Escape Velocity
This essay will attempt to answer two interrelated questions: “why is capitalism?” and “how did it get so bad?”. To do so, I will apply and extend Moishe Postone’s interpretation of Marx’s analysis as a basis for understanding contemporary economic phenomena, using concepts from Lazzarato’s Governing by Debt. While so-called orthodox Marxism has limited applicability in the postindustrial, financialized phase of capitalism, Postone asserts this to be based on a misunderstanding of Marx’s theory. Instead of a transhistorical theory of economics, applicable to any system of social organization, Marx limits his analysis to capitalism as an historically-specific phenomenon. Postone highlights the central role of “value” in the logic of capital as a social mediator — one which is also self-mediating. Being a purely abstract notion, this mediation process becomes increasingly divorced from concrete conditions, rendering production as a means to its own means — irrespective of utility. Driven by this instrumental logic, the impetus to value-creation leads to continuous acceleration with potentially existential consequences. Despite fundamental contradictions of the underlying logic, escalating innovative strategies sustain this trend. The work of Maurizio Lazzarato will be used to augment this analysis, demonstrating the role of debt-based financialization in the present phase of capitalism. Finally, the cautionary and emancipatory potential of Marx’s augmented model will be provisionally viewed in light of contemporary challenges: looming ecological apocalypse, the paradoxical superfluity of humanity, and the possibility of getting ‘outside’ from within. Using this mode of analysis, the fundamental contradictions of capital can be rendered in terms of a temporal relationship; avoiding the inevitable collapse of this logical aberration requires continuous asymptotic acceleration. In this light, the task of social praxis is to precipitate a non-catastrophic disintegration of capital, either by eliminating the contradictory logic of value, or realizing the emancipatory potential of (post-)industrial production in a wholly new form.
In our pursuit of the contradictions underlying the contemporary world, it is necessary to identify the historical conditions from which they developed. By following the thread of human history, we can identify notable social and economic changes in the context of their appearance, and attempt to establish causal relationships leading to the phenomenon of interest. In an effort to avoid scope-creep, this historical discussion will be specific to the development of industrial capitalism in Europe, employing Postone’s reading of Marx to conceptualize our observations. To limit complexity, we will intentionally deploy generalizations to illustrate broad trends, trusting that exceptions do not invalidate the overall point.
To understand and operationalize how capitalism functions, Marx deploys a number of conceptual categories, and describes their interrelations and antagonisms. To frame this discussion, these terms will be defined by context, mostly drawn from Capital Volume 1 and highlighted in bold. While some of these terms are quantifiable, concrete measures, others are more nebulous — conceptualizing general tendencies and trends. Central to this discussion are two methods of measuring worth: ‘material wealth’, and ‘value’. The former, material wealth, refers to social, material, informational, and organizational assets vital to the survival and flourishing of individuals and societies. In this analysis, this form of worth will be referred to as ‘wealth’ or ‘real wealth’ to reflect the inclusion of such nonmaterial assets — not to be confused with the colloquial use of the term, which will be avoided. The latter term, ‘value’, is particular to the capitalist mode of social organization: an abstract measure of worth with a temporal quality, which serves to mediate social relations in this form of society specifically. Although our interest is specific to the capitalist mode of social organization, many of Marx’s categories apply to non/pre-capitalist societies as well. To highlight the differences and relationships between these concepts of worth, we will trace changes in social organization from hunter-gatherer tribal society through to capitalism itself.
Regardless of the mode of social organization, a certain amount of wealth is required to sustain and enrich the life of an individual or society. Each person requires food, shelter, and other goods to survive, requiring a certain minimum amount of labour-time to fulfil — referred to as socially-necessary labour time (or SNLT). A completely-isolated individual would need to perform all the labour for their own survival, requiring the instincts (since skills and technologies are acquired socially) and productive capacity to meet all their needs without external input. Given the limitations of the human animal, this is an effectively-impossible task; as obligate social beings, human labour necessarily occurs in a social context. By collaborating with other individuals, non-human animals, and social technologies, the total amount of SNLT per person is greatly reduced.
With enough labour-time available to meet basic needs, a quantity of surplus labour becomes available, which can produce wealth not immediately necessary for personal survival. Surplus goods and services can be traded by individuals or societies to secure other necessary forms of wealth (potentially reducing SNLT), or enhance luxury (leisure time, higher quality goods, etc.). Crucially, surplus labour can be leveraged to enhance the social relations of production, ie: improve the conditions and coordination of labour. Since the total labour-time of every individual is not needed for personal subsistence, a degree of labour specialization becomes possible. The innovations of specialists (tools, techniques, etc.) become social technologies, increasing wealth created per labour-time: productivity. This process has an additive effect: as productivity rises, total SNLT decreases, yielding even more surplus labour, specialization, productivity, and (in theory) the universal satisfaction of a rising standard of wealth.
A higher degree of specialization also promotes greater interdependence, cultivating the conditions for new forms of social organization, through which surplus labour is socially mediated. The existential necessity of individual labour in weakly-specialized societies engenders strong group bonds and a degree of communal motivation. Surplus labour in this context is generally spontaneously mediated — dynamically coordinated to meet social need. But roughly coinciding with the advent of sedentary agriculture, the possibility of a permanent surplus product introduces new questions of ownership, distribution, and control of surplus labour. Beyond meeting social need, social mediation then becomes a political project: the nature and quantity of surplus labour-time, and the allotment of wealth are determined through domination.
As Lazzarato observes via Schmitt, each new societal paradigm begins with a tripartite act of nomos — “structuring”, “ordering”, or “periodizing” — defined through appropriation, apportionment, and actuation. By an exercise of power, the nascent ruling class seizes control and claims ownership over the common surplus, appropriating it as their own. Now granted authority to define and divide by virtue of ownership, resources and relative power are apportioned based on any desired criteria. These power relations intensify into formal hierarchies, generating divisions between the labouring and ruling classes. With control of surplus product, the ruling class can actuate surplus labour in exchange for access to necessary wealth. In effect, socially-necessary labour time can be artificially mediated through ownership, appropriating the surplus labour of those so dominated by extension.
Chattel slavery and feudalism represent overt examples of this dynamic, but even ‘free’ labour can be subject to direct or indirect coercion. Lacking the means of comprehensive self-sustenance, trade of surplus becomes compulsory. For much of precapitalist history, this relationship occurred in concrete terms — the product of labour (or its equivalent in currency) exchanged for the satisfaction of need. The prehistory of capitalism reaches an inflection point as the emergent notion of value unfolds through the commodity form during the industrial era. Unlike wealth, which is based in the products of concrete labour, value is temporal in nature — representing a measure of abstract labour-time. By this conceptual shift, labour-time itself becomes the prime mediator of labour-time in the logic of capital, gradually supplanting all other social forms through self-referential acceleration.
The reason for this temporal turn lies in the character of industrial production. The bulk of pre-industrial labour occurred as-needed, driven by material necessity or overt coercion, as previously discussed. Production in this model is typically performed end-to-end by singular specialized labourers in specific conditions, limiting the rate of production to the speed at which a given thing can be produced. This ‘task-oriented’ work (as described by EP Thompson) is measured by reference to linear limits and cyclic patterns; in most cases, work is performed from dawn to dusk, and governed by seasonal requirement. Technical-material advancements of the industrial era produce a social transition from task-orientation to time-orientation.
Industrial production splits overall processes into a series of discrete, temporally-variable tasks. The granularity of production in this model allows time- or labour-intensive tasks to be conducted in parallel — decoupling the rate of production from its most time-consuming task, but requiring the coordination of all components to operate effectively. Although theoretically capable of much higher speed and efficiency, the constituents of industrial production are highly interdependent. Each step requires the timely completion of the one before it, and limits the speed of subsequent tasks in turn — thus limiting overall productivity. Increases in task-local production, conversely, provide no benefit to the global rate of production unless synchronized with the overall process. As such, the optimal rate of task-local production is not necessarily its maximum, but rather that which matches the rhythm of production itself.
The decomposition of processes into tasks also lowers the individual skill requirement of industrial labour. A worker in a given job has no need for comprehensive understanding of the entire operation — only the ability to perform their particular task. Mechanical tools, which can accelerate or fully automate these tasks, flattens individual productivity differentials — further reducing the significance of particular labourers. Specialization of this kind renders labour fungible, divorcing labour from its concrete product — constructing labour-time as a generic quantity.
To summarize thus far with an ideal type of industrial production: producing a unit of real wealth requires a variable quantity of concrete labour-time. The particular content of this labour is determined by the relative labour-time needed to accomplish various component tasks — i.e. their task-local productivity. The rate of overall production is limited by the task with the lowest combination of task-local productivity and allocated labour-time. Excess labour-time in non-limiting tasks produces no additional real wealth, which lowers total wealth created per labour-time, ie: overall productivity. So: productivity depends on balancing the rate of task-local production. Absent any changes in task-local productivity, peak overall productivity is thereby achieved by allocating the minimum concrete labour needed to synchronize production in all tasks.
Given the fungibility and genericity of deskilled labour, this balance can be readily mediated with respect to an abstraction representing labour-time. The neoclassical ‘labour theory of value’ advances a related notion: the value of a commodity is equivalent to the total labour-time involved in its creation (including materials represented as labour-time). But the commodity is not just the sum of objectified labour; since synchronization of an overall process — rather than total labour — determines productivity, the value of a commodity is a function of coordinated concrete labour-time mediated as abstract labour-time.
Industrial labour’s dual character implies its objectification in the commodity is likewise dual: it is both the concrete product of real labour having some utility as wealth (which Marx terms use value), and an objectified representation of abstract labour-time (value). Since commodity production is mediated through abstract labour-time, exchange also occurs in terms of value (labour-time) rather than real wealth (utility). The abstract nature of exchange value allows it to be measured with respect to a generic commodity: money. This currency is different than prior forms of money, which represent concrete goods and particular labour. Commodity-money represents abstract labour-time in the form of wages, which are exchanged for concrete labour-time. Money in turn mediates labour-time by provoking the production of commodities. Put plainly: value creates labour-time, and labour-time creates value; labour is not a means to an end, but rather a means to itself.
This self-referential paradox produces a collection of interrelated contradictions. Value defined this way can only be created through labour-time, so socially-necessary labour time represents the utility function of this logic — not real wealth. Increased productivity either creates more real wealth, or decreases necessary labour time (or both). At first, higher productivity generates more value per labour-time — since commodities can be produced at lower cost — but market forces eventually return the rate of value-creation to normal as the productivity increase becomes universal across the market. To maintain constant value, then, production of real wealth must increase to meet this new base level of productivity — what Postone describes as the ‘treadmill effect’. But as real wealth increases, any oversupply (or even satisfaction) of necessary social wealth causes its exchange value as a commodity to fall, placing additional downward pressure on socially-necessary labour time and, by extension, value-creation. In effect, increasing productivity reduces value.
Our analysis thus far has been viewed from a single industry, but these effects apply more generally as well. The industrial mode of production carries clear benefits over previous social forms — improved efficiency, increased rate of production, etc. — allowing it to gradually outstrip pre-industrial techniques society-wide. But as a general form, the implications of these inherent contradictions manifest more totally. Real wealth is only an incidental product of value-creation, but it increases at a far greater rate — which can inhibit value-creation through oversupply, as we have seen. In a macroeconomic sense, increased global productivity reduces the amount of money (ie: labour-time) in circulation, which lowers buying power (ie: general demand), while also potentially creating oversupply (ie: reducing profit margins). Counterintuitively, when labour is mediated by value, satiating general social need is undesirable; real wealth and value are not just detached — they are inimical.
In this light, a utility function maximizing for value-creation quickly becomes anachronistic; initial success produces ultimate failure, and only temporary increases of value are possible. To avoid a collapse of value, those initial increases must therefore be perpetual; the utility function must be continuously reconstituted to drive productivity upward. Based on historical observation, we can identify several relevant compensatory strategies to this end, and inspect their common characteristics. The key theme of this genre is Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization: the removal and replacement of existing forms of meaning. Establishment of the commodity form of waged labour and value represent the nascent pattern of this compensation, which finds its full form in capital. Through capital, the real and virtual economies become increasingly decoupled — suspending the main impediment to value-creation and producing other strategies in turn.
Capital is related to, but distinct from commodity money. Commodity money represents value (as abstract labour-time), which can be exchanged for other commodities (including labour-time). Capital is self-valorizing value — a form of money that can make money. Specifically in the context of industrial production, capital is used to purchase labour-time, through which resources (which are also valued as labour-time) are converted into commodities. In turn, these commodities are sold for more than the cost of production, generating additional capital from surplus value. Industrial capital therefore represents a claim on labour that can generate more labour by its circulation. Applied to an industrial economy as a whole, the generative effect of capital continuously raises productivity away from the collapsing value function — capital represents value in motion.
As a form of social mediation, capital also displaces other social forms. If capital represents value-creating abstract labour-time, then labour-time must be conceivably available for capital to operate. As discussed previously, preindustrial surplus labour is directly mediated by overt coercion. Labour in this paradigm is indirectly mediated through capital, involving what is at least ostensibly ‘free’ labour. Although having more relative liberty than the feudal serf, the lifestyle of the early-phase industrial wage labourer is hardly ideal — long hours, little control of production or personal autonomy, monotonous work, and often low-quality living and working conditions. Most notably, the industrial labourer gains no claim on the product of their own concrete labour — instead receiving money in compensation for their time. Since the purchaser of labour sells their products for more than the cost of their production, the labourer is necessarily receiving the “short end of the stick”. By comparison, retaining a traditional agrarian or artisanal lifestyle would arguably be preferable, but this would limit the supply of labour-time.
Here, we see the return of Schmitt’s nomos, in both overt and covert forms. The “enclosure movement” occurred in Europe roughly coinciding with industrialization in a given locality. By this process, what was common land is appropriated by decree, partitioned and apportioned to particular owners. Typically, the new owners of the land were not the people who had lived or laboured on it, leading to mass displacement. Exacerbating the process, vagrancy becomes criminalized, with harsh penalties against those now considered to be squatting or poaching on privately owned land. Without access to their traditional means, those so dispossessed are no longer able to meet their own social need nor produce surplus for trade, compelling them to seek other methods of sustenance. Mass urbanization results, and the worth of labour (including existing labour on that same land) is reterritorialized as a relation of capital. With a growing portion of material need impossible to be met without monetary exchange, mass participation in waged labour is elicited without overt coercion. Since the machinery and capital used to coordinate industrial production is not generally owned by the labourers, the nature and quantity of labour-time is — at least initially — at the sole discretion of the owners of capital. As these changes propagate through society, the social form of capital becomes total, and a permanent waged class — the proletariat — is produced.
But the capitalist, too, is affected. Much as for the labourer, exchange is required for the satisfaction of material need, making it necessary to generate value to trade. Since the industrial capitalist (as a capitalist) does not themself produce value through labour-time, the money exchanged for subsistence must be obtained by appropriating adequate surplus value. But as we have seen, sustained value creation depends on continuous increases in productivity, so a portion of extracted value must be converted back into capital to continue the valorization cycle. In effect, the industrial capitalist derives wealth by accelerating production while maximizing marginal appropriation. If even mere subsistence for the capitalist requires acceleration, then the logic of capital informs an instrumental rationality to that end — all other concerns notwithstanding.
Being so strongly linked with industrial production, the basic capitalist economic model spread via mass industrialization to become a de facto standard. Having deterritorialized existing social forms, the logic of capital becomes normalized as “common sense”, creeping into cultural norms and values. Lazzarato describes this effect using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “axiomatics”. As a concept becomes integral to a society, its core notions are taken for granted — no longer the subject of political debate or perhaps even philosophical inquiry. Axioms do not represent beliefs, but rather the basic structure of reality on which beliefs are built. Social and political change can thereby be produced by manipulating axioms. In the case of capitalism, two key axioms are the equivalence of time and money, and the apparently-intrinsic value of labour. We’ve discussed the economic effects extensively, but these axioms pervade the sociocultural sphere as well, with implications far beyond the scope of this paper (see: Weber’s Spirit of Capitalism, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, etc.).
Axiomatics represents a new form of power. Unlike the overtly coercive power of slavemasters and feudal lords, or the indirect economic compulsion of “free” labour, axiomatic power operates at an ontological or even metaphysical level. When capital is perceived as a natural category this way, its social, economic, political, and aesthetic norms constitute “human nature” as a self-actualizing claim. Although the proletarian and capitalist alike are afforded free choice under capitalism, their choice occurs within this overriding logic — necessarily producing uncoerced decisions commensurate with capital. Economic and political policy are similarly determined, with each decision contingent on the needs of continuous growth. In Schmitt’s terms, the naturalization of capitalism represents the “nomos of the Earth” — the reterritorialization of value giving rise to an axiomatic, evolving utility-maximizing logic of acceleration.
From this perspective, the compensatory strategies mentioned above (and capital-logic itself) can be understood as emergent phenomena, occurring as the result of amalgamated rational (or arational) decisions of individuals grounded in the logic of capital. To be abundantly clear: the dynamics observed here do not result from the conscious or unconscious execution of explicit strategy, nor are they the result of manifest ideology. Rather, they are best understood as the spontaneous synchronization of a complex system, revealing order in apparent chaos. Similar to enclosure, or money-capital itself, strategies of this kind serve to cultivate and safeguard the continued growth of value by acting on some element of the valorization process. Although the examples are too numerous to mention, we will briefly explore the characteristics of two such expressions: consumerism, and the military-industrial complex.
Consumerism broadly describes a capital-based economic paradigm predicated on demand-production; the desire for goods itself becomes a key commodity. As we’ve seen, mass industrialization makes possible the production of an unprecedented variety and quantity of goods. The low (and falling) costs of these commodities enables broad satiation of a rising standard of luxury with lower socially-necessary labour-time. But in view of the aforementioned contradictions, both material satiation and lowered labour-time impede value-creation. Consumerism compensates by dynamically reterritorializing what constitutes satiation — creating new needs to heighten demand. This can be accomplished in both positive and negative forms.
The modern marketing industry evinces the positive mode of consumerism: methods of persuasion can be used to invoke need both in individuals and across cultures. These needs can be real, representing a better product than currently exists, or a possible avenue for increasing luxury. But it is also possible to generate purely synthetic need — overselling the utility of a product, positioning goods as status symbols (eg: conspicuous consumption, “keeping up with the Joneses”, the invention of “style”), or inventing entirely new genres of need. This synthesis is not necessarily deceitful; new technological innovations (eg: computers) have no inherent demand, but through their adoption may become a previously-unrealized need. Marketing aside, this dynamic promotes innovation to expand or create new markets. But these innovations occur strictly within the bounds of capital-logic; non-value-creating or contra-axiomatic development is necessarily inhibited by market forces — unless it can negate or produce its own axiomatic paradigm in response.
The negative mode of consumerism can be seen in planned obsolescence. Since a product with permanent utility has no repeat demand, it becomes advantageous to produce goods with an intentionally-finite lifespan. A succession of cheaply-made, low-quality items that cannot be repaired will provoke more labour-time per utility than one high-quality item, which reduces the value-negating effects of overproduction. To a certain extent, obsolescence itself is unavoidable — particularly for products undergoing rapid change (eg: computers) — but even these are subject to artificially-limited lifespans, or are made to be disposed of rather than renewed at their end-of-life. At a more extreme level, single-use, disposable products carry an even lower utility-to-value ratio — the production of packaging alone constituting a major industry. The recent trend of products-as-services is arguably another manifestation of this strategy, which warrants further exploration elsewhere.
Although highly effective at value-creation, the primary downfall of consumerism as a compensatory strategy is obvious: a growing mass of useless, effectively irrecoverable, and often toxic waste, and corresponding harms to irreplaceable ecological assets, and marginalized and colonized peoples. But since these impacts are strictly external to the value function of capital, consumerism remains a central axiom; subjects are reterritorialized as “consumers”, wastefulness as virtue, and satisfaction as inconceivable. Conventional political attempts to regulate industrial consumerism through policy and (hilariously ironic) consumer boycotts are made ineffective by definition; these occur as economic activity within capital-logic, generating their own antithesis by their very proposition.
The other phenomenon to be discussed is remarkably similar in form, and only moderately distinct in content. In his farewell address, President Eisenhower offered a stern warning against the “unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex”. During the Second World War, a permanent armaments industry developed in the United States — becoming a substantial portion of economic activity. Given the severity of the need, the rapid expansion and productivity-increasing accelerative characteristics of industrial capitalism were well-suited to securing victory by out-producing Axis forces. But after the war, defense products were no longer in sustained demand — creating oversupply and negating value. As in consumerism, demand-production then emerges as a key axiom of compensation. Unfortunately, the consequences are more immediate and dire given the nature of the industry in question.
The vast fortunes and political relationships formed during wartime enabled arms producers to gain significant influence in (particularly American) government, which persists to the present day. Interlocking groups of powerful people in industry, finance (discussed anon), military, and government constitute an unelected power structure, with the ability to manipulate foreign and domestic policy decisions to generate demand. At the most benign level are apocryphal tales of hundred-dollar hammers and pothole-digger brigades, representing simple overvaluation and utility-reduction, respectively. Slightly more nefariously, American defense production is intentionally spread across many states, ensuring continuous feedback between government contract awards and election campaign spending — the considerable implications of which lie outside the scope of this paper.
Far more worrisome still: the most reliable way to generate demand for the means of war is war. This is not to say that all military conflict is the direct result of undue influence, nor is the arms industry the sole beneficiary of such manipulation. The axiomatics of capital-logic produces spontaneous synchronization without further regard, which can engender dramatic acts of violence if growth would ultimately result. Whether by directly stimulating arms production, or as a means to further appropriation (as in Lenin’s observation of capitalism’s imperial character), war is good for business. By this instrumental logic, demand is produced by the elimination of wealth — destruction as an act of creation.
So far, our analysis has been strictly limited to industrial capitalism. Capital, however, can take several other forms, revealing other potential strategies to sustain value-creation. Of interest in the contemporary context: finance capital — specifically characterized by debt. Industrial capital operates by using money to create commodities, which generates more money: M → C → M’. Finance capital, however, generates money directly from money: M → M’.
Most fundamentally, finance capitalism operates through debt-with-interest. In its most basic form, money is loaned — creating in effect a promissory contract between the creditor and debtor. At an agreed-upon time, the debtor (theoretically) repays the debt — but also pays interest as part of the transaction. The notion of debt as a promissory contract has existed for some time, but its underlying implications have changed in the capitalist context. Since money represents abstract labour-time, this relationship no longer relates to concrete exchange — debt now represents a promise to future labour. Consequently, interest represents additional labour-time owed above the initial loan.
As it relates to industrial capital, finance capital can be used to bootstrap and sustain the productive process. By securing a loan, the budding capitalist can purchase the necessary means of production, labour-time, and commodities to generate commodity-money. Ideally, once adequate surplus value is extracted from labour-time, the principal can be repaid. Since the arrangement involves interest, additional surplus value must be generated — requiring more coordinated abstract labour-time than would otherwise be necessary. On the whole, the effect is to increase total value-creation, with some allocated to the creditor in exchange for the use of their capital.
But not all debts are meant to be repaid. When generated as an investment, the aspiring factory owner agrees to pay regular dividends rather than returning the principal. Considered another way, this arrangement creates a continuously-accruing promise to future labour in exchange for the means to actuate a definite sum of labour-time. With ongoing production, then, a portion of labour-time (as surplus value) is promised to the investor in perpetuity. The industrial capitalist receives less surplus value to use as capital (or trade in other ways), compensated for by increasing value-creation altogether. In the larger picture, value-creation still increases overall, but additional persistent economic pressure is generated for the industrial capitalist to increase productivity in order to maintain value — increasing the speed of Postone’s ‘treadmill’.
As with industrial capital, finance capital becomes general through nomos. Using the appropriating, apportioning, and actuating power of capital itself, ever-increasing segments of an economy become financialized — down to the level of the individual as a permanently-indebted virtual commodity. The axioms of finance capitalism are normalized in turn, reterritorializing existing political-social-economic sensibilities with those of debt-based valuation. What results is a new and significantly more effective compensatory strategy to those described above. The industrial template of compensation modulates the production of real wealth relative to value, ensuring continuously-increasing demand for the products of labour, and thus generating value. Instead, finance capital divorces wealth from value when considered in its own logic. Being independent of production, finance capital can continuously generate value without producing real wealth, thus avoiding the value-negating effects of productivity and satiation — not just moving but accelerating away from value-collapse toward infinity.
Ostensibly, finance capital can generate value at a far greater rate than industrial capital. The best strategy for maximizing value creation, then, is to prioritize financial activity above industrial activity: M → C → M’ is subject to diminution, while M → M’ grows. Although subject to occasional attempts at legislation and other imposed axioms (eg: New Deal reforms), the spontaneous synchronization effect of capital ultimately overrides impediments — in the form of regulatory capture, for instance. Owing to its remarkable power, the axiomatic model of finance capital comes to be applied even in non-economic contexts (ie: the neoliberal paradigm). Marketization renders any possible social relation — government, culture, media, and even the family — as a quantifiable system of commodities, mediateable by supply-demand curves and pseudo-economic exchange. Imbued with debt, the individual transforms into a desubjectified source of future labour — what Lazzarato terms a “dividual” — manageable en masse without coercion through abstract valuation.
Market exchanges and market-like social forms are now the central institutions of decision-making in the late modern world, subducting the sovereign nation-state and liberal democracy itself. In turn, the main role of government is to ensure the stability of the market, such that its regulating effects suitably mediate social relations. The means and ends of the cosmopolitan polity transform likewise as a function of the market — job-creation stands in as a measure of human wellbeing, while access to credit replaces vital social services. The axioms of capitalism gradually whittle themselves down, until capital itself remains the sole, totalitarian principle. As Lazzarato explains in his titular claim: this is no longer a disciplinary society — it is a society governed by debt.
The subtly crumbling — yet incredibly shiny — state of the world hints at the underlying problem. In the transition to pure financial capitalism, concrete labour — and thus the humans performing it — are made apparently superfluous, but this is far from the case. Financial capitalism is an economic model whose logic is based on a purely abstract notion of value, operating in an economy based on value as abstract labour-time. Put another way: contemporary financial markets are abstract, game-like systems, through which capital can be created quite literally from thin air — but value is still based on labour-time. This contradiction engenders a growing gap between value-on-paper capital, and value that can actually be valorized. Since there is far more abstract labour-time (as capital) than can even potentially generate labour, the value of value rests on an increasingly-delusory assertion of confidence. With nowhere to go, value grinds to a halt, and capital pools and stagnates in a shrinking number of hands.
This contradiction, too, produces compensatory strategies. Taxation represents the most vital stabilizing influence to the system as designed. As understood by Lazzarato, taxation involves appropriating the stagnant value of capitalists and redistributing it generally across society (eg: social welfare projects). In turn, the infusion of commodity-money stimulates production, which generates value — ensuring the value-creation cycle continues to function. But given the game-like nature of finance and relative impotence of government, it is relatively easy to frustrate attempts at taxation. Otherwise-taxable money can be sequestered into offshore accounts, or made to jump through tax-evading loopholes. Meanwhile, the interoperability of finance and government facilitates regulatory capture even to the point of obviation.
When taxation cannot operate, the sole remaining recourse is oscillation between periods of manic acceleration and value-negating “corrections”. The financial crash of 2008 exemplifies this cyclic process, in which the stagnation of capital precipitated a valuation crisis — catalyzed by the collapse of a particularly absurd specialty credit product market. Fiat valuation (in the form of bailouts) and neo-Keynesian expansionism blunted the extent of the collapse, but trends observed in the intervening years suggest a similar event looming in the not-too-distant future. Whether or not the subsequent event(s) can be similarly mitigated, the same template will likely persist — if some more pressing catastrophe doesn’t otherwise intervene.
From the perspective of we, the proletariat, these periods of rapid acceleration produce primarily an impetus to work more. Since capital represents labour-time, economic growth drives job-creation — through which we gain our subsistence. During downturns, the value of both money and labour falls — jobs are lost, wages fall, and savings are wiped out by market ‘fluctuations’. But in each cycle, the value of labour never quite returns, the cost of bread always goes up, and we’re somehow led to believe austerity is the only solution. When time is money and money is debt, every moment is owed — even though we can’t remember the loan. We’re hollowed out — transformed into personified impersonal labour, mechanistically enslaved and perpetually in arrears.
Is there a “way out”? Given the totalizing ubiquity of the present order, the power of status-quo propagandists, and limitations of the nascent human overmind, can we wrest our lives and planet from a system whose aims and functioning have escaped our control?
First, we must be specific in our intent. Postone emphasizes that Marx is not offering a critique of capital from the perspective of labour, but rather a critique of labour itself. From this perspective, the goal is much simpler than that of so-called traditional Marxism. Whereas the orthodoxy seeks to abolish private ownership so as to liberate proletarian labour, our desire is to abolish labour-as-value. Every contradiction above results from economic logic following this perverse value function, with further implications that could fill volumes. When maximizing for labour-time, our combined economic behaviour only ultimately produces more labour-time; meeting human need is a strictly incidental effect. This point is made most obvious by a single observation: rather than a cause for celebration, when robots take our jobs it constitutes a crisis.
The solution revealed by this analysis is blindingly simple to explain, but fiendishly difficult to implement. If, instead of value-as-labour-time, we measured value by something more — pardon the expression — valuable, then economic forces would maximize for that instead. In light of current challenges, I would suggest a method of valuation based on ecological integrity and human well-being — the specifics of which are well beyond this scope. Implementation of such an axiomatic replacement is a similarly unwieldy project, but Lazzarato suggests — and I agree — that it begins with an aesthetics of absolute deterritorialization; by continuously and comprehensively deconstructing the state of what is, it becomes possible to consider what could be.
In conclusion, sociotechnical changes of the industrial revolution led to a concept of value measured by labour-time; since industrial production initially required a vast amount of coordinated generic labour, money came to represent labour-time. But by this logic, productivity increases are paradoxically detrimental, resulting in a series of innovative compensatory strategies of continuous growth based on capital as self-valorizing value. With further abstraction, finance capital can achieve infinitely-accelerating growth by decoupling value from material wealth — but this reveals new forms of paradox and now presents a growing existential risk. To resolve this condition, the value of value must be redefined — freeing us from ceaseless empty labour and absolving our phantomic debts.
Works Cited
Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2015. Governing By Debt. South Pasadena (Calif.): Semiotext(e)intervention.
Marx, Karl. 1999. Capital: Volume 1. Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org)
Postone, Moishe. 2006. Time, Labor, And Social Domination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
