Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

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Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

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Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital's paradoxical expansion and entrenchment amidst crisis and unrest, Mute Compulsionoffers a novel theory of the historically unique forms of abstract and impersonal power set in motion by the subjection of social life to the profit imperative. Building on a critical reconstruction of Karl Marx's unfinished critique of political economy and a wide range of contemporary M Althursser is correct in that Marx discards these Feuerbachian humanist and romantic notions after reading Max Stirner’s The Unique and its Property, and no longer refers to ‘species-being’. And although alienation occasionally pops up in Marx’s later writings, it is often used to describe social relations, not referring to ‘human nature’ or the four aspects of alienation mentioned above in Marx’s early writings. In summary, Mute Compulsion is able to articulate different strands of Marxism, following a main thread posed by certain theories of the value-form. Despite the clear focus on a purified capitalist mode of production, the theory of economic power is capable of internalizing different mechanisms that enable capital to be produced and reproduced through real impersonal abstractions. The book is not only very innovative in terms of its synthetic contribution, but also has political implications for communists, even if not always (explicitly) spelled out. Mau’s investigation indicates a preference for communizing interventions that can disrupt the mute compulsion, breaking down its self-reinforcing mechanisms through the creation of other ways of relating, without class divisions, wherefrom a new mode of production might emerge. I got the idea for the book not from that passage in particular but from reading works by scholars from the German “New Marx-Reading” or Neue Marx-Lektüre (NML) tradition, especially Michael Heinrich, as well as from reading political Marxists, especially Ellen Meiksins Wood. The idea that one of the characteristic things about capitalism is that it’s reproduced by means of an impersonal and abstract form of power is not new. Lots of Marxists have written about this before me; I just thought that this idea deserved more attention and that there was more to be said about how this form of power works. Despite what many assumed after the fall of the Berlin wall, Marx’s work has not fallen out of fashion. In fact, since the latest capitalist crisis began in 2008, Marx’s work has seen a resurgence that shows no sign of abatement. Among the efforts to reintegrate Marxist thinking into today, Søren Mau’s book Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (Verso, 2023) stands as a landmark contribution. The author is a communist philosopher and postdoctoral researcher based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Following historical materialism, subsequent Marxists in the early 20th century believed capitalism was entering a new stage, “monopoly capitalism” where domination was viewed as the absence of competition and guaranteed by the ability of state violence and imperial expansion. This view was modified but continued in 1966 Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy published their book Monopoly Capital. Robert Brenner argues that their work was specific to the U.S. at that time before global competition intensified. This cannot explain mute compulsion of capital. Instead, Mau turns to analyzing the horizontal relations mentioned earlier: how value is realized by direct producers (workers) through the market to meet their needs and competition between different capitalists (and workers for higher wages etc). These horizontal relations create forms of power which can’t be reduced to vertical class domination. Marx’s analysis of value is not intended to explain quantitative prices but the qualitative organization of social reproduction in capitalist society that underlies them. Many of the SRT thinkers do not deal with the role of the state at all. For example, the limitations of the ‘dual systems perspective’ is discussed with no mention of the state. I would have liked to see Kirsten Munro cited here, as Munro clearly states there is a fundamental need to change production processes, not merely redistributing the costs and benefits of that production. Munro has a clearer perspective on how households, capitalists firms, and the state are all connected in the reproduction of capitalist society. The role of the state is not just violence, as Mau will later mention the importance of patents and world trade treaties in agriculture. The concrete roles the state plays would seem to detract from an abstract and impersonal economic power that Mau is theorizing. The theoretical status of the concept of the human being in Marx’s writings is a central issue. Here I will detour from the book slightly to expand on Marxist humanism.Essential to Marx’s critique is the historically unique split between abstract labor time-based and used for the production of commodities for value on the market (historically specific to capitalism) and concrete labor needed for social reproduction (transhistorical - has and always will exist). Think of cooking breakfast for a loved one at home (concrete labor) vs cooking the exact same breakfast for money at a restaurant for sale (abstract labor). Women have been forced to undertake much of the concrete labor outside of the workplace needed for social reproduction and ultimately the reproduction of capitalism. Yet Mau writes, “Marx’s failure to examine this kind of labour and its role in the capitalist economy is probably the most damaging blind spot in his critique of political economy.” The economic power of capital is hard to understand with the standard concepts you encounter in an introductory course in political theory or political philosophy. Violence, coercion, and force — the things the state is supposed to monopolize — are not appropriate. Neither are the legitimacy, authority, and voluntary submission that are supposed to mark the relationship between citizens and government in most liberal and democratic theory. No one forces you to go to work every day, but that doesn’t mean you think your boss has a legitimate right to tell you what to do. Søren’s work is now available in revised form as a book. It is dedicated to a detailed investigation of this specific ‘power of capital’. The various elements of a theory of this power are reconstructed from Marx’s critique of political economy in his manuscripts written after 1857. The results of this reconstruction do not refer to a concrete capitalist society; they are located on the level of representation of the ‘ideal cross-section’ of the capitalist mode of production, namely the level of abstraction on which Marx locates his own analysis, at the end of the manuscript for the third book of Capital. On this level, everything is analysed that necessarily belongs to the capitalist mode of production, regardless of its respective historical manifestation – and here this ‘mute compulsion’ is inherent in every case.

Other thinkers are briefly mentioned as a foundation for the economic power of capital but none provide a comprehensive account: David Harvey’s work on the spatiality of capitalist power, William Clare Roberts’s interpretation of the first volume of Capital as a political theory, Jasper Bernes’s writings on agriculture and logistics (both these topics are returned to later in chapters 11 and 12), and Aaron Benanav’s work on the global surplus population (covered in chapter 13 along with crisis). In animal production, pasture raised eggs, milk and beef are much higher in omega-3 fatty acids than factory farmed varieties. These omega-3 fats are essential to humans as they are not available in the active form in plant foods. Inadequate intake of omega-3 fats may lead to higher risk of heart disease and depression in adults, and they are needed for proper brain development for children. Increased intake of processed foods is increasing unhealthy omega-6 fats at an alarming rate, while omega-3 intake is decreasing due to factory farming. Western diets can have an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio as high as 30:1, while traditional Japanese diets may be closer to 4:1! This may contribute to inflammatory diseases including heart disease. Capitalism kills. The eschewal of transhistorical claims by capitalism’s critics has been a by-product of the collapse of orthodox historical materialism, and of the criticisms directed at theories of universal historical development in general. Those older paradigms saw capitalism as a necessary consequence of the preceding history of economic development, an inevitable stage in a much larger arc. The growing power of the forces of production, the dialectical development of the material powers of labor, the real freedom of human beings — these were the driving forces behind capitalism’s emergence, spread, and eventual downfall.So what are we left with? Capital reproduces antagonisms within the proletariat to a certain extent, but not to a degree when it interferes with accumulation. “The balancing act capital has to perform thus consists in nurturing antagonisms to such a degree that it prevents proletarians from forming a collective force yet does not create obstacles for the accumulation process.” In 1924, Evgeny B. Pashukanis, a Soviet legal scholar that was later executed by the USSR, asked “why does the machinery of state coercion not come into being as the private machinery of the ruling class; why does it detach itself from the ruling class and take on the form of an impersonal apparatus of public power, separate from society?” Fifty years later, scholars such as Nicos Poulantzas, Ellen Meiksins Wood, the Conference on Socialist Economics, and the German state-derivation debate would seek to answer the question: “capitalist relations of production presuppose the existence of an institution not directly involved in the organisation of social reproduction... For example, it can be shown that the universalisation of the ‘cell form’ of capitalism – the commodity – presupposes an institution with the ability to guarantee property rights.” Basically state violence was, and continues to be necessary, but social production continued to be dominated by the mute compulsion of capital. Why do people freely vote against their own interests or continue to work for low wages etc? Now we can move on to the “power of value” which takes place not only at work, but at all times. A distinction is used from Robert Brenner, dividing social relations of production into two sets: vertical relations between the immediate producers and the exploiters, and horizontal relations among producers themselves and exploiters themselves. The foundation of capitalism is discussed using Marx’s “so-called primitive accumulation” in addition to Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s commercialisation model of the historical origins of capitalism. The market is established. The proletariat is forced to use the market to meet social needs. Mau makes a distinction here of the proletariat vs. the working class “not everyone who depends on capital for their survival works (or has the ability to do so), I prefer to speak of ‘proletarians’ and ‘the proletariat’ rather than ‘workers’ and ‘the working class.. proletarians do not automatically become workers – they have to be made into workers… If we examine the relationship between the worker and the capitalist without asking why the worker is a worker in the first place, we lose sight of an important aspect of the power of capital.” Mau also offers another important footnote: “Raya Dunayevskaya also made important headway with her interpretation of Capital as ‘a critique of the very foundations of political economy’. More than two decades before Diane Elson, she suggested that we should speak of the ‘value theory of labour’ rather than the ‘labour theory of value’. Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until Today." Following that, Mau discusses metabolic domination and value. “In a ridicule of economists in Capital, Marx writes that ‘so far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond’. What does he mean by that? That the value form is a ‘purely social’ property which has nothing to do with ‘natural qualities’ of a commodity, such as its chemical composition.”

Extensive expansion globally as well as intensive expansion of capital into new areas of life are also part of competition. Competition ‘executes the inner laws of capital; makes them into compulsory laws towards the individual capital, but … does not invent them. It realizes them.’ Competition should thus be understood as one of the mechanisms of the economic power of capital. It is an abstract, universal, and impersonal form of domination to which everyone is subjected. It is a real abstraction. Money thereby directly and simultaneously becomes the real community, since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time the social product of all.” Besides the sale of labor-power and competition already examined, production is another aspect of market domination. The authority of the capitalist within the workplace is merely the form of appearance of the impersonal power of capital, which allows Marx to move beyond moralist critiques of individual capitalists. Chapter 10 introduces the concept of real subsumption of the labor process by capital, followed by chapters on historical examples of subsumption in agriculture and logistics.

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This is why “capitalism does not contradict or repress the essence of the human being any more than any other mode of production, and communism will not be the realization of that essence.” The diversity of modes of production are the diversity of ways that human nature can be organized or realized. No one of them is more true to — or more alien to — the potentialities they mobilize than any other. Capitalism is just as natural — and just as unnatural — as any other mode of production. It is also just as human, and just as social. The distinctiveness of capitalism is not to be found in how far away it is from human or nonhuman nature but in how it mediates and organizes the relations among humans and between humans and nonhuman nature. Vertical and Horizontal Power Years ago I turned to Marx to explain the domination we face under capitalism, but was put off by the orthodox theory of historical materialism and the Eurocentric focus. I wondered what lessons could be taken from Marx from a less orthodox, U.S. context. This led me to C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, also known as the dissident “Johnson-Forest Tendency” (JFT) of the 1940s that would completely break with Trotskyism in the U.S. in 1950. Grace Lee Boggs was a central member and she was the first to translate The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 into English in 1947 (not in 1956 as Mau claims). The corporeal organisation of the human being is a crucial part of the explanation for why human social reproduction can take so many different forms. It explains how the social emerges dialectically from nature, and thus how natural history itself gives rise to human history, without reducing the logic of the latter to that of the former. (118) I am grateful to Mau for critical takes and clarification on orthodox Marxist concepts like Historical Materialism, crisis theory, alienation and contextualizing the “New Reading of Marx” for English readers like me outside of academia. This stuff is great. But too often the book reads like others such as Marx on the Margins and Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism that spend too much time justifying Marx instead of going beyond him. Mau admits Marx is inconsistent. We should read Capital and take what we can get from Marx, but be clear that it is past time to leave “Marxism” behind. Combining Marx and Foucault seems like a solid start. If this book is “not a Marxological treatise; its ultimate aim is to understand capitalism, not Marx” it provides a foundation but leaves more work to be done.

I think Marx could have expanded on abstract vs. concrete labor and brought in real world examples, as he did in ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, and Heinrich has informally mentioned that Marx could have expanded this footnote into an entire chapter, but he did not.Unfortunately, the canon of Marxist theory does not do much better than Poli Sci 101 in this regard. The dichotomies of violence and ideology, of coercion and consent, of dominance and hegemony, of RSAs and ISAs litter the traditions of Marxist theory. They all reproduce the fundamental intuition of social contract theory, of modern economics, and of Weberian sociology “that power comes it two fundamental and irreducible forms,” the power to act forcibly on the body and the power to alter thoughts and act on ideas. Mute Compulsion is available in English, Danish and German, and forthcoming in Spanish, French and Arabic in 2024. The break is clear in The German Ideology as Mau writes, “Marx and Engels repeatedly distance themselves from the concepts of alienation and ‘the essence of man’, making fun of the ‘speculative-idealistic’ conception of revolution as ‘self- generation of the species’ – which was precisely how Marx understood revolution in the 1844 Manuscripts.” Below I will dive into the book and expand on some of my interests: the “New Reading of Marx”, critiques of socialist humanism, social reproduction theory, and food.



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