Karl Marx desenvolveu sua crítica ao capitalismo estudando as “fábricas satânicas” da Inglaterra. Mas, como escreve David Harvey, ele entendia o capitalismo como um sistema global. Se estivesse vivo hoje, insistiria que os socialistas se concentrassem tanto no Vale do Silício quanto em Shenzhen.
David Harvey
Jacobin
David Harvey
Jacobin
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| É uma questão em aberto se as leis do movimento do capital, formuladas por Karl Marx, se aplicam com a mesma força na China, em Bangladesh, na União Europeia e nos Estados Unidos hoje. (Eye Ubiquitous / Universal Images Group via Getty Images) |
O texto a seguir é um trecho editado de The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works, de David Harvey, publicado pela Verso Books hoje, 24 de fevereiro.
Karl Marx situou suas investigações teóricas sobre o modo de produção do capital e suas leis de movimento no contexto do capitalismo industrial britânico entre as décadas de 1840 e 1860. Inicialmente, ele o fez acreditando que “o país mais desenvolvido industrialmente apenas mostra, ao menos desenvolvido, a imagem de seu próprio futuro”. Se tal crença era justificada ou não é, naturalmente, uma questão em aberto.
No final de sua vida, após intensas investigações antropológicas e uma análise detalhada do caso russo em particular, o próprio Marx começou a duvidar dessa proposição, preparando assim o terreno para uma crítica subsequente ao que muitos consideram seu eurocentrismo. Mas o que não está em questão é a profundidade e a abrangência do conhecimento de Marx sobre o estado do capital industrial na Grã-Bretanha de meados do século XIX.
Feito em Manchester
Neste contexto, Marx teve a sorte de encontrar um vasto arquivo de materiais investigativos reunidos pelos inspetores de fábricas nomeados pelo Estado britânico, por funcionários da saúde pública e por comissões parlamentares de inquérito sobre tudo, desde trabalho infantil até práticas bancárias. Ele reconheceu plenamente a importância desses materiais para suas próprias interpretações e lamentou o “estado deplorável” das informações provenientes de outros lugares:
Ficaríamos consternados com a nossa própria situação se, como na Inglaterra, o nosso governo e parlamentos nomeassem periodicamente comissões de inquérito sobre as condições econômicas; se essas comissões tivessem os mesmos poderes plenos para chegar à verdade; se fosse possível encontrar, para esse fim, pessoas tão competentes, tão imparciais e livres de favorecimento pessoal, quanto os inspetores de fábricas da Inglaterra, seus relatores médicos sobre saúde pública, seus comissários de inquérito sobre a exploração de mulheres e crianças, sobre as condições de moradia e alimentação, e assim por diante.
Os inspetores de fábricas e funcionários da saúde ingleses, como Leonard Horner, o Sr. Scriven e o Dr. Greenshaw (para citar alguns), foram figuras-chave. Imagine o quão desprovido e insatisfatório seria o primeiro volume de O Capital sem os relatos fornecidos por esses funcionários do governo.
Marx também reuniu um vasto acervo de reportagens da imprensa contemporânea, panfletos e livros relevantes sobre todos os aspectos da economia política (como os de Andrew Ure e Charles Babbage sobre tecnologia de máquinas). Por fim, seu amigo e mecenas Friedrich Engels não apenas o inspirou com sua obra inicial e notável, A Situação da Classe Trabalhadora na Inglaterra, de 1844, mas também forneceu comentários contínuos sobre o trabalho e a vida em Manchester, registrados por meio da experiência em primeira mão de Engels ajudando a administrar a empresa da família na cidade.
Para completar, Engels também teve a oportunidade de ver Manchester pelos olhos de sua companheira e amante irlandesa da classe trabalhadora, Mary Burns. Foi por meio dela que Engels tomou conhecimento da miséria fétida dos alojamentos dos imigrantes proletários irlandeses da cidade. O fundamento histórico-materialista que Marx sempre almejou em sua obra teórica veio de figuras como Horner, Burns e Engels. É isso que confere uma aura tão poderosa de precisão e autenticidade aos escritos de Marx. E é isso que explica, em parte, como e por que as teorizações de Marx daquela época ressoam até nós de forma tão convincente, mesmo vivendo em tempos tão diferentes. Contudo, isso também dá substância à visão de que as formulações teóricas de Marx podem estar contaminadas pelas particularidades do caso de Manchester ou, de forma mais ampla, por perspectivas anglocêntricas ou eurocêntricas.
Capital Goes Global
But capital as an economic system was itself Eurocentric in origin and continued to be so throughout his lifetime. It began in its industrial form in Britain and spread worldwide but, as it did so, it had to adapt to different conditions and take on different forms. From time to time, it had to confront proto-capitalistic social formations and hybrid forms elsewhere. Marx also had to deal with regions of arrested development, regional economies where seemingly insurmountable barriers to full-fledged capitalist development prevailed (for example, the American South until very recently or the backward region of the Italian South that Antonio Gramsci confronted).
Marx universalizes the qualities and character of the capitalist mode of production by way of the particularities of mid-nineteenth-century Britain in general and Manchester industrialism in particular. How to theorize its nature was the challenge that, before Marx, troubled both Adam Smith and David Ricardo. How to distill a few universal concepts and relations from the myriad and voluminous record of social practices of, for example, market exchange and capitalist production everywhere and how to ensure that whatever conceptual apparatus is derived is “adequate to” (as Marx would put it) valid interpretations of the “laws of motion” of capital in general. To this day, it is an open question whether the laws of motion of capital that Marx laid out apply with equal force in China, Bangladesh, the European Union, and the United States.
Marx’s attempt to find an answer to that sort of question — a question that confronts all attempts to theorize capital — has first to deal with an intense hostility to all things Marxist, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition. As Walter Rodney wittily observes: within that tradition, “one knows that [Marxism] is absurd without reading it and one doesn’t have to read it because one knows it is absurd.”
Even if Marx’s presentations may have been accurate and relevant for the place and time of their origin, their validity for Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong as well as for movements as diverse as Amílcar Cabral’s revolutionary movement in Guinea-Bissau, Thomas Sankara’s revolutionary government in Burkina Faso, or Rodney’s revolutionary work in Guyana needs demonstration. Rodney has, perhaps, the most succinct answer. What matters is not so much Marx’s substantive findings, which are always tainted by the circumstances of their place and time, but his method of investigation and inquiry that led him to those substantive findings.
Marxism “starts from a perspective of man’s relationship to the material world . . . and when it arose historically, consciously dissociated itself from and pitted itself against all other modes of perception which started with ideas, with concepts and with words.” Marxism “rooted itself in the material conditions, and the social relations in society.” This, says Rodney, is the starting point: “a methodology that begins an analysis of any society, of any situation, by seeking the relations that arise in production between men.” There are a whole variety of things that flow from that: “Man’s consciousness is formed in the intervention in nature, nature itself is humanized through its interaction with man’s labor, and man’s labor produces a constant stream of technology, that in turn creates other social relations.” This is the spirit of Marx’s historical materialism and the Communist Manifesto at work.
To the degree that we all now have our being within a material world dominated by capital and the geopolitics of capital’s imperialism, so the method of inquiry must be directed toward understanding “the motor within that system” in order to expose and overthrow “the types of exploitation which are to be found within the capitalist mode of production.” The resultant theory is thereby revolutionary. As Cabral put it: there may be revolutions that have had a revolutionary theory that failed, but “nobody has yet successfully practiced revolution without a revolutionary theory.” While the material conditions of production and social relations in Guinea-Bissau may have been the starting point, the culmination, in Cabral’s view, entails mobilizing the power of revolutionary theory everywhere.
In his single-minded concentration on Manchester industrialism, Marx presumes that the merchants, the bankers, and the landed interest took up the subservient role of serving the needs of an all-powerful industrial capital. In the first two volumes of Capital, Marx largely ignores these other factions of capital. In the first volume, for example, he explicitly presumes that all commodities trade at their value (the market functions perfectly), that “capital passes through its process of circulation in the normal way,” and that the fragmentation of surplus value into rent, interest, and profit on merchant capital in no way affects accumulation. In the Grundrisse, Marx boldly asserts that “the laws of capital are completely realized only within unlimited competition and industrial production.” This rules out any problems that might derive from state-imposed restrictions on competition, monopolization, or the excessive centralization of capital.
There is nothing wrong with abstracting in this way, but major modifications to the theory might be needed in the event of restrictions on competition and shifts in the balance of power between the different factions of capital. It is very unlikely, for example, that the laws of motion of industrial capital are the same as the laws of motion of merchant, banking, or landed capital. In recent times, for example, industrial capital has increasingly been disciplined by the monopsony power of merchant capitalists like Walmart, Ikea, and the major clothing and electronics companies (like Apple). Whole sectors of the economy (such as contract farming) exist in which the direct producers dance to the tune of the merchants or other intermediaries. Likewise, the power of banking and finance, debt and credit, and land and property capital has, at certain times and in certain places, been decisive in shaping capital accumulation and its crises. The revisions that such transformations mandate in Marx’s theory of capital will be examined later.
O foco de Marx no industrialismo de Manchester implicava confrontar as particularidades dos processos de trabalho nas fábricas de algodão e a natureza do mercado de trabalho que ali se definia.
Marx’s focus on Manchester industrialism entailed confronting the particularities of the labor processes in the cotton mills and the nature of the labor market it defined. The power loom weavers were essentially machine minders. The transfer of skills from the laborer into the machine (a transfer that Marx makes much of in Capital and the Grundrisse) entailed a de-skilling of much of the labor force. Unskilled Irish labor and women could easily substitute for what had traditionally been semiskilled male artisans who worked handlooms, although through the “putting out” system in which merchants provided the raw materials and gathered back the finished product.
The depressing effect on wages and living conditions through the employment of Irish laborers posed a problem for Marx. Initially scathing in his criticism of the Irish for their role in redefining the value of labor power downward, he later came to recognize that the answer lay in raising the Irish labor force up as a necessary first step in the organization of class struggle. For the millowners, division within the working class (based on gender, ethnicity, national identity, and religion) was more than welcome. It helped them rule unopposed by pitting one faction of labor against another. Capital presumed the domination of labor by capital. Capital’s power would be consolidated to the degree that it could mobilize other structures of domination (such as race and gender) in support of its domination over labor.
It could be argued that Marx’s focus on the particularities of Manchester’s industrial capitalism biased his vision and that his preoccupation with the doctrines of the free market, competition, and free trade promoted by the industrialists of the so-called Manchester School of Richard Cobden and John Bright somewhat warped his vision. But the factory inspectors, the public health officials, and the parliamentary reports did not confine their observations to Manchester. They went all over the country. And Marx was well aware of the distinctive influence of the Manchester industrial faction in the realm of ideology and politics as well as in their enormous (for that time) centralization of economic wealth and power.
The results were, in a sense, predictable: “One fine morning, in the year 1836, Nassau W. Senior . . . a man famed for his economic science and his beautiful style, was summoned from Oxford to Manchester, to learn in the latter place the political economy he taught in the former.” What Senior learned was that the capitalist’s profit was totally encompassed by the last hour of work in a twelve-hour day and that any shortening of that day to, say, ten hours would spell ruination for the capitalist system because the hours of profit making would disappear.
This “so-called ‘analysis’” prompted a fierce rebuttal, as much directed to parliament as to Senior, by none other than Horner, who worked with the factory inspectors from 1833 to 1857 and “whose services to the English working class will never be forgotten,” as Marx noted. And, of course, the Ten Hours Act was finally passed. The shortening of the length of the working day was, Marx opined, one small but critical step toward a socialist future. It opened a pathway to the realm of freedom — understood as free time — for the working classes.
For the Manchester industrialists of that time, a different kind of freedom — “His Holiness Free Trade,” as Marx called it — was the only kind of freedom that mattered. The economics of free trade were lauded to the skies by the Manchester School and incorporated into state policies across the country and with respect to the industries that at that time dominated in world capitalism. Free trade, it turns out, is always the mantra of the leading capitalist industries and powers. The elaboration and instantiation of the doctrine in the form of the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements of the late 1990s at the behest of the major global corporations and the United States as the hegemonic power of the moment is the obvious case in point.
Para os industriais de Manchester daquela época, um tipo diferente de liberdade — “O Livre Comércio de Sua Santidade”, como Marx a chamava — era o único tipo de liberdade que importava.
In June 1849, Marx moved to London, where he stayed for the rest of his life. While not a participant in British politics, he followed British political life closely by way of press reports and parliamentary debates. For a while, he earned some much-needed income as London correspondent of the New-York Daily Tribune. During the 1850s, he tried to make sense of British imperial politics for New York readers covering, among other things, the barbarity of the repression of the Indian Sepoy Rebellion of 1857–8, the equal barbarity of the second Chinese opium war of 1858, and the dissolution of the East India Company in favor of British direct imperial rule over India. These were, incidentally, the years when Marx was intensely engaged in writing the Grundrisse. The connection back to Manchester free-trade politics was obvious.
As he noted in 1853:
The ruling classes of Great Britain have had, till now, but an accidental, transitory and exceptional interest in the progress of India. The aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it and the millocracy to undersell it. But now the tables are turned. The millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them.
The Indian market had, for some time, been a major outlet for the huge increase in output of the Lancashire cotton industry. Imperial power had assured the destruction of a long-standing indigenous handloom cotton industry in favor of becoming “inundated with English twists and cotton stuffs.” “The necessity for opening new markets or extending the old ones” was as pressing in India as it was in China and the failure to do either signaled “an approaching industrial crisis” due to “diminished demand for the produce of Manchester and Glasgow.”
The millowners’ answer was to rationalize the space-economy of India by building railroads. Prior to this, the Indians could not use machinery “to work up their cotton, which is sent by ox-carts, sometimes over eight hundred miles over wet lands, to be shipped to the Ganges, thence round the Cape of Good Hope to England, to be fabricated and then returned to the natives at whatever percent above ninety such an operation costs.” The millocracy wanted, needed, and eventually got a railroad system that gave access to cheap raw materials and spatially integrated markets across the Indian subcontinent. Marx records the astonishing increase in British trade in cotton goods to India from £2.5 million to £6.1 million between 1856 and 1859.
It is important to recognize how global this system already was. The Manchester system rested on the slave labor of the cotton plantations in the United States and the markets for the commodities produced were to be found primarily in India, where caste distinctions prevailed. The whole system was managed by British imperial administration in which the Colonial Office in London was prepared to deploy violence and outright repression of whole populations to keep much of the world open for trade.
While the British bourgeoisie in general, and the millocracy in particular, were motivated by the vilest of interests, and promoted their endeavors with the most blatant hypocrisies, the building of the railroads would, Marx hopefully supposed, ultimately mean the building of an industrial system in India that would “dissolve the hereditary divisions of labour, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.” The account of globalization in the Communist Manifesto has a contemporaneous ring:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.
In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The stirring up of revolutionary sentiments by these processes might, Marx hypothesized, create opportunities for socialist revolution, though this would depend on how the now ruling classes “shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat.” The relations between Manchester industrialism, imperialism, and class struggle were evident, though partly masked by doctrines of free trade that, in Marx’s time, were supported by Manchester School economics and the works of the Ricardian socialist John Stuart Mill.
The Manchester materialist anchor in Marx’s thought produced a critical theory of the role of imperialism, although as experienced and understood from the center rather than from the periphery. But this imperialism was not only about the colonization of markets. It also rested on access to raw materials from the rest of the world and, in the case of raw cotton, Marx was acutely aware that, before the US Civil War, Manchester industrialism rested on the slave economies of the Southern states in the United States.
The intersection of the slave mode of production with a booming capitalist mode of production produced unfathomable brutality at the same time as “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.” The location of Manchester in the emergent global economy of nineteenth-century capitalism, intermediating between slave labor in the cotton fields of the southern United States and the teeming populations of South Asia as the main market, was of remarkable interest. It pioneered the global production-consumption networks that dominate global capital today.
From Manchester to Birmingham
If, however, forty years after Senior had been summoned to Manchester he had been summoned to Birmingham, he would have encountered a rather different industrial structure in a different global situation with a different mode of labor exploitation (resting on rapidly rising labor productivity) producing for very different markets. Much of the production was relatively small scale (compared to the gargantuan cotton mills) and often highly skilled, even with some degree of primitive mechanization. The Matthew Bolton and James Watt steam engine was manufactured in Smethwick, for example, a suburb of Birmingham. The whole West Midlands region was dominated by a machine tools and metal-working sector that was very different from the cotton mills of Lancashire.
Above all, Birmingham was the center of gun-making and specialized in the production of military equipment, munitions, and artillery. The market for such products is very much tied to state expenditures and state contracts. But the status of the defense industries, and the role of what is conventionally referred to in the United States as the military-industrial complex, is something far beyond what Marx could have envisioned.
In the midst of the “Reagan Recession” of 1982, for example, when unemployment topped 10 percent after Paul Volcker, then chair of the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates to 14 percent to confront an inflation rate of around 17 percent, Reagan ruthlessly cut back on all forms of social expenditure, reduced the top tax rate from around 70 percent to 35 percent, and confronted and broke PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union.
He then launched a massive increase in defense funding to challenge the Soviet Union to a gargantuan arms race, which in the long run the Soviets disastrously lost. While the rest of the United States swooned in economic depression, the defense industries, scattered in a great arc from Virginia, through the Carolinas, across Texas to Los Angeles, and up to Boeing in Seattle, boomed in an astonishing wave of what some called “military Keynesianism” since it was all deficit financed, leading Republicans like Dick Cheney later to opportunistically say in the George W. Bush years that “Reagan taught us that deficits do not matter.”
Marx poderia ter apresentado uma narrativa teórica diferente em O Capital se tivesse se concentrado no industrialismo de Birmingham — um cenário em que a mudança tecnológica se tornou, desde cedo, um negócio em si.
Precision engineering and making guns and steam engines require very different types of labor from minding a cotton loom. Almost a century later, the West Midlands was the industrial region in which the automobile industry took root, anchored in cities like Coventry, Aston, and even Oxford, with Birmingham as its commercial center, while totally avoiding Manchester and the cotton towns of Lancashire. In the United States, the Massachusetts industrial model of the textile towns like Lowell was likewise radically different from that of steel towns like Pittsburgh or, in later times, Detroit and the auto industry.
Marx might have ended up telling a rather different theoretical story in Capital had he focused on Birmingham industrialism — one where technological change had early on become, as he himself had predicted, a business in itself. Here was a form of industrial organization that drew heavily on agglomeration economies of the sort that Marx had recognized and commented on in Capital.
In the case of Birmingham, its industrialism depended on the emergence of a labor force with distinctive machine-tool skills and modest but livable wage levels in a cultural environment where the working class was primarily divided on the basis of mental versus manual capacities. A workman who had skills in metal forging in the making of steam engines was valuable, and employers had to prevent such workers being lured away by rival firms in Belgium, France, and indeed all over the continent. Conversely, Birmingham manufacturers were happy to employ skilled workers no matter what their background (Polish, Prussian, and so on). Diversity of ethnic or religious background did not matter (as it plainly did in Manchester) as long as the skills were there.
The image of the future that this experience proposed was rather different from that suggested by the Manchester experience of the 1840s. When the International Workingmen’s Association was founded in London in 1864, with Marx prominent in its formation, these were the kinds of skilled and literate workers who were involved from France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and other countries. The watchmakers of the Jura Mountain regions along the French-Swiss border in the 1860s were legendary in their political sophistication (the split between Marxist and anarchist currents had not yet occurred).
These were the organizers who collected and sent money in support of strikes and other agitations occurring throughout Europe in the late 1860s, culminating in the Paris Commune of 1871, in which international participation was important and welcomed. On the other hand, these were the relatively affluent workers who constituted an “aristocracy of labour” that Lenin later worried would not only rally to support imperialist and colonial ventures but also be all too ready to compromise with the strategies of corporate capital.
By 1860 or so, the industrialist Joseph Chamberlain (popularly known as “Radical Joe”) was exploring civic reforms in the social provision of gas and potable water, popular education, and housing for the improvement of the “respectable” and adequately skilled working classes. He eventually went some way to implementing his reformist vision as mayor of the City of Birmingham. “Gas and water socialism” was at that time seen as a feasible answer to a whole range of ills backed by widespread local labor discontent.
Chamberlain took steps to realize such a possibility. With a measure of working-class support, “Radical Joe” later became a leading advocate for colonial expansion (the South African Boer War was his most notable contribution), in part impelled by the Conservative Party’s rejection of his reformism. He recognized that, if internal reform and growth of demand in the home market were blocked by bourgeois class power, the only option to expand the market was to seek out a “spatial fix” in the form of colonial ventures and cultivation of foreign markets. The notorious partitioning of Africa by the colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1885 was the culmination of a phase of interstate geopolitical rivalries over access to the raw materials and incipient markets of the whole African continent.
The image of the future defined by the Manchester industrialism of the 1840s and 1850s thus plainly did not apply to Birmingham in the 1870s. If Engels’s father had had an industrial establishment in the jewelry, gun, and machine-tool trades in Birmingham rather than a textile factory in Manchester, Capital might have read rather differently, as we have noted. But, against this seeming bias, Marx had the factory inspectors’ reports and the writings of an increasingly militant working class that focused on capital in general rather than on cotton factories in particular.
Where Is Capital’s Future Being Made Now?
Any casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that the Manchester image certainly still does apply to the conditions of life and labor in the Rana Plaza textile and apparel factory, twenty miles outside of Dhaka in Bangladesh, which collapsed on April 24, 2013, killing 1,129 workers, mostly women, and wounding many more. Producing textiles and name-brand apparel for Western markets, the factories were under constant pressure to cut costs for the benefit of Western consumers. Wages were close to starvation levels and factory discipline fierce.
The same could be said of the Foxconn production complex in Shenzhen, China, which produces most of Apple’s products and employed some 250,000 (some said 400,000) workers as of 2011 in one vast factory complex. A spate of worker suicides in that year persuaded the company to festoon the cramped company-provided living quarters of the migrant workers with mile on mile of netting to capture anyone who jumped. It is all too easy to take descriptions of labor and life conditions in the euphemistically dubbed “emerging markets” and insert them into Marx’s chapter “The Working Day” in Capital without noticing much difference. To the people living under such conditions, a dollop of “gas and water socialism” along with some internal social reformism of the “Radical Joe” sort would seem like a gift from heaven.
Capital produces a great deal of uneven geographical development, the qualities of which are often reflected in the particular theories to which economists subscribe. Marx noted, for example, that the protectionist theories promoted in his time by the US economist Henry Charles Carey reflected the needs of US “infant” industries to defend themselves against the dominance of British industrialism. This was the same rationale that produced import substitution industrial policies widespread throughout Latin America in the 1960s under the theoretical aegis of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA).
The French economist Frédéric Bastiat, who fiercely promoted free markets and the virtues of laissez-faire in the early nineteenth century, reflected, in contrast, the struggles of French industrialists to free themselves from the shackles of a costly and inconvenient patchwork of local and national state regulations, taxes, and interventions. This, too, was later echoed in Latin America after neoliberal refutation of the ECLA and the advance of free-trade policies favored by Augusto Pinochet and the Argentinian generals from the mid-1970s on. Even in Marx’s time, the image of the future that the most advanced regions projected was perpetually changing and geographically quite diverse.
O socialismo que deve ser construído para neutralizar o que atualmente é alienante e ameaçador no mundo de hoje precisa ser em constante transformação e geograficamente diverso.
The question then looms as to where and what is that contemporary form of capitalism that projects the image of our own socialist future today? Is it the Rana Plaza textile plant, Shenzhen industrialism, the Amazon warehouse workers, the Google workers in San Francisco, the Microsoft workers in Seattle, or the huge labor forces at the world’s major airports? Yet it was not only an image of everyone else’s future that Marx’s descriptions conveyed but also the image of what might be a socialist or communist alternative utopian reflection (of the sort that the socialist utopians of the 1840s were fond of creating and which Marx and Engels had so firmly rejected in the Communist Manifesto). It was instead constituted through a historical materialist negation of all that was so dreadful on the ground at that time and in that place.
The immediate grounding, in Marx’s case, was heavily reliant on mass production and social reproduction in the industrial region of Manchester. The cruel conditions of the workers in factories, workshops, and down mines along with the equally pitiful conditions of social reproduction in the industrial urbanization that capital had created and that Engels had so pointedly described, called out for negation. The material circumstances and the socialist project to which they pointed spoke for themselves.
It follows that the socialism that must be constructed to negate what is currently alienating and threatening in today’s world must be both constantly shifting and geographically diverse. These questions call for the closest attention, because, in the history of anti-capitalist oppositional politics, there has been a tendency to fetishize a certain imaginary of a socialist future as an ideal, ahistorical construct.
In the same way that John Maynard Keynes feared that we were in perpetual danger of becoming slaves to the thought of some long-defunct economist, so the political threat of obeisance to the ideals and ideas of some long-defunct socialist or communist project also looms. The fixity of our mental conceptions acts as a drag on our ability to think, let alone freely act on the political projects now required to create a more just, more ecologically acceptable, and more emancipatory socialist world. To put it in such terms is not to invite yet another bout of utopian dreaming (though a little more of that would not hurt). It is to construct an accurate, properly theorized account of what capital is currently about, much as the factory inspectors provided back in Marx’s time, and, on that basis, to take feasible steps toward the creation of a freshly conceived socialist alternative adequate to our current situation.
What this might mean depends, however, on geographical conditions. The problems posed by capital in Latin America are quite different from those in Sweden, where the whole country went into mourning with the death of the founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, who was lionized as a national folk hero. Yet there is a distressing habit of theorizing socialism as a political project outside of any historical and geographical grounding, even if capital’s basic laws of motion are invariant and universal enough within capitalism to demand and command respect everywhere.
It is significant, therefore, that, when Lenin came to power in Russia in 1917, he pursued an industrial policy based on the principles put forward by Henry Ford as the best and fastest way to increase the productivity of labor and build an economy capable of resisting the counterrevolutionary forces seeking to undermine the fledgling communist revolution.
While Lenin’s strategy worked in building industrial capacity, it came at the cost of perpetuating capital’s social relations. When China entered the global economy after 1978 and, in particular, when it signed on to the WTO in 2001, it had no choice but to submit to the laws of motion of capital. It is the operation of those laws that connects the industrialism of Manchester in the 1840s to contemporary conditions in Shenzhen’s Foxconn factories and those of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh. It also explains why China is now modeling itself on Silicon Valley, a very different imaginary of a capitalist future, while attempting some version of gas and water socialism along with “common prosperity” zones through equal access to housing, health care, and education (the “three mountains” that China has to climb to quell rising discontent).
While Marx’s work is open to critique and dismissal as that of some “long-defunct (Eurocentric) economist,” we still live under the rule of capital. The admittedly incomplete theory of capital circulation and accumulation that Marx laid out is plainly still relevant. His theorizing transcended the particularities of Manchester, and his “concrete abstractions” are robust and flexible enough to encompass Manchester and Birmingham or Shenzhen and Silicon Valley, provided we allow for the particular conditions within which Marx was working.
His account of relative surplus value is rooted in the British experience with strong reference to the Manchester system and the cotton industry. In Marx’s time, the industrial form of capital and its distinctive laws of motion dominated only in Britain, Western Europe, and the Eastern seaboard of the United States, with some mercantile outliers sprinkled across the rest of the world. But in our times, thanks to the relentless push to create an ever deepening and expanding world market, the economy is subsumed almost everywhere under the laws of motion of capital that Marx uncovered.
Marx’s account of those laws and how they work is thus more relevant than ever (which is not to say that our account of them cannot be improved and extended, or that problems of interpretation and application should not trouble us). The charge of Eurocentrism has to be set against the fact that capital itself may be Eurocentric, in the sense that it originated in identifiable and hegemonic form in the Italian city-states before mutating under the hegemony of the Low Countries (with Amsterdam as its center), moving to Britain (where Marx encountered it), and then in the last century to the United States.
These hegemonic shifts, in Giovanni Arrighi’s account, entailed a change of scale as well as a deepening of institutional arrangements ordered around rising capitalist state power. But in the same way that Marx, toward the end of his life, detected a rising challenge to British hegemony by the increasing centralization of capital in the United States after the end of the Civil War, we currently wonder to what extent a Sino-centric influence is beginning to emerge to challenge the current hegemony of the United States.
Uma política socialista precisa reconhecer as qualidades, os problemas e as contestações que surgem na totalidade da circulação da capacidade de trabalho, bem como no ponto em que esta se cruza com a acumulação de capital.
A escassez de informação da qual Marx se queixava já não é um problema. Há uma abundância de informações detalhadas sobre as condições das classes trabalhadoras em todo o mundo, as condições de sua reprodução social, as falhas da assistência social e as condições precárias próximas ao trabalho escravo em certas regiões. Existem inúmeros relatos de situações de vida e aprendizado extremamente difíceis em muitas partes do mundo e das condições de pobreza opressivas em que as pessoas lutam para sobreviver com quase nada.
Existem inúmeras monografias de pesquisa, além de volumosos relatórios de organizações internacionais como as Nações Unidas, o Banco Mundial, o Fundo Monetário Internacional, o Banco de Compensações Internacionais e a Organização para a Cooperação e Desenvolvimento Econômico (OCDE), juntamente com o vasto acervo de informações coletadas por ONGs (por exemplo, os relatórios periódicos da OXFAM), autoridades estatais e organizações comerciais (principalmente para fins de marketing, mas ainda relevantes).
Sofremos com uma abundância, e não com uma escassez, de informação. As técnicas de mineração de dados em massa e manipulação da mídia proliferaram. Mas também há muita desinformação (hoje em dia rotulada como “notícias falsas”). O excesso de informação é, em certos aspectos, mais um problema do que uma bênção. Há tanta informação que grande parte do público não consegue acessá-la, muito menos compreendê-la. Não poucos dos chamados “especialistas” que são chamados a nos esclarecer parecem tão confusos quanto todos os outros, mesmo quando conseguem deixar de lado as predileções ideológicas há muito implantadas por séculos de estudos burgueses enganosos sobre assuntos relacionados à chamada luta de classes e economia política.
Como analisar e interpretar a informação é algo controverso, e a mídia a distorce tanto para obter ganhos políticos quanto para facilitar a compreensão. Isso nos deixa com sérios problemas. Para Marx, foi relativamente fácil enxergar o panorama geral, pelo menos da perspectiva do industrialismo de Manchester e dos relatórios dos inspetores de fábricas, e vislumbrar as negações que definiriam um projeto socialista para aquele lugar e época. O desafio para nós parece muito mais complexo e talvez indeterminado.
O ponto de partida mais óbvio é o estado atual da luta política e dos protestos no mundo, juntamente com uma compreensão da dinâmica, incluindo as oscilações entre a direita e a esquerda, que influenciam o cenário atual. Parece haver um aumento nas lutas trabalhistas em todo o mundo — tanto oficiais e lideradas por sindicatos quanto espontâneas ou meramente reativas a alguma falha grave de política pública ou excesso de ganância corporativa. Muitas dessas lutas, na Índia, Bangladesh, Indonésia e China, por exemplo, ecoam as lutas tradicionais que surgiram contra o industrialismo de Manchester.
Mas a maioria dos grandes movimentos de massa nos últimos tempos tem se concentrado na incapacidade do modelo econômico dominante de proporcionar as qualidades de vida necessárias para satisfazer até mesmo as necessidades mínimas da grande maioria da população. A alienação da natureza e os níveis cada vez maiores de desigualdade social, medidos principalmente pela riqueza financeira e patrimonial, bem como pela renda, geram fortes correntes de ressentimento devido à privação relativa. A austeridade que muitas vezes é exigida poderia ser aceitável se não estivéssemos cientes dos enormes incrementos de riqueza e poder que são drenados da economia pelos oligarcas e autocratas que exercem tamanha influência sobre as políticas públicas.
Embora os movimentos Occupy contra o "1%" não tenham se sustentado, o gosto amargo e a preocupação com o aumento, em vez da diminuição, das desigualdades permanecem. É esse tipo de situação que fornece uma base histórico-materialista para alguém como Thomas Piketty reviver a tradição do socialismo ricardiano, sem recorrer à teoria do valor-trabalho, e defender o princípio de um imposto global abrangente sobre a riqueza.
Então, como devemos interpretar essa história e essa situação em relação a qualquer estratégia socialista emergente? Uma política socialista precisa reconhecer as qualidades, os problemas e as contestações que surgem na totalidade da circulação da capacidade de trabalho, bem como no ponto em que ela se cruza com a acumulação de capital. Quando a alienação domina todos os diferentes momentos da circulação da capacidade de trabalho, profundos problemas se avizinham. Isso é algo que a “suposta análise” da economia contemporânea tende mais a ocultar do que a revelar.
Colaborador
David Harvey é um renomado professor de antropologia e geografia no Centro de Pós-Graduação da Universidade da Cidade de Nova York. Seus livros mais recentes são The Ways of the World e The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles.
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