This summer, I've been reading through Marx's Capital Vol. 1 with some friends. It basically tells the story of how capitalism operates, and how it came to be. (It's in his other essays where we goes in on his theory for what his alternative, communism, would be.) Here are some of the things I've been reading in support of that endeavor.
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| trucks filling up on gas somewhere in Oklahoma |
The Economic Policy Institute's Productivity-Pay Gap
A graph that illustrates the outcome of the explicit policy decisions of "trickle down economics" (anti-labor deregulation that allowed for monopolies to return, decreases in taxes on the wealthy, fewer increases in the minimum wage). This allowed for an increase in productivity to result in increased CEO and management profits and not in worker wages.
From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slower—increasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation).
Productivity also decreased in this timeframe, meaning "economic growth became both slower and more radically unequal."
The good news is, these are all policy decisions we can reverse — if we want to and have the political will! Massachusetts' Fair Share Amendment could send this message.
Jeff Bezos believes in the labor theory of value?
After returning from space, Jeff Bezos said in a press conference: “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.” This indicates that he ascribes to Marx's labor theory of value as an explanation for how he got wealthy enough to fly into space. This is an important break from the story we typically hear from the super wealthy and uncritical, which is that value, in an economic "boost the GDP" sense, comes from the "ideas people." According to Marx, value is generated at the point of production of the commodity — let's say, by the workers who make iPhones at the FoxConn factory in China. The value of an iPhone comes from its utility, and the profit they generate comes from the discrepancy between what it costs to produce the iPhone (raw materials + wage-labor) and the price at which it is sold. When we talk about exploitation, we are referring to the fact that the wage-laborers are not compensated for all of the value they generate, as part of this value is siphoned off as profit for the people who own the factory and drew up the plans. The ideas are important, and they make possible the value creation in the form of the iPhone, but that is not where the value itself comes from — there is no profit without (exploited) workers.
Amazon is a bit more complicated of an example. Rather than providing a commodity in the form of a concrete product, they offer a platform (digital marketplace, and digital real estate in general) and service (delivery) for other peoples' cheap goods, taking a serious cut off the top. If Amazon's "fulfillment center" workers were paid more for the service they supply, Bezos would have less money, but still plenty, to blow it on space projects like this.
Howard Zinn's approach to writing history
I started reading the popular Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." It is eminently accessible, seemingly written with a teenage audience in mind, and is ever-so-subversively Marxist, without ever using the world, or explicitly mentioning capitalism.
Marx's approach to history is called "Dialectical Materialism," which posits that the unfolding of political and historical events results from the conflict of social forces over material needs, and is interpretable as a series of contradictions and their resolutions. In this approach, you'll see history described through class antagonisms — the poor and disempowered versus the wealthy and powerful — rather than through the more mainstream approach which focuses on individual events and individuals as inflection points. In Dialectical Materialism, these events and people are part of a larger historical process. This frame also asserts the primary and fundamental driving force of material circumstances (the base) over what's going on on the level of consciousness and culture (the superstructure, determined by the base — "matter over mind").
Zinn's take on writing history in American society:
The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or ration or national or sexual.
Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation—for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations.
What I appreciate here is his framing of writing history as definitely not an endeavor to document, to the best on one's ability, the objective reality of the historical process — life on earth, which becomes history, is far too expansive and complex to be fully documented, and any documentation effort will necessarily flatten and distort parts of history an an ideologically non-neutral way. According to this approach, we measure historical accounts on a scale of more or less objectively true, as opposed to supporting a particular ideological slant to history. But the question of objectivity and history is a big one, and I need to think about it more.
An interview with Peter Gowan, a Marxist political economy professor
Basically his life story, which I found to be a useful departure from what I/we in the United States have been exposed to.
Most illuminating in this account is his description of his approach to his work:
Q: Looking back, would you say that there is a constant set of themes that characterizes your work?
A:What is probably distinctive about my work is its jack-of-all-trades dimension: interdisciplinary, if you like. I’ve always been interested in thinking across politics and economics, and thinking in historical terms. Hayek said: someone who is only an economist is no economist, and I would say the same about politics. These categories—economics and politics—which are treated as utterly autonomous within conventional thought, are absolutely imbricated with each other, in very complicated ways. The second thing is that I don’t, on the whole, have the courage to write in the field of general theory; instead, I write in a kind of analytical mode. Analytical work has narrow parameters—it’s confined to particular times and particular spaces, and doesn’t claim truth across all ages; and much of my work is also contemporary. When I write, I do try to look downwards, if you like, towards the empirical, and upwards towards the theoretical. But I also find that when you get into this kind of work, you discover the specificities of relationships and dynamics which are much more peculiar and distinctive than one could ever have imagined. Last point: I consider myself to be at the opposite extreme from, say, Gerry Cohen in his Marx’s Theory of History, in that I do not think that economic and technological determinism can explain anything. This economic–technological determinism, what I would call ‘mechanical materialism’, is the approach of the classical political economists: Adam Smith and Ricardo. It’s quite extraordinary to me that such a huge number of Marxists have adopted it; Marx himself spent his life doing what he called a critique of political economy—i.e. of that mechanical approach. I think it is very helpful to make a distinction between the constitutive and the causal: the ontological significance of capitalism, of that social structure, is fundamental for understanding modern politics, and modern economics. But that doesn’t at all mean that you should start with what’s going on in the capitalist economy to find the causes of conflicts and changes.
Q: Could you explain that a little further?
A: Well, by ‘ontological’ I mean a very simple thing: your theory of what the world—the social world—is made up of. The standard approach in Western social science—the one used by Weber, but it’s an ideology that’s become as naturalized as the air people breathe—is an atomistic one: that the world is essentially made up of individuals. In addition, the individuals may be pushed by certain drives; Weber would say by rational drives in the economic field and by non-rational drives in the political field. But Marxists have taken the view that there are big objects out there which are not atomistic: social structures such as capitalism, for example, that are changing and shaping the everyday world. When we are looking at contemporary developments—say, in international politics—we need to ask ourselves what kind of ontological assumptions we are making, and what they imply for our analysis.
Degrowth: An environmental ideology with good intentions, bad politics — Collin Chambers
"Degrowth," a term coined by André Gorz in the 1970s, is the stance that, in the face of capitalism's drive toward limitless growth beyond natural bounds, which sets us on a path to environmental destruction and civilizational collapse, we must turn away from not just capitalism but any kind of productivism.
Here is a pull quote that describes the essence better than I could:
The author's problem with this theory is that it takes accumulation as the central problem, and its solution of self-limiting to sustainable bounds amounts to "ecological austerity for the working classes," who are already fighting for basic subsistence. Scale isn't the issue: it is scale applied toward the end of maximizing surplus-value (profit) for big corporate CEOs, rather than determining the necessary amount of accumulation to divide among the people and to reinvest in communal projects. The political prospects of the idea are limited: "The ideas from degrowth will not appeal to masses of exploited and oppressed people who actually need more, not less."
Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of degrowth, defines it like this: “The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption” [3]. The degrowth perspective asks why society is so obsessed with “growth” (measured by Gross Domestic Product) and seeks to deconstruct the entire “ideology of growth.” The “ideology of growth” is used by the capitalist class to argue that more and more growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected.
Marxism and ecology: the dialectic of growth — Ernest Mandel (1973)
Marx is very clear that value, under capitalism, comes from two sources: raw materials provided by the earth, and the labor of humans. In this way, his understanding of not only economics but of human life, and all life, can be read as ecocentric — there is no understanding of human society without understanding how we interact with and within our environments. Capitalism structurally fails to recognize this point: Marx writes in Capital Vol. I that "Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer."
Mandel's essay is seminal in the thread of folks imagining what Marx might have to say about the climate crisis. In it, Mandel asserts Marx's belief in the importance of harnessing the large-scale productive forces toward the benefit of humanity. (That said, I would expand beyond just humans to all life, and also non-living matter — we do depend on our environment to survive, after all.)
The essential points run thusly: a surplus must be produced to allow for a division of labor and the possibility of leisure time spent doing something other than meeting subsistence needs; once a sufficient level of advancement is reached, we can liberate all from doing grueling physical labor and eliminate "the tyranny of the social division of labor."
This level of advancement can look different, as the way the surplus is divided and governed serves as the genesis of class differentiation (some get more control than others, justifying and enforcing this in various ways). Marx warned that, without a transformation of the social structure and the mentality of the people, we will wind up with an unequal, exploitative society, rather than his more balanced and egalitarian vision.
The issue we face is not accumulation as such (as discussed above), but rather that capitalist accumulation exceeds our collective capacity to consume and knows no bounds, expanding beyond the natural limits of our environment, and leading to its destruction.
Marx recognizes that all value comes from two sources: nature and human labor-power. He writes in Capital Vol. 1, "Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer." He also recognizes that, at a certain point, the forces of production become destructive of these very sources of value — and simply human livelihood. After that point, we are doomed.
Certain significant natural resources, such as clean air and running rivers, cannot be fully privatized, and therefore have no "cost," meaning they cannot be factored into any calculus within the capitalist logic of decision-making. Profits are privatized and judged on short time-scales, while the costs, both short- and long-term, are collectivized — we all pay for the ecological damage wrought by reckless production.
Mandel is clear that degrowth is not an option. I'll let him bring his argument home:
The choice for ‘zero growth’ is clearly an inhuman choice. Two-thirds of humanity still lives below the subsistence minimum. If growth is halted, it means that the underdeveloped countries are condemned to remain stuck in the swamp of poverty, constantly on the brink of famine. It sounds good to say ‘zero growth’ must go hand in hand with a radical and global redistribution of wealth. But who really believes that such an international redistribution can take place within the framework of a capitalist economy based on private ownership and under the constant pressure of the market economy, when even inside the industrialized capitalist countries such a redistribution has never succeeded? ...
Our only salvation is in the second option, controlled and planned growth. Disorderly, uncontrolled capitalist growth, which disregards people’s most fundamental interests and basic respect for nature, poses such a threat to humanity’s physical survival that radical change in economic and social structures has become an absolute necessity. The struggle for the socialist world revolution, for the classless society, is no longer only a struggle for a more rational, fairer, more humane and freer society. It has become a struggle for the physical survival of the human species...
A triple priority can be established in consensus with the majority of the world’s inhabitants; (1) primary needs of all people must be met; (2) new and different forms of technology which save and replenish the reserves of scarce natural resources must be sought; and (3) the intellectual abilities of all must be developed (through education, research and meaningful recreation)...
Planned growth means controlled growth, rationally controlled by human beings. This presupposes socialism: such growth cannot be achieved unless the ‘associated producers’ take control of production and use it for their own interests, instead of being slaves to ‘blind economic laws’ or ‘technological compulsion’.
Two essays on Marxist Feminism, written by my friend Dr. Smriti Rao
The first essay is an accessible overview of Marxist-feminist economics. I'm especially on board with the analysis of the "backstory" of capitalism, which is everything that surrounds and supports the "front story" of generating profit on the market. Social Reproduction Theory examines this "backstory" — the softer things, like cultural norms and gender roles, as well as the unpaid labor of biological reproduction, child-rearing, nannies, cooking — that supports capitalist accumulation in the market. Basically, imagine all of the things that the stay-at-home moms have to take care of not only for Big Boss Tommy to go to work on Wall Street, but also the working moms who also feed and clothe the next generation of worker bees, working in the service industry or customer service jobs at major corporations. While these are all natural functions of human life (eating, birthing, raising), they have been co-opted and conditioned to be supportive of the overall functioning of our society, whose aim is not merely the reproduction of human life, but the reproduction of human life toward the end of generating profit for the bosses.Here is a quote that describes the social reproduction twist on classic Marxism, which fails to fully account for this extra-market labor:
There are two characteristically Marxist elements of this literature. First, it explores the mutually constitutive relationship between gender and class, where class is defined as the relationship of a person/group to the production, appropriation and distribution of surplus, as discussed in more detail below. Second, most contemporary Marxist-feminists view capitalism not just as an economic system but as an institutional order that shapes the culture, polity, as well as the economy, through its tendency to prioritize the accumulation of surplus, which is the “front story” of capitalism (Fraser 2014:102). Marxist-feminists have developed a critique of this drive to accumulate, arguing that it cannot be reconciled with a feminist vision that prioritizes life-making, in the broadest sense of that term (Bhattacharya 2017)...Capitalism has no mechanism for automatically ensuring the reproduction of workers (Katz 2001). Yet the “front story” of capitalism—capital accumulation—requires the existence of the realm of social reproduction as a “backstory” that is subordinated to the logic of accumulation (Fraser 2014).
The second essay further explores Social Reproduction Theory, focusing on what the crises caused by the present COVID-19 pandemic reveal about capitalist society. The first understanding to establish is the distinction between the "productive" and "non-productive" spheres — productivity in terms of generating profit for the bosses who employ workers. Marx is not super clear on this, perhaps because the distinction is murky. Nancy Fraser studies this fault line, and here Smriti summarizes her research:
When something like COVID comes along, the "double burden" of mainly poor women becomes more challenging, torn between the wage-labor productive sphere and unpaid domestic social reproductive sphere. Both are necessary not only for their own livelihood, but for the maintenance of the entire national economy, with this weight falling primarily on the most vulnerable. In Smriti's research on India, she finds that "households most marginalised by caste and class were pushed into the most gendered solutions, with women’s responsibility for reproductive labour in Dalit, labouring households reinforced by the increased difficulty of finding work for pay or profit that did not require displacement (Rao and Vakulabharanam, 2019)."
The takeaway is that "the coronavirus is a further reminder of the fundamental contradiction between a capitalist system that prioritises profits, and a feminist ethic that prioritises life-making or social reproduction."
capitalist society is not only the site of class struggles over the distribution of surplus between capital and labour in the “productive” sphere, but also the site of what Nancy Fraser (2016) calls “boundary struggles” over where the boundary between production and reproduction, the visible and the invisible lies, and who bears the costs of social reproduction.
The takeaway is that "the coronavirus is a further reminder of the fundamental contradiction between a capitalist system that prioritises profits, and a feminist ethic that prioritises life-making or social reproduction."
An open letter from Chicago DSA's Class Unity Caucus
A friend from college is involved in some political organizing in Chicago, and worked on this letter. The Democratic Socialists of America is a leftist movement largely aimed at rehabilitating the Democratic party. Since the intentional eroding of organized labor's political power, the DSA has emerged as a promising potential vehicle for working class interests, but its membership remains largely middle-class. As a result this caucus proposes four central aims:
- Prioritize universal campaigns that speak to working people’s actual concerns.
- Make CDSA welcoming to the working class.
- Politicize our rank-and-file membership, strengthen chapter democracy.
- Independence from politicians, no paid staffers in chapter leadership.
This endeavor is a head-scratcher for me. Given the duopoly's stranglehold on our democracy, it makes sense to attempt to salvage the Democratic party by building pro-labor grassroots power, aiming to replace party leadership and redirect party platform away from the current neoliberal pro-business track toward something more populist (ideally with some medicare for all in there). The question is, is the DSA the way to do it. I think so, if done right, and this group is trying. Given the slow increase in ranked-choice voting, perhaps third-party alternatives have a chance in local elections — and one can dream that they may have a chance at the national level someday as well.
An alternative perspective on the Uygher situation in western China
As the mainstream media criticizes President Biden for pulling out from Afghanistan, effectively ending our longest "forever war," which I thought would be celebrated, I am becoming increasingly skeptical of sources that seem to unquestioningly maintain that this ineffectual imperial conflict should have continued in any form. The Taliban will now attempt to pick up the pieces of their shattered country, after 20 years of continuous war, and another 25 before that, when the United States intelligence agencies first supported the founding of Islamic extremist Mujahedeen groups, such as al Qaeda and eventually ISIS, to destabilize the region through toward the end of (successfully) exhausting the Soviet Union.
In pulling the thread further, I started reading about the present buzz from those same media sources about the Chinese government supposedly perpetrating severe human rights abuses against the Muslim minority Uygher people in Western China. The first red flag is the U.S.'s identification of China as our renewed Cold War enemy, strategically chosen as only they challenge our economic stranglehold on the world market. The Belt and Road initiative, proposed in 2013, that will link China to Russia through the Middle East outlines a new world order that excludes the former imperial powers of NATO. Another red flag is that only NATO countries have criticized China for these supposed abuses (which have been disproven), whereas the global Muslim community is in full support.
The more realistic story seems to be that the U.S. has perpetrated the same same destabilizing tactics that worked in the Middle East and in Nicaragua with the Contras in order to radicalize Islamic extremists, who have even been aided in traveling through Turkey to Syria to fight with the rebels there. The allegations of human rights abuses against Uyghers serves to cast China as our authoritarian, anti-freedom enemy that we must sanction and oppose at all opportunities. In reality, we seem to be the ones desperately lashing out at their own freedom of self-determination. It is yet another war on Communism to preserve the global capitalist world order, with the United States at the top.
Following this thread has been profoundly disillusioning. I know this may sound crazy, and I feel crazy writing it because it is so far out from the mainstream understanding in the U.S. media bubble. Feel free to read for yourselves and come to your own conclusions, and let me know.
