit-squeeze terms.
(3) ACCESS TO THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION

When capitalists go into the market, they need to find there extra means of production (extra elements of constant capital) to meet their needs for reinvestment of part of the surplus in the expansion of production. The means of production are of two sorts: the intermediate products (already shaped by human labor) that are used up in the production process (through what Marx calls “productive consumption,” such as energy and cloth used up in making a coat) and the machinery and fixed capital equipment, including factory buildings and the physical infrastructures such as transport systems, canals, ports, all those sorts of things that are necessary for production to proceed. The category of means of production (constant capital) is evidently very broad and complicated. Just as plainly, the lack of availability of these material inputs and conditions constitutes a potentially serious barrier to sustained capital accumulation. The auto industry cannot expand without more steel inputs. It is for this reason that Marx notes that technological innovations in one part of what we now call a “commodity chain” render innovation elsewhere necessary if it is to facilitate the general expansion of production. Innovations in the cotton industry required innovations in cotton production (the cotton gin), transport and communications, chemical and industrial dyeing techniques and the like.
From this we can derive the possibility of what are called “crises of disproportionality” within the complicated structure of inputs and outputs within the totality of a capitalist mode of production. At the end of Volume II, Marx engaged in a detailed study of how such crises might form in an economy divided into two grand departments, those industries producing means of production and those industries producing the wage goods for the workers (he later complicated the model further by introducing luxury goods). What Marx showed (and subsequent more sophisticated mathematical research by economists like Morishima has confirmed the point) was that equilibrium was far from automatic, given the tendency of capital to flow to wherever the rate of profit was highest, and that spiraling disproportionalities could seriously disrupt the reproduction of capitalism. In our own times, we see also the obvious impact of energy shortages and rising prices on capitalist dynamics. Barriers of this sort are plainly sources of perpetual concern within a capitalist system, and the equally perpetual need to overcome and circumvent barriers of this sort is often in the forefront of political activity (state subsidies and planning—particularly of physical infrastructures—research and development activity, vertical integration through mergers, etc.).
(4) SCARCITIES IN NATURE

But behind all this, there lurks a deeper problematic that Marx also raises several times in Volume I. This concerns our metabolic relation to nature. Capitalism, like any other mode of production, relies on the beneficence of a bountiful nature, and as Marx points out, the depletion and degradation of the land makes no more sense in the long run than does the destruction of the collective powers of labor, since both lie at the root of the production of all wealth. But individual capitalists, working in their own short-term interests and impelled onward by the coercive laws of competition, are perpetually tempted to take the position of Après moi le déluge! with respect to both the laborer and the soil. Even without this, the track of perpetual accumulation puts enormous pressures on expanding the supply of so-called natural resources, while the inevitable increase in the quantity of waste is bound to test the capacity of ecological systems to absorb it without turning toxic. Here, too, capitalism is likely to encounter barriers which will become increasingly hard to circumvent. Capitalism, Marx notes, “acquires an elasticity, a capacity for sudden expansion by leaps and bounds, which comes up against no barriers but those presented by the availability of raw materials and the extent of sales outlets” (579).
There are, however, all sorts of ways in which such barriers in nature can be confronted, sometimes overcome and more often than not circumvented. Natural resources are, for example, technological, social and cultural appraisals, and so any shortage in nature can be mitigated by technological, social and cultural changes. The dialectical relation to nature that is set up in the footnote at the beginning of chapter 15, on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” indicates a range of possible transformations, including the production of nature itself. The historical geography of capitalism has been marked by an incredible fluidity and flexibility in this regard, so it would be false to argue that there are absolute limits in our metabolic relation to nature that cannot be transcended or bypassed in some way. But this does not mean that the barriers are not sometimes serious and that overcoming them can be achieved without going through some kind of environmental crisis. A lot of capitalist politics, particularly these days, is about ensuring that what Marx calls the free gifts of nature are both available to capital on an easy basis and sustained for future use. The tensions within capitalist politics over these sorts of issues can sometimes be acute. On the one hand, the desire to maintain an expanding flow of cheap oil has been central to the geopolitical stance of the United States over the past fifty or sixty years. Making sure that the world’s oil supplies are open for exploitation has drawn the US into conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere, and energy politics, just to take one example of a crucial relation to nature, often emerges as a dominant issue within the state apparatus. But on the other hand, the politics of cheap oil has created problems of excessive depletion, as well as global warming and a host of other air-quality issues (ground-level ozone, smog, particulate matter in the atmosphere and the like), that pose increasing risks to human populations. Land-use degradation through energy-consuming urban sprawl has been a problem at the other end of the steady depletion of natural resources to support all aspects of growth of the automobile industry.
Some Marxists (led by Jim O’Connor, who founded the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism) refer to the barriers in nature as “the second contradiction of capitalism” (the first being, of course, the capital-labor relation). In our own times, it is certainly true that this second contradiction is absorbing as much political attention as the labor question, if not more, and there certainly is a wide-ranging field of concern, of political anxiety and endeavor, that focuses on the idea of a crisis in the relation to nature, as a sustainable source of raw materials and land for further capitalist (urban) development as well as a sink for waste.
In O’Connor’s work, this second contradiction of capitalism comes to displace the first, after the defeats of the labor and socialist movements of the 1970s, as the cutting edge of anticapitalist agitation. I leave you to make up your own mind on how far that sort of politics should be pursued. But what is certain is that the barrier in relation to nature is not to be taken lightly or treated as minor, given the framework that Marx sets out in Volume I of Capital. And in our own times, it is clear that the barriers in nature are looming large and that there may be an imminent crisis in our relation to nature that will require widespread adaptations (such as the development of new environmental technologies and the expansion of industries producing these goods) if this barrier is to be successfully circumvented, at least for a time, within the framework of endless capital accumulation.
(5) THE QUESTION OF TECHNOLOGY

The relations between capital and labor, as well as those between capital and nature, are mediated by the choice of organizational forms and of technologies (hardware and software). In Volume I, Marx is, I think, at his very best in theorizing where the impulsions for organizational and technological change come from and why it is that capitalists inevitably fetishize machinery, which cannot produce value, because it is a vital source of surplus-value to them both individually and collectively. The result is perpetual organizational and technological dynamism. “Modern industry,” Marx notes “never views or treats of the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative” (617). This is a persistent motif in Marx’s works. As noted in the Communist Manifesto,
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all other ones.
But it is at this point also that the coercive laws of competition step forward, underpinning the search for relative surplus-value. The implication, which Marx for some reason is reluctant to contemplate, is that any weakening in those coercive laws, through monopolization and the increasing centralization of capital described in chapter 25, will have an impact on the pace and form of technological revolutions. The class-struggle dimensions through broad-based oppositions (e.g., the Luddite movement) or sabotage on the shop floor also have to be taken into account. As Marx noted, a stimulus to technological change arises out of the desire on the part of capital to have weapons to deploy against labor. The more laborers become mere appendages of the machine, and the more their monopolizable skills get undermined by machine technologies, the more vulnerable they become to the arbitrary authority of capital. To the degree that the actual history of technological and organizational innovations displays a distinctively wave-like character, it seems that more has to be said about these dynamics than is given to us even in the rich analysis set out in Volume I.
These questions becomes even more important because, in setting up his arguments on the organic and value composition of capital in chapter 25, Marx is clearly anticipating the view laid out in Volume III, that an ineluctable tendency toward a rising value composition of capital presages an equally compelling law or tendency for the profit rate to fall, inevitably producing long-term crisis conditions in the accumulation process. It is most emphatically here, in Marx’s view, that capital has to confront a crucial barrier internal to its own nature.
The resultant crisis of profitability is solely due to the destabilizing effects of technological dynamism arising out of the persistent search for relative surplus-value. A short-cut version of the argument states that the search for relative surplus-value pushes capitalists to labor-saving technologies, and the more labor saved, the less value produced, because labor is the source of value. To be sure, there are compensating possibilities such as raising the rate of exploitation or reabsorbing displaced workers in expanded production. But there are, as I argued in chapter 10, reasons for being skeptical of any necessary and ineluctable tendency for the value composition of capital to rise. In Volume III, Marx actually lists a variety of “counteracting influences” to a falling rate of profit, including rising rates of exploitation of labor, falling costs of constant capital, foreign trade and a massive increase in the industrial reserve army that blunts the stimulus for the employment of new technologies (as noted in Volume I). In the Grundrisse, he had gone even further, noting the constant devaluation of capital, the absorption of capital in the production of physical infrastructures, the opening up of new labor-intensive lines of production and monopolization. My own (probably minority) view is that the falling-rate-of-profit argument simply does not work in the way that Marx specifies it, and I have laid out more fully why I think so in The Limits to Capital.2
But I also think there is no question that organizational and technological changes do have serious destabilizing effects internal to the dynamics of capital accumulation and that Marx’s brilliant exposition of the forces at work impelling perpetual revolutions in technologies and organizational forms sets the stage for a better understanding of processes of both class and popular struggle over the deployment of new technologies and crisis formation. The crisis tendencies can be manifest (as “footnote 4” indicates) in labor relations, in the relation to nature as well as in all other coevolving moments in the capitalist developmental process. There are also directly destabilizing effects such as the devaluation of prior investments (machinery, plant and equipment, built environments, communications links) before their value has been recovered (amortized); rapid shifts in labor-quality requirements (e.g., skills such as computer literacy) that outpace existing labor-force capacities and the investments in social infrastructures needed to create them; the production of chronic job insecurity, spiraling crises of disproportionality due to the uneven development of technological capacities across different sectors; dramatic shifts in spatiotemporal relations (innovations in transport and communications) that entail a total revolution in the global landscape of production and consumption; sudden accelerations and speed-up in capital circulation (computer trading on financial markets can create serious problems, as we have seen); and so on. And, yes, there may be occasions in which a rising value composition of capital can be detected with consequent effects on profits.
(6) LOSS OF CAPITALIST CONTROL OVER THE LABOR PROCESS

Marx is at great pains to emphasize that the creation of surplus value rests on the ability of the capitalist to command and control the laborer on the shop floor where value is produced. This command and control over the “form-giving fire” of the labor process is always contested. The “despotism” of labor control depends on some mix of coercion and persuasion as well as upon the successful organization of a hierarchical structure of authority in labor relations. Plainly, any breakdown in this control presages a crisis, and Marx emphasizes the implicit power of workers to disrupt, sabotage, slow down or simply to cease altogether the production of value upon which the capitalist necessarily relies. The refusal to succumb to the disciplinary apparatuses set up by capital, the power of refusal to work, is of supreme importance in the dynamics of class struggle. In itself it can force a crisis (as theorists such as Tronti and Negri emphasize in the “autonomista” Marxist tradition). This power of the worker is, of course, limited in that workers have to live and without the wage they will also suffer unless they have available to them some other means of subsistence (such as cultivation of the land). The potential limit that exists within the circulation of capital at the point of production and within the labor process itself cannot, however, be ignored. Much attention is therefore paid both by individual capitalists as well as by the whole capitalist class to ensuring labor discipline and adequate forms of labor control.
(7) THE PROBLEM OF REALIZATION AND EFFECTIVE DEMAND

The seventh potential barrier comes at the end of the sequence, when the new commodity enters the market to realize its value as money through exchange. The C-M transition is always more problematic than going from the universal of money to the particular of the commodity, for reasons noted back in chapter 2. To begin with, a sufficient number of people must need, want or desire the commodity produced as a use-value. If a thing is useless then it has no value, says Marx. Useless commodities will be devalued, and the circulation process of capital will come to a crashing halt. So the first condition for the realization of value is to pay attention to the wants, needs and desires of a population. In our time, relative to Marx’s, an immense amount of effort, including the formation of a whole advertising industry, is put into manipulating the nature of wants, needs and desires in a population to ensure the market for use-values. But what is involved here is something more than just advertising. What is required is the formation of a whole structure and process of daily living (the reproduction-of-daily-life component of “footnote 4”) that necessitates the absorption of a certain bundle of use-values in order to sustain it. Consider, for example, the development of the wants, needs and desires associated with the rise of a suburban lifestyle in the United States after World War II. We are talking about the need for not only cars, gasoline, highways and suburban tract houses but also lawn mowers, refrigerators, air conditioners, drapes, furniture (interior and exterior), interior entertainment equipment (the TV) and a whole mass of maintenance systems to keep this daily life going. Daily life in the suburb required the consumption of all that. The development of suburbia ensured a rising demand for these use-values. In this way, “to bring forth a new need,” as Marx presciently notes, becomes a crucial precondition for the continuity of capital accumulation (201). The politics of need creation are in themselves intriguing and increasingly important over time, and now it is well understood that “consumer sentiment” is a key element in the stimulus for endless capital accumulation.
But where does the purchasing power to buy all these use-values come from? There must be, at the end of this process, an extra amount of money that somebody holds somewhere to facilitate the purchase. If not, there is a lack of effective demand, and what is called a crisis of “underconsumption” results—there is not enough demand backed by ability to pay to absorb the commodities produced (see chapter 3) The barrier posed by the “extent of sales outlets” has to be overcome. (579). In part, effective demand is expressed through workers spending their wages. But variable capital is always less than the total capital in circulation, so the purchase of wage goods (even with a suburban lifestyle) is never sufficient for the realization of the whole value stream. But, and this is a point that emerges in Volume II of Capital, reducing wages in the manner presupposed in the Volume I analysis plainly creates deeper stresses at the point of realization and in itself can be an important component in the creation of crises of underconsumption. It was for this reason that the politics of the New Deal, at the time of a crisis that many came to regard as primarily a crisis of underconsumption, turned to supporting unionization and other strategies (like Social Security payments) to bolster effective demand across the working classes and also why, in 2008, at a point of economic stress, the federal government released a six-hundred-dollar tax rebate to most taxpayers in the US in order to jack up consumer effective demand. Raising the real wages of labor (thus countering the tendency toward increasing immiseration of the proletariat) may be necessary to the stabilization of continuous capital accumulation, but for obvious reasons the capitalist class (let alone the individual capitalist) may not be willing to contemplate any radical implementation of such a solution.
But worker demand, though an important base, can obviously never go as far as to solve the problem of realization. Rosa Luxemburg paid great attention to this. First she took up the possibility that the extra demand could come from increasing the gold supply (or in our day by simply having the central banks print more money). While obviously this can help in the short run (injecting sufficient liquidity into the system, as during the financial crisis of 2008, becomes a crucial tool for stabilizing and sustaining the continued circulation and accumulation of capital), in the long run the effect is to create yet another kind of crisis, that of inflation. Luxemburg’s solution was to presuppose the existence of some latent and mobilizable demand outside the capitalist system. This meant the continuation of primitive accumulation through imperialist impositions and practices on societies not yet absorbed into the capitalist mode of production.
In the transition to capitalism, and in the phase of primitive accumulation, the stores of accumulated wealth within the feudal order could play this role along with the robbery and plundering of wealth from the rest of the world by merchant’s capital. Over time, of course, what might be called the “gold reserves” of the feudal classes were steadily depleted, and the capacity of the peasantry to generate consumer power by way of taxation to support the consumerism of a landed aristocracy was also exhausted. As industrial capitalism consolidated in Europe and North America, so the plundering of wealth from India, China and other already developed noncapitalist social formations became more and more prominent, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century onward. This was the phase of an immense transfer of wealth from East and South Asia in particular, but also to some degree from South America and Africa, toward the industrial-capitalist class located in core capitalist countries. Eventually, as capitalism grew and spread geographically, the ability to stabilize the system by such means became decreasingly plausible, even if such means had ever been entirely sufficient (which is doubtful) during the phase of late-nineteenth-century high imperialism. Certainly, since 1950 or so but even more markedly since the 1970s, the capacity of imperialist practices of this sort to perform the role of grand stabilizer through opening new fields (new markets) for the realization of capital has been seriously impaired.
The most important answer, one that Luxemburg failed to notice but which follows logically from Marx’s argument (though he never articulated it directly because he ruled out the problem of potential realization crises by assumption in Volume I), is that the solution lies in capitalist consumption. This, we have seen, is of two sorts: a portion of the surplus-value is consumed as revenues (e.g., luxury goods), but the other portion is put to further expanding production through reinvestment strategies that appear (and I use this word in Marx’s sense) to be impelled by the coercive laws of competition. We here encounter the necessity of what Marx calls “productive consumption” as a link in the realization process. This means that surplus-value production has to internalize its own increasing monetary demand. The demand for yesterday’s surplus product depends on tomorrow’s expansion of surplus-value production! Capitalist consumption today, fueled by the surplus gained yesterday, forms the market for yesterday’s surplus product and surplus-value. What this does is to convert what appears as a potential underconsumption crisis because of lack of effective demand into a lack of further profitable investment opportunities. In other words, the solution to the realization problems encountered at the end of the circulation process depends upon going back to the beginning and expanding even more. The logic of perpetual compound growth takes over.
(8) THE CREDIT SYSTEM AND THE CENTRALIZATION OF CAPITAL

For the circulation of capital to complete its course, two fundamental conditions must be realized. First, capitalists must not hold the money they gained yesterday. They must immediately release it back into circulation. But as Marx argues in his critique of Say’s law, there is no compelling necessity that says C-M must immediately be followed by M-C, and within that asymmetry there lies the perpetual possibility not so much for monetary and financial crises but for the emergence of a barrier to the realization of surplus-value through failure to spend. In chapter 2, we considered various circumstances in which it would make perfect sense to hold on to money rather than to release it, and it is at this point that an overlap emerges between Marx’s and Keynes’s thinking on the possibility of crises of underconsumption. Keynes sought to bypass this barrier by resorting to a state-led set of technical strategies of fiscal and monetary management.
The second condition is that the time gap between today and yesterday needs to be bridged for continuous circulation to be assured. This gap can be filled, as Marx also shows in chapter 3, by the rise of credit moneys and the use of money as a means of account. Put bluntly, the credit system as an organized relation between creditors and debtors steps into the circulation process to play a vital function. As other options run out, this becomes the main means to cover the effective-demand problem in a way that is internal to capital circulation. In so doing, however, the credit system claims its part of the surplus in the form of interest.
At several points even in Volume I of Capital, Marx tacitly recognizes the crucial role of the credit system, but in order to get to what he considers the heart of the problem of the labor-capital relation in part 7, he finds it necessary to exclude the facts of distribution (rent, interest, taxes, profit on merchant’s capital) from the analysis. While this helps reveal and clarify some important aspects of capitalist dynamics, it does so at the cost of pushing to one side a crucial feature in the capital-circulation process. Unfortunately, Marx continues to push this aside throughout much of Volume II (while acknowledging its crucial presence in relation, for example, to the circulation of long-term fixed capital investments), leading Luxemburg quite correctly to state that the accumulation schemata laid out at the end of that volume failed to solve the problem of realization and effective demand. It is only relatively late in Volume III that Marx gets round to examining the role of the credit system, and frankly, these chapters, though full of suggestive insights, are a mess (I tried as hard as I could—and I don’t mind confessing it nearly drove me crazy doing so—to clean them up in chapters 9 and 10 of The Limits to Capital). He had, however, established in the Grundrisse that “the entire credit system, and the over-trading, over-speculation etc., connected with it, rests on the necessity of expanding and leaping over the barrier to circulation and the sphere of exchange.”3
If it is the further expansion of capitalism that creates the demand for yesterday’s surplus product, then this means that the realization problem cannot be solved, particularly under today’s conditions of globalized capitalist development, without the construction of a vibrant and extensive credit system to bridge the gap between yesterday’s surplus product and tomorrow’s absorption of that surplus product. This absorption can occur either through the further expansion of surplus-value production (reinvestment) or through the capitalist consumption of revenues. In the long run, it can easily be shown, the capitalist consumption of revenues will lead to stagnation (this is the model of “simple reproduction” Marx considers in chapter 23). Only the further expansion of surplus-value generation will work in the long run, and it is this that underpins the social necessity for compound rates of growth forever as a condition of capitalism’s survival.
It is at this point that Marx would surely have said, had he got to this point, that the coercive laws of competition are merely a tool to secure this absolutely necessary condition for capitalism’s survival. In other words, the survival of capitalism requires the maintenance of the coercive laws of competition in order to keep the expansion of surplus-value production tomorrow on track as a means to absorb the surpluses produced yesterday. From this it follows that any slackening of those coercive powers, through, for example, excessive monopolization, will in itself produce a crisis in capitalist reproduction. This was exactly Baran and Sweezy’s point in Monopoly Capital4 (written during the 1960s, when monopolies like the Big Three auto companies in Detroit were of increasing significance). The tendency toward monopolization and the centralization of capital necessarily produced, as Baran and Sweezy clearly predicted, the crisis of stagflation (rising unemployment coupled with accelerating inflation) that so haunted the 1970s. The answer to this crisis was the neoliberal counterrevolution that not only smashed the power of labor but also effectively liberated and unleashed the coercive laws of competition as “executor” of the laws of capitalist development by all manner of strategems (more open foreign trade, deregulation, privatizations and the like).
But this process is not without its potential complications. To begin with, the presumption is that all the other barriers (e.g., the relation to nature) to the expansion of surplus-value production tomorrow are non-operative and that there is plenty of room for more production to occur. This implies, for example, a different kind of imperialism, which is not about robbing values and stripping assets from the rest of the world, but about using the rest of the world as a site for opening up new forms of capitalist production. The export of capital rather than of commodities becomes critical. Herein lies the big difference between nineteenth-century India and China, whose wealth was plundered by capitalist domination of their markets, and the United States and to some degree Oceania and parts of Latin America, where unrestricted capitalist development producing new wealth developed rapidly and in so doing provided a field for absorbing and realizing surplus product being generated in the older centers of capitalism (for instance, Britain exported capital and machinery to the US and Argentina in the nineteenth century). In recent times, of course, China has absorbed a lot of foreign capital in the development of production and in so doing has generated a huge effective demand not only for raw materials but also for machinery and other material inputs.
There are, however, two problems inherent in this solution, both of which can reconstitute barriers to the continuity of capital accumulation in the very act of seeking to bypass them. The first derives from the simple fact that the circulation process becomes by definition speculative: it rests on the belief that tomorrow’s expansion will not encounter any barriers (including that of further realization), so that today’s surplus can effectively be realized. The speculative element, which is fundamental rather than exceptional or excessive, means that anticipations and expectations, as Keynes for one well understood, are fundamental to the continuity of capital circulation. Marx tacitly recognizes this in Volume III when he notes that capitalist expansion is, as he puts it, very “Protestant” because it is based on faith and credit rather than on the “Catholicism” of gold, the true monetary base. Any fall-off in speculative expectations will be self-fulfilling, therefore, and generate a crisis. In this regard, it is interesting to reread Keynes’s General Theory and notice that the technical solutions of monetary and fiscal policy occupy only a minor part of the argument compared with the psychology of expectations and anticipations. Faith in the system is fundamental, and loss of confidence, as happened in 2008, can be fatal.
The second problem arises within the money and credit system itself. The possibility of “independent” financial and monetary crises, which Marx points out but does not develop in chapter 3, is omnipresent. The underlying problem lies in the contradictions of the money-form itself (use-value as the representation of value, the particular [concrete] as representation of the universal [abstract] and the private appropriation of social power—see chapter 2). When Marx disputes Say’s law, he points to the fact that there is a permanent temptation to hold on to money, and the more people do this, the greater the check to the continuity of circulation. But why would people hold on to money? One reason is that it is a form of social power. It can buy conscience and honor! In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx tells us that if “I am ugly … I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women”5 (or beautiful of men); if I’m stupid, I can buy the presence of intelligent people; if I’m lame, I can have people carry me around. Just think what you can do with all that social power! So there are very good reasons why people want to hang on to money, particularly in the face of uncertainty. Releasing it into circulation in order to get more social power takes an act of faith, or the creation of safe and trustworthy institutions where you can save your personal money while someone else puts it back into circulation to make more money (which is, of course, what banks are supposed to do).
But the ramifications of this problem spread far and wide into the field of representations, where loss of confidence in the symbols of money (the power of the state to guarantee their stability) or in the quality of money (inflation) butt up against more directly quantitative considerations such as “monetary famine” and the freezing up of the means of payment of the sort that occurred in the fall of 2008.
The bourgeois [read Wall Street], drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. ‘Commodities alone are money,’ he said. But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world; only money is a commodity. As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction. (236)
What better description could we have of the crisis that suddenly erupted in 2008!
At the heart of the credit system there exists a range of technical and legal aspects (many of which can fail or badly distort simply by virtue of their rules of operation) coupled with subjective expectations and anticipations. And to the degree that capitalism continues to expand, so the role of the credit system as a kind of central nervous system for directing and controlling the global dynamics of capital accumulation becomes more prominent. The implication is that the control over the means of credit becomes critical for the functioning of capitalism—a positionality that Marx and Engels had recognized in the Communist Manifesto by making the centralization of the means of credit in the hands of the state one of their key demands (presuming, of course, control over the state by the working class). When this is added to the key role of the state with respect to the quality of the coinage and, even more important, symbolic moneys (a role which is acknowledged in chapter 3), then some sort of fusion of state and financial powers appears inevitable. This contradictory fusion was established by the formation of state-controlled central banks with unlimited reserve powers over the disbursement of the means of credit to private appropriators.
In the same way that capital can operate on both sides of the demand and supply of labor-power (see chapter 10), so it can operate through the credit system on both sides of the production-realization relation. In recent years in the United States, for example, the increasingly liberal supply of credit to prospective homeowners coupled with an equally liberal supply of credit to property developers to fuel a massive boom in housing and urban development. In this way, it was imagined that the realization problem was done away with. The only difficulty arose because real wages did not rise in parallel (as the Volume I analysis would predict, given the dominance of neoliberal policies after 1980 which meant that gains from rising productivity were not shared, but concentrated entirely in the upper classes), so that the ability of ordinary homeowners to pay off their rising debt (which tripled for US households from 1980 to 2008) was steadily diminishing. The resultant property-market crash was utterly predictable.
But an analysis of the current crash suggests yet another key role of the credit system. In the same way that Marx noted the role of credit (and usury) in extracting wealth from the feudal lords through primitive accumulation, so the credit system is well positioned to target and extract wealth from the assets held by vulnerable populations. Predatory lending practices—a form of accumulation by dispossession—eventually resulted in foreclosures, which allowed assets to be acquired at low cost and transferred wholesale to boost the long-run wealth of capitalist class interests. The foreclosure wave that began in 2006 inflicted a huge loss of asset values on, among others, vulnerable African-American populations. This second moment of “accumulation by dispossession” via the credit system is of great consequence to the dynamics of capitalism. It facilitated an immense transfer of wealth from East and Southeast Asia to Wall Street in the crisis of 1997–8, for example, as a liquidity freeze forced all manner of viable firms into bankruptcy so that they could be bought up cheaply by foreign investors and then sold back at an immense profit when the recovery came. The credit-led attack on family farming that has occurred in waves since the 1930s in the United States has in similar fashion effectively centralized agricultural wealth in the hands of massive agribusinesses at the expense of small owners, who have been forced to give up their assets cheaply, through foreclosures. Class struggle and the accumulation of capitalist class power work their way through every possible channel within the maze of credit instruments that now exist.
Marx did not investigate the credit system in a sufficiently thorough way to confront the realization problem in all its complexity. This is one of the items of unfinished business in Marx that requires a good deal of work to complete, particularly given the complexity of financial and credit markets, which makes so much of what goes on within them opaque even to their managers and users. But what is interesting about the argument of Volume I is that Marx, in making the transition from the circulation of commodities to that of capital, finds himself forced to invoke relations between creditors and debtors and the use of state-regulated money as a means of payment. He also invokes the time structure of production processes and payments as a key problem of monetary circulation that requires credit if it is to achieve the necessary continuity of capital circulation and accumulation. “Credit-money,” he pointed out, takes root “spontaneously in the function of money as a means of payment.”6 This is what I mean when I say that a careful study of the Volume I argument tells us a lot about what is to come in the rest of Marx’s analysis. It also helps reveal what might be missing and what therefore needs to be more fully investigated.
THE CIRCULATION OF CAPITAL AS A WHOLE

When capital circulation is looked at as a whole, it becomes apparent that the numerous potential barriers to the free and continuing flow of capital through all its moments are neither independent of one another nor systemically integrated. They are best construed as an ensemble of distinctive moments within the totality of the circulation process of capital. There has been a tendency within the history of Marxian theorizing about crises, however, to look for one dominant and exclusive explanation of the origins of the obviously crisis-prone character of a capitalist mode of production. The three big traditional camps of thought are the profit-squeeze, the falling-rate-of-profit and the underconsumptionist traditions, and the separations are often so strongly marked as to put the theories at one another’s throats. The very term “underconsumptionist” in some circles amounts to a dirty word (it seems to mean you are a Keynesian and not a “true” Marxist), while fans of Rosa Luxemburg get outraged at the mean-spirited dismissal of her ideas on the part of those who place the falling-rate-of-profit argument at the center of their theorizing. In recent years, for obvious reasons, far more attention has been paid to the environmental and the financial aspects of crisis formation, and in what are called “the noughties” these aspects of crisis formation have top billing.
I find it more compelling, in the spirit of the analysis laid out in Volume I alongside the extremely interesting discussion of the relations between limits and barriers in the Grundrisse (“every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome”7), to think of all the limits and barriers discussed above as potential points of blockage, each of which can slow down or disrupt the continuity of capital flow and thereby create a crisis of devaluation. I think it also important to understand the potentiality of displacement of one barrier by another. Moves made to alleviate a crisis of labor supply by generating widespread unemployment can obviously create problems of an insufficiency of effective demand, for example. Consequent moves to resolve the effective-demand problem by extensions of the credit system among the working classes can ultimately create crises of confidence in the quality of money (as registered by inflationary crises, sudden constrictions of credit supply and financial crashes). I also think it is more in keeping with Marx’s frequent invocation of the fluid and flexible character of capitalist development to recognize the rapid repositioning of one barrier at the expense of another and so recognize the multiple ways in which crises can be registered in different historical and geographical situations.
Summarizing, the potential barriers are as follows: (1) inability to mass together enough original capital to get production under way (“barriers to entry” problems); (2) scarcities of labor or recalcitrant forms of labor organization that can produce profit squeezes; (3) disproportionalities and uneven development between sectors within the division of labor; (4) environmental crises arising out of resource depletion and land and environmental degradation; (5) imbalances and premature obsolescence due to uneven or excessively rapid technological changes driven by the coercive laws of competition and resisted by labor; (6) worker recalcitrance or resistance within a labor process that operates under the command and control of capital; (7) underconsumption and insufficient effective demand; (8) monetary and financial crises (liquidity traps, inflation or deflation) that arise within a credit system that depends on sophisticated credit instruments and organized state powers alongside a climate of faith and trust. At each one of these points internal to the circulation process of capital, there exists an antinomy, a potential antagonism that can irrupt as an open contradiction (to use the language that Marx frequently deploys in Capital).
This is not the end of the analysis of crisis formation and resolution under capitalism, however. To begin with, the dynamics of uneven geographical development together with the whole problem of spatiotemporal unfolding of capitalist development on the world stage are stressful in the extreme, as capital seeks to create a geographical landscape (of physical and social infrastructures) appropriate to its dynamic at one time only to have to destroy it and re-create yet another geographical landscape at a later point. The changing dynamics of urbanization on the world stage dramatically illustrate this process. Geopolitical conflicts (including catastrophic wars) abound and, arising as they do out of the peculiar qualities of territorialized power (requiring an adequate theorization of the state, a set of institutions and practices that is frequently invoked in Volume I but, like the credit system, left undertheorized), have a logic that does not neatly fit into the requirements of continuous capital circulation and accumulation. The recent history of global shifts in production and deindustrialization have entailed an immense amount of creative destruction, largely worked out through sometimes local but in other instances continent-wide crises (such as that which hit East and Southeast Asia in 1997–8). Furthermore, the possibility of external shocks (including hurricanes and earthquakes) triggering crises cannot be excluded. When almost all activity stopped in the United States in general and New York in particular in the wake of 9/11, the stoppage of circulation was so threatening that within a week the powers that be were everywhere urging the population to get out their credit cards and go shopping!
The spirit of Marxian inquiry into the actual history of crises should, I believe, be open to all these possibilities. Keynes was, I suspect, basically correct to interpret the crisis of the 1930s as mainly an insufficiency of effective demand (though probably for class reasons, he did not point out the relation to income inequality—not historically replicated until recently—that exploded in the 1920s owing to wage repression). This was exacerbated by the fact that people got nervous about the capacity for sustained accumulation and so started to hold on to money. And the more people held on to money, the more the system gummed up. This is what Keynes called the liquidity trap. Ways had to be found to entice money out of hiding, and one answer was debt-financed government expenditures to reinvigorate capital circulation (the other answer was to go to war). On the other hand, I think Andew Glyn and others were basically correct to see a strong element of profit squeeze in the difficulties of the late 1960s in the advanced capitalist countries, where labor scarcities and strong labor organization were clearly putting a brake on accumulation. Excessive monopolization simultaneously helped slow productivity, and this, along with a fiscal crisis of the state (associated with the US war in Vietnam), initiated a long phase of stagflation that could only be resolved by disciplining labor and liberating the coercive laws of competition. In this case, the crisis cascaded from one barrier point to another and back again. The relation to nature also affects profitability, particularly if the rent (a category which, like interest, is not handled in Volume I) on natural resources rises dramatically.
My point here is not to attempt some potted history of crises but to suggest that the insights that come from a study of Marx’s works need to be used flexibly and contingently rather than formalistically. My own view of the internal dynamics of crisis theory (as opposed to independently occurring but not unrelated geopolitical struggles) rests on an analysis of the various limits and barriers encountered within the circulation process; a study of the various strategies for overcoming or circumventing these limits and barriers politically and economically; and a careful monitoring of the ways in which barriers overcome or circumvented at one point result in new barriers appearing at other points. The continuous unfolding and partial resolution of the crisis tendencies of capitalism becomes the subject of inquiry.
Behind this lies a deeper problem. Accumulation for accumulation’s sake and production for production’s sake and the perpetual need to achieve a compound rate of growth were all very well when the core of industrial capitalism was constituted, as it was around 1780, by activities in the forty square miles around Manchester and a few other hot spots of capitalist dynamism. But what we are now confronting is the possibility of a compound rate of growth of, say, 3 percent per year, on the basis of everything happening in China and the rest of East and Southeast Asia, an expanding core of activity in India, Russia and Eastern Europe, surging economies in the Middle East and Latin America and intense pockets of capitalist development in Africa, as well as in the traditional heartlands of capitalism in North America, Europe and Oceania. The mass of accumulation and of physical movement required in future years to keep this compound rate of growth going will be nothing short of staggering.
I view crises as surface eruptions of deep tectonic shifts in the spatiotemporal logic of capitalism. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion, and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises increases. The manner, form, spatiality and time of the consequent eruptions are almost impossible to predict, but that they will occur with greater frequency and power is almost certain, making the events of 2008 appear normal if not trivial in comparison. Since these stresses are internal to the capitalist dynamic (which does not preclude some seemingly external disruptive event like a catastrophic pandemic), then what better argument could there be, as Marx once put it, for capitalism “to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production”?8
But this is easier said than done. It entails, of course, the shaping of a political project. For this we can’t wait until we know everything we need to know, or even understand everything Marx has to say. Marx holds up a mirror to our reality in Volume I in such a way as to create an imperative to act, and he makes it clear that class politics, class struggle, has to center what we do. In itself, this doesn’t sound particularly revolutionary. But over the past quarter century, many of us have lived in a world where we have been told again and again that class is irrelevant, that the very idea of class struggle is so old-fashioned as to be mere fodder for academic dinosaurs. But any serious reading of Capital shows irrefutably that we will get nowhere unless we write “Class Struggle” on our political banners and march to its drum-beat.
We need, however, to better define exactly what this might mean for our place and times. Marx in his own day was often uncertain as to exactly what to do, what kinds of political alliances would make sense, what kinds of objectives and claims should be articulated. But what Marx also shows is that even in the midst of such uncertainties, we cannot fail to act. Cynics and critics typically object that one is trying to reduce questions of, say, nature, gender, sexuality, race, religion or whatever to class terms, and that this is unacceptable. My answer to this is: not at all. These other struggles are clearly important and have to be waged in their own right. But, I would note, it is rare for any of them not to internalize a significant class dimension, the solution to which is a necessary though never sufficient condition for, say, an adequate anti-racist or pro-environmentalist politics.
Just look, for example, at the impact of the so-called subprime-mortgage crisis on conditions in the city of Baltimore. A disproportionate number of black households and households headed by single parents (mainly women) have been dispossessed of their living rights and in some cases their assets in the course of a vicious class war of accumulation by dispossession. In such a situation, we cannot walk away from the category of class and deny its relevance. We have to stop being nervous and fearful of talking class talk and of mobilizing political strategies around notions of class war.
But there is, of course, a reason for the wishful silences. Class is the one category that the powers that be do not want anyone to take seriously. The Wall Street Journal scathingly mocks anything smacking of class war as being gratuitously divisive when the nation should be pulling together to confront its difficulties. The ruling elite does not ever want to openly admit, let alone discuss, the one central thing it is engaged on, its class strategy to augment its wealth and power.
The one thing that Marx again and again insists on is that the concept of class, in all its ambiguous glory, is indispensable to both theory and action. But there is much to do to make the category work. For example, one of the questions that comes out of reading Capital is what to say about the relations between struggles waged around primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession on the one hand, and the class struggles typically waged around the workplace and in the labor market on the other. It is not always easy to put these two forms of struggle together. But I find it hard to ignore the vast array of struggles going on in the world against dispossession, even though some of them are merely a hardened form of retrograde not-in-my-backyard politics. The division between these two grand forms of class struggle hurts politically. But what Marx’s chapter on “The Working Day” teaches is that alliances are important and that it is hard to get anywhere without them, because the capitalist class accumulates capital by whatever means are at hand, and that means at the expense of the rest of us. Capitalists get filthy rich while everyone else stagnates or suffers. This class privilege and power, Marx says, must be battled against and destroyed to make way for another mode of production.
But what Volume I also teaches is that the displacement of one mode of production by another is a drawn-out and complicated process. Capitalism did not supplant feudalism with some neat revolutionary transformation. It had to grow within the interstices of the old society and bit by bit supplant it, sometimes through force, violence, predation and seizures of assets but at other times with guile and cunning. And it often lost battles against the old order even as it eventually won the war. As it achieved a modicum of power, however, it had to build its alternative at first on the basis of the technologies, social relations, mental conceptions, production systems, relations to nature and patterns of daily life as these had long been constituted under the preceding order. It took a coevolution and uneven development of these different moments within the social totality (see chapter 6) before it found not only its own unique technological base but also its belief systems and mental conceptions, its unstable but clearly class-ridden configuration of social relations, its curious spatiotemporal rhythms and its equally strange ways of daily life, to say nothing of its production processes; before it was truly possible to say that this was capitalism, albeit constantly changing in response to its own inevitable contradictions.
I began this book by urging you to try to read Marx on Marx’s own terms. Obviously, my own view as to what those terms are has played a crucial role in the mental map I have tried to construct to guide you. My purpose in this was not to persuade you that I have the correct line, the correct reading, but first to open a way for you to construct your own meanings and interpretations. Many people will, I know, dispute my reading, as you should, too, in whole or in part. For me, the second crucial task is to open up a space of dialogue and discussion in such a way as to bring the Marxian vision of the world back onto center stage, both intellectually and politically. Marx’s works have far too much to tell us regarding the perils of our times to consign them to the dustbin of history. It should by now, given the events of the last year or so, be evident that we need to think “outside the box” of received wisdoms. “Events,” wrote Henri Lefebvre in his little book The Explosion, covering the events of 1968, “belie forecasts; to the extent that events are historic, they upset calculations. They may even overturn strategies that provided for their possible occurrence.” Events “pull thinkers out of their comfortable seats and plunge them headlong into a wave of contradictions.”9 What better moment to study carefully the inner contradictions of capitalism and the works of that superb dialectician who did so much to make them so luminously transparent!
While mental conceptions cannot on their own change the world, ideas are, as Marx himself observed, a material force in history. Marx wrote Capital to better equip us to fight that struggle. But here, too, there is no easy path, any more than there is some “royal road to science.” As Bertolt Brecht once wrote:
It takes a lot of things to change the world:
Anger and tenacity. Science and indignation,
The quick initiative, the long reflection,
The cold patience and the infinite perseverance,
The understanding of the particular case and the understanding of the ensemble:
Only the lessons of reality can teach us to transform reality.