All,
The readings for November 27, next Wednesday, have been posted. We have presenters for A Smith, GWF Hegel, and K Marx.
Our challenge for November 27 is to explore this new regulatory regime and to decipher how those who first grasped its true novelty understood what they were looking at. In many ways, A Smith is the “odd man out.” He is looking at the new regulatory regime from its epicenter. Two full cycles of capital accumulation, the Genoese and Dutch cycles, have already retreated into the past, long since eclipsed by the British cycle. And, like all of those who occupy the center, there are many things that A Smith mistakes as “normal.” A Smith could not have been fully aware, for example, that Great Britain’s wars with France had so depleted the Exchequer that the Crown would have to place historically high revenue burdens on its North Atlantic colonies. He could not have known that the very regime of social regulation he praises in Wealth had also given rise to a form of social subjectivity that imagined itself even more natural than the quasi-mercantile mentality that he condemns in Wealth. And so he could not have known that the consummately bourgeois revolution of capital unfolding on the Atlantic’s northwestern seaboard not only perfectly illustrated the theories he had developed in Wealth, but that it also announced the appearance of Great Britain’s arch-nemesis, which over the next century would eclipse Great Britain’s own production of wealth.
More importantly, A Smith did not see himself in his theory. Never once does he ask why or how it is he has put all the pieces together – what leisured absence of coercion, what education, and what social security empowered him to think clearly about the composition of the world. That A Smith left to his German counterpart GWF Hegel who in nearly all respects reproduces A Smith’s Wealth of Nations – division of labor, efficiency, land, labor, value – but with this difference. Hegel is curious about the conditions under which individuals enjoy sufficient freedom to think clearly and accurately about the world around them. In other words, unlike Smith, Hegel knows that thinking is itself dependent on the world about which he is thinking. And so he is curious about how he himself is composed. He thus, albeit imperfectly, illustrates what later social theorists will call immanent social critique.
From GWF Hegel to K Marx is but a small step. Because Hegel mistakenly ascribed the directional dynamism and goal of history to a rational being; to the Self-Moving Substance that is Subject. Marx by contrast recognized this quasi-transcendental Agent as nothing more or less than the sublime value form of the commodity, the rational agent and actor that gave rise to the comprehensive integration of the world system and the domination of social subjects within this system. And, although initially Marx felt that the working classes could and should ride this Agent to its natural conclusion, a comprehensive working class society, by the time he writes Capital Marx has concluded that labor is not the source of liberation, but the source of domination. Emancipation will therefore entail the end of labor through the reduction of the working day.
NOTE: Please, all presenters should contact me so that we can discuss the texts before next Wednesday.