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According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the 2020 election cost in excess of $14B. To put that figure in perspective, in 2020, the year of a global pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control spent a total of $1.2B for chronic disease prevention and control. The $14B price tag for politics in 2020 begs an interesting question: what did this money buy?

Pfizer is one of the private pharmaceutical companies competing to develop a vaccine for Covid-19. According to the industry news outlet Health Leadership Media, Pfizer netted $16.2B in profits in 2019. That same year Pfizer contributed $2.8M to political campaigns and $11M lobbying. For every dollar Pfizer spent on policymakers, it netted $1,173. That is a greater than 100,000 per cent return on investment. Given those margins, politics is among the most fruitful investments anywhere in the global marketplace.

To be sure, political outcomes are not Pfizer’s only investment. They also produce pharmaceuticals. Nevertheless, the fact is that with a very small investment, Pfizer has been able to purchase an extraordinarily generous regulatory environment and rates of profit unparalleled elsewhere in the industrialized world. $13.8M may seem like a lot of money. It is not. $16.2B? That’s a lot of money.

Pfizer is not exceptional. A quick spin around the Center for Responsible Politics website will show just how unexceptional Pfizer is. From the defense industry, to the incarceration industry, to the petroleum industry, to the agriculture industry, investors are spending billions and billions of dollars buying policy. This makes politics among the most attractive investments anywhere in the global market. In other words, politics is a commodity. But what is a commodity?

According to William Stanley Jevons, one of the founders of modern neoclassical economics, a commodity is any surface form of appearance whose value arises from its relationship to all other commodities (Theory of Political Economy, pp. 37-74). According to Jevons, a surface form of appearance, or utility, need not take a material form at all. This, of course, is the same definition of the commodity that Karl Marx used in his Capital. From there, however, Jevons’ and Marx’s discussions of the commodity diverge. So, for example, Jevons expressed deep concern over investors who fail to disclose the full nature of their product, who maintain trade secrets, or who hold more or less of their product than they let on.

There must be no conspiracies for absorbing and holding supplies to produce unnatural ratios of exchange. Were a conspiracy of farmers to withhold all corn from market, the consumers might be driven, by starvation, to pay prices bearing no proper relation to the existing supplies, and the ordinary conditions of the market would be thus overthrown.

WS Jevons, Theory of Political Economy, p. 86.

Jevons considered secrets and speculation to be “against the public good” (Theory of Political Economy, p. 87). Marx, by contrast, saw in the commodity form itself, even when functioning strictly by the rules, in the open, completely unsullied by speculation, a deception on the highest order. As Jevons himself affirmed, the commodity is not what it appears to be on its surface. Nor is it what Jevons thought it to be. So, what is it?

A commodity appears a t first sight a n extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it fro m the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. . . . Whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity? Clearly it arises from this form itself. The equality of the kinds of human labour takes on a physical form in the equal objectivity of the products of labour as values; the measure of the expenditure of human labour-power by its duration takes on the form of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour.

K Marx, Capital, volume 1, pp. 163,164.

This, for Marx, meant that “the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this” (K Marx, Capital, volume 1, pp. 165). The deception was not, as Jevons believed, in trade secrets or conspiracy. The deception was in the very form itself. “It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Ibid.).

Politics is a commodity. But what does this mean? It means, does it not, that its surface forms of appearance — laws and regulations and regulatory agencies and departments and institutions — are not what they appear to be. These surface forms mediate the accumulation, circulation, and expansion of value; value, which, if we are to believe Marx, is the abstract form taken by labor once labor itself is transformed into a commodity.

To return to our original example, Pfizer appears to be manufacturing pharmaceuticals. It appears to be purchasing political goods in order to facilitate the manufacture of pharmaceuticals. If Marx is to be believed, however, Pfizer is in fact expanding value for shareholders. Abstract value is the underlying socially generalized form both of the political goods it purchases and the pharmaceutical goods it produces. The deception is not exceptional. It is how the commodity works. We focus on the commodity’s surface form of appearance. Its true value lies beneath this surface.

What is this value? If we are correct, it is as much as 1000 times more than the value invested in it, perhaps as much as $14T; which is to say, two thirds of the entire US GDP (which is roughly $22T).

Why do elections cost so much? Why are we ready to spend so much electing “public servants” to “public” office? Why $14B? If we are right, and what we are purchasing here is an expansion of value on this unprecedented scale, is it any wonder that we spend so much on elections?

From this vantage point, it is clear that the biggest prize is the US government itself; all of its agencies and institutions, its governing and regulatory agencies, its military, and its people. For this reason, it might be supposed that campaign finance reform is the most important issue facing US citizens, more important even than climate change. Climate change mitigation cannot proceed with sufficient enough speed if those charged with regulating carbon are driven by a marginal product that is dependent on carbon. (Exxon Mobile contributed $2.4M to candidates and spent $9.7M on lobbying in 2019. It earned $255.6B.)

Campaign finance reform is important. But we should not think about campaign finance reform independently from the capitalist social formation in which it would be implemented. Eliminating the benefits investors can enjoy from purchasing politics may place downward pressure on the marginal product investors can anticipate, but it will by no means eliminate the commodity character of the political or, more importantly, the commodity character of the social. Too often campaign finance reform is addressed in isolation from the commodified character of society as a whole, as though removing the deception in this one corner will prove sufficient. Campaign finance report might instead be publicized as an especially noteworthy example of commodification more generally; commodification that includes health, education, housing, clean water and air, race, gender, sexual preference, and, indeed, labor itself. In capitalism, all of these are commodified; all are surface forms of appearance mediated by abstract value. The deception is not peculiar to politics. It is everywhere. Nevertheless, politics offers an especially egregious example of how commodification works, to our peril.

I remember in graduate school reading a book about Max Weber and Thomas Mann, Harvey Goldman’s Max Weber and Thomas Mann, that explained their approaches to vocational calling by the traumas they suffered growing up. However, it always struck me as odd that readers who presumably were not so victimized as they evidently were nevertheless found that their ideas resonated. It is possible that all of educated Europe was similarly victimized, but were that the case then Goldman should have been writing a social history not psychological biography.

Goldman’s book came to mind as I read one after another account that fault’s Donald Trump’s own psychoses for his compulsion to undermine republican values and democratic process. In these accounts, Trump is faulted for believing that its all about him. In that case, one might as well fault Trump’s 71M supporters for also believing that its all about him, because they do. But its not.

As is so often the case, this form of argument takes me back to the opening lines of Aristotle’s Politics, where Aristotle argues that only free and equal individuals have the capacity to govern effectively together because none has the capacity to dominate the others. Such is not the case in a tyranny or under despotic rule; i.e., either where an inferior possesses sole power (a tyrant), or where a superior deprives others of power (a despot). Not incidentally, δεσπότης (despotes) is the word in Greek used to describe the manager of a private enterprise (οἰκονομία), or oikonomia, a private business, which, by definition, is not free and equal. In this sense, Trump is the tyrant who benefits from conditions of dependence and inequality. Trump’s sense of being wronged, always, is also their sense of being wronged, always. In this sense, it really is about Trump; but it is also really about the 71M who voted for him. They have been wronged.

If this is an accurate assessment, then Biden and Harris cannot solve this problem. However wronged they may in fact have been, Biden and Harris feel they have overcome them. They are therefore unlikely to govern from that place; which is both the good news and the bad news. It is good news because they are likely to trust expert research in their policymaking. But that is also the bad news insofar as they may not recognize the pathologies that oppression often confers upon the oppressed. If Aristotle is correct, however, no matter how benevolent their rule, Biden and Harris will be obligated to rule despotically until that point where citizens are in fact (and not only in aspiration) truly free and equal. That said, as Aristotle himself argued, despotism is far preferable to tyranny.

When I was in graduate school back in the day we regularly ran into Tom Frank and his Baffler groupies down Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap. When Thomas Frank broke into the mainstream, none of us were terribly surprised. He has a nice sense for the ironies of US history. Listen Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? is a good example.

Nevertheless, whether in Kansas, or in Washington, or no longer in Washington, Frank leaves us wondering: why did all of this happen?

Republicans believe they know why it happened. It happened because centrally controlled economies are inefficient. It happened because centrally controlled economies let down the very people they aim to be helping, working families. And it happened because the Democrats only insight over the past century, tax and spend liberalism, failed. Once Democrats realized this they tried to convince voters that they too were free market liberals. It didn’t work.

Marxists also have an explanation for why this happened. It begins with Frank’s analysis — Democrats left labor behind — but it then faults democrats for failing to adopt a class-based analysis or a coherent critique of capital. You cannot at the same time support both capital and labor, which is precisely what the democrats seek to do. Their answer is to organize working families to oppose capital.

Yet, for much the same reason Frank’s argument fails to satisfy, neither does the mainstream Marxist argument. Both lack a working class eager to hear what they are saying. Frank’s Kansas has not budged at all since 2007. In the November 2020 election working families preferred Trump to Biden. Neither Frank nor mainstream Marxists offer us a coherent explanation for why this is so.

Mainstream Marxism is what I call the mostly class-based critique of capital. It is far from monolithic. Somewhat surprisingly, however, mainstream Marxism has at its core a practical rejection of dialectical materialism. History simply has not cooperated in the way mainstream Marxists had hoped it would. Culturally, workers are overwhelmingly conservative. More often than not they side with capital, even against their own interests. (Witness the large red stain running north to south, east to west, in the center of any electoral map since well before “bleeding Kansas.”) It is for this reason that mainstream Marxists migrated during the 1940s away from dialectical materialism towards what could be called political materialism. In political materialism, politics holds priority over history, as in this quote from Analles scholar Fernand Braudel:

A third sector should be added to the pre-industrial model — that lowest stratum of the non-economy, the soil into which capitalism thrusts its roots but which it can never really penetrate. This lowest layer remains an enormous one. Above it, comes the favoured terrain of the market economy, with its many horizontal communications between the different markets: here a degree of automatic coordination usually links supply, demand and prices. Then alongside, or rather above this layer, comes the zone of the anti-market, where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates. This — today as in the past, before and after the industrial revolution — is the real home of capitalism.

Braudel, Wheels of Commerce pp. 229-230

Not the market, but the anti-market, drives history. Countering this anti-market, however, is what mainstream Marxists count as authentic human, or “species,” being. This authentic human being has been subverted by capital. It has been forced to become something it is not. Inauthentic human being counts money, labor, and land as commodities, when, in fact, they are fictitious commodities. They are not natural. They are constructions. As a consequence, the social being structured around these fictitious commodities is no longer dialectical, but simply oppositional, a victim of what Karl Polanyi calls the double movement.

Let me first acknowledge that this is a gross misreading of Marx’s mature thought. In his mature writings Marx argued that the dialectic arises out of the two-fold form of the commodity, whose particular surface forms of appearance are valued in terms of an abstract value that governs social relations not in particular, but universally. The difference between outward forms of appearance and abstract value leaves open the possibility, but only the possibility of crises. At these moments, this difference, which almost always operates unseen, comes into the open. Nevertheless, even when it does, it does not come with its own operations manual. More often than not, therefore, crises are resolved, and the difference between particular surface forms and abstract value once again retreats into the background.

To say that these mutually independent and antithetical processes form an internal unity is to also that their internal unity moves forward through external antitheses. These two processes lack internal independence because they complement each other.  Hence, if the assertion of their external independence proceeds to a certain critical point, their unity violently makes itself felt by producing — a crisis. There is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity, between use-value and value, between private labour which must simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labour, between the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things; the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of the commodity are the developed forms of motion of this immanent contradiction. These forms therefore imply the possibility of crises, though no more than the possibility.  For the development of this possibility into a reality a whole series of conditions is required, which do not yet even exist from the standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities

K Marx, Capital I.I.3 §2 (a).

Such was the case from 1929 to 1968, when the abstract value credited to commodities proved to be completely out of touch with the material forms of appearance of these commodities. Eventually, it would take $4.7T public appropriations beginning in 1938 to erase the gulf between surface forms of appearance and the abstract values that mediate these social forms universally. That is what the US Congress appropriated to defeat Germany and Japan. By 1968, however, this Keynesian “multiplier” had run its course. And by then everyone had forgotten precisely why so much wealth had been in circulation for the past forty years. Nevertheless, right on schedule, surface forms of appearance began once again to pull free from the abstract value that accounted for their social relations to one another.

By then, however, mainstream Marxists had fully bought into political materialism. The long upturn, as Robert Brenner has called it, was entirely a product of the political militancy of the working class. They had demanded and received higher wages and better benefits. They had fought for and won the right to organize. It was their militancy that throughout the 1950s and 1960s won civil rights for women and minorities, and that had expanded the social and political franchise. The US Congress’ $4.7T had nothing at all to do with it.

But this means that, for mainstream Marxists, the solution to what for working families has now been a steady sixty year decline must be in politics. So much for the dialectic.

If, by contrast, we begin instead with Marx’s mature analysis, we can see that just as the long upturn from 1938 to 1968 was grounded in commodity production and exchange, so the long downturn beginning in 1968 is also grounded in the two-fold character of the commodity. Even if we were able to restore something like the New Deal, that too would also be grounded in the commodity. But how might this analysis take us any further than the analysis offered by Frank or by mainstream Marxists?

The commodity, as explained by Marx, invites commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism ascribes transcendental, quasi-universal powers to the surfaces of things, which these surfaces do not actually possess. Nevertheless, commodities do possess transcendental, quasi-universal powers insofar as they are valued in terms of the abstract value possessed by all commodities under capitalism. To put names on these fetishes, abstract value, $4.7T of it, purchased health, job security, education, political power, and social security for millions of Americans from 1938 to 1968. And, yet, because the powers these things exercised were separated, both in experience and analytically, from the abstract value by which they were underwritten, working families could believe that these things themselves had power apart from US Congressional taxation and distribution. Moreover, it was not only working families who operated under this illusion. It was mainstream Marxists themselves who came to believe that these commodities had appeared on account of their political militancy. In fact, the reverse was true. Their political militancy was itself among the commodities purchased with the $4.7T. Take away that $4.7T, which is what happened beginning in 1968, and that political militancy will also disappear. I guarantee it.

But the fetish will not disappear. This explains why working families will work themselves to the bone in order to deprive themselves of health, education, and welfare; this explains why working families will also fetishize the surface forms of people of color, immigrants, women and Muslims, all of whom are credited with far more power than these surfaces themselves warrant.

The crises to which Marx referred in volume one of capital are all around us; but not in such a manner that they wear their meanings on the surface. To the contrary, the commodity loudly calls attention to its surfaces, but not to the abstract value underlying these surfaces.

So, Listen Marxist! If we may ever expect to adequately diagnose and seek to overcome the crisis that fills our world today, it cannot be grounded in political materialism. It will only arise from a sober and careful analysis of the commodity and its fetish.

I shared a lovely socially distanced dinner last night on the patio of two friends, an art curator and a critical theorist. One of the topics we covered was how the Democratic Party lost organized labor. First, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, organized labor counts for only 6.2 per cent of the workforce. Second, the Democratic Party was only able to court organized labor because of a fluke; or, rather, because of the double-tragedy of Great Depression and World War II.

True, in the old ILW and CIO and ILGWU there were militants who knew how to drive issues such as race and gender, but within the labor movement as a whole, they were always a minority. Labor flourished when investors needed labor to flourish, between 1938 and 1970. No sooner had the US dropped its payload on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and labor could once again be counted on to support anti-immigrant, anti-civil rights, and anti-women policies; and join the police in clubbing the heads of war protestors.

This is not to suggest that the left should not support labor. It is to suggest that organized labor has always only reluctantly and only when convenient supported the left.

In a related thread this week another friend reminded me how thoroughly the Democratic Party has abandoned working families. She cited Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal. She went on to detail all of the reasons why working families might support Trump: tariffs on foreign imports, increasing the standard deduction, the lowest unemployment in history. I, of course, questioned all of these. Tariffs hurt working families, the increased standard deduction was a pittance compared to the tax cuts and subsidies for the wealthiest Americans, and the lowest unemployment in history was already trending in 2010, a clear result of the 2008 stimulus package. But my friend then went on to detail how Trump had reclaimed Jerusalem, opposed reproductive rights, defended Christianity, and male-female marriage, all of which, she noted, are popular precisely among white working families.

I might note that these are not issues my friend supports, but only issues that may help to explain why working families feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and why they might warm to Trump.

Both of these conversations made me wonder what it might mean for the Democratic Party to court working families. If it means that the Democratic Party must become more misogynist, more racist, and more jingoistic than it already is, then that does not work for me. If it means that we are doomed to await a Great Depression and world war, that doesn’t work for me either. But, if working families are culturally inclined to be misogynist, racist, and jingoistic, it also might be worth asking whether labor is something the left is ready to court on this grounds. And, yet, without labor, what is the left?

The US 2020 mis-election has brought a lot of this into focus for me. Locally, there have been some very bright spots. Nationally, not so much. The Democratic Party has lost labor. The Democratic Party has abandoned working families. And, quite frankly, when I encounter white working families, their white Christian nationalism reminds me more of members of the NASDP than members of the AFL-CIO. This feeling of uneasiness cannot have been lost on women of color who might find themselves in the orbit of white working families.

Wendy Brown has asked how we might win these white Christian nationalists back. I don’t want white Christian nationalists back. I want communities where white Christian nationalism gains no traction. Looking back to the 1960s and 1970s and faulting Democrats for being Democrats is silly. They never were socialists. They were always in favor of free markets. When in the 1990s they warmly embraced neoliberalism, they were not doing anything but being good Democrats. The question is what do we do to carve out pockets of sanity where white Christian nationalism gains no traction.

I am open to suggestions.

Win or lose on Tuesday, this is not new. It is not unprecedented. Although it seems so to us.

During my graduate studies, early on, I became intrigued with the writings of Carl Schmitt, in part because he was a student of Max Weber. I was writing a dissertation on Max Weber. But also because his way of thinking was so in tune with the leadership of the Republican Party in the United States. Could there possibly be a relationship?

“The Concept of the Political” — Der Begriff des Politischen — was first published in 1928. It was then republished in 1932, with the approval of the Third Reich. It’s argument was simple. The “political” is not a debating point or a negotiating point. The “political” is existential. It determines whether a party will succeed or fail. Whether it will exist. In order to exist, the political must identify and defeat an opponent that wishes to eliminate it. The opponent is also the “political.” The opponent also identifies the other as its enemy.

This way of conceptualizing politics differs qualitatively from the way that British, and then American, political thinkers conceptualized politics. British common law advances step by step with each case, sometimes pulling this way, sometimes pulling that way. We are not friends. We are not enemies. We are members of the same community. We will live together. The common law tradition differs in fundamental ways from the Roman tradition, which is grounded in what is felt to be established moral and legal principle.

Carl Schmitt was the legal scholar who defended the Third Reich’s right to deny citizens their rights in the case of “emergency.”

In the end, Schmitt’s legal reasoning justified the murder of 6 million Jews, communists, homosexuals, gypsies, and others.

Schmitt’s most gifted student was Leo Strauss, who, because he was Jewish, could not remain in Germany. Strauss emigrated to the US where he took up residence at the University of Chicago. Strauss never denied the validity of his mentor’s arguments. He never defended British common law tradition. He never found fault with Roman tradition. In fact, Strauss strenuously criticized the popular movements of the 1960s as quasi-fascist. Strauss’ students ended up in leading cabinet posts in the administrations of Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.

So. Yes. We are back in 1932.

But — and here’s my point — we have been here since 1980. That is forty years ago. Which is why we need to take a deep breath. It is not as though, suddenly, in 2016, everything changed. We have been living with this since . . . 1980! It has felt bad, we have felt bad, since 1980. And, if we are honest, it has felt bad since 1976.

Take a deep breath. If Joe Biden wins the election, if the Democrats win the Senate and the House, we still live in a nation that hates women, blacks, gays, and minorities. We still live in a nation whose citizens have rejected democratic process and the most basic principles of republican values and institutions. We live in what our grandparents and great-grandparents would have recognized in an instant as a fascist nation. That is simply true. Even if Joe Biden wins. That is simply true.

So, take a deep breath. We have a lot of work to do. Win or lose.

Demons are real. Tonight we remember the dead. My sons donned costumes. I delivered halloween gifts to the households of our friends. We honor Halloween with costumes and candy. But demons are real.

Here is what I am thinking about October 31. I am thinking about the dead. Every single one of us, every man and woman, every child has hoped that, when then pain and hopelessness is over, they will open their eyes and it will be better. I am thinking about all of those men and women, boys and girls, who closed their eyes this year, and every year, hoping to awake in a better place, a good place.

Yesterday my wife left for Massachusetts to bury her mother. She arrives in Massachusetts with her father in intensive care. He will pass. We all will pass.

The demons will remain. Here is what I am hoping for All Saints Eve. I am hoping that we overcome the demons. I am hoping that we recognize that their future is not ours. I am hoping that that Christians and Jews and Muslims will recognize our shared foundation in Abraham and that we will work together on behalf of emancipation.

Hindsight is 20/20. Actually not. In fact, the vast majority still require corrective lenses even to see what happened four, eight, twenty or even forty years ago. This is because most of us still believe, or hope, that capitalism and democracy reinforce one another. They do not. Moreover, this is not the opinion of militant Marxist-Leninists. Until very recently it was the received wisdom among even the most conservative of economists. Opinion actually did not begin to shift until the 1930s when Friedrich von Hayek arrived at LSE and began to impose a metaphysical compass on what until then had been a science governed by rigorous mathematical modeling. When von Hayek arrived at the University of Chicago, he could not even buy his way into the Department of Economics, which, ironically, sported two communists (Oskar Lange and Don Patinkin) among its faculty. And when in the early 1960s Gary Becker authored two articles proving that democracy and markets were incompatible, only Becker’s colleague (and recent von Hayek convert) demurred. Capitalism and democracy are not compatible.

So why did so many democrats come to believe that they were? The answer lies in the $4.7T the US spent to defeat Germany and Japan. This money ended up fueling the largest and longest industrial expansion in history, all at public, tax-payer expense. Nevertheless, even though it was Congress itself that approved this unprecedented public appropriations package, it was convenient in the immediate cold-war aftermath of WWII to claim that the post-war boom was built on private enterprise and American know-how and can-do. Of course, it was all a huge lie. Which means that when the $4.7T began to run out (the multiplier had run its course), rather than put another $4.7M of public moneys into the pot, democrats found it more convenient to defend the lie at the expense of working families; to be sure, with republicans applauding the democrats’ conversion to “liberal democracy.” This death bed conversion came no later than 1976, which is to say forty-five years ago.

Hindsight is 20/20? I don’t think so. Canvass any economics department not in Atlanta or Iowa and you will hear this same story. It is not a left-wing fantasy. It is sound mainstream economic history. This is what happened. And here is why.

Economic expansion rests on ensuring that a quantity is increasing at a greater pace than the change in value of either the capital or labor driving that increase. And, as any economist — left, right, or center — will tell you, unless an allocation of public money aims specifically at increasing efficiency, it will increase the denominator, the cost, of generating efficiency. There is nothing devious or underhanded in this. It is simply economic reality under capitalism. So, unless a public investment aims explicitly at increasing marginal efficiency — say, by improving human capital beyond the margin, or improving health beyond the margin — it wall draw down the efficiencies capital earns when invested in other asset classes. Regulation can change this. Regulation does change this. Tax oil. Subsidize wind and solar. Investments shift. But — and this is the critical point — none of this is democratic; not one way or the other.

That is because democracy asks an entirely different set of questions. It locates value not in the marginal product, but in the common weal. This, actually, is what the neoliberal Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker pointed out, again and again in the 1960s, when he showed why markets were far preferable to democracy (therein undermining his colleague Milton Friedman’s argument that the two were the same).

All of a sudden? No. Fascism has been a long time coming to Amerika. The moment it committed itself to capitalism over democracy, it committed itself to the marginal product over the public weal. Win or lose next Tuesday, this will still hold true.

Marxist Legal Theory: The State

This is part of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law . All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal Form and Critical Legal Thinking.

Rafael Khachaturian offers a valuable review of some of the positions Marxists have staked out over the years on how to understand the state. He identifies three obstacles Marxian social theorists face developing a coherent critical theory of the state:

the incomplete character of Marx’s theorization of the state; the question of whether the state is adequately represented by the metaphor of the productive “base” and the juridical and political “superstructure”; and how, and how much, it can justifiably be said that law and the state maintain “relative autonomy” from the forces and relations of production.

Marxist Legal Theory

Fair enough. But perhaps in the interests of space or clarity, Khachaturian neglected an essential dimension of Marx’s analytical framework, a dimension that may add clarity to the entire discussion. Khachaturian correctly identifies an early “Hegelian” and a later (what should we call it) empirical or historical engagement, but he neglects to show how the later Marx redeploys Hegel’s categories in his later works. Attention to the specific changes in Marx’s analytical frame shed valuable light on the obstacles Khachaturian identified in his introduction.

Let me propose that one of the leading differentia distinguishing the early from the late Marx is that the late Marx shifted his vantage point of critique from the worker to the commodity form more generally, of which the worker, to be sure, is a singular example. In his early writings, Marx infers an integrated social subject, “species being,” whose actions are objectified through labor and whose products it then reappropriates. When objectified labor is alienated and appropriated by another, species being loses its integrity. Revolutionary activity aims to restore the integrity of species being by rationally, deliberately, and legally reclaiming alienated labor for those whose product it is. Khachaturian contrasts this Marx — the Marx of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts — to a later Marx, the Marx of German Ideology (1846) and the Communist Manifesto (1848). Let me simply note that the differences of perspective in these three works are far less significant than the differences between them and Marx’s Capital (1867).

In Capital, Marx shifted the vantage point of his critique from species being and the objectification of its labor to the commodity form and its two-fold composition. The base-superstructure interpretive framework noted by Khachaturian is an incomplete and one-sided version of Marx’s more nuanced take on the commodity form. In Marx’s version, in Capital, the so-called “economic” base is itself doubled. Abstract value, the abstract social substance from which all commodities derive their values, is paired with highly differentiated surface forms of appearance. This analytical frame Marx then applied to all commodities: labor, money, capital, land, and so on. From this vantage point, restoring the integrity of the alienated social form would entail no more than restoring unity to the two-fold commodity. In that case the value of every commodity would correspond precisely to the value of its surface form of appearance. (This in fact is the lesson Oskar Lange, architect of Comintern economics, took back to Poland after WWII.) But Marx took his argument in a very different direction. Rather than a restored integrity to a “whole” alienated under capitalism, Marx instead counted the two-fold form itself — both its surface and its underlying value — as mutually constitutive of capitalist social being.

This critique of capital is implicit in Marx’s earlier criticisms of Hegel, where Marx accused Hegel of ontologizing and universalizing social forms whose validity derived solely from capitalism. In his later writings, 1858 and later, Marx was more inclined to count capital itself as the ontologizing and universalizing social form and the Hegelian analytical frame as one of this social form’s expressions. In other words, both surface (superstructure) and underlying immaterial value (base) mutually compose a social totality whose supersession requires an entirely different kind of valuation; valuation no longer grounded in labor. To be clear, the mature Marx did not argue for the “return of labor to itself,” which had been his argument regarding species being. Had that been Marx’s argument, then a society mediated by labor, such as the Soviet Union or Communist China, would make perfect sense. But Marx was instead arguing that the form of domination unique to capitalism consisted in the limitations of social being in any society where labor constitutes value, irrespective of how that value is distributed, irrespective of who owns that value.

From this vantage point state forms within capitalism — including those versions of capitalism adopted by mid-twentieth century communist nations — can be understood as expressions of the two-fold form of the commodity. However wildly their surface forms of appearance, including their institutional and legal forms, differ from one another, we can understand them as expressions of a specific kind of underlying value. Here, the complete disfunctionality of the Soviet state form invites us to explore how abstract value constituted by labor in the Soviet state was appropriated by the party and distributed in ways that were less than efficient, to say the least. We can test this hypothesis by imagining how well the Soviet economy should have performed were it in fact based on substantive value democratically mediated, as Oskar Lange had suggested. In that case, there could be no value relation among commodities and between commodities and the labor commodity. Communities would produce what they needed to consume and produce what they wanted to consume, all the while reducing the labor time necessary to produce goods. Instead, never was there an opportunity to “step aside and install machines” in the place of workers. Rather, the party compelled workers to work even harder to cover the inefficiencies of the political apparatus. In this sense, the surface forms of appearance of the Soviet state mediated abstract value, but mediated it poorly.

Where volume 3, chapter 48, of Capital might have fit in Marx’s grand scheme of things is anyone’s guess. Nevertheless from it we can draw several fairly clear inferences about what a Marxian theory of the state might look like. Chapter 48 is where Engels chose to place Marx’s discussion of freedom: “freedom begins where labor determined by necessity ends.” From which it is self-evident that a labor-based, labor-mediated, society — no matter how the social product is distributed, no matter by whom it is owned — is still a society plagued by the two-fold form of the commodity. Bourgeois economists will point out that any other value criteria — health, ppm carbon, leisure time, food and wine, friends, entertainment — will either need to be reduced to abstract value, or it will generate distortions, create moral hazards, and, ultimately, give rise to dead weight loss. They are not lying. All of these consequences were on daily display in the former Soviet Union. And, yet, we know from our observations of other social formations that abstract time, labor, and value need not mediate social relations. ΔQ/ΔL (change in quantity divided by change in labor, or capital) is not universal. Aiming for its increase, more with less — through technological innovation, or cheaper energy, or lower labor costs, for example — is uniquely capitalist. By contrast, if we follow Marx’s discussion in chapter 48, communities might rationally and humanely aim instead not at a constantly increasing marginal product, but at good health, decreasing carbon footprint, superior knowledge, great wines, good cooking, and more than simply “quality time” with friends and family. We could reduce these once again to their marginal product. But why?

From this perspective we can easily imagine a proliferation of value spheres whose relationships to one another are no longer gauged by their marginal products, but, as they were for 2.4M years in all communities, carefully, thoughtfully, and rationally deliberated over. Such deliberations might take place in and through institutions that look very different from those that prevail under capitalism. But they might also look very similar. The critical question concerns the values informing the deliberations. If these are reduced to the marginal product, then nothing has really changed. If, by contrast, they are as rich and diverse and complex as human beings are in fact then the specific institutional expressions are likely to reflect this richness, diversity, and complexity.

France urges end to boycott of French goods as Macron defends Muhammad cartoons

France has appealed for foreign governments to stamp out calls by what it calls a “radical minority” for a boycott of French products after Emmanuel Macron’s public backing of the Muhammad caricatures. The appeal came as anger escalated across the Islamic world over the president’s remarks at a national tribute to the murdered high-school teacher Samuel Paty last week.

For good reason the response of many Muslims to President Macron’s defense of secular values has me thinking about Carnival; not the modern New Orleans style Carnival, but medieval Carnival as described in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais.

Carnival falls just prior to the Christian season of Lent, a penitential season of fasting that leads inexorably to Good Friday, when Jesus was crucified, and Easter, when He was raised. Some Muslims have sought to draw a parallel between Carnival and Eid, in some cases even renaming Eid the “Eid Carnival” (http://www.muslimcoalitionct.org/eid-carnival.html). Eid al-Fitr is a celebration on which Muslims break the fast of Ramadan. But it is not Carnival.

In Carnival, Christians openly poke fun at Jesus, at priests, and at the whole Church hierarchy, emphasizing what is unpresentable and degrading those things that the rest of the year are honored. The biblical and theological basis for Carnival is everywhere present in sacred text, where those with wealth and honor are brought low and where the poor and lowly are raised up. So, for example, asses are outfitted in clerical wear while the local priest dons the mask of an ass. Statues of Jesus and Joseph appear in women’s clothes while Mary is adorned with a man’s tunic. All in good fun.

Of course the brutal murder of a history teacher is no laughing matter. Still it is worth wondering why there is no Islamic Carnival, no festival where overturning, undermining, and exaggerating provide comic relief; where bawdy jokes and pratfalls take center stage.

Let me propose that there is a parallel here between Islam and Protestantism (or even Calvinism). Outside of my own Anglican branch, there is no Carnival in Protestant Christianity either, one must presume because “its not funny!”

I know too little about Islam to know whether Muslims or the Holy Prophet or the Qur’an display belly-aching laughter over their faith. And if they no longer do, my suspicion is that they once did but that they do so no longer. This kind of Bakhtinian laughter seems to me a more appropriate response to lampooning than either the anger expressed by some Muslims or Macron’s appeal to secularism. Lighten up. Laugh. Because the alternative may come to nothing short of murder, which I am guessing the Holy Prophet does not endorse.

This week friends sent me a link to an article on freedom published in the Jacobin Magazine written by the Marxist scholar David Harvey. Harvey, correctly in my view, calls readers to “reclaim the idea of freedom for socialism.” Again correctly, Harvey also finds fault with the idea of freedom peddled among both Republican and Democratic policymakers, an idea he characterizes as “liberal utopian.” Unfortunately, Harvey proposes as a response to liberal utopian freedom a socialist notion of freedom that is just as one-sided and just as utopian as the idea he is eager that we supplant.

At the center of Harvey’s analysis is a discussion from volume three of Marx’s Capital where Marx seeks simultaneously to locate freedom socially and to distinguish it from the form of domination that prevails under capitalism:

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.

Capital, volume 3, chapter 48, §3

Harvey reads Marx’s analysis as a call to eliminate the realm of necessity. Yet, however much we might like to eliminate necessity (a feat that, even if possible, would be disastrous), this reading of Marx’s discussion is one-sided and incomplete. Even were we to elect to rationally and deliberately coordinate our productive relationships with one another, this would itself “always remain a realm of necessity.” Even though we reduce the working day and develop “human powers as an end in itself, . . . it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.”

Some readers may feel that Marx’s analysis is itself one-sided. Insofar as Marx failed to differentiate labor in its broadest sense and labor for the production of commodities, he also failed to contemplate the circumstance where capitalism persists but the marginal product is distributed more rationally, socially, and equally. This redistribution of the marginal product caught on everywhere, even in fascist economies, following the 1929 stock market crash. Well before the close of World War II, redistribution of the marginal product was counted as sound Keynesian economic policy. Primed with the $18T in total global spending on World War II, the world’s leading economies were set adrift on a sea of capital for the next three decades, a sea of capital that some mistook for freedom. This, clearly, was the case for the generation of 1968 to which Harvey calls our attention. With industrial productivity at an all-time high, wages and benefits climbing, and four-year university tuitions and cost of living at all time lows, professors, workers, women, students, and minorities counted their wealth, education, and leisure only a first installment on a long overdue debt. But, then, in a story that Harvey himself knows better than anyone, the war-time dividend began to run dry. When it did, however, those on the left drew inferences that bore no relationship to economic reality. They had concluded, mistakenly, that the $18T that funded the post-war expansion of the social franchise everywhere in the world was a product of their hard work and tough negotiating. When this money ran out, they concluded that someone was stealing their marginal product.

Workers concluded that the stolen marginal product was theirs. Investors concluded that the stolen marginal product was theirs. Both were mistaken. When the US Congress voted its $4.2T share of the global war debt, this not only brought a quick end to the Great Depression, it also funded the next forty years of industrial growth. Which means that in 1938, when the bonds were approved, the lion’s share of that debt fell to future tax payers. These overwhelmingly were workers. But, considering the much higher corporate and individual tax rates between 1945 and 1970, corporations kicked in an amount that was not negligible.

All of which is to say that 1968 may not be the best point of departure for a discussion of freedom, least of all a Marxian notion of freedom. For as quickly as the marginal product found its way into the pockets of working families, just as quickly was it once again seized. This also places in perspective Karl Polanyi’s analysis, upon which Harvey also relies. The “double-movement” that invites public intervention is the same double-movement that demands the restoration of “freedom” to capital. Both movements are equally immanent to the capitalist social formation. Neither entails the freedom from necessity Marx described in volume 3, chapter 48.

In the discussion Harvey cites to, reproduced above, Marx was clearly contemplating a freedom that, unlike the freedom of 1968, is not grounded in labor, and therefore contributes nothing to the marginal product. When economists object that Marx’s expansion of the realm of freedom eats into the marginal product, they are telling the truth. This Marx readily acknowledged. Which is why simply increasing wages and benefits, which also shifts the marginal product, cannot, on its own, give rise to freedom. Freedom of the sort that Marx was imagining requires that the work day be shortened, for example from eight to six to four hours. With each shift, workers are no longer contributing two or four or more hours to the marginal product. That product is transferred as time to workers’ accounts. To this extent it escapes from Polanyi’s double-movement.

This is not to trash good, progressive, socialist policies that transfer a greater portion of the marginal product to working families; the social product they themselves have produced. But this is not the realm of freedom about which Marx wrote. We do not reclaim the realm of freedom by shifting the marginal product.

This is also, in part, the problem with liberal utopianism. It holds that by distributing the marginal product up the income hierarchy we buy freedom, for some. But, the larger problem with liberal utopianism is that, like socialist utopianism, it promises what it cannot deliver. In particular, shifting the problem up the income hierarchy does, in theory, grant more leisure time to those who enjoy a higher marginal product. But insofar as the marginal product is everywhere equal to a ratio — ΔQ/ΔL, the change in quantity divided by the change in labor or capital — even this marginal product is only as good as the current quantity and volume of labor, which is upwardly slanting. Any investor who stands still loses. Capital must continuously be reinvested. In this sense, too, therefore, investors remain bound to the realm of necessity.

But this means that redistributing the marginal product in this direction or that — housing or health or retirement subsidies — however beneficial or damaging, does not touch the kind of necessity unique to the capitalist social formation. A closer read of Marx could dramatically strengthen Harvey’s argument. It is therefore unfortunate that he relies so much on Polanyi.