Kevin > Books: 1-how-the-world-works‎ (171)

In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

I speculated about what would have happened had James Watt invented the steam engine in ancient Egypt:

The most he could have expected is that the ruler of Egypt would have been impressed and placed one or more of his engines in his palace, demonstrating to visitors and underlings how ingenious his Empire was.

My point was that the reason the steam engine changed the world, rather than ending up a showpiece in some ruler’s landscaped garden, was the epic raid on the common lands that had preceded its invention: the enclosures [see later].

As consecutive mutations multiply the variants of an organism until, at some point, a brand-new species appears, so technological change proceeds within a social system until, suddenly, the system has been transformed into something quite distinct, though that doesn’t mean that all of the materials out of which the system is built – capital, labour, money – have necessarily changed. […]

Suppose we were living in the 1770s [First Industrial Revolution], as the first steam engines began driving the water pumps that kept the mines dry and turning the wheels of William Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’. […] we would not be wrong to speak of an emergent ‘industrial feudalism’ or ‘market feudalism’. Technically, we would be correct.

In the 1770s, and for at least another century, wherever one looked one saw feudalism. Feudal lords dominated rural areas, owned the freehold titles of most city blocks, commanded armies and navies, and presided over parliamentary committees and government bodies. Even in the 1840s, as Marx and Engels were writing their manifesto in response to the worldwide effects of the capitalist class, most production was still taking place under the auspices of the old feudalist class, the landed gentry. Land ownership remained the main source of political authority and rent continued to be more powerful than profit, especially in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars [1803-1815] when landlords regained the upper hand over capitalists by banning grain imports with their Corn Laws [1815-1846].

And yet something critically important would have been lost if those who forged the language of that era had been reluctant to ditch the word feudalism, choosing to call the nascent system not capitalism but industrial or market feudalism. By boldly calling it capitalism, a century before capital had fully dominated our societies, they opened humanity’s eyes to the great transformation unfolding around them as it was happening.

Unfortunately, explaining the global market before liberation is beyond the scope of this project. We highly recommend Understanding the Capitalist Market, Understanding the Geopolitics of Imperialist Nation States, and Understanding Wage Dependency as supplemental reading to this section [these are fictional works].

But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

Starting, as I say, from the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions. Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it’s just two people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence of a sort of communism.

Of course, it wasn’t the doctor who had really turned grannie away [for not having health insurance]! It was the hospital! And who was the hospital? It was whoever was making money off it, and those faces were invisible. It was the whole fucking system. I remembered these pamphlets that people would hand out on the subway or on the street or that people would forward to me. Things about how the system was broken, how it was capitalism, etc. I always thought, “I don’t have time for this,” or “I don’t have energy for this.” But then I realized, “I don’t have time because of this. I don’t have energy because of this.” This system had taken everything from me, from us. It had taken my mom, my grannie—even myself. It had even taken me away from me.

Like, the universities are gone, of course, or the idea these specialized fields of knowledge are separated out from the rest of life or not subject to the same logic of profit and exchange. But, in this other way, the zeal for knowledge was saved. Way, way more people read and debate philosophy and theory than ever when I was growing up.

‘Our [English] father got it right with you. He left you to ferment until you were literate. But he brought me here before I’d formed enough connections, enough memories. What’s more, he was the only person I ever spoke Mandarin with, when my Cantonese was far better to begin with. And that’s lost now. I don’t think in it, and I certainly don’t dream in it.’

‘You know how it feels for your native tongue to slip away. You caught it in time. I didn’t.’

‘But Babel [Western education/academia] gave you everything.’ Letty seemed unable to move past this point. ‘You had everything you wanted, you had such privileges—’

‘Not enough to make us forget where we’re from.’

This confusion, this jumbling of different conceptions of imagination [idealism], runs throughout the history of leftist thought.

One can already see the tension in Marx. There is a strange paradox in his approach to revolution. As I’ve noted, Marx insists that what makes us human is that rather than relying on unconscious instinct like spiders and bees, we first raise structures in our imagination, and then try to bring those visions into being. When a spider weaves her web, she operates on instinct. The architect first draws up a plan, and only then starts building the foundations of his edifice. This is true, Marx insists, in all forms of material production, whether we are building bridges or making boots. Yet when Marx speaks of social creativity, his key example—the only kind of social creativity he ever talks about actually—is always revolution, and when he does that, he suddenly changes gears completely. In fact he reverses himself. The revolutionary should never proceed like the architect; he should never begin by drawing up a plan for an ideal society, then think about how to bring it into being. That would be utopianism. And for utopianism, Marx had nothing but withering contempt [see Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific]. Instead, revolution is the actual immanent practice of the proletariat, which will ultimately bear fruit in ways that we cannot possibly imagine from our current vantage point.

Why the discrepancy? The most generous explanation, I would suggest, is that Marx did understand, at least on some intuitive level, that the imagination worked differently in the domain of material production [i.e. “means of production” via factory wage labour, where most workers are “alienated” as cogs in the machine while imagination’s idealism is reserved for elite workers/capitalists] than it did in social relations [i.e. “social reproduction” via carework, where elites are privileged with violence’s stupidity while those below have to perform imagination’s idealism to reproduce the elite’s fantasies and to empathize with others, i.e. “interpretive labour”]; but also, that he lacked an adequate theory as to why. Perhaps, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, long before the rise of feminism, he simply lacked the intellectual tools. [Graeber’s footnote: “I might add that it is a profound reflection on the effects of structural violence on the imagination that feminist theory itself was so quickly sequestered away into its own subfield where it has had almost no impact on the work of most male theorists.”] Given the considerations already outlined in this essay, I think we can confirm that this is indeed the case. To put it in Marx’s own terms: in both domains one can speak of alienation. But in each, alienation works in profoundly different ways.

The Dutch East India Company was pre-capitalist […] an extractive merchant circuit that the East India Company had created. The East India Company was a combination of a joint-stock company and an imperialist state that had 200,000 soldiers that did all the looting on [their] behalf. I don’t think this is a good example of capitalism […], it’s a good example of how British imperialism and Dutch imperialism and European imperialism started.

[…] you made a point about monopoly capital. East India Company is not a good example of that, but my Westinghouse, Ford and Edison trio [Second Industrial Revolution] are a good example […]

This vineyard will belong to the bank [Finance capitalism]. Only the great owners can survive […]

Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten [profit vs. social needs]. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price [profit or why bother?], and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. […] A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. [Such waste is still rampant in global capitalism; “efficiency” is for making profits.]

[…] There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot [millions die under global capitalism each year due to preventable hunger/thirst/diseases, the other side of all the waste].

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

I would prefer any day to spend my time fighting to build popular unity among people than just being critical of the world.

You see, here’s the problem with abstract intellectualism. It is too easy to stand outside the practical activity of building the future and offer one’s criticisms. You might end up with the best criticisms of everything because you have taken a step outside the stream of reality, and take the position of objectivity. You’ve taken a god-like perch. […] All the things you are saying are probably true, but I learned something very early on from Marx. In the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, Marx writes, “The philosophers have interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.” What he’s talking about is the intellectual that leaves the stream of reality, stands outside it and says, Ah, I interpret that world over there. You understand things best if you are in the midst of changing them. You have to root yourself in the stream of history; […] It’s difficult because it means you have to make commitments to people; you are to understand the limitations, but you have to find a way to exit our problems rather than judge the world one way or the other. [Bold emphases added]

There’s a line from the eighteenth-century poet Akbar Allahabadi, aadmi tha, bari mushkil se insaan hua. We were people; with great difficulty we became human. The process of struggle is a humanizing process. It’s in the process of struggle that you and I learn to be better people.

It wasn’t until nearly 400 years later [since capitalist privatizations at home in Britain, i.e. the Enclosures starting in 1500s] that life expectancies in Britain finally began to rise. […] It happened slightly later in the rest of Europe, while in the colonised world longevity didn’t begin to improve until the early 1900s [decolonization]. So if [capitalist economic] growth itself does not have an automatic relationship with life expectancy and human welfare, what could possibly explain this trend?

Historians today point out that it began with a startlingly simple intervention […]: [public] sanitation. In the middle of the 1800s, public health researchers had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by introducing simple sanitation measures, such as separating sewage from drinking water. All it required was a bit of public plumbing. But public plumbing requires public works, and public money. You have to appropriate private land for things like public water pumps and public baths. And you have to be able to dig on private property in order to connect tenements and factories to the system. This is where the problems began. For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property [note: the Enclosures required state violence to privatize land], and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done.

The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few. These movements delivered not only public sanitation systems but also, in the years that followed, public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, public housing, better wages and safer working conditions. According to research by the historian Simon Szreter, access to these public goods – which were, in a way, a new kind of commons [social Commons] – had a significant positive impact on human health, and spurred soaring life expectancy through the twentieth century. [Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World]

Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres [concentration of production], and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive power of society [urban working-class, i.e. proletariat]; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. […] Moreover, all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. […] Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker. [Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Ch.15 section 10; emphases added]