Zizek is famously quoted as saying, “it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.” I have been reading a lot of writers who are trying to prove Zizek wrong by imagining a society that might be loosely categorized as post-capitalism — a term I personally detest.
Despite my aversion to that term, I want to make several observations that might be considered odd for folks interested in the subject of post-capitalism:
1. The problem with most thinking about communist society, oddly enough, is that this thinking is almost always set in opposition to capitalism.
Here is the problem with assuming communism is irreconcilably antagonistic to capitalism: Unique among all existing classes of bourgeois society, the working class is a product of the capitalist mode of production and its fate is tied to this mode of production. The material conditions of existence of the working class as a class necessarily requires the sale of our labor power to capital. Since we are all products of a mode of production founded on the sale of labor power, imagining its end amounts to imagining we can no longer sell our labor power.
Just for a minute, imagine a world where you cannot sell your labor power, because there is no buyer for it at any wage.
The sale of labor power is determined by production for profit, by accumulation of capital — a power standing over against you. No capitalist will ever buy your labor power unless by doing so he can make a profit. Thus, the conditions most advantageous for the sale of your labor power are precisely those conditions that are most profitable to capital. This is an unavoidable paradox or contradiction that forms the core material premise of the working class as a class.
All discussion of a society beyond capitalism thus runs into the problem that by setting itself in opposition to capital the premise of the discussion, the abolition of wage labor, is essentially unimaginable to anyone who survives by selling their labor power.
2. “Capitalist realism” has always been the unspoken premise of communism
Ed Rooksby makes an interesting criticism of Mark Fisher on the subject of a post-capitalist society that the latter makes “unconvincing, sweeping claims about the novelty and distinctness of what Fisher terms ‘capitalist realism’”. I find this argument valid.
There has always been a sort of “capitalist realism” — an unspoken assumption in communist thought that capitalism must complete its historical mission before communism is possible. What made Bernstein so distasteful to revolutionaries was his insistence capitalism would peacefully evolve into socialism. Marx obliquely argues against waiting for capitalism to evolve into socialism in the 1870s when he argues for a period of proletarian dictatorship: “Mr Bakunin concludes from this that it is better to do nothing at all just wait for the day of general liquidation — the last judgement.”
Folks like Bernstein and Bakunin, each for their owns reasons, were essentially counseling the working class to do nothing and wait for “the last judgement” — for capitalism to complete its historical mission. In this sense a sort of “capitalist realism”, as Fisher calls it, (the idea there was no alternative but to await capitalism fulfilling its historical mission), has always been around.
For the most part, this unspoken heresy has been suppressed in revolutionary communist writings and replaced with a sort of political voluntarism. And there have been repeated attempts to expunge it from Marxism dating at least from the late 19th century, when some Russian communists proposed capitalism might be bypassed in Russia. In the run up to the Great War, the critics of revisionism argued capitalism should be overthrown by the proletariat. Waiting for capitalism to “peacefully evolve” into communism was politically indefensible, since it ignored the costs of this strategy in terms of human life.
3. Reform or revolution is a false dichotomy
The objection to this observation might be that the social democrat approach, which accepts the premises of capitalism and wage labor, has in practice led directly to neoliberalism. This objection, however, overlooks the fact that the revolutionary (Leninist) has led to neoliberalism as well. Those who say they want a society founded on communist principles have been unable to realize this goal either by waiting patiently for capitalism’s own peaceful development, (which, by the way, is absurd since capitalism has never been peaceful), or by trying to force the issue by revolutionary measures.
Far from the dichotomy between reform and revolution having any relevance here, it would seem we can’t get to communism either by opposing capitalism by revolutionary measures or by peacefully waiting it out. The alleged polar distinction between reform and revolution has turned out to be an illusion.
4. Imagining the end of the world is not just easier than imagining the end of capitalism, it is essentially the same thing as imagining the future of capitalism.
The fact that we cannot imagine a future beyond capitalism really means something far more important than might be at first realized: Since our world exists solely within the boundaries of the capitalist mode of production, a future beyond capitalism can never be anything more than a capitalist future without its present contradictions. To turn Zizek on his head, since we are the product of capitalist society and cannot help but think entirely within the boundaries of this mode of production, and since imagining a world beyond these boundaries is for all practical purposes like trying to imagine a world where we cannot, under any circumstances sell our labor power, the end of capitalism is effectively the same thing as the end of the world for us.
At the same time, if we cannot imagine a world beyond capitalism, this is only because, as products of capitalist society, we no longer think capitalism has a future. The only future we capable of imagining is a capitalism without all of the contradictions and irrationalities that beset present capitalism. What Zizek diagnoses as an incapacity to imagine a future beyond this mode of production is actually an incapacity to imagine a future for this mode of production. For us, the collective product of the capitalist mode of production, it is far easier to imagine the end of our (capitalist) world than it is to imagine some way will be found to resolve its contradictions.
5. The future beyond capitalism, or, the future of labor beyond capitalism?
Still, I would argue, however, that ultimately Rooksby is wrong. What Fisher is pointing to is not “capitalist realism” in the sense folks like Bernstein might use that term to argue the proletariat must wait for capital to finished its historical development; rather, the question raised by Fisher is the historical mission itself. Now that capitalism has raised the productiveness of labor to a level that could not even be imagined in Marx’s time, how will its resolve the inherent contradictions arising from actually accomplishing its historical mission.
6. To be clear: when most communists talk of a future society beyond capitalism, they are really speculating on the future of labor beyond wage labor.
Are we not laborers? Do we not have to exchange our labor power for means of life? To whom will we sell this labor power if not capital? We were supposed to sell our labor power to the state, according to the most popular post-capitalist scenarios in the 20th century. The state would then put this labor power to work according to scientifically and ecologically rational principles.
But those scenarios turned out to be bullshit; first in the US, then decisively in the SU. Capital has almost entirely eliminated the need for labor, yet as wage laborers we must sell our labor to survive. But if there is no future for labor beyond wage labor, how can there be any future at all?
With the end of wage labor, effectively the world itself ends for us.
The Real Movement 
maybe
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So does it end with a bang or whimper? Hyperinflation or hyperdeflation?
To move away from a LTV approach, Joseph Tainter proposed a theory of how/why civilizations collapse, namely that the level of complexity can no longer be maintained, the law of diminishing marginal returns on complexity and the collapse is a reduction in complexity to a level that matches the income available. By complexity he would also mean capital.In many ways, his theory is very similar to Marx’s Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
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Life is a many to many organized phenomenon. Capital is one to one, with cheats. Capital’s inability to handle complexity is pretty much built into its DNA.
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The only labor that doesn’t make me twitch, is labor against or in harmony with Nature. And I won’t pass judgment on either path or on switching sides, since there’s a certain honesty in both.
Everything else is passing the buck to and reaping benefits off someone else’s back, by force. If you’re going to steal to survive, fine, do what’s necessary, but don’t pass your misfortune along.
What I find most disturbing about capitalism, specifically the perversion of C-M-C+ into M-C-M+, is the fact that people can’t imagine any other form of gain or category of profit other than surplus M.
A virtual valuation of gaining more than we put in, as a guide, is fine. Capital stagnates because we expect profit to be of the same form as what went in. As if evolving human needs don’t exist.
Capitalism is literally an economic form of anti-humanist, anti-realism.
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What’s interesting is that Marx saw this in the Grundrisse as the End of History, or as he termed it the capitalist were seeking to eliminate space and time:
Once the “limits of human capability” had been reached the Factory model gave way to complete automation and machine based systems which were capable of what their human components were not. (Sohn-Rethel, p. 174) Marx himself had already spoken of this. Thus, for example, Marx writes in the Grundrisse:
“In as much as the circuits which capital travels in order to go from one of [its] forms into the other constitute sections of circulation, and these sections are travelled in specific amounts of time (even spatial distance reduces itself to time; the important thing e.g. is not the market’s distance in space but the speed – the amount of time – by which it can be reached), by that much the velocity of circulation, the time in which it is accomplished, is a determinant of… how often capital can be realized in a given time.” (2005: p. 538)
Marx develops these ideas on the next page in a famous passage which has come to represent more generally the inherently accelerating and globalizing tendencies of capitalism:
“Thus whilst capital must on the one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and to conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another.” (2005: p. 539)
As you suggest capitalism’s project has been total elimination of the human through its gradual replacement, which has brought us in our time to the capability of total automation by way of machines. The Capitalist is preparing the way for the elimination of the human worker, whether blue collar, white collar or knowledge worker…
My question is: What does that say about real Capitalism?
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Addendum: We also remember that Taylorism was a supplement to this for of capitalism. Taylor says: ‘What the writer wishes particularly to emphasize is that this whole system rests upon the accurate and scientific study of unit times which is by far the most important element in scientific management.’ (Shop Management.)
The time-unit became the cornerstone of both assembly or monopoly capitalism and post-Fordism.
In other words the elimination of spacetime through automation was central to later 19th Century capitalism which led to our current information economy as just that: the ultra elimination of the spacetime continuum by a total system of capital: financialization. Which as we’ve seen does not need labor anymore. One reason the banks no longer invest in R&D or other measures of old school innovation… most of the money = time = information: or actually information = time = money is now the object of what we’ve termed casino capitalism, etc. with its use of weak AI of fast trades to eliminate further the time barrier down to the milliseconds, etc.
Capitalism as supposed neoliberalsm, as political control is done… most of the problems for us are over in the since, it no longer needs us. The elite rich are eliminating the old boundaries between Third world and First world, flattening the world as one giant prison for the elimination of the human animal. A sort of total debt / austerity system across the globe till they can install the machines in every aspect and niche of the system of total global capital. At that point we’ll be eliminated altogether for a small subset.
At least this is the logic and madness of this scenario…
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Which raises the question of whether the prison program can succeed, or whether its possibility is illusion. And is this merely a question of the quality of the effort that goes into it? Or is there some determinate beyond human choice?
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