Capital and Its Discontents

Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult

Sasha Lilley, Sasha Lilley

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781604865325
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Capitalism is stumbling, empire is faltering, and the planet is thawing. Yet many people are still grasping to understand these multiple crises and to find a way forward to a just future. Into the breach come the essential insights of Capital and Its Discontents, which cut through the gristle to get to the heart of the matter about the nature of capitalism and imperialism, capitalism's vulnerabilities at this conjuncture—and what can we do to hasten its demise.

Through a series of incisive conversations with some of the most eminent thinkers and political economists on the Left—including David Harvey, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Mike Davis, Leo Panitch, Tariq Ali, and Noam Chomsky— Capital and Its Discontents illuminates the dynamic contradictions undergirding capitalism and the potential for its dethroning. The book challenges conventional wisdom on the Left about the nature of globalization, neoliberalism, and imperialism, as well as the agrarian question in the Global South. It probes deeply into the roots of the global economic meltdown, the role of debt and privatization in dampening social revolt, and considers capitalism's dynamic ability to find ever new sources of accumulation—whether through imperial or ecological plunder or the commodification of previously unpaid female labor.

The Left luminaries in Capital and Its Discontents look at potential avenues out of the mess—as well as wrong turns and needless detours—drawing lessons from the history of post-colonial states in the Global South, struggles against imperialism past and present, the eternal pendulum swing of radicalism, the corrosive legacy of postmodernism, and the potentialities of the radical humanist tradition. At a moment when capitalism as a system is more reviled than ever, here is an indispensable toolbox of ideas for action by some of the most brilliant thinkers of our times.

Full list of Interviewees:

• Noam Chomsky is a laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics and Chomsky is one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. His recent books include Who Rules the World? and Hopes and Prospects.
• Tariq Ali is a historian, novelist, and filmmaker, and the author of many books. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and a contributor to the Guardian and the London Review of Books.
• Mike Davis is an urban theorist, historian, and political activist, author of many works including City of Quartz. He is an editor of the New Left Review and received a MacArthur Fellowship Award and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.
• Ellen Meiksins Wood, for many years professor of political science at York University, Toronto, is the author of a number of books, including The Origin of Capitalism and Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.
• David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a pioneering radical geographer. He has written numerous books and is among the 20 most cited authors in the humanities.
• Leo Panitch teaches political economy at York University in Toronto and is coeditor of the Socialist Register. He is the author of numerous books, including In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, published by PM Press.
• Doug Henwood is editor of Left Business Observer, author of After the New Economy and Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom, and a contributing editor to The Nation magazine.
• A South African native, Gillian Hart is professor of geography at UC Berkeley and the author of Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa.
• John Bellamy Foster is the editor of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He is the coauthor, among other works, of The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences.
• Ursula Huws is the editor of the international interdisciplinary journal Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, and the author of The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World.
• David McNally is professor of political science at York University in Toronto and the author of many books, including Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance, published by PM Press.
• Jason W. Moore is a research fellow at the Department of Human Geography at Lund University, Sweden.
• Vivek Chibber is professor of sociology at New York University and the author of Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India.
• John Sanbonmatsu teaches philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He is the author of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making? of a New Political Subject.
• Andrej Gruba?i? is a dissident from the Balkans. A radical historian and sociologist, he is the coauthor of Wobblies and Zapatistas and author of Don't Mourn, Balkanize! (both from PM Press).

Part I Empire, Neoliberalism, Crisis

CHAPTER ONE
Ellen Meiksins Wood: Empire in the Age of Capital

While empire long precedes capitalism, contemporary imperialism is inseparable from capitalism. What, then, are the distinguishing features of capitalism as an economic system, as you see it?

EMW: I think the essential characteristic is that all of the major economic actors are market dependent, dependent on the market to maintain and reproduce their conditions of life. This also means that the relationship between classes is mediated by the market, so that unlike precapitalist systems in which exploiting classes were able to extract surplus labor from exploited classes by means of superior coercive power, direct noneconomic coercion, in capitalism the compulsions are economic imperatives. So in a mature capitalist economy, the capitalist doesn’t need to have superior political, legal or military power over workers, the way a precapitalist landlord had to have power over peasants who had nonmarket access to land. Wage laborers have to sell their labor power to a capitalist simply in order to gain access to the means of their own life, their own labor, and so on. And of course the capitalist depends on the market for access to labor and to realize the profits the workers produce. Of course there’s a huge difference between propertyless workers and the owners of capital, which means a huge imbalance of class power. But capitalists are no less dependent on the market to maintain themselves and their capital. The whole capitalist system is operated by market imperatives, the compulsions of competition, profit-maximization, and capital accumulation.

Why don’t commerce or trade in goods constitute capitalism, as some might assume?

EMW: I make a distinction between market opportunities and market imperatives. And I think it’s only in capitalism that you have a system in which people are obliged, are compelled, to enter the market simply to guarantee their own existence and their own self-reproduction. There have been markets throughout history in which people have brought their surpluses to sell, but there’s never been a system before capitalism in which producers and appropriators both were absolutely dependent on the market for their most basic conditions of life and therefore compelled to follow the dictates of the market in order to sustain themselves.

You write that the exploitation that is a necessary part of capitalism is hidden in certain ways, unlike the coercion that characterized feudal societies where naked power was more apparent. How is exploitation under capitalism opaque?

EMW: The contrast that you just indicated, between capitalism and feudalism, is a useful one. If you think about what the relationship is between a feudal lord and a dependent peasant, it’s a very transparent relationship, which is even legally recognized as a relationship of inequality.

In capitalism, the capitalist and the laborer begin, on the face of it, as equals. They’re legally equal, and on top of that, the capitalist actually pays the workers instead of transparently extracting surpluses from them. In the case of feudalism, the peasant is obliged to do labor services or to transfer surpluses directly to the lord; whereas in capitalism, the relationship appears on the face of it to be the opposite, because the capitalist actually pays the worker up front before realizing profits from the worker’s labor in the market. So it takes some complicated calculation to figure out how it is that the worker’s surpluses are transferred to the capitalist and how it is that the capitalist derives a profit from the worker’s labor.

What are the main features of capitalist imperialism?

EMW: The main feature of capitalist imperialism is that it operates as much as possible via economic imperatives, instead of by direct colonial rule. I think that if you had talked about American imperialism before the invasion of Iraq, you would likely meet the objection that the United States doesn’t really possess colonies. But I actually think it remains true that it’s not a colonial power in the sense that we’ve traditionally understood it. I think the United States would still prefer to stay out of colonial entanglements and operate its domination through economic imperatives.

I think that the United States is actually the first, and so far the only, truly capitalist empire, which has exercised its domination largely by these economic imperatives, by making subordinate powers subject to economic compulsions emanating from the United States and from American capital.

So in the case of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, would you say then that it is an exception to this rule?

EMW: I think the mess that they made of it in Iraq, and the complete lack of planning for after the war, probably testifies to the fact that they hadn’t really intended it to be this way. They hadn’t intended to be an occupying power. What I think they hoped would happen was that they could decapitate the regime and just install some more compliant leadership and then allow

American capital to insert itself comfortably into the Iraq economy and into the production of oil. The very fact that they made such a hash of it seems to me to confirm the point, rather than the reverse.

What is it about capitalism today that allows empire to exist and to flourish and to expand without the need for military colonialization?

EMW: When we were talking about the relationship between capital and labor, I talked about the ways in which capital can exercise its domination over labor, because workers are market dependent and obliged to enter the market, to sell their labor power, simply in order to gain access to the means of life and self-reproduction. In a way, an analogous thing has happened on the global plane, in which more and more parts of the world have been subjected to these market imperatives by making them dependent on entering the market. Capitalists have to pay workers up front before they realize profits from the workers’ work through the market just to gain access to the means of maintaining themselves. You only need to think about the conditions imposed by the IMF on developing economies, which are designed to make them more dependent on global markets and foreign capital. Or, for example, think about agricultural producers who have been forced into single cash crop production and increasingly forced to orient themselves towards the external market and export. The more they’ve been oriented in that way, the more susceptible they’ve became to the imposition of this kind of domination from the advanced capitalist countries.

Why wouldn’t smaller, poorer countries just try to stay independent of a global economy in which the winners are clearly the richer countries?

EMW: This is obviously the toughest question for anybody in these countries to answer. The extent to which economies can withdraw themselves from the global capitalist economy is obviously a matter of huge contention and, frankly, I can’t answer it myself. It’s really difficult now to imagine a world in which people could be independent and completely autonomous of the global market. But I think that what has happened is that increasingly, through the IMF and so on, these countries have more and more subjected themselves and allowed themselves to be drawn even more into this form of domination, more dependent on foreign capital and finance.

Take Brazil for example. The Brazilians in recent years have liked to talk about their independence or decoupling from the global economy, but in reality, even under the Workers’ Party, they’ve made themselves more dependent on international capital, and some economists far more expert than I am have raised questions about whether this has been wise or even necessary. You might think that an economy as big and potentially autonomous as this could have detached itself much more than it has been prepared to do. Whatever the press is now telling us about the Brazilian recovery from the current crisis, there’s ample evidence that they’ve suffered more from the recession than they needed to do or than they would have done had they not been following IMF principles and made themselves increasingly dependent on the global economy. But I really don’t feel qualified to comment on this with any confidence. strong>You distinguish empires of capital—capitalist imperialism—from at least two other kinds of imperialisms that have existed and to some extent flourished in the past for a time: empires of commerce and empires of property. You regard the Roman Empire and the Spanish Empire in Latin America as conforming to the latter. What defined these empires?

EMW: I selected these two forms of empire and distinguished them from the empire of capital because a focus on property and on commerce are something that we associate with capitalism. I wanted to show that it was possible, and historically did happen, that empires could be property-oriented or could be commercially oriented without being capitalist and without responding to the same capitalist imperatives.

The Roman Empire is probably the first really to be grounded in the acquisition of private property. The reason I called the Roman Empire an empire of property is because, first of all, it was responding to the interests of private propertied classes in ways quite different, for example, from empires like the Chinese, where private property was well developed but where the imperial state was a primary mode of appropriation for officeholders and the main source of great wealth. In the Roman Empire we’re talking about property in land as the principal source of power and the empire was constructed on that foundation. The republic that created this empire was basically an oligarchy of propertied classes and it was their interests that were being expressed in imperial expansion. And, in fact, although they created an imperial state, the imperial state never became the primary source of wealth for the ruling classes. Property was always the objective, the sole reliable source of wealth, while the imperial state served as an instrument of appropriation indirectly by protecting and expanding private property. The Roman Empire was basically one big land-grabbing operation.

All the ruling classes enriched themselves big time. They also, to some extent, used imperial land to pacify their own peasant armies, whom they had basically been expropriating at home. But they also effectively created local propertied classes in their colonial territories, even in places where aristocracies of property hadn’t existed before. So the empire was in a sense more a coalition of local landed aristocracies than an imperial state.

What empires of commerce, which are based on commerce and trading routes, stand out to you historically?

EMW: Probably the most commercialized empire that ever existed before capitalism was the early modern Dutch Empire. But you can also identify the Arab-Muslim Empire in these terms and, for example, the Venetian and other Italian commercial city-states. The principal reason that I call them noncapitalist is that their commercial success depended on their extra-economic powers, political, military, and so on. I have this complicated argument—and this is obviously very contentious and controversial—about how the Dutch economy, as commercialized as it was, was not driven by capitalist imperatives. It was above all a commercial power, but its commercial successes depended not really on competitive production. Although it did introduce quite a few innovations in production, its main successes had to do, for example, with its naval power, its navigational skills, its extra-economic command of trade routes and its imposition of de facto trade monopolies in various places.

So trade, which would involve buying low and selling high, is not a hallmark of capitalism, which involves a certain kind of competitive production to continually make products faster and better at less cost.

EMW: Right. One way of looking at it is to say that precapitalist commerce depends on fragmented markets. In other words, you buy in one market and sell in another and that’s why long-distance trade was the most wealth-creating form of commerce. Whereas an economy driven by truly capitalist imperatives is in effect an integrated market, ideally, in which all producers are subjected to the same competitive imperatives and have to adopt productive strategies to meet those imperatives.

In the case of the Dutch, for example, it’s certainly a case of dependence on commerce, in the sense that even Dutch farmers were obliged to enter the market for some of their basic inputs like grain. But the way they achieved their success was to command, for example, the Baltic grain trade and to import cheap grain from relatively low-cost producing areas, while the Dutch farmers themselves were able to move onto semi-luxury goods like dairy products and meat and so on. It was never a question of their competing with cheap low-cost producers. They actually benefited from low-cost production elsewhere. They were able to keep their output prices high and keep their costs low simply by their command of this vast trading system.

Let’s turn to the British Empire, which you regard as the first emerging instance of capitalist imperialism. How did capitalism emerge in England? What happened to production and agriculture there?

EMW: It wasn’t some single revolutionary moment that brought about capitalism, but what emerged in the English countryside was a distinctive network of agrarian relations in which tenants increasingly held their property on economic leases, not rents fixed by custom, for instance, but rents that varied according to the movements of economic forces. And you had landlords who became increasingly dependent for their wealth on the competitive productiveness of their tenant, rather than on their own superior force, their own coercive power to extract more surpluses. So you had a system in which both appropriators and producers had an interest in increasing the labor productivity, at first by innovative land use and then by technical means, and embarked on this project of what they called “improvement” to increase the productivity of agriculture.

Improvement, the idea of improving uncultivated or poorly cultivated land, was used to justify seizing the land of others, whether in England or Ireland or elsewhere. How did the philosopher John Locke, perhaps the most influential proponent of the concept of improvement, shape Western ideology about the value of property?

EMW: European imperialism was often justified by claiming that unoccupied land was available for appropriation—the so-called res nullius principle. This wasn’t an uncommon defense of colonial appropriation. But what happens with capitalism, which is absolutely distinctive, and what you get with the capitalist ideology to which Locke contributed so much, is that it isn’t simply a question of unoccupied land being available for appropriation. The argument now was that anything which was not being fruitfully and productively used, by the standards of English commercial agriculture, was itself subject to justifiable appropriation. So that applied, for example, to indigenous lands in the Americas where the indigenous people did not improve their land by the standards of English commercial agriculture and did not increase the exchange value of what they produced.

And that’s critical: the notion of exchange value is the really essential point. Locke is very explicit about this. He indulges in these calculations about how much of the land’s value derives from nature and how much from human labor, and in an improved economy, the value created by labor is maybe 99 percent or something like that. But it soon becomes clear that the essential point isn’t labor—the expenditure of effort—but the creation of exchange value; and the point then is that, no matter how much effort may have been expended by the indigenous peoples in America, they weren’t actually doing what needs tobe done to establish their rights of property, because, in the absence of a well developed commercial economy, they weren’t creating value.

And so the production of exchange value becomes effectively the basis of property both domestically and abroad. Now this doesn’t mean that once somebody seizes a piece of land and renders it productive, somebody else can come along and claim it on the grounds that they’re going to be even more productive. Locke says that we establish a right to property when we mix our labor with something. But you have to follow the argument a bit further than that, because it isn’t just a question of our mixing our labor with something that gives us a right to property. What establishes property is adding to its commercial value by rendering it more productive.

That created a whole new justification for empire, although I have to say that Locke wasn’t the first one to think of it. There’s a fascinating document, which I refer to in my book, by one of the architects of British imperialism in Ireland, a lawyer named Sir John Davies, who decades earlier than Locke justified seizing Irish land by arguing that the Irish themselves were not really using the land because they weren’t improving the land. Not that they weren’t cultivating it, because they obviously were, so it wasn’t just a question of unoccupied or uncultivated land being open to appropriation. But they simply weren’t improving it, they weren’t increasing its exchange value sufficiently, so the English were entitled to claim it. And it became the objective of English imperialism in Ireland to transform Irish property relations in such a way that they could try to reproduce the effects of English agrarian capitalism—until of course Ireland itself threatened to become a competitor and then they started obstructing Irish development. But that’s another story.

How do you regard the British Empire in India in light of your contentions about territorial empire and the imperatives of British early capitalism?

EMW: The British were never able to transport their social property relations to their empire in the way that they tried to do in Ireland. In the case of India you had a prosperous highly developed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Introduction Sasha Lilley
• Part I: Empire, Neoliberalism, Crisis
• Part II: Commodification, Enclosure, and the Contradictions of Capitalism
• Part III : Alternatives?
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Notes
• Index