Translations: Türkçe
Capital, however, actually molds the concrete. It empties labour increasingly of its meaningfulness. At the same time it is an alienated form of human sociality, of human capacities. As such, it is generative of socially general forms of knowledge and power, even if it generates them historically in a form that oppresses the living. Yet, in many respects, precisely this becomes the source of future possibilities. That is, living (proletarian) labour is not the source of future historical possibilities. Rather, what has been constituted historically as capital is that source. I am saying that the category of living labour in Marx is not the source of emancipation. Rather, dead labour is. Maybe this sounds like a provocation, but it needs to be thought about.
-Moishe Postone in an interview
For those of us who want a communist society, a society of rationally planned production with universal human wellbeing as its main priority, we must ask: what makes communism possible? What is the foundation upon which such a society comes into being and perpetuates itself?
The short answer is: machinery. Lots and lots of machinery. Capitalism, too, holds machines very close to the core of its totalizing logic. The advent of the industrial revolution brought about the innovation and proliferation of all manner of mechanical, electrical, and chemical breakthroughs manifested in the form of countless productive machines all chugging away in subservience to capital: the act of turning money into even more money.
Productive machinery does not act on its own though. The leviathan history of industrial machinery is a partner dance between the machine and the human chained to it. Sometimes these chains are literal, but the secret sauce to capitalism is the chain of proletarian necessity. Workers perform wage labor by and large because if we do not work, we cannot afford food, shelter, clothes, or any of the other comforts of this world. Maybe some people can go back to living off the land, but the insatiable monster of capital has foreclosed that option for the overwhelming portion of the human species. People need stuff, and participating in capitalism is the only reasonable way to get it.
Capitalism differs wildly from pre-capitalist forms of productive activity in countless ways, but for the sake of my argument I want to draw attention to two specific dynamics that constitute capitalism. The first is an immanent tendency for the means of production to become ever more sophisticated allowing for greater material output. The second is the wide scale dispossession of people from their means of subsistence, forcing them to participate in both labor markets and consumer commodity markets. These two tendencies are responsible for much human suffering under capitalism, but are the keys to understanding the way capitalism has created the material basis for communism.
The Power of Machines
The machines of today are simply better at what they do than those of centuries past. If you transported an 1800s factory manager to a modern machine shop, circuit board shop, or plastic component fabrication facility he would probably shit himself. These machines are bonkers! The level of automated speed, precision, and simple raw power behind many of today’s manufacturing facilities is absolutely jaw-dropping.
Increasing sophistication of machinery over the centuries has not happened necessarily because machine designers are just that passionate about improving machines. It is not a matter of passion, it is a matter of necessity, except this time it’s bourgeois necessity rather than proletarian necessity. The name of the game for industrial capital is number of commodities produced per unit of labor time. Across a given industry there are, at least in theory, competitors who make similar products and must compete against each other for market share. Given that profit is equal to revenue minus expenses, increasing profit means either raising revenue or lowering expenses. One way to do this is to reduce the time it takes to produce each commodity unit. There’s limits to how much faster you can push commodities out the door by simply coercing workers to move quicker, so the other option is improving the machines they use to produce commodities. This is the material impetus behind R&D that improves the effectiveness (measured by capitalist standards) of means of production. A company that develops or purchases machines that output commodities faster than their competitors spends a lot less capital to produce each individual commodity. Each commodity unit can be sold for a much greater profit, assuming the prices are similar to the average price everyone else with inferior tech is selling the competing commodities for. As other companies adopt the new technology, the average amount of labor time required to fabricate the commodity decreases accordingly. Once the new technology is generalized across an industry, further improvements to production methods are needed in order to secure a technological advantage to generating profit. Increasingly large amounts of commodities are produced with a constant amount of labor time from workers. Society, as such, is constantly churning forward in the development of productive capacity. Postone dubbed this dynamic the “treadmill effect.”1
This treadmill effect is a necessarily abstract description of real-world phenomena. The relationship between commodity price, capital investment, competition, R&D budgets, and the broader economy is far more complex than this particular dynamic, however it is a useful way to think about the relationship between the structural logic of capital and the sophistication of means of production. The concrete manifestation of capital’s structuring logic in machinery innovation is undeniable: workers can produce more and more stuff with less and less labor time. This is obviously useful to the capitalist. The utility of this dynamic to the communist is one of historical contingency and cruel irony. The laborer controls the machine in a direct literal sense, but the machine controls the laborer in an abstract macro-scale sense. The historical subsumption of the world’s productive capacity under the structuring logic of capital, and the way it drags the other elements of society with it, has been one of abject misery with billions of lives cut short or immiserated in service of profit accumulation. This social arrangement sucks, we want out! But out is not backwards in time, it is necessarily forward in time, and with that comes the detritus of the present. Some of this detritus is useful, and by that I mean the productive machines of capitalism and the knowledge required to use them. At some point after the advent of capitalism there came an arbitrary point in time where the productive capacity of the world became capable of providing enough material goods for the entirety of the human population to live healthy lives filled with comfort and dignity with reasonable amounts of labor time. I don’t know or care when that point was exactly, but it has certainly already happened.
Since that point was reached, the material basis for communism has long been ripe. Communism, that is to say a society where the productive and distributive apparatus is rationally planned and administered for the primary purpose of universal human wellbeing, depends on the productive capacity to create the goods necessary for satisfying people’s needs with a minimal amount of labor input. The present character of the means of production is fundamentally structured and intimately shaped by the needs of capital. Goods are designed for revenue turnover, not human necessity or ecological accounting. Machines are designed for drastic overproduction and structurally incentivize long hours of tedious low-pay work. The speed at which commodities can be produced would be advantageous for a nascent communist society in the process of birthing itself however. Any communist program worthy of the name would entail a drastic reduction in the amount of labor performed by each member of society, both for the reasons of reducing the tedium of toil and for the sake of the biosphere we all depend on. Many people currently perform work that only has utility to capitalists, and none to a communist society. Cashiering, financial analysis, insurance administration, university admissions, property management, policing, and scores of other professions would simply disappear alongside the need to manage money and other artificially scarce resources. The elimination of commodity production would mean the drastic scaling back of manufactured goods. Much of today’s mass-produced junk would not be missed if nobody needed to buy it and if there were no longer capitalists itching to press machines into constant production to make good on their investments. A reduction in many unnecessary commodities would entail a massive reduction in the amount of resource extraction and industrial services necessary. The combination of a reduced need for production overall and a freeing up of a huge amount of people’s time would mean massively less labor time is needed to produce the bare minimum for a universal decent standard of life. The speed of modern productive machinery currently subjects workers to an accelerating pace of work. Eliminating the entire notion of profit, and with it the need to produce a huge amount of unnecessary commodities, bundled with a massive amount of freed-up labor power, turns the speed of modern machinery into a vehicle for human emancipation from capital rather than a bourgeois tool that ensures our subjugation.
Our Mutual Interdependence
Capitalism is a global system. At this point in history, very few people live outside of capital’s reach. The vast majority of goods produced for human consumption now are produced as commodities, as objects whose utility to their creator is that they can be sold. Access to a wage in exchange for labor power is the defining daily struggle for much of humanity. In some places the market extends beyond the reaches of the wage labor system, and people are hit with the double whammy of not having access to income or access to the means of subsistence outside of purchasing commodities they cannot afford.
It was not always like this of course. While long distance trade and buying stuff is hardly historically exclusive to capitalism, the necessity for most of humanity to participate in globalized production in order to partake in society is exclusive to capitalism. The production of the means of subsistence, i.e. the things needed to live like food and important household goods, was historically a much more localized affair. The majority of humanity lived very close to where their food came from, often growing it themselves. Useful items were often crafted in the home, or purchased more locally. Even where more complex economies with significant long distance trade and deeper divisions of labor developed, survival and regular participation in society by a given person was not generally dependent on the labor of others outside of a regional polity. By contrast, just about everything one needs to not only survive but thrive today depends on a huge amount of proletarian labor spread across very large distances. Food production is a prime, but maybe counter-intuitive example. One of the defining features of industrialization, which is historically inextricable from the advent of capitalism, is the shrinking of the proportion of the populace involved in agriculture. Despite the fact that less human labor is now needed to harvest each crop, this has created a situation where more people can work outside of agriculture and, critically, live far away from where agriculture is performed. Advances in agricultural mechanization, food science, and chemistry have greatly improved the reliability of food production. The average person is less likely to die of famine today than before capitalism, but is at the same time more dependent on the labor of someone else, or at the very least someone far away for their food. The criticality of food to human survival makes this example the most obvious, but this logic applies to the vast majority of things we buy whether it be essential to survival or a triviality. Clean water production and distribution is dependent on the labor and technical expertise of scores of people. Just about every electronic device contains material and labor from all over the globe. The gasoline needed to fill cars and trucks, not to mention cars and trucks themselves, come from patterns of movement and labor mediated by the market forces of global capital. The satiation of just about every material need, and the overwhelming majority of every non-material need, is now intertwined with the social totality that is global capitalism. Unlike before, humanity is all in the same boat. Even someone who chooses not to participate in society is still subject to the truly global phenomenon of industrially-induced climate change.
So what does this have to do with communism? Quite a bit! This global mutual interdependence, something historically unique to capitalism, is what allows a global society predicated on human wellbeing to exist. Under capitalism, nearly everyone is performing work that in some indirect way or another is allowing for everyone else to get the things they want to buy. The problem of course is that access to these goods is locked behind life-draining wage labor, work that for most of the species only provides just enough to scrape by, if that. My ability to eat is no longer a zero sum competition over the fertile patch of land by the river capable of only supporting either my tribe or yours, at least in terms of material scarcity. There’s enough fertile ground, so to speak, to make more than enough stuff for everyone, but it is not deployed that way. In pre-capitalist societies where production of important goods was localized, attaining resources that were not locally available had to be done either by exchange or by warfare. Despite exchange being the less immediately-violent of the two, both exchange and war are inherently antagonistic forms of relating to other people. To exchange goods with another person, tribe, village, town, or country implies that they are not someone you would simply share your resources with unconditionally, but rather someone whose survival becomes instrumental to yours. Large scale institutional trade, of which plenty existed prior to capitalism, requires violence (or the threat thereof) to maintain, not to mention the social violence inherent to commanding enough labor to create commodities for exchange.
The cruelty of market-mediated access to goods, combined with the brutality of capitalist nation states hyper-focused on enriching the local bourgeoisie, is hardly the right environment for a global society of plenty to flourish. Capitalism, like the societies that precede it, pits humans against each other for access to goods. Capitalism, unlike the societies that precede it, creates enough resources for everyone to have plenty without zero-sum conflict, but does not operate on a structural logic that leads to that outcome.
Dead Labor as Communism
Back to the main point: the solidification of dead labor in the form of fixed capital (means of production, specifically) is the root of what makes a communist future possible from the capitalist present. The application of human ingenuity and labor towards the creation of machines allows the species to produce more material wealth with less labor time than at any point in history. For the first time in history there is unambiguously enough productive capacity for the free development of each and the wellbeing of all. Humanity, no longer mostly chained to the toil of agriculture, is now mutually dependent for access to goods to an unprecedented degree. Most things produced under capitalism require material and labor inputs from around the globe. Such a situation was made possible by machinery, and contains within a latent cooperative logic. This machinery, and the standard of living it can create, requires a global productive apparatus in order to function properly. The whole human species, already held hostage by capital in its entirety, can only turn this existing capitalist productive apparatus into a communist productive apparatus (i.e. something better than what we have now) through global cooperation.
Such a logic is not realized under capitalism, nor could it ever. Capital’s dominance over human society is fundamentally at odds with generalized human wellbeing for reasons that are probably obvious to anyone reading this. To realize the latent possibility of an unalienated human society requires the installation of communism by proletarians who, as part of their existence in capitalism, have the knowledge and structural positioning to wrest machinery from the jaws of capital and set it to work producing for the benefit of everyone, not an alien abstraction. Communism, then, is not only made possible by the two dynamics described above, but is also only possible if those two dynamics remain intact. If the revolutionary proletariat cannot wrest the productive capacity to assure unconditional access to the means of subsistence, the mass of people left in the graveyard of capitalism will have no choice but to resort to exchange or violence (one implies the other) to secure their continued existence. A communism where people are materially incentivized to produce goods for the purpose of exchanging them is not worthy of the name. Visions of localized self-sufficiency, democratically-controlled commodity-producing enterprises, or other such absurdities have haunted the historical communist movement for a variety of spatio-temporally specific reasons. Not only are these simply not feasible without collapsing back into capitalism or something worse, they also simply fail to understand what a globally-connected technical system of production can accomplish for humanity when rationally controlled by and for everyone rather than for the abstraction of capital and the enrichment of a few.
Footnotes
- See chapter 8 of Moishe Postone’s 1996 book Time, Labor, and Social Domination.
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