I didn’t see this post in April when it was first published but I should have: “Against Accelerationism – For Marxism”, by reidkane. According to the writer, accelerationism aims to force down the wages of the working class and thus goad them to organize and fight back:
“‘Acceleration’ is ambivalent; it is regressive in that it is the mechanism by which the conditions of the working class are forced downwards, but progressive to the extent that this is mediated by political radicalization.”
This a quite wrongly stated, at least insofar as the idea can be traced to Marx and Engels.
The accelerationist project as Marx and Engels explained it
Here is what I do understand about Accelerationism, and it is all taken from a couple of sentences in the Communist Manifesto, written, as you probably know, by the original accelerationists, Marx and Engels — a couple of guys I tend to trust when it comes to historical materialism because they invented it:
“We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
The first part is probably uncontroversial: the proletariat aims to displace the bourgeoisie as the ruling class of society. We can agree with this idea, at least insofar as it implies the previous ruling class is pushed off the stage and forced to get a real job. Leaving aside whether Marx and Engels could get a quorum for this idea is another question, as well as whether this made sense. In any case, they thought it might be nice for the working class to organize itself as the ruling class of society as it first step. They thought this — there is no controversy about this; no one suggests Nick Land came up with the idea of seizing political power on his own.
Next they discuss what the proletariat will do with this power and this comes down to three objectives: a. get control of capital, b. centralize control over it and c. develop it as rapidly as possible. Political power was merely a means to effect these three measures; it was never an end in itself. There is no proletarian political revolution as such, but merely the use of general instruments of coercion to carry out a real revolution. The proletarian revolution is not political per se, but material; the alteration of material relations on a mass scale.
How do we know this?
Because in the very next paragraph Marx and Engels explains all political measures would be economically insufficient and untenable. Once begun, the proletariat would be forced to take additional measures until capital was completely eradicated. Thus, whatever the specific measures were implemented — and, Marx and Engels explained, they may vary by country — it essentially comes down to a. gaining control of capital, b. centralizing its management, and c. developing it as rapidly as possible.
Now, I direct your attention to “c”, i.e., developing the productive forces as rapidly as possible. Weren’t the productive forces already being developed by capitalism? Of course they were. The working class never needed to seize power to develop the productive forces — capitalism could do this itself, but this process was subject to crisis, sudden and unpredictable halts, crashes and even prolonged depressions. The development of the productive forces advanced this way, because capital did not care about development of the productive forces; it is solely concerned with the production of surplus value, production for profit.
As Marx later writes, capitalists won’t ever introduce improved technology unless by doing so they can make more profits. If the working class could gain control of the national capital its development could be freed from this obstacle that is continually reproduced by capital. Thus freed from capitalist relations of production, and managed by conscious application of science, in theory at least, the development of the force of production should not run into any necessary obstacles.
Why might this be of interest to the proletariat? Because we do all the fucking work, of course. And since we do all the fucking work, we have a singular interest in seeing the need for labor reduced as rapidly as possible. In this way, we can spend more time cavorting in the sun and having orgies on the beach.
Capital developed the productive forces, but this development was prone to crises and periodic destruction of the productive forces. Taking the capital from the capitalists made it possible to eliminate this stop and go anarchic development. Thus the development of the productive forces could be sped up — “accelerated”. Perhaps I am missing something here, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about; I really don’t understand why imbeciles like Ben Noys find the idea of accelerating the development of the productive forces so terrifying.
If you look at Greece you see the results of capitalistic development of the productive forces. This form of development of the productive forces is actually taking place right now. Nothing can prevent it. It is not as though if we decide we don’t want to develop the productive forces, the capitalist will also stop doing it; and they just will continue to do it on their own terms, like we saw in the financial collapse of 2008 — that is how capital develops the productive forces. So you have a choice: accept development of the productive forces on capital’s terms or on yours. But let’s be clear: the process doesn’t need your permission; it can easily just keep going without your consent or input.
To call anti-Accelerationism Luddite bullshit is an insult to the Luddites.
The Marxist “dialectic”: starvation
This is just the oddest statement in Reidkane’s article on Accelerationism:
“This developmental dynamic is intimately tied to the struggle of the working class to increase value of its labor power, and thus to diminish the need to work.”
The statement is regarding what Reidkane calls “the dialectic”, which is always and everywhere a bad sign. Any time a Marxist employs “the dialectic” in a discussion, what follows is inevitably some serious bullshit.
What is “the dialectic”?
On the one hand, there is capital’s constant revolutionizing of the forces of production. On the other hand there is, “the struggle of the working class to increase value of its labor power, and thus to diminish the need to work.” How does the working class “increase the value of its labor power”? And why would this effort diminish the need for labor?
First, what is “the value of its labor power”? Is this not the socially necessary labor time required for its production? To increase the socially necessary labor time required for production of labor power means labor time is increasing? Right? Yet, Reidkane argues that by increasing the socially necessary labor time required for production of labor power the working class diminishes “the need to work”.
WTF am I missing here?
This mangled presentation of “the dialectic” can be summarized this way: sooner or later the working class makes enough money to quit their jobs. Reidkane accuses accelerationism of saying If wages rise sufficiently, the working class (somehow) acquires the option to not work. Honestly, I am not sure who is even making this argument among the so-called Left accelerationists, but they should be slapped. It is an argument often enough made by the advocates of UBI, who seem to think income can rise to such a level labor becomes an option.
Okay, people who hold this idea are silly — but what does this have to do with what Marx spoke about in the Communist Manifesto? All varieties of Accelerationism trace their roots to the Manifesto, not UBI.
Moreover, and this is extremely important, nowhere does Marx discuss developing the forces of production as rapidly as possible (accelerating development) in relation to the existing state; this is a project undertaken by the new proletarian power once it is established. The new proletarian power gradually brings all capital under its control, centralizes its management and speeds up its development.
Accelerationism and proletarian political power
Thus it makes absolutely no sense for Reidkane to write: “technology is employed not to emancipate the worker from the need to work, but from the opportunity to do so”. Who, in Marx’s argument, is employing the technology to accelerate its development? Isn’t this the new proletarian power? Why would this new proletarian power be trying to lock itself out from the opportunity to work?
Marx is talking about what takes place after a proletarian political revolution, while Reidkane appears to be talking about what takes place before it. This seems to be a recurrent error in the discussion of Accelerationism: it is entirely unclear who is in charge of the process. Nick Land is often accused of wanting to push the boundaries of capital to its ultimate limits: no borders, no regulations, no food stamp socialism, etc. Marx, however, clearly was not talking about anything like this in the Manifesto. What neoliberals is doing today and what Marx proposed in the Communist Manifesto are two entirely different things.
It is true both processes produce communism in the end, but they follow two distinct paths. Luxemburg called these two paths, “socialism or barbarism”. Both arrive at communism, but the latter one is pretty rough on us getting there.
And this is the point: Marxists deny neoliberalism is the political expression of a process that ends in communism. They don’t believe capitalism — of itself and with no other forces involved — directly results in communism. For Marxists, communism requires a period of proletarian rule and cannot be achieved without a period of proletarian rule, but this was never Marx’s argument and has no relation to Marx’s argument.
Proletarian political rule is a contingent event as Luxemburg put it; not a necessity. It is the outcome of a proletarian class that had acquired some definite level of political consciousness. Nothing said the proletarians would reached this level of political consciousness and (frankly) everything pointed to it being an unlikely event.
How unlikely?
Between 1914 and 1945, the proletariat slaughtered 100 million workers and almost completely exterminated several peoples. It seriously tried to level Europe and Asia following its own bourgeoisis into wars of redivision. These proletarians did not act like proletarians at all, but like Americans, Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen.
This bizarre behavior of the class can’t be blamed on social democrats, or the labor aristocracy, or opportunism, or any other such nonsense; this was the behavior of the class itself. Social democrats and labor leaders and opportunism were simply political expressions of the class’s own consciousness, not its cause. The class suffers a serious “defect” that it does not see itself as a class. It exists split up and at odds with itself in an environment of universal hostility and competition.
As Marx and Engels explained: Labor can only exist on the basis of this fragmentation. Overcoming this actual and real fragmentation requires some definite level of a political consciousness.
In any case, whether this consciousness was acquired is a matter of contingency, and is not directly given in the mode of production itself. We can always aim for the slogan, “Workers have no country”, but this does not in any way necessarily mean this ideal is realized on the battlefield.
The trajectory of capitalism is toward communism
I went off on this tangent to establish one fact: What Marx and Engels called communism — the real movement of society — was not this political contingency. Like all contingencies it might happen or it might not happen, but Marx and Engels saw communism as a historical necessity not a contingency. If the working class acquired a sufficient level of political consciousness and if it successfully seized power, Marx and Engels argued it could accelerate the development of the productive forces and emancipate itself from class society..
That is a lot of ifs.
But even if the working class never got it together, communism was still the direct result of the historical trajectory of capitalism itself. The working class could accelerate it and the capitalists could retard it, but nothing in society could prevent it.
Thus, to put this in the simplest possible terms, as Marx and Engels discuss this idea, accelerationism requires that the proletariat has already become the ruling class of society. You cannot have an accelerationism that is premised on the existing state, the capitalist state. It is a strategy or project undertaken by the working class to put an end to class society in the shortest possible time.
Reidkane is horribly wrong to describe accelerationism this way:
“Wage workers, displaced by machinery, are proletarianized, deprived of access to the means of subsistence they collectively produce. It was precisely this tendency that Marx saw “accelerating” with the completion of the bourgeois revolutions.
This is NOT Accelerationism as Marx and Engels described it — this is the normal operation of the capitalist mode of production. This is what you get when the proletarian political revolution fails and we embark on the path of barbarism, of fascism. To equate accelerationism with barbarism or fascism is a tactic first employed by Ben Noyes. Now, it is impossible to have a discussion of the subject without Marxists evoking images of working class babies starving in a polluted concentration camp.
Our attention is diverted from a discussion of how to achieve the swiftest possible end to class society, to the idea you can force the working class to take power by starving it. And Reidkane adds his voice to this silly discussion:
“Yet [Marx] did not advocate it simply because it led to technological advancement, but because it forced the proletariat to organize itself to mediate the deprivation they faced.”
Marx made no such argument and it is just unforgivable that a Marxist would ever suggest he advocated driving down the wages of the working class to goad it into organizing itself! At no point in his career did he ever suggest this sort of nonsense. In Marx’s theory, it is capital and big industry that brings organization to the proletariat, not starvation.
Indeed, if the working class has to be in power to effect an accelerationist project, how could this be based on starvation? Reidkane conflates Marx and Engels discussion of how to speed up development of the productive forces with what happens if capital is left in charge of society. If a biologist got Darwin’s argument as mangled as Marxists get Marx’s argument, she would be laughed out of her field as a creationist.
Somehow, we are supposed to believe Marx thought you could develop the productive forces as rapidly as possible by implementing the very measure that cause capitalism to collapse into crises? Really? How the fuck does that work? Somebody has to explain the mechanism by which periodic destruction of the productive forces on a mass scale accelerates development of the productive forces.
The Real Movement 
You say, “Any time a Marxist employs “the dialectic” in a discussion, what follows is inevitably some serious bullshit.”
Well I suppose that “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” and “Capital, Vol 1” amount to “some serious bullshit”!
“Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man’s “knowing” by his “being”, instead of, as heretofore, his “being” by his “knowing”. From that time forward, Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.”
“The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi [Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”
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I never said the when Marx or Engels employed “the dialectic” it was bullshit. I specifically said, when “Marxists …” I do not quibble with dialectical materialism, but with Marxists misuse of it.
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You say, “How does the working class “increase the value of its labor power”? And why would this effort diminish the need for labor?”
Well, according to Marx,
“Having shown that the periodical resistance on the part of the working men against a reduction of wages, and their periodical attempts at getting a rise of wages, are inseparable from the wages system, and dictated by the very fact of labour being assimilated to commodities, and therefore subject to the laws, regulating the general movement of prices; having furthermore, shown that a general rise of wages would result in a fall in the general rate of profit, but not affect the average prices of commodities, or their values, the question now ultimately arises, how far, in this incessant struggle between capital and labour, the latter is likely to prove successful.
I might answer by a generalization, and say that, as with all other commodities, so with labour, its market price will, in the long run, adapt itself to its value; that, therefore, despite all the ups and downs, and do what he may, the working man will, on an average, only receive the value of his labour, which resolves into the value of his labouring power, which is determined by the value of the necessaries required for its maintenance and reproduction, which value of necessaries finally is regulated by the quantity of labour wanted to produce them.
But there are some peculiar features which distinguish the value of the labouring power, or the value of labour, from the values of all other commodities. The value of the labouring power is formed by two elements — the one merely physical, the other historical or social. Its ultimate limit is determined by the physical element, that is to say, to maintain and reproduce itself, to perpetuate its physical existence, the working class must receive the necessaries absolutely indispensable for living and multiplying. The value of those indispensable necessaries forms, therefore, the ultimate limit of the value of labour. On the other hand, the length of the working day is also limited by ultimate, although very elastic boundaries. Its ultimate limit is given by the physical force of the labouring man. If the daily exhaustion of his vital forces exceeds a certain degree, it cannot be exerted anew, day by day.
However, as I said, this limit is very elastic. A quick succession of unhealthy and short-lived generations will keep the labour market as well supplied as a series of vigorous and long-lived generations. Besides this mere physical element, the value of labour is in every country determined by a traditional standard of life. It is not mere physical life, but it is the satisfaction of certain wants springing from the social conditions in which people are placed and reared up. The English standard of life may be reduced to the Irish standard; the standard of life of a German peasant to that of a Livonian peasant. The important part which historical tradition and social habitude play in this respect, you may learn from Mr. Thornton’s work on over-population, where he shows that the average wages in different agricultural districts of England still nowadays differ more or less according to the more or less favourable circumstances under which the districts have emerged from the state of serfdom.
This historical or social element, entering into the value of labour, may be expanded, or contracted, or altogether extinguished, so that nothing remains but the physical limit. During the time of the anti-Jacobin war, undertaken, as the incorrigible tax-eater and sinecurist, old George Rose, used to say, to save the comforts of our holy religion from the inroads of the French infidels, the honest English farmers, so tenderly handled in a former chapter of ours, depressed the wages of the agricultural labourers even beneath that mere physical minimum, but made up by Poor Laws the remainder necessary for the physical perpetuation of the race. This was a glorious way to convert the wages labourer into a slave, and Shakespeare’s proud yeoman into a pauper.
By comparing the standard wages or values of labour in different countries, and by comparing them in different historical epochs of the same country, you will find that the value of labour itself is not a fixed but a variable magnitude, even supposing the values of all other commodities to remain constant.
A similar comparison would prove that not only the market rates of profit change, but its average rates.
But as to profits, there exists no law which determines their minimum. We cannot say what is the ultimate limit of their decrease. And why cannot we fix that limit? Because, although we can fix the minimum of wages, we cannot fix their maximum.
We can only say that, the limits of the working day being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to the physical minimum of wages; and that wages being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to such a prolongation of the working day as is compatible with the physical forces of the labourer. The maximum of profit is therefore limited by the physical minimum of wages and the physical maximum of the working day. It is evident that between the two limits of the maximum rate of profit an immense scale of variations is possible. The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.
The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.
2. As to the limitation of the working day in England, as in all other countries, it has never been settled except by legislative interference. Without the working men’s continuous pressure from without that interference would never have taken place. But at all events, the result was not to be attained by private settlement between the working men and the capitalists. This very necessity of general political action affords the proof that in its merely economical action capital is the stronger side.
As to the limits of the value of labour, its actual settlement always depends upon supply and demand, I mean the demand for labour on the part of capital, and the supply of labour by the working men. In colonial countries the law of supply and demand favours the working man. Hence the relatively high standard of wages in the United States. Capital may there try its utmost. It cannot prevent the labour market from being continuously emptied by the continuous conversion of wages labourers into independent, self-sustaining peasants. The position of a wages labourer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave within a longer or shorter term. To mend this colonial state of things the paternal British Government accepted for some time what is called the modern colonization theory, which consists in putting an artificial high price upon colonial land, in order to prevent the too quick conversion of the wages labourer into the independent peasant.
But let us now come to old civilized countries, in which capital domineers over the whole process of production. Take, for example, the rise in England of agricultural wages from 1849 to 1859. What was its consequence? The farmers could not, as our friend Weston would have advised them, raise the value of wheat, nor even its market prices. They had, on the contrary, to submit to their fall. But during these eleven years they introduced machinery of all sorts, adopted more scientific methods, converted part of arable land into pasture, increased the size of farms, and with this the scale of production, and by these and other processes diminishing the demand for labour by increasing its productive power, made the agricultural population again relatively redundant. This is the general method in which a reaction, quicker or slower, of capital against a rise of wages takes place in old, settled countries. Ricardo has justly remarked that machinery is in constant competition with labour, and can often be only introduced when the price of labour has reached a certain height, but the appliance of machinery is but one of the many methods for increasing the productive powers of labour. The very same development which makes common labour relatively redundant simplifies, on the other hand, skilled labour, and thus depreciates it.
The same law obtains in another form. With the development of the productive powers of labour the accumulation of capital will be accelerated, even despite a relatively high rate of wages. Hence, one might infer, as Adam Smith, in whose days modern industry was still in its infancy, did infer, that the accelerated accumulation of capital must turn the balance in favour of the working man, by securing a growing demand for his labour. From this same standpoint many contemporary writers have wondered that English capital having grown in that last twenty years so much quicker than English population, wages should not have been more enhanced. But simultaneously with the progress of accumulation there takes place a progressive change in the composition of capital. That part of the aggregate capital which consists of fixed capital, machinery, raw materials, means of production in all possible forms, progressively increases as compared with the other part of capital, which is laid out in wages or in the purchase of labour. This law has been stated in a more or less accurate manner by Mr. Barton, Ricardo, Sismondi, Professor Richard Jones, Professor Ramsey, Cherbuilliez, and others.
If the proportion of these two elements of capital was originally one to one, it will, in the progress of industry, become five to one, and so forth. If of a total capital of 600, 300 is laid out in instruments, raw materials, and so forth, and 300 in wages, the total capital wants only to be doubled to create a demand for 600 working men instead of for 300. But if of a capital of 600, 500 is laid out in machinery, materials, and so forth and 100 only in wages, the same capital must increase from 600 to 3,600 in order to create a demand for 600 workmen instead of 300. In the progress of industry the demand for labour keeps, therefore, no pace with the accumulation of capital. It will still increase, but increase in a constantly diminishing ratio as compared with the increase of capital.
These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.
At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!””
And elsewhere:
“After a 30 years’ struggle, fought with almost admirable perseverance, the English working classes, improving a momentaneous split between the landlords and money lords, succeeded in carrying the Ten Hours’ Bill. The immense physical, moral, and intellectual benefits hence accruing to the factory operatives, half-yearly chronicled in the reports of the inspectors of factories, are now acknowledged on all sides. Most of the continental governments had to accept the English Factory Act in more or less modified forms, and the English Parliament itself is every year compelled to enlarge its sphere of action. But besides its practical import, there was something else to exalt the marvelous success of this workingmen’s measure. Through their most notorious organs of science, such as Dr. Ure, Professor Senior, and other sages of that stamp, the middle class had predicted, and to their heart’s content proved, that any legal restriction of the hours of labor must sound the death knell of British industry, which, vampirelike, could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood, too. In olden times, child murder was a mysterious rite of the religion of Moloch, but it was practiced on some very solemn occassions only, once a year perhaps, and then Moloch had no exclusive bias for the children of the poor. This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labor raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.”
And elsewhere:
“We started with the supposition that labour-power is bought and sold at its value. Its value, like that of all other commodities, is determined by the working-time necessary to its production. If the production of the average daily means of subsistence of the labourer takes up 6 hours, he must work, on the average, 6 hours every day, to produce his daily labour-power, or to reproduce the value received as the result of its sale. The necessary part of his working-day amounts to 6 hours, and is, therefore, caeteris paribus [other things being equal], a given quantity. But with this, the extent of the working-day itself is not yet given.
Let us assume that the line A–––B represents the length of the necessary working-time, say 6 hours. If the labour be prolonged 1, 3, or 6 hours beyond A—–B, we have 3 other lines:
Working-day I. Working-day II. Working-day III.
A–––B–C. A–––B––C. A–––B–––C.
representing 3 different working-days of 7, 9, and 12 hours. The extension B—–C of the line A—–B represents the length of the surplus-labour. As the working-day is A—–B + B—–C or A—–C, it varies with the variable quantity B—–C. Since A—–B is constant, the ratio of B—–C to A—–B can always be calculated. In working-day I, it is 1/6, in working-day II, 3/6, in working day III 6/6 of A—–B. Since further the ratio (surplus working-time)/(necessary working-time), determines the rate of the surplus-value, the latter is given by the ratio of B—-C to A—-B. It amounts in the 3 different working-days respectively to 16 2/3, 50 and 100 per cent. On the other hand, the rate of surplus-value alone would not give us the extent of the working-day. If this rate, e.g., were 100 per cent., the working-day might be of 8, 10, 12, or more hours. It would indicate that the 2 constituent parts of the working-day, necessary-labour and surplus-labour time, were equal in extent, but not how long each of these two constituent parts was.
The working-day is thus not a constant, but a variable quantity. One of its parts, certainly, is determined by the working-time required for the reproduction of the labour-power of the labourer himself. But its total amount varies with the duration of the surplus-labour. The working-day is, therefore, determinable, but is, per se, indeterminate. [1]
Although the working-day is not a fixed, but a fluent quantity, it can, on the other hand, only vary within certain limits. The minimum limit is, however, not determinable; of course, if we make the extension line B—‑C or the surplus-labour = 0, we have a minimum limit, i.e., the part of the day which the labourer must necessarily work for his own maintenance. On the basis of capitalist production, however, this necessary labour can form a part only of the working-day; the working-day itself can never be reduced to this minimum. On the other hand, the working-day has a maximum limit. It cannot be prolonged beyond a certain point. This maximum limit is conditioned by two things. First, by the physical bounds of labour-power. Within the 24 hours of the natural day a man can expend only a definite quantity of his vital force. A horse, in like manner, can only work from day to day, 8 hours. During part of the day this force must rest, sleep; during another part the man has to satisfy other physical needs, to feed, wash, and clothe himself. Besides these purely physical limitations, the extension of the working-day encounters moral ones. The labourer needs time for satisfying his intellectual and social wants, the extent and number of which are conditioned by the general state of social advancement. The variation of the working-day fluctuates, therefore, within physical and social bounds. But both these limiting conditions are of a very elastic nature, and allow the greatest latitude. So we find working-days of 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 hours, i.e., of the most different lengths.
The capitalist has bought the labour-power at its day-rate. To him its use-value belongs during one working-day. He has thus acquired the right to make the labourer work for him during one day. But, what is a working-day? [2]
At all events, less than a natural day. By how much? The capitalist has his own views of this ultima Thule [the outermost limit], the necessary limit of the working-day. As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. [3]
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. [4]
If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist. [5]
The capitalist then takes his stand on the law of the exchange of commodities. He, like all other buyers, seeks to get the greatest possible benefit out of the use-value of his commodity. Suddenly the voice of the labourer, which had been stifled in the storm and stress of the process of production, rises:
The commodity that I have sold to you differs from the crowd of other commodities, in that its use creates value, and a value greater than its own. That is why you bought it. That which on your side appears a spontaneous expansion of capital, is on mine extra expenditure of labour-power. You and I know on the market only one law, that of the exchange of commodities. And the consumption of the commodity belongs not to the seller who parts with it, but to the buyer, who acquires it. To you, therefore, belongs the use of my daily labour-power. But by means of the price that you pay for it each day, I must be able to reproduce it daily, and to sell it again. Apart from natural exhaustion through age, &c., I must be able on the morrow to work with the same normal amount of force, health and freshness as to-day. You preach to me constantly the gospel of “saving” and “abstinence.” Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth, labour-power, and abstain from all foolish waste of it. I will each day spend, set in motion, put into action only as much of it as is compatible with its normal duration, and healthy development. By an unlimited extension of the working-day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater than I can restore in three. What you gain in labour I lose in substance. The use of my labour-power and the spoliation of it are quite different things. If the average time that (doing a reasonable amount of work) an average labourer can live, is 30 years, the value of my labour-power, which you pay me from day to day is 1/(365×30) or 1/10950 of its total value. But if you consume it in 10 years, you pay me daily 1/10950 instead of 1/3650 of its total value, i.e., only 1/3 of its daily value, and you rob me, therefore, every day of 2/3 of the value of my commodity. You pay me for one day’s labour-power, whilst you use that of 3 days. That is against our contract and the law of exchanges. I demand, therefore, a working-day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast. That which seems to throb there is my own heart-beating. I demand the normal working-day because I, like every other seller, demand the value of my commodity. [6]
We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class. …
“What is a working-day? What is the length of time during which capital may consume the labour-power whose daily value it buys? How far may the working-day be extended beyond the working-time necessary for the reproduction of labour-power itself?” It has been seen that to these questions capital replies: the working-day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of repose without which labour-power absolutely refuses its services again. Hence it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!) [72] — moonshine! But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to determine the limits of the labourers’ period of repose. Capital cares nothing for the length of life of labour-power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power, that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.
The capitalistic mode of production (essentially the production of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus-labour), produces thus, with the extension of the working-day, not only the deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical, conditions of development and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself. [73] It extends the labourer’s time of production during a given period by shortening his actual life-time.
But the value of the labour-power includes the value of the commodities necessary for the reproduction of the worker, or for the keeping up of the working-class. If then the unnatural extension of the working-day, that capital necessarily strives after in its unmeasured passion for self-expansion, shortens the length of life of the individual labourer, and therefore the duration of his labour-power, the forces used up have to be replaced at a more rapid rate and the sum of the expenses for the reproduction of labour-power will be greater; just as in a machine the part of its value to be reproduced every day is greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out. It would seem therefore that the interest of capital itself points in the direction of a normal working-day.
The slave-owner buys his labourer as he buys his horse. If he loses his slave, he loses capital that can only be restored by new outlay in the slave-mart…
The establishment of a normal working-day is the result of centuries of struggle between capitalist and labourer. The history of this struggle shows two opposed tendencies. Compare, e.g., the English factory legislation of our time with the English labour Statutes from the 14th century to well into the middle of the 18th. [83] Whilst the modern Factory Acts compulsorily shortened the working-day, the earlier statutes tried to lengthen it by compulsion. Of course the pretensions of capital in embryo — when, beginning to grow, it secures the right of absorbing a quantum sufficit [sufficient quantity] of surplus-labour, not merely by the force of economic relations, but by the help of the State — appear very modest when put face to face with the concessions that, growling and struggling, it has to make in its adult condition. It takes centuries ere the “free” labourer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e., is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life. his very capacity for work, for the price of the necessaries of life, his birth-right for a mess of pottage. …
The history of the regulation of the working-day in certain branches of production, and the struggle still going on in others in regard to this regulation, prove conclusively that the isolated labourer, the labourer as “free” vendor of his labour-power, when capitalist production has once attained a certain stage, succumbs without any power of resistance. The creation of a normal working-day is, therefore, the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working-class. As the contest takes place in the arena of modern industry, it first breaks out in the home of that industry — England. [155] The English factory workers were the champions, not only of the English, but of the modern working-class generally, as their theorists were the first to throw down the gauntlet to the theory of capital. …
It must be acknowledged that our labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity “labour-power” face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no “free agent,” that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it, [163] that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” [164] For “protection” against “the serpent of their agonies,” the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling. by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death. [165] In place of the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear “when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.” Quantum mutatus ab illo! [What a great change from that time! – Virgil]”
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If you’re having difficulty connecting these dots, I’ll put it simply as possible:
How does the working class increase the value of its labor power? First, in being compelled by the need to survive to struggle against falling wage rates and increasing hours of labor, and as its organizational strength increases, to struggle for higher wage rates and lower hours of labor.
Why does this “diminish the need for labor”? Because a shorter working day with constant, or increased, daily wages means not having to work as much to maintain the same level of subsistence.
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Clearly you are missing my argument here. Of course, this is the only assertion in your comment above to which I take exception:
Your argument is wholly contingent on the idea the working class is “being compelled by the need to survive to struggle against falling wage rates and increasing hours of labor”. Really? We know wages have been falling since 1970. Where is this struggle? Yes, the potential for a struggle for higher wages and lower hours of labor is there? But there is no necessity for this struggle to actually emerge in fact. The reality is that hours of labor have increased since the Great Depression and wages have been falling at least since 1970 as well — without producing either serious class struggle or organization within the class.
In his argument, Marx points to no more than the possibility that wages may rise, and this rise is contingent on the actual organization and resistance of the working class. Which is to say, as we have always said to bourgeois simpletons, that a period of rising wages or falling hours of labor does not in any way contradict Marx’s theory. Unfortunately, you convert this possibility almost into a certainty: a. that with the fall in wages and longer hours that working class will be compelled to struggle; and, b. that in the course of this struggle its organizational strength increases. In fact, as the last 80 years show, both wages and the organization of the working class has collapsed.
Then you state in your essay:
Okay, I might quibble with your wording here, but it is true an increasing mass of workers are rendered superfluous to the production of value. However, where I do take exception to your argument is where you then state:
Marx never ‘advocated’ this — I think I have a real problem with your choice of words here. First, this is not the process Marx was speaking of in the relevant passage of the Communist Manifesto. Second, I take serious objection to your use of the term “advocate”. I would agree Marx described what was taking place within capitalistic development, but he never advocated deprivation “because it forced the proletariat to organize itself”.
Can you understand my point on this? Perhaps this last objection is just a matter semantics. But with people actually advocating deprivation to spur the class to organize and resist, it is unfortunate wording. It should never be thought that Marx ever advocated deprivation to spur organization and resistance of the class.
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“First, what is “the value of its labor power”? Is this not the socially necessary labor time required for its production?”
Back to Marx 101 for you.
“But there are some peculiar features which distinguish the value of the labouring power, or the value of labour, from the values of all other commodities. The value of the labouring power is formed by two elements — the one merely physical, the other historical or social. Its ultimate limit is determined by the physical element, that is to say, to maintain and reproduce itself, to perpetuate its physical existence, the working class must receive the necessaries absolutely indispensable for living and multiplying. The value of those indispensable necessaries forms, therefore, the ultimate limit of the value of labour. On the other hand, the length of the working day is also limited by ultimate, although very elastic boundaries. Its ultimate limit is given by the physical force of the labouring man. If the daily exhaustion of his vital forces exceeds a certain degree, it cannot be exerted anew, day by day.
However, as I said, this limit is very elastic. A quick succession of unhealthy and short-lived generations will keep the labour market as well supplied as a series of vigorous and long-lived generations. Besides this mere physical element, the value of labour is in every country determined by a traditional standard of life. It is not mere physical life, but it is the satisfaction of certain wants springing from the social conditions in which people are placed and reared up. The English standard of life may be reduced to the Irish standard; the standard of life of a German peasant to that of a Livonian peasant. The important part which historical tradition and social habitude play in this respect, you may learn from Mr. Thornton’s work on over-population, where he shows that the average wages in different agricultural districts of England still nowadays differ more or less according to the more or less favourable circumstances under which the districts have emerged from the state of serfdom.
This historical or social element, entering into the value of labour, may be expanded, or contracted, or altogether extinguished, so that nothing remains but the physical limit. During the time of the anti-Jacobin war, undertaken, as the incorrigible tax-eater and sinecurist, old George Rose, used to say, to save the comforts of our holy religion from the inroads of the French infidels, the honest English farmers, so tenderly handled in a former chapter of ours, depressed the wages of the agricultural labourers even beneath that mere physical minimum, but made up by Poor Laws the remainder necessary for the physical perpetuation of the race. This was a glorious way to convert the wages labourer into a slave, and Shakespeare’s proud yeoman into a pauper.
By comparing the standard wages or values of labour in different countries, and by comparing them in different historical epochs of the same country, you will find that the value of labour itself is not a fixed but a variable magnitude, even supposing the values of all other commodities to remain constant.
A similar comparison would prove that not only the market rates of profit change, but its average rates.
But as to profits, there exists no law which determines their minimum. We cannot say what is the ultimate limit of their decrease. And why cannot we fix that limit? Because, although we can fix the minimum of wages, we cannot fix their maximum.
We can only say that, the limits of the working day being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to the physical minimum of wages; and that wages being given, the maximum of profit corresponds to such a prolongation of the working day as is compatible with the physical forces of the labourer. The maximum of profit is therefore limited by the physical minimum of wages and the physical maximum of the working day. It is evident that between the two limits of the maximum rate of profit an immense scale of variations is possible. The fixation of its actual degree is only settled by the continuous struggle between capital and labour, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum, and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction.
The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.”
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“This mangled presentation of “the dialectic” can be summarized this way: sooner or later the working class makes enough money to quit their jobs.”
Nope. See above comments.
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Yes. Again, I was not referring to what you said, but to what I thought you were implying about accelerationists.
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“Reidkane accuses accelerationism of saying If wages rise sufficiently, the working class (somehow) acquires the option to not work.”
I do? A citation to support this bizarre assertion would be nice.
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Yes. You are right. I misread you here. I thought you were speaking of Left accelerationists. But clearly I was wrong.
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“Who, in Marx’s argument, is employing the technology to accelerate its development?”
To accelerate *whats* development? Pronoun without an antecedent. You quoted me as saying, “technology is employed not to emancipate the worker from the need to work, but from the opportunity to do so”. The point is Marx’s:
“The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself. [116] The self-expansion of capital by means of machinery is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of livelihood have been destroyed by that machinery. The whole system of capitalist production is based on the fact that the workman sells his labour-power as a commodity. Division of labour specialises this labour-power, by reducing it to skill in handling a particular tool. So soon as the handling of this tool becomes the work of a machine, then, with the use-value, the exchange-value too, of the workman’s labour-power vanishes; the workman becomes unsaleable, like paper money thrown out of currency by legal enactment. That portion of the working-class, thus by machinery rendered superfluous, i.e., no longer immediately necessary for the self-expansion of capital, either goes to the wall in the unequal contest of the old handicrafts and manufactures with machinery, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and sinks the price of labour-power below its value.”
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Who, in Marx’s argument in the Communist Manifesto, is employing the technology to accelerate the development of the productive forces. There is no question that, apart from a successful proletarian revolution, capital itself develops the productive forces. And it is also true that this development accelerates with the development of capital. However, in the Communist Manifesto, in the relevant passage I cited, to which most accelerationists today trace their discussion, who is employing the technology? Capital or the proletarian association?
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Accelerationism, to me, seems to be a way of ending the productive forces as “destructive forces,” which delay its development. And this point has to coincide with the annulment of the private ownership of labor and thus the end of “universal competition” — the destruction of small capital by big; the centralisation of capital. Though, I’m wondering as to whether this acceleration continues the artificial, linear growth or, because it is now in the hands of the proletariat, it constitutes a return to “natural growth.”
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“Marx is talking about what takes place after a proletarian political revolution, while Reidkane appears to be talking about what takes place before it. This seems to be a recurrent error in the discussion of Accelerationism: it is entirely unclear who is in charge of the process.”
What I am talking about is the political tendency calling itself “(left) accelerationism”. This political tendency is not a form of revolutionary proletarian socialism, as it does not recognize the necessity of the political domination of the proletariat. Hence, for this tendency, the “who” that would be “in charge of the process” is not “the proletariat”.
The notion that both “socialism” and “barbarism” would necessarily end in communism is belied by Luxemburg’s actually elaboration of the alternative:
“A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales. In this war imperialism has won. Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery. The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes.”
For Luxemburg, witnessing WWI as the horrific culmination of, to quote the German Ideology, the “stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being, which, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces”, barbarism meant the end of civilization, the inglorious end of history. When “[s]ociety as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps”, the “common ruin of the contending classes” alluded to at the outset of the Manifesto could only mean the ruin of society as a whole. Not communism.
When one strips the dialectics from Marx, one loses recognition of the urgent task history poses for the proletariat to accomplish, on pain of consummating the “complete loss of man” proletarians embody in their desperate struggle with poverty and starvation. All that is left is a farcical determinism in which “first ‘fascism’, then us!” No.
What you misleadingly call the “fascist” state is not a way-station on the way to communism, but the mechanism by which humanity expends its freedom in hedonic self-annihilation. It represents an emergency situation created when the bourgeoisie can no longer, but the proletariat can not yet rule. If this situation is not resolved through the self-conscious political agency of the proletariat, it matters not that “the technical conditions that form the elements” of the solution of the class conflict are “concealed within it”.
You say, “And this is the point: Marxists deny neoliberalism is the political expression of a process that ends in communism. They don’t believe capitalism — of itself and with no other forces involved — directly results in communism.”
Right, because Marxists don’t believe there are “processes” that “directly result” in anything, when taken in abstraction from the involvement of real individuals of whose lives said processes are mere expressions. To treat such “processes” as real in and of themselves, regardless of the role said individuals play in constituting, and thus potentially transforming, said processes is to abstract away from concrete reality and to deal in an “abstract image of actual conditions”.
As Engels put it, “Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with, them. But, when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and, by means of them, to reach our own ends.”
“For Marxists, communism requires a period of proletarian rule and cannot be achieved without a period of proletarian rule, but this was never Marx’s argument and has no relation to Marx’s argument.”
You might want to tell Marx that! Or actually, better not. He wasn’t very kind to his political enemies.
“The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
“The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.
“They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.”
Or take this absolutely unambiguous statement: “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”
You say, “Nothing said the proletarians would reached this level of political consciousness and (frankly) everything pointed to it being an unlikely event.”
You have got to be kidding. This might be the dumbest thing ever written about Marx.
Marx says, explicitly and unambiguously, that the proletariat would be forced to reach this level of political consciousness, and that everything pointed toward it being an inevitability:
“The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.
This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.
Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
To support your ridiculous claims, you refer to the Wars, saying, “These proletarians did not act like proletarians at all, but like Americans, Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen.
This bizarre behavior of the class can’t be blamed on social democrats, or the labor aristocracy, or opportunism, or any other such nonsense; this was the behavior of the class itself. Social democrats and labor leaders and opportunism were simply political expressions of the class’s own consciousness, not its cause. The class suffers a serious “defect” that it does not see itself as a class. It exists split up and at odds with itself in an environment of universal hostility and competition.
As Marx and Engels explained: Labor can only exist on the basis of this fragmentation. Overcoming this actual and real fragmentation requires some definite level of a political consciousness.”
So “these proletarians did not act like proletarians”, but their behavior was that “of the class itself”? Proletarians didn’t act like proletarians because they were acting like proletarians? Idiocy.
It can’t be blamed on opportunism, but instead was the result of the class “not seeing itself as a class”? So it can’t be blamed on opportunism, but was the result of opportunism? IDIOCY.
Marx and Engels obviously do not argue labor “can only exist on the basis of fragmentation”. On the contrary, labor can only exist in the dialectic between the competition between workers and the organization of workers around common interests. It is through this dialectic that political consciousness is developed. Again, I’m not making this up, look at the above-cited passages from the Manifesto. If your pea-sized brain cannot handle the word “dialectic”, feel free to substitute a dumbed-down synonym like “interplay” or “back-and-forth”.
You say, “In any case, whether this consciousness was acquired is a matter of contingency, and is not directly given in the mode of production itself.” There are so many citations already in this comment sufficient to refute this abject stupidity that I’m not going to bother to reiterate them. But leaving aside the Manifesto, for which you seem to have nothing but contempt, take your beloved Socialism: Utopian and Scientific –
“Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.”
You say, “Like all contingencies it might happen or it might not happen, but Marx and Engels saw communism as a historical necessity not a contingency.” Yes, communism must be realized if history is to continue. If not, which is to say, if the proletariat fails to win political power, then human history will come to an end. Communism’s inevitability is immanent to a particular social organism, as a stage in it’s development. But if it fails to develop, it will die, like any organism. Human history is a part of natural history, and the necessities that pertain to the former are by no means coextensive with those of the latter, but special and contextual.
You say, “Thus, to put this in the simplest possible terms, as Marx and Engels discuss this idea, accelerationism requires that the proletariat has already become the ruling class of society. You cannot have an accelerationism that is premised on the existing state, the capitalist state. It is a strategy or project undertaken by the working class to put an end to class society in the shortest possible time.”
Fair enough, but this is not what people who call themselves “accelerationists” argue for, and Marx and Engels never called themselves “accelerationists”.
Accelerationism, according to all who use the term save yourself, is very much a politics that presupposes the capitalist state and ignores the rule of the proletariat as an article of nostalgia.
“This is NOT Accelerationism as Marx and Engels described it — this is the normal operation of the capitalist mode of production. This is what you get when the proletarian political revolution fails and we embark on the path of barbarism, of fascism.”
Marx and Engels did not describe accelerationism.
Of course this is the normal operation of the capitalist mode of production. But this operation does not begin with the failure of the proletarian political revolution, but with the faltering – the inadequacy – of the bourgeois revolution.
“Our attention is diverted from a discussion of how to achieve the swiftest possible end to class society, to the idea you can force the working class to take power by starving it. ”
The idea that *you* can force the working class…etc? Who? Who is the agent in this process? To whom am I recommending this course of action? No one, of course. As you said above, I’m merely describing “the normal operation of the capitalist mode of production”, as was Marx. The upshot of this observation is the political consequences it has for the working class, the particular exigencies bearing upon them due to the nature of the historical process in which they’re bound up.
“Marx made no such argument and it is just unforgivable that a Marxist would ever suggest he advocated driving down the wages of the working class to goad it into organizing itself!”
You are truly one of the stupidest people to ever associate with the name of Marx. You think Marx was in the business of recommending particular courses of action to the bourgeoisie in managing industry? You think he was telling them they should reduce the wages of workers for this or that reason? What the fuck is wrong with you? Marx was observing that the bourgeoisie as a class were bound by forces outside their control to reduce the wages of workers at every opportunity and as far as possible, and that these same forces created a situation in which the workers would have no choice but to organize to defend themselves. If you don’t understand this, you have absolutely no business writing about Marx.
“In Marx’s theory, it is capital and big industry that brings organization to the proletariat, not starvation.”
This statement is a brilliant emblem of your profound density. You say “capital and big industry” and not “starvation” is what leads the proletariat to organize – AS IF THESE WERE OPPOSED PHENOMENA! But of course, the proletariat is only starving – BECAUSE OF CAPITAL!
“Indeed, if the working class has to be in power to effect an accelerationist project, how could this be based on starvation?”
If the working class were independently pursuing a political project of any kind, of course it wouldn’t be based merely on “starvation”, as you insipidly suggest, but on the development of their organization as a class which would have had to far surpass the earliest stages of purely defensive and desperate character. READ THE FUCKING MANIFESTO.
“Somehow, we are supposed to believe Marx thought you could develop the productive forces as rapidly as possible by implementing the very measure that cause capitalism to collapse into crises? Really?”
No. I suppose your difficulties aren’t so much in your reading of Marx as in reading comprehension more generally. Embarrassing.
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To your first point: part of the problem here is that you are talking about a political tendency, while I am talking about the concept itself. It is true that there is a political tendency that calls itself “Left accelerationism”, but both this tendency and the Landian variety trace their origins to the discussion by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of speeding up the development of the productive forces. As you will note, I do not in any way defend “Left accelerationism”. My comments are wholly directed to the discussion by Marx and Engels’s concept of speeding up the development of the productive forces that is found in the Communist Manifesto.
To your second point: Yes, Luxemburg outlined a horrific scenario, but there is nothing in historical materialism to support this. In this regard it does not matter what Luxemburg believed, because we know she was drawing on Marx and Engels and we know what they believed: Society was moving toward a fork in the road where it would have to choose between what Luxemburg called socialism or barbarism. Engels himself made much the same argument, with the exception that he did not see the endpoint as the ruin of society as a whole — although a lot of ruin did actually occur, we survived it. Instead, he argued that the state would be forced to take control of the national capital. In his argument, this event did not imply the end of civilization, but would mark an advance in the mode of production preliminary to society taking control of the productive forces. I am not sure how Marxists reconcile Engels’ prediction of an economic advance, with their prediction of the end of civilization.
To your third point: Again, there is nothing in the empirical evidence to support the claim “humanity expends its freedom in hedonic self-annihilation”. We have lived through fascism as Engels predicted it and now we are witness the fascist state toppling over in real time — as he also predicted.
To your fourth point: I would point out that a blind natural process — evolution, or, at a more fundamental level, the big bang — actually led to us holding this exchange. Just because a natural process is blind, does not in any way mean it cannot produce rather interesting results. The self-contradictory character of the capitalist mode of production ultimately leads to it abolition. It halts and must halt at the point where labor no longer produces any value. Yes. There a many quotes supporting your view, however none of them managed to find their way in Capital. There capital collapses without any mention of a revolutionary subject. Of course, I don’t have to go back that far, I can simply point out my window and ask you to show me this class struggle that will bring an end to capitalism.
To your fifth point: it really is a low probabilty outcome: “Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time.”
To your six point: The proletariat did not act as a class because, as a class, they do not see themselves as a class. I am not sure what of this is difficult to understand.
To your seventh point: The proletariat not seeing itself as a class has nothing at all to do with opportunism. The class does not see itself as a class because any class only sees itself as a class when it is in conflict with another class. This is something Marx and Engels argued makes the proletariat unique: it is a product of bourgeois society and has no interest as a class to assert against the ruling class. (German Ideology)
To your eight point: Using my pea-sized brain, I went back to that rather extensive passage you quoted, where Marx and Engels state: “Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers.” Moreover this statement is found in the German ideology as well.
To your ninth point: Again political (class) consciousness this is a contingent development. None of the classical Marxists believed the proletariat was capable of spontaneously developing a political (class) consciousness because it was not a class.
To your tenth point: Again, there is no evidence that civilization will die simply because labor no longer produces value and thus the production of surplus value ceases.
To your eleventh point: Yes. I do not defend anyone’s take on this subject but Marx and Engels — and they never called themselves anything but communists.
To your twelfth point: Yes. And accelerationists did not call themselves accelerationsists until Ben Noys hung the label on them. So the term did not exist until now.
To your thirteenth point: Yes. This is my objection to your using the term “advocate” in relation to this subject. It is somewhat prone to misinterpretation. The fact that you are so offended by it shows what effect it has.
To your fourteenth point: We have already agreed earlier (at least I agreed with you) that wages can rise. And Marxists have long held that rising wages is not incompatible with Marx’s theory. It follows from this that it is bourgeois industry, not starvation, that organizes the proletariat.
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In the first volume of Capital Marx will say,
It will be remembered that the rate of surplus-value depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour-power. Political economy lays such great stress on this point that it occasionally identifies the acceleration of accumulation which results from an increase in the productivity of labour with the acceleration which arises from an increase in the exploitation of the worker.1
Marx’s accelerationism is the acceleration of accumulated capital:
The continual re-conversion of surplus-value into capital now appears in the shape of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters into the production process. This is in turn the basis of an extended scale of production, of the methods for raising the productivity of labour that accompany it, and of an accelerated production of surplus-value. If, therefore, a certain degree of accumulation of capital appears as a pre-condition for the specifically capitalist mode of production, the latter reacts back to cause an accelerated accumulation of capital.2
Marx also points out how the centralization of capital in the new stock companies accelerates the effects of accumulation:
Centralization, however, accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye, by means of joint-stock companies. And while in this way centralization intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously extends and speeds up those revolutions in the technical composition of capital which raise its constant portion at the expense of its variable portion, thus diminishing the relative demand for labour.3
In most ways acceleration is a time-variable marker for Marx that quantifies both accumulation and composition of capital itself:
It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of the total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of workers, or even, on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already performing their functions. This increasing accumulation and centralization also becomes in its turn a source of new changes in the composition of capital, or in other words of an accelerated diminution of the capital’s variable component, as compared with its constant one. This accelerated relative diminution of the variable component, which accompanies the accelerated increase of the total capital and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase in the working population, an increase which always moves more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of employment.4
1. Marx, Karl (2004-02-05). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: A Critique of Political Economy v. 1 (Classics) (Kindle Locations 10735-10738). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
2. Marx, Karl (2004-02-05). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: A Critique of Political Economy v. 1 (Classics) (Kindle Locations 11109-11113). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
3. Marx, Karl (2004-02-05). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: A Critique of Political Economy v. 1 (Classics) (Kindle Locations 11175-11178). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
4. Marx, Karl (2004-02-05). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: A Critique of Political Economy v. 1 (Classics) (Kindle Locations 11205-11212). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
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“Marx’s accelerationism is the acceleration of accumulated capital”
So, does this mean Nick Land is a Marxist?
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Now that’s funny… 🙂 I was being facetious (ironic) when I said that… obviously Marx was using the terms in critical fashion to appraise the way one sees the various cycles and flows of capital accumulation through time… Land is a Techno-Capitalist – whatever that ultimately means to Land… If one reads through his current mélange of cryptic inference one sees a thousand-and-one variations on the counter-enlightenment thematic which stems from Moldbug’s Cameralism to Economics. Let’s face it Land is out of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deluze… don’t thing one could put anything but virulent nihilist to what Land is… Annihilationist would be the closest term one could use.
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Obviously Marx’s accelerationism is a critique of the “accelerated production of surplus-value” in capitalism, so Marx was not an accelerationist of either the Left or Right… he was just seeing what the Capitalists were up too. The capitalists are the accelerationists, not Marx. 🙂
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As for Landian accelerationism: his is an almost agreement with Deleuze/Guattari’s utopianism:
“A little additional effort is enough to overturn everything, and to lead us finally toward other far-off places. The schizoanalytic flick of the finger, which restarts the movement, links up again the tendency, and pushes the simulacra to a point where they cease being artificial images to become indices of a new world. That is what the completion of the process is: not a promised and a pre-existing land, but a world created in the process of its tendency, its coming undone, its deterritorialization. The movement of the theatre of cruelty; for it is only a theatre of production, there where the flows cross the threshold of deterritorialization and produce the new land – not at all a hope, but a simple “finding,” a “finished design,” where the person who escapes causes other escapes, and marks out the land while deterritorializing himself. An active point of escape where the revolutionary machine, the artistic machine, the scientific machine, and the (schizo) analytic machine become parts and pieces of one another.” (p. 322 Anti-Oedipus)
Land just brings in the notions of advanced AI and Machinic Phylum posthumanist disconnectionism etc. Land is a techno-commercialist moving beyond the human into the inhuman core of capitalists trajectory.
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If you’ve read enough of Land I think you’ll notice he would keep the State, get rid of the pretense of democracy, install a (non-fascist) corporatism based on Camerlism (a Corporate CEO, CFO, CTO, etc. structure) give out stocks, break down the final barriers between politics and economics: install economics and oust politics for a corporate takeover of the State run by Capitalist efficiency in an almost Spenserism of social competition controlled only by the state interventionism of the operative market.
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One last thought: In Land’s system instead of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” one would have a dictatorship of the stock holders. Profit alone would guide who is in power within the State Corporation, etc. If a CEO etc. is not efficiently competing against other cameralist states he will be replaced… etc. The principle of competition is the only guiding principle in Cameralism.
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One final thought:
Obviously Marx was not an accelerationist, but rather provided a critique of capitalist accelerationist policies and enactments: acceleration of accumulation, acceleration of the production of surplus-value, the centralization that intensifies and accelerates the effects of accumulation, etc. He would see this in the light of the industrial struggle of nations on the world market, involving an accelerated development of capital which cannot be attained in the so-called natural way but only by compulsion. (see below) This sense of an unnatural compulsion as driving the accelerated development of capitalism is at the core inhuman accelerationism. This is Marx’s critique of accelerationism: that it is driven by an unconscious compulsion or drive toward greater and greater acceleration of accumulation which is both artificial and inhuman.
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So you deny Marx and Engels proposed the proletariat take power, progressively expropriate capital, centralize the manage of this capital, to speed development of the productive forces? (I just want to know if this is how you read his program in the Manifesto, not what it might be labeled by Ben Noys or Nick Land.)
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No, that’s something else. I only stated the critique of capital acceleration, I did not deny what Marx proposed, which is this:
As soon as this metamorphosis has sufficiently decomposed the old society throughout its depth and breadth, as soon as the workers have been turned into proletarians, and their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, the further socialization of labour and the further transformation of the soil and other means of production into socially exploited and therefore communal means of production takes on a new form. What is now to be expropriated is not the self-employed worker, but the capitalist who exploits a large number of workers. This expropriation is accomplished through the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production itself, through the centralization of capitals. One capitalist always strikes down many others. 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 economizing 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.
Marx, Karl (2004-02-05). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: A Critique of Political Economy v. 1 (Classics) (Kindle Locations 13273-13288). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
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So Marx actually proposes as you suggest:
“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.”
But he also as you see above suggests that at this moment of expropriation private property disappears and the expropriators are expropriated. So it is no longer based on capital accumulation which is based on private property and the surplus-value of labor, etc. It becomes communistic production based on other forms than capital.
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In other words it is monopoly capitalism itself that is a fetter upon the core truth of capitalism as a mode of production, not the mode of production itself. So that under communism the centralization of this mode of production and the socialization of labor without the monopolistic oligarchy and oligopolistic fetters that bind it together in a protective integument of legalism and power would be ripped out, torn asunder and reappropriated by the proletariat which would abolish both private property, capitalist monopolies, and the very actual class of the proletariat itself forming the bases of a classless society.
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Interesting. I need to think this through. Thanks!
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tl/dr: The demands of individual workers for a better life as individual workers, thus expressed in their growing electoral significance, *is* the dictatorship of the proletariat. The counterforce of trying to restore surplus value combines with worker demands to drive the development and centralization of capital which, ironically, pushes ever farther away a sustainably improved life for workers. There is a limit to how far this can go, of course (ca. 2008?). Meanwhile, without any vanguard or organizing, the developing global self-consciousness of workers of themselves, of production, and of material potential grows and grows: the natural process by which communist consciousness forms.
tl:
Obviously the formation of communist consciousness neither precedes or follows the commencement of communism. It directly comprises it.
In the case of the U.S., I tentatively see it that:
In the 19th century, electoral politics revolved mainly around disputes as to how capital was to develop. In the late 19th century there is a kind of populist politics and event that seems to have been largely about reconciling the presence of large (and growing) capitals with small capitals.
Quasi-laissez-faire with clientelism takes its last breath, we can see in retrospect, with FDR. One of its dying acts, an acknowledgement that the proletariat was an increasingly powerful political force, was the state take-over of the labor movement (in the guise of labor union legalization and protection).
From that point forward the state is certainly run by big capitals, but in the now thorougly industrialized society with widespread franchise, voters are increasingly driven by concerns regarding quality of life for workers. Whatever the capital class accomplishes through its sway over the state, an increasingly significant constraint is these worker-focused concerns of the voters.
I think this *is* the rising dictatorship of the proletariat.
People don’t often call mid-20th century onward the d.o.p. because (I think) they imagine a proletariat enlightenment, in which proto-communist consciousness arises, and then the proletariat start making plans to wrest control of the state from the bourgeoisie. But that common conception makes no sense in historical materialism, from Marx through Foucault.
The workers, blindly, mainly by demanding better quality of life for workers, push the state to favor big corporate forms, empire, and eventually the expansion of financial capital.
At no point after world war II, through today, has the U.S. government taken any action that did not seem, to probably a large majority of the prols, like something that would tend to make prol lives better. As a result (plenty of details to fill in here, now), capital is concentrated and the t.f.r.p.f. moves along at a good clip as an unintended consequence.
Communist consciousness *is* developing in the form of shared awarenesses of what quality of life should be possible for all, and where the limits lie. The proletariat knows more about its (global) self and the state of (global) production today than at any point in history. It’s self-consciousness as a global class is almost unfathomably better than it was in 1800, 1900, or even 2000.
Meanwhile, the personified bourgeoisie, for all their swagger and lawlessness, are vastly more constrained by the state (and all states) today than in earlier centuries. At the level of the board room there is very little freedom of motion. Their superfluity arises at increasingly constrained mutual inter-dependencies, checks-and-balances, and obligations, all of which are necessary to preserve the economic status of the personified bourgies in the context of the increasingly powerful state. (Look, for example, at the recent-decades history of Hewlett-Packard. Once it was one of the late examples of a big capital hands-on controlled by a handful of individual founder/owners. By today the company is mostly driven by making executive decisions from a very limited menu of options developed more or less mechanically by executive staffers. It is like this all over. The genius capitalist is dead. The corporations are almost deterministic with very few big choices and even then very few options.)
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What Land does as reader of Marx is to affirm Marx’s critique, update it with his knowledge of Freud/Bataille/Deleuze and push it’s agenda into the techno-capitalist future in which it is the movement of a sort of Lovecraftian technophilic AI that is retroactively causing this compulsion or driveness toward a capitalist singularity beyond which no human will remain the same… a brave new world (or dystopia?). One can gather this from his essays in Fange Noumena… etc.
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See, this is the thing: as you will notice I make no reference to what Land believes in this essay. Nor do I even care what Left accelerationists say about it. The only thing I do in the essay is show how Marx and Engels discussed it in the Manifesto and their reasoning behind it. If speeding up the development of the productive forces is accelerationism, as Ben Noys seems to think, the Manifesto lays out Marx and Engels’ accelerationist agenda.
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Marx further stresses in Capital Volume 2 that there exists a nexus between the trade cycle and the turnover cycle of fixed capital which is distinct from the usually mentioned one of determination grosso modo of the length of the former by that of the latter. Fixed capital expenditure is discontinuous in a double sense. Machines are replaced not piecemeal but in toto, say once every seven or ten years. Their replacement tends to occur at the same time in numerous, inter-connected key branches of industry, precisely because the process is not only, or even essentially, a function of physical wear and tear, but rather a response to financial incentives to introduce more advanced technology. These incentives coincide only at a certain point in the trade cycle; but when this occurs, there follows a massive investment in the renewal of fixed capital. This in turn sets up a dynamic of accelerated capital accumulation and economic growth, together with rapid expansion of markets, which leads finally to an increase in the organic composition of capital, a declining trend of the rate of profit and a tendency to slow down investment and renewal of fixed capital., etc.
In Volume 3 Marx will speak of credit acceleration which brings both crisis as well as a dissolution of old modes of production as new modes are introduced, etc.:
The credit system hence accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market, which it is the historical task of the capitalist mode of production to bring to a certain level of development, as material foundations for the new form of production. At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production.
Marx, Karl (1992-08-27). Capital: Critique of Political Economy v. 3 (Penguin Classics) (p. 574). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
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And, finally, in Capital v.3:
But it is also the characteristic feature of the self-interested merchants and manufacturers of that time, and belongs to the period of capitalist development that they represent, that the transformation of feudal agricultural societies into industrial societies, and the resulting industrial struggle of nations on the world market, involves an accelerated development of capital which cannot be attained in the so-called natural way but only by compulsion. It makes a substantial difference whether the national capital is transformed into industrial capital gradually and slowly, or whether this transformation is accelerated in time by the taxes they impose via protective duties, principally on the landowners, small and middle peasants and artisans, by the accelerated expropriation of independent direct producers, by the forcibly accelerated accumulation and concentration of capital, in short, by the accelerated production of the conditions of the capitalist mode of production. It also makes an enormous difference in the capitalist and industrial exploitation of the nation’s natural productive power.
Marx, Karl (1992-08-27). Capital: Critique of Political Economy v. 3 (Penguin Classics) (pp. 920-921). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
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Jehu try this reading:
The proletariat “constitutes itself as the ruling class”. I claim: this means that the proletariat assumes the position of and mimics the bourgeoisie. In other words, the extensional character of the ruling class — its transactions with the rest of society — is not interrupted by proletariat take-over. Only its intentionality is changed, meaning that if you “crack open” the ruling class that has continued uninterrupted, you see it is now just a shell operated by the proletariat who have configured themselves — constituted themselves — to “enact” the established role of the bourgeoisie.
Demoratic states would dissolve the literally personified bourgeois class, but initially retain those roles, effectively enacting them through the democratic exorcise of the prols.
The dicktatorship of the proletariat is a period of self-opppression through the mechanism of the state.
There is no implied consciousness (or vanguard consciousness) for the prols in those conditions.
Individual prols — second part of “try this reading” — is for prols to seek to “increase the value of their labor and thereby decrease work”.
The individualistic ideal of the prol who is still consciously in a capitalist ideology is to have lots of money, and lots of free time. To dabble in earning tons more. To do a little work and get another 3 month vacation. To — paradoxically — increase the value of their labor.
Everone wants their hour of work to be paid for with 100 hours of other people’s work.
So towards that paradoxical and unachievable outcome, the prols will exercise democratic processes that, one way or another, force the state to try to make everyone happy by the expediency of increasingly centralizing the increasingly hard-to-grow mass of productive capital.
The state flails trying to capture the surplus value in order to enact some mirical policy that will mean everyone has wages well above the median. The flailing takes the form of centralizing and trying to manage the national capital.
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Audio: https://youtu.be/tEFwpAyEx28
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