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It may be inevitable that the subjects covered in my courses provoke reflection among students on the apocalypse. Indeed, one should think that ἀποκάλυψις (ἀπό [away,off] + καλύπτω [to cover]; hence dis-close, dis-cover, reveal) would be among the principle aims of all teaching and learning. Even when students “know” the end of the story, as they do, for example, in ECON 105, The History of Economic Thought, their reflection easily migrates to questions about what is next. That what is next could be a καλυψις or concealing rarely if ever occurs to students, though it is probably more likely than revelation.

And then, of course, there is the natural assumption that we will find what is revealed attractive and welcoming. Were the four horsemen of Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse attractive? Were they welcoming? And what about the disclosure announced by their appearance?

Recently a student shared with me an article written by Eric Olin Wright published recently at Jacobinmag.com. The article, “How to be an anticapitalist today,” explores four alternative paths to an anticapitalist future: smashing capitalism, taming capitalism, escaping capitalism, and eroding capitalism. Both the interest attracting readers to Professor Wright’s article and the motivation behind his article could be described as apocalyptic. Professor Wright is seeking to disclose or uncover a different future. His readers would like to discover a path leading to this post capitalist future. Where, in my view, Professor Wright’s article falls short is not so much in the mediations that could plausibly give rise to an alternative, post capitalist future, but the present social mediations that could illuminate these paths. Is there a light that the capitalist social formation sheds on itself, immanent to its own formation, that illuminates the way toward a post capitalist future?

When posed from this vantage point, Professor Wright’s four paths invite us to reflect on the social and historical specificity of each of these paths. Do we live in such a time when violent agents who embrace emancipatory ideals and who enjoy the means for institutionalizing these ideals are in a position to smash and replace capitalism? As I survey the global landscape, it strikes me that the agents who enjoy the means to smash the current institutional arrangements either lack emancipatory ideals (e.g., the United States, Israel, China, Russia) or mistake for emancipatory ideals which are themselves oppressive (e.g., ISIS, al Qaeda, Taliban, Aryan Nation). What can be said about these agents is that (perhaps deliberately) they are both responding to and helping to accelerate systemic dysfunctions and breakdowns from which it is difficult to conclude that emancipatory outcomes will flow.

At first blush, therefore, taming capitalism appears a much more realistic alternative. Here we can identify socially and historically specific conditions — climate change, growing income inequality, racism, nationalism — that are bringing progressive political actors to conceptualize building a more sustainable, perhaps emancipatory, future. There is only one problem: since our social relations are mediated by a social form — the commodity — that derives its value from abstract labour time expended and since the endless production and consumption of material wealth is among the necessary by-products of this form of mediation, it is difficult to identify where and how or when political actors, no matter how progressive, will shift their focus away from concerns over distributional justice and toward the underlying social mediations that give rise both to inequality and to the unending production of abstract value. When, for example, we argue for a meaningful reduction of our carbon footprint, we need to be absolutely clear that the size and depth of this footprint is inextricably tied to a variety of social mediation that produces value as its signal product and material goods only for the sake of this value. Taming capitalism — allowing the logic of capital to persist while regulating its effects — means that the social logic reproduced in commodity production and exchange still forms the guiding structuring principle within society.

Escaping capitalism is non-responsive in obvious ways. And, yet, it still holds a certain attraction particularly for those individuals whose accumulated wealth and value grant them the luxury of carving out pockets of social life mediated and structured (or so they would like to believe) in a post capitalist, emancipatory manner. Even assuming that personal wealth holds the key to personally escaping the mediations that structure social life under capitalism, since these alternative mediations are predicated upon and underwritten by capitalist social forms, they escape with one hand what they restore with the other. This is not to say that this escape might not hold part of the solution to our problem. Yet, on its own, the path it illuminates is the pathway to capitalism, not post capitalism.

Perhaps the most illusory, but for this reason most attractive alternative is eroding capitalism. This, I take it, is the premise of Naomi Klein’s recent cover on climate change: This Changes Everything. Here is the deus ex machina, the environment itself, the material precondition for sustained biological reproduction, erecting its own indomitable barrier to a capitalist future. We can either await the environment’s certain erection of this barrier or we can deliberately chart a course that is sustainable. Either way, capitalism is coming to an end. More modestly, however, this line of argument will be familiar to anyone who has heard or repeated that “Capitalism contains within itself the seeds to its own destruction,” whether in the revolt of the industrial working class, the revolt of the global south, the revolt of the dispossessed, or, now, the revolt of the earth itself. As shorelines retreat and oceanside metropolitan areas sink below sea level, wealth itself may find it expedient to broaden even further the walls separating their air-conditioned luxury from the damp and diseased territories crammed full of the less fortunate. Nor should we anticipate more than terroristic interventions into the peace and quiet of those who can afford climate change. Among the systemic qualities immanent to revolt is the un- or ill-preparedness of those most oppressed by and, therefore, those most motivated to lead their oppressed brethren out of bondage into the promised land. For the fact is that we know of no precedent — 1789? 1848-49? 1914? 1918? 1932? 1949? 1989? — when the oppressed were the architects of an emancipatory future.

But let us suppose that our capacity to produce material wealth has become increasingly attenuated from its foundation in abstract value-creation. And let us therefore suppose that we come to question and politically challenge the legitimacy of the social mediations that perpetuate abstract value-creation: the laws, regulations, institutions, practices, etc. At this point I would argue that two conceits intrude into our apocalyptic rationale. Both are fundamental. First, the conceit that the technology and machinery generating such mountains of wealth are somehow independent from the social mediations upon which such wealth is predicated. So that, for example, as we pivot from a society mediated by the production of abstract value toward a society mediated by relationships among family members, sustaining our physical world, exploring the endless varieties of language, music, and art, it strikes me that we would be foolish not to recognize that the very mechanism generating wealth — the pursuit of abstract value — would without question be a casualty of this transition. A future post capitalist world would therefore of necessity be deprived of some of the efficiencies won through the pursuit of abstract value. There is, in other words, a trade off in this shift of social mediations. We simply do not know what a world would look like that was mediated, let’s say, by familiar and communitarian relations, by care for one another and for our world, by enjoyment of performance, song, art, food, drink and text. The material world — including its capacity to generate material wealth — will be altered as we pivot away from abstract value production.

The second conceit, perhaps even more significantly, concerns the agents of this pivot. The narrative we are inviting social actors to entertain tells a story about the increasingly tenuous relationship between material wealth and value. Automation, mechanization, and robotization are making human intervention into the production process increasingly obsolete. But precisely because this obsolescence is grounded in the relatively greater value produced by shedding human labour, this means that its capacity to produce both value and wealth are predicated upon an ever larger part of the workforce becoming less valuable, socially, than the machines that have taken the place of their labour. Human beings are then compelled to work for increasingly less of the social product at jobs so degrading and demeaning that they are not even suitable for machines. There are some jobs that even machines won’t perform. Human beings locked into such degrading and demeaning jobs almost always find themselves at the bottom not only of the income hierarchy, but also at the bottom of the educational goods market, the health care market, the security goods market, and the family systems market. That is to say, far from being or feeling themselves freed from their compulsion to labour, they instead find themselves bound ever more tightly to increasingly degrading and demeaning labour. Moreover, absent the leisure, health, security, and education that might grant them time to reflect critically on their circumstances, the working poor are also the least likely to recognize or seize the opportunities presented in the isolation of value from material wealth. To the contrary, their very degradation marks them as targets for demagogues pandering to their well-founded fears and pent-up anger. Such are not likely to be the agents initiating the pivot identified above. Rather are the working poor likely to demand more work for more money to buy more things, therein underwriting the social mediations responsible for their own domination.

To find the agents most likely to effect the pivot described above from value production to forms of mediation more appropriate to human dignity, we must instead look precisely to those whose wealth, leisure, health, education, and security have brought the possibility of this pivot to their attention. Clearly this narrative is problematic, not least among progressives, because it does not identify the agencies of the oppressed with the potential for their own emancipation. Rather does it invite the wealthy and, in fact, the extremely wealthy to underwrite a social transformation in which, on some level, they would be net losers. And, yet, at least in my experience, borne out by survey research and voting records, the extremely wealthy are intrigued by their own power to provoke substantive social change. Such curiosity helps explain the large portions of their fortunes the wealthy donate to charitable foundations in general and to educational institutions in particular. Can my wealth make a difference? is a question the super wealthy ask every day. To be sure, the wealthy are not immune to psychopathologies. Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers are notorious for their hatred of humanity and their willingness to crush the life out of every living creature that stands in the way of their diabolical dreams. And, yet, for the most part, what the super wealthy lack is not a soul, but a narrative that places them at the center of emancipatory history.

And what might that history entail? It would entail sending the efficiencies seized by the wealthy back down the income hierarchy — not in the form of money, but in the form of health, leisure, security, and education. Spreading these efficiencies downward and outward could hold the promise of helping constitute the possibilities and capabilities that the seizure of wealth has deprived the working poor. Imagine, for a moment, if the same capital investment enjoyed by today’s congressional misanthropes were earmarked for candidates committed to broadening the social franchise of the working poor; expanding their health, leisure, education, and security and therein underwriting their political independence. On some level, of course, this would constitute a regression to the deus ex machina; but here in the guise of a modern-day Rockefeller or Carnegie. Yet, if we believe that even the capacity to think and reason clearly is not independent of the security of our bodies and minds, then it stands to reason that those bodies and minds best able to think for themselves are those that are secure in their freedom.

Clearly what we are talking about here is Class. And the question that we are raising is whether abstract value has so isolated itself from material wealth that historically and socially specific agents can deliberately and knowingly act to transform how our social relations are mediated in an emancipatory way.

I have not thought about Eric Olin Wright, author of the article in Jacobinmag.com, for almost forty years. It was in the early 1980s that I enrolled in Professor Wright’s sociology seminar on Class. His ideas still provoke. Perhaps they also disclose, discover, and reveal.

I received my December 5 Economist in the mail today. On its cover: “Donald Trump: a danger to elephants.” Really? Donald Trump epitomizes the Republican Party. Trump is the GOP’s most illustrious creation.

To be sure, were Dwight Eisenhower or even Richard Nixon to encounter Donald Trump — or any of his Republican rivals — they would no doubt believe that they had stumbled upon a Nazi meeting. But we are not talking about the Republican Party of the 1950s or 1960s, which, say what you will about their hawkishness or their racism, knew enough to stay clear of the anti-Federalism of the Dixicrats and so for the most part still embraced something approaching republican institutions.

No more. When Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush filled their cabinets with certified Straussians and when George W. followed suit, they clearly declared their break with and fundamental opposition to democratic procedures and republican institutions. Leo Strauss many will recall was the most celebrated student of Carl Schmitt, also known as the architect of National Socialist jurisprudence. Strauss, however, was unfortunate to have been born a Jew and was therefore compelled to flee from Hitler’s Germany and hence from Carl Schmitt. Neverthelss, Strauss continued to defend many of Schmitt’s best known principles, such as the “Noble Lie,” the Friend-Enemy distinction, and the Führerprinzip (in English, the Executive Principle).

The Executive Principle holds that all appointees within the Executive Branch are bound to answer not to the US Constitution, or to the charter of their department, but to the Executive, the President. So, for example, when George W. took office, he prohibited funding any research at the National Institutes of Health looking at teen sex because the Executive held that sex among teens is morally wrong. No more research into how teens contract HIV and AIDS, or into how to prevent them from contracting the same. Similarly, when John Yoo authored his famous torture memos in support of the Executive Branch’s decision to torture prisoners, his obligation to do so was based upon the Führerprinzip or unitary executive principle. However, it also illustrated Schmitt’s Friend-Enemy distinction, which holds that politics consists of identifying and disarming or eliminating the enemy. Could Congress or the Judiciary have prevented the President from engaging in torture, they would therein have exhibited their capacity to identify and disarm or eliminate the political enemy. But since neither Congress nor the Judiciary were inclined to contest the Executive’s decision to commit torture, it was the Executive that, in effect, created new law by fiat. Yet, it is Leo Strauss’ defense of the Noble Lie that has become the most prominent feature of Republican politics.

Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss justify the Noble Lie with an argument originally found in Plato’s Republic, where, in Bk 3, 414e-415c, Plato constructs a lie for the purpose of distinguishing the wise from the foolish. Those who do not know that they are being lied to are clearly among the foolish. But foolish too are those who recognize the lie, but who then complain about being lied to. The wise, by contrast, understand that it is the people who are foolish and because the people are foolish they are incapable of understanding the truth. Therefore the wise understand why it is necessary to lie to the people. Wise politicians, according to Strauss, must lie to the people, even to their political supporters, because the wise politician knows that the people, including their supporters, are foolish.

When in 1980 Ronald Reagan packed his cabinet with self-identified Straussians, he deliberately shifted the center of gravity of the Republican Party away from democratic process and republican institutions toward post-democratic and explicitly anti-republican strategies and procedures. George H.W. and George W. followed his lead. Donald Trump may epitomize these post-democratic and anti-republican qualities better than any of his opponents, but there is not a Republican presidential candidate, and surely no Republican member of the House or Senate, who is not fully on board with these strategies and procedures. “A Danger to Elephants”? Hardly. Donald Trump is the essence of the Republican Party today.

War is coming to Europe and there is very little we can do to hold it at bay. One common way to respond to such fatalities is to rush to ascribe guilt. Tropi Rata (Tropes of War), by contrast, is interested in identifying the mechanisms at play. Our assumption is that just as conditions can be identified that promote peace, so conditions can also be identified that promote war. War is coming to Europe, in our view, because the conditions that make for peace are retreating while the conditions that make for war are advancing. War is coming to Europe, in our view, because we do no believe there to be sufficient political will to promote conditions that make for peace or ameliorate conditions that make for war.

Scholars, of course, are notoriously poor at resolving conflict. If scholars have a contribution to make therefore it would involve helping policy makers identify the mechanisms precipitating conflict or, in the alternative, promoting reconciliation among parties. War is coming to Europe because the conditions that make for war can no longer be geographically contained. This was the lesson of the One Hundred Years War, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848-49, and the 20th century WWI-WWII-Korea-Vietnam-Palestine conflict. War is coming to Europe because war perpetuates and amplifies the conditions that make for war.

War traumatizes populations subject to war. It deprives persons in war zones of the conditions that make for peace. But war also carves neural paths specially designed to respond to conditions of war. Victims of war know better how to respond to war than how to respond to peace. War also traumatizes the children of war victims, who, though never feeling the thud of shells striking their targets or experiencing the adrenaline induced by existential terror, respond to the social signals visible on the bodies and in the actions of elders conditioned by the horrors of war. As conflict zones bleed over into zones not yet subject to war, as zones adjacent to war respond to their proximity to conflict, and as populations flow to and from such war zones, whether as combatants or refugees or as both, proximate territories are drawn into conflict. Under such circumstances, the conditions that make for peace — relative wealth, health, comfort, security, education, leisure, and a horizon that extends beyond the next day — these conditions recede from view. But tropes of war — Tropi rata — not only seeks to better understand the cultures, institutions, formal and informal arrangements and understandings, habits of speech that arise out of conflict. Tropi rata also seeks to better understand those social, political, and institutional tropes that feed into and nurture conflict.

When, in the late 1960s, the economies of Germany and Japan rejoined the game, the global economy was subject to downward competitive pressure. One response to these constraints might have been to distribute the efficiencies of the previous two decades downward and outward. In this case, investors would reconcile themselves to far more modest short-term returns in exchange for long-term stability. More modest short-term returns would also have cooled down a global economy fired up by unprecedented growth in the world’s three leading industrial economies. But spreading the social franchise downward and outward would also have permitted the victors in WWI-WWII to make good on their promises for a broader global social, political, and economic franchise. This broadened franchise was deemed essential, following WWI-WWII, for creating and maintaining the conditions that make for peace.

What happened instead in the early 1970s were a nexus of cultural, social, and institutional readjustments designed to maintain reasonably high rates of return for investors at the top of the income hierarchy. Maintaining these rates of return, however, entailed redistributing efficiencies not down and outward, but further up the income hierarchy. In other words, this nexus of cultural, social, and institutional readjustments entailed transferring up the income hierarchy those very conditions — relative wealth, health, comfort, security, education, leisure, and a horizon that extends beyond the next day — that make for peace while transferring down the income hierarchy those conditions — relative want, sickness, deprivation, insecurity, ignorance, work, and existential dread — that make for war.

Tropi rata is interested in the social and historical constitution of these conditions that make for war. But it is also interested in the social mediations that lend validity to action orientations and perspectives where these deprivations are believed necessary or inevitable. Why were policy makers so ready — culturally, politically, socially ready — for peace in 1973, when a mere seven years later they were so ready for war? To point out the obvious, that these were two different groups of policy makers, does not resolve the deeper social and cultural question of why social actors who were, for example, ready to support a labour government in the UK or Jimmy Carter in the US, were equally prepared in 1979 and 1980 to elect Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Unless we are to believe that the velcro and hooks were manufactured willy-nilly at the end of the 1970s, researchers will be curious about how 1979 and 1980 were already implicit in the prior decade.

On account of the specially close ties it enjoyed with the United States, the backstory to 1980 is particularly clear in the case of the former Yugoslavia. When Josip Broz Tito broke with the Cominform in 1948, Yugoslavia uniquely found its fortunes tied to those of western Europe and the US, which decided, mostly for strategic reasons, to underwrite the “Yugoslav Dream,” a visible token of the benefits of a free market economy and unrestricted travel. But self-governing socialism always ran at a net loss. This loss would have been tolerable so long as interest rates remained low and money cheap. From this vantage-point 1972 was a two-edged sword. On the one hand, Richard Nixon’s pulling the dollar off the Gold Standard saved the Yugoslav economy. Cheap money flowed into Belgrade and from Belgrade south to Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the leading agricultural regions of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, when in 1979 Paul Volker dramatically restricted the monetary supply and quadrupled interest rates, this saddled the Yugoslav leadership with debt obligations that they could only meet by selling of public assets, closing inefficient production facilities, and eliminating the social franchise.

Tropi rata is interested in the relationship between the decisions of US investors and policy makers in the 1970s and the ways that their decisions paved the way for the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Their decision to redistribute efficiencies up the income hierarchy played a leading role in the expansion of debt in post-Tito Yugoslavia. And, to this extent, this decision played a leading role in the principle factor — economic collapse, social and political crisis — responsible for the Yugoslav wars. What is curious, however, is that these policy decisions are grounded in notions respecting “freedom” that, while immanent to the social formation of the 1960s and 1970s, enjoy their social validity at the expense of bodies. That is to say that, already in the 1960s and 1970s the freedom to work, consume, buy and sell, to invest and expand one’s investment, has become dissociated from the bodies these decisions might help or harm. The decisions of the late 1970s or early 1980s, decisions that deprived bodies of the conditions that make for peace, were already being justified in defense of a freedom that was essentially disembodied. This means that the tropes of war inscribed on the bodies of Yugoslavs in the 1990s were already well rehearsed and internalized decades earlier in a freedom narrative in which the conditions that make for war were everywhere celebrated.

War is coming to Europe because, with full knowledge of the conditions that make for peace, global political actors appear incapable of reversing the conditions that make for war. Understanding these conditions, their social, political, cultural, and economic production and reproduction, is the leading mission of Tropi Rata.

Currently I am nursing a cold and enjoying a post-Thanksgiving retreat in Inverness, on Tomales Bay, at St Columbo’s Retreat Center. And I am sitting in front of a sign that reads “Prayer Changes Things.” The word that catches my eye is “things.” What happens to things when they are no longer taken only as things, when they are inflected through art or poetry or, in this case, prayer? What happens when I bear witness to things changed, when the indigence of the object gives way?

A Kantian will argue that what changes is not the thing, but the Subject, the agent, the ego, the “I.” And this is very close — in fact, identical — to how many Christians have come to view prayer. Prayer changes me and, since I am an agent who can act and change things, therefore prayer changes things.

But, what if prayer changes things? Not because prayer changes me, but because I have come to see and understand that things are not things. Prayer changes things.

Both of my courses at UC Berkeley are careening toward their untimely ends. In the History of Economics (ECON 105), my students have just passed through WWI and are on their way to WWII. In the Economic System of Karl Marx (ECON 164), we have skipped to the end of Capital, Volume III, Chapter 48, where Marx unexpectedly tells us that the shortening of the work day (and not death to the running dog capitalist pigs) is the prerequisite to freedom. Damn and double damn.

In ECON 105, Jacob Viner, Professor to Milton Friedman and one of the founders of the Chicago School, asks Who Paid for the War? His answer is unequivocal. When they invested in war bonds to underwrite US military assistance for Great Britain, the wealthiest citizens in the US anticipated and received huge returns on their investment. US bonds helped create full employment and placed US industry at near full capacity. Near full capacity production and full employment in turn placed upward pressures on wages, which kept far enough ahead of inflated war-time prices, to allow average workers to save and consume. And, yet, as Viner puts it:

The pre-war federal tax system, with import duties and excise taxes on tobacco and liquors as its main sources of revenue, was certainly not progressive; it was possibly even regressive in its incidence. With the greater numbers in the lower economic classes than in the higher, and with the greater expenditure on commodities, relatively to total income, of poor than of rich, the bulk of the revenue came from the poorer classes.

The real danger, Viner notes, is that average working families might expect the wealthy, who earned huge returns on their war-time investments, to pay their fair share for the actual costs of the war, not through bonds, which end up in net returns, but in taxes, which they will never see again. “In the modern democracy, the path of least resistance to the collection of increased revenue leads to the greater taxation of the larger incomes. The only feasible way of keeping such taxation within narrow limits by imposing a great share of the burden on the shoulders of the poor is to distribute the repayment of the war debt over a long period.” This is what Viner recommends and this, in fact, is how the war is funded, through long term taxation of working families.

Based on economic growth over the next decade, this appears to have been a good choice.

Following a slight dip in Gross Domestic Product during the first two years of the war, war-time spending and post-war investing appears to have provided a real boost to the economy. Indeed, following the execution of the Dawes Plan, when JP Morgan loaned Germany funds to pay reparations to France and the United Kingdom, France and the United Kingdom were finally able to repay JP Morgan for the generous loans he advanced to them during the war. As these funds recrossed the Atlantic, they provided quite a boost to US consumption and spending.

But, here’s the rub. Insofar as holders of wealth had made off like bandits during the war, they were sitting on piles of cheap money. Had this wealth been taxed, the results would have been two-fold: first, it would have relieved wage earners the cost of having to settle the US debt, which in turn would have ended up on the consumer goods rather than the financial goods market. Thus, instead of an inflated financial goods market, consumers would have driven the expansion of the consumer goods market. The second result, therefore, would in all likelihood have been a financial goods market more in line with the actual asset base. Had there nevertheless been a recession in 1929, it could not have been nearly so deep nor the consequences so violent as the great depression actually experienced.

It was the depth and violence of this global economic downturn that set the stage for next Fall’s ECON 105 during which we resume our story with the rise of political extremism and — again — world war. Remarkably, JM Keynes had already predicted this Fall’s ECON 105, when, in his 1932 Atlantic Monthly Article, he tellingly wondered why governments appeared unwilling to spend for peace what they will inevitably end up spending on war.

Formerly there was no expenditure out of the proceeds of borrowing that it was thought proper for the State to incur except for war. In the past, therefore, we have not infrequently had to wait for a war to terminate a major depression. I hope that in the future we shall not adhere to this purist financial attitude, and that we shall be ready to spend on the enterprises of peace what the financial maxims of the past would only allow us to spend on the devastations of war.

One way to inflect this cascade of fatalities is through a lens of fairness. It was unfair for Congress to saddle working families with the costs of WWI while rewarding wealth, already enriched by the war, with the liberty to invest their returns on speculative financial markets. But another way to inflect these events is through a lens of care. When we deprive people of the means for thinking clearly and acting responsibly, they will respond as best they can, through the fog of want and ignorance. On the one side a false sense of entitlement and easy money; on the other side genuine ignorance and growing fear. The combination proved toxic, less in the US than in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Japan. Yet, even the US, fear and ignorance provoked political extremism, which, but for WWII, would surely have exacted heavy casualties on that generation as well.

Which brings us to ECON 164. Really, Marx, the shortening of the work day? That’s your answer?

The realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain and reproduce his life, so must civilized man, and he must do so in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. This realm of natural necessity expands with his development, because his needs do too; but the productive forces to satisfy these expand at the same time. Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite.

Not fairness, but dignity. Not fairness, but freedom: the development of human capacities not in order to maximize their utility or expand their margin, but simply because when confronted by truly difficult problems, the reasoning of a Ted Cruz or a Donald Trump, based on or catering to ignorance and fear, falls far short of the ends of which human beings are capable. But, of course, JM Keynes’ earnest questions proved prophetic. No, we were not willing to spend for peace what we would be compelled to spend on war. And anyone who has perused the annual budgets of the last dozen US Presidents must surely have some idea what this ignorance has cost us, not only in dollars, but in lives lost and opportunities squandered.

And so we face about the globe, but specially in those regions reeling from war, poverty, unemployment, hunger and violence, ever new opportunities for investment, not in the instruments of war (whose returns are, it will be admitted, spectacular), but on human beings and their capacities. Such returns are, as Mr Marx points out, impossible to measure precisely because they are themselves the ends to which we have reason to aspire. It seems clear, however, that we will not choose these, but will choose other ends.

Next week we will draw the whole mess to a close, in war, want, and ignorance. And then next semester we will begin again with ECON 161, Transitional Economics, which considers how eastern European, Chinese, and southeast Asian nations have faired in their transition from socialism to capitalism. Can’t wait.

As we near the end of the semester, my Economics 164 students are also nearing the end of Volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital, in which Marx appears to revert to the analysis of capitalism that he had avanced in 1848, in The Communist Manifesto. There, prior to the collossal and swift defeat of revolutions all across Europe, Marx had entertained the hope that the industrial working class would defeat the bourgeoisie and establish socialist forms of social mediation on an international scale. So swift and comprehensive were the defeats of revolutionary movements across Europe that Marx was compelled to admit gaping holes in his understanding of capitalism. These holes grew larger over the coming decade as Europe’s emerging industrial economies enjoyed spectacular growth unimaginable from the vantage point of 1848. Thus Marx’s cautious, meticulous, painstaking approach to capitalism in Volume I.

Up until Chapter 32, “The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation,” all has appeared relatively smooth sailing, with plenty of ups and downs, expansions and contractions, but no revolutions on the horizon. Then, suddenly, on page 929 of the Penguin edition, Marx discharges the following salvo:

Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime. Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

There it is. After 928 pages in which he leads readers to believe that capital or, more specifically, value is the Subject of a process in which it continually increases its value and that labour is but a subjectless element within its reproduction, Marx invites readers to recover the subject status and hence the agency of the working class. Has Marx lost his theoretical chops?

Two points, one brief and the other more involved. The first point is that much of the validity of Marx’s analysis would appear to rest not only on the decreasing number and aggregation of wealth at the top of the income hierarchy or the increasing number of those bunched at the bottom of the income hierarchy — both points recently verified by French economist Thomas Piketty — but on the training, solidarity, and organization of those at the bottom of the income hierarchy. Here we must truly wonder about whom Marx was writing; members of the Communist Party? If so, Marx must surely have been aware that, though growing, party membership was still quite small in 1867. So, too, he must have known that it would have been an embarrassingly small number of those party members who would have enjoyed the background and training needed to understand Marx’s Capital, much less to have gained that understanding directly from the “misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation” they would have experienced personally at its hands. Oppression does not come with a guidebook to explain where it comes from, how it works, or how to mitigate its effects. As Marx’s Capital itself makes clear, grasping how capitalism works is theoretically challenging even for the best-educated, most lucid reader.

My second point revolves around this hackneyed assertion that “the centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument,” an apparent reference to the traditional Marxist contradiction between the “socialized” and therefore forward leaning forces of production and the “privatized” and therefore retrograde “relations of production. First, what is this integument, this shell or covering? Let us suppose for a moment that this integument is the legal, institutional form regulating and enforcing social relations within capitalism. Second, let us suppose that means of production are, as it seems clear, the capital goods and factors that make value production possible. These goods and factors are now concentrated in specific locations, along specific networks and, therefore presumably not in other locations or along other networks. That is to say, from being widely dispersed and broadly distributed among a wide range of facilities, households, and networks, they have now become “centralized” or, if you like, institutionally and organizationally “rationalized.” Third, let us suppose that by the “socialization of labour” Marx understands that labour is now fully integrated into this centralized production process, its regulatory, institutional, and legal formation.

If this is reasonably close to how Marx wants us to read this passage, then we must wonder how this apparent adequacy or suitability of capital concentration to labour socialization gives rise to a lack of fitness, an incompatibility between this concentration and socialization and its legal, institutional, and regulatory shell.

Traditional readings invite us to imagine the formation of a militant, “trained” proletariat rising up and expropriating the expropriators. Yet, so out of step is this explanation with the previous 928 pages, there is good reason for us to hazard another explanation more consistent with those pages. Let us, therefore, propose something like the following. Capital, as conceptualized by Marx, is continuously seeking to cast off the material forms weighing it down, whether these be labour power, cast off through technological innovation, or physical footprint, cast off in the nineteenth century through colonization and, more recently, by digitalization. That is to say, physical concentration of capital and socialization of labour could be conceptualized as twin impedements to the production and reproduction of value. And, yet, insofar as liberating labour from its domination by value and therein casting off this impediment would eliminate its very foundation, there grows a tension between the systemic necessity of socialized labour for the production of value and its obsolescence. If the integument or shell holding the capitalist social formation be the entire regulatory, institutional, and legal framework that makes labour essential to the production of wealth, then bursting this integument asunder would entail some process through which laws, regulations, and institutions were made more adequate to a social formation that no longer required labour for the production of wealth.

Yes, but then what are we to make of those final two auspicious declarations: “The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” Clearly they are more than mere cheerleading for our team. Again, however, we need to interpret these calls within the framework of Marx’s overall economic system. And to do so requires, first, that we understand what Marx means by private property. Let us suppose that the increasing obsolescence of labour and of the spatial, geographical concentration of capital reveals a growing tension within capital itself. Capital must leave a footprint. It must own fixed capital. It must rent labour power. And, yet, its very form pushes it to cast off these impediments. What is it then that capital owns? What is its “property”? Or, better, how are we to grasp the nature of “private property” at a point when capital appears eager to disavow its need for a footprint? However, let us now suppose that the tenuous character between wealth production and private ownership of property, including private rental of labour power, makes the regulatory, legal, and institutional integument the only barrier between wealth production independent of private property ownership and its system-dictated maintenance.

Is it significant here that Marx calls it “capitalist private property”? Isn’t all private property capitalist? The answer is “no,” and Marx has spent several chapters identifying social formations in which, though property is privately owned, it is not owned to produce abstract, homogeneous, undifferentiated value. The answer to our question appears, in fact, in the very next chapter, Chapter 33, the final chapter of Volume I, titled “The Modern Theory of Colonization”:

The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed by it: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of that private property which rests on the labour of the individual himself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker (940).

If this is the lens through which we need to read Marx’s sounding of the “knell of capitalist private property,” he is not calling here for the abolition of private property at all, but, to the contrary its restoration to those individuals from whom it was seized. And, with this, we also find a much more satisfying — because consistent with Marx’s economic system — reading of the expropriation of the expropriators. Who is it who stole this property, who turned all material into material for capitalist production and all human action into value-producing labour? And, what will happen with this property upon its restoration to its owners? Presumably it will be privately owned, but no longer for the production of abstract value.

What does this mean? It means that those who interpret this passage as a call for a socialization and centralization of the means of production in the hands of the industrial working class, the so-called “working class state,” have it wrong. Rather is Marx contemplating a contradiction within capitalism that yields changes in the legal, regulatory, and institutional form — the integument — whose effect is to decentralize and disperse private ownership among those whom capital had reduced to mere labour power.

Following a long hiatus, during which I transferred my blog from one host to another, we are back considering K Marx’s mature economic system.

We are now in Chapter 15, volume I, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” which, considering its future, particularly in socialist nations, one might expect K Marx to be eagerly promoting. He is not. “In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him” (548). So, how might it have made sense (for a list of socialist leaders too long to concern us here) to feel that installing machines to make use of socialist workers was different than installing machines to make use of non-socialist workers?

One clue comes on page 547, where K Marx differentiates between what he calls “the development of the social process of production” and “the exploitation by the capitalists of that development,” seeming therein to suggest that the purely technological elaboration of production can be considered in isolation from the exploitation of this technology to produce surplus value. Is this not precisely what VI Lenin, J Stalin, M Zedong, JB Tito, et al. were doing when they leveraged the factory system on behalf of workers and not against them?

The conclusion appears inescapable that K Marx believed (mistakenly it so happens) that an institutional form in which machines make use of workers might be exploited for the benefit of workers in a socialist state. Is there any reason to conclude otherwise?

Yes, there is. The most direct avenue to this alternative reading is to ask whether K Marx thought any process of production was not social. Clearly the answer is “No.” Here he stands shoulder to shoulder not only with Aristotle and GWF Hegel, but also with a host of eighteenth century economic theorists who eagerly acknowledged that anyone caught at any time in the process of labour was by virtue of that fact its victim. Individuals either own their own private enterprise and employ dependent labourers or individuals work in such a household. Even the hermit depends upon the labour of others. It follows that when K Marx calls attention to the “social process of production” he is not directing our attention to a contrast between a process that is “social” and therefore emancipatory and a process that is not social — political? arbitrary? anti-social? economic? — and therefore oppressive.

The second point that needs making is that irrespective of whether I am producing surplus value for my employer (or for others), we can all recognize more or less humane ways to organize work. In Chapter 15 K Marx is eager to show that the efficiencies generated by large-scale machine production — efficiencies that might accrue to workers and might reduce their work load or shorten their working day — are uniformly reinvested in the production of surplus value. So, yes, K Marx identifies a social mechanism within capitalism that gives rise to a tension between labour and value. The drive for ever greater efficiency gradually makes human input into the production process increasingly obsolete. Yet, because it is subject to the greater mechanism to maximize returns on investment, and because surplus value relies solely on abstract labour time expended, labour must always be called back in to fill the gap between material wealth and value. “The economical use of the social means of production, matured and forced as in a hothouse by the factory system, is turned in the hands of capital into systematic robbery of what is necessary for the life of the worker while he is at work, i.e. space, light, air and protection against the dangerous or the unhealthy concomitants of the production process, not to mention the theft of appliances for the comfort of the worker. Was Fourier wrong when he called factories ‘mitigated jails’” (553)?

So, what would a regulatory shift away from the production of surplus values look like and how would it change the labour process? Presumably, if my motivation for work was not driven by the production of surplus value, I would not feel compelled to produce more wealth than the market demanded. Would this absence of compulsion also remove the drive for innovation? Clearly the answer is both yes and no. If innovation could grant me more leisure time, then this in itself could motivate innovation. Would it motivate me to produce an iPhone 6s? Perhaps not, unless, of course, doing so had the effect of shortening the work day. Beyond production itself, however, as other social mediations — the environment? family? religion? culture? — outside of private markets reasserted themselves, it is also likely that the drive to produce ever more value would itself undergo a dramatic change.

In terms of K Marx’s economic system, however, it simply makes no sense to suggest (as, e.g., VI Lenin or M Zedong apparently thought) that we would “naturally” be driven to tie ourselves ever more firmly to machine production to realize the higher production goals set by the Party, especially since the primary motivation for this social form has always been the production of greater value.

What is it that the Secretary Gates doesn’t get about democracy or trust? Gates expresses concern that Wikileaks has damaged the trust the United States enjoys among its friends and allies, but expresses no concern at all over the deceit, half-truths and lies the US has spread among its friends and allies, not to mention its own citizens, that were disclosed by Wikileaks. Gates suggests that trust is best served by lying, that truth is best served by deception, and that democracy is best served by private self-interest. Something is terribly wrong here.