A Kinder, Gentler, More "Revolution-friendly" Regime of Accumulation?

“The object of our efforts is not “inequality” or “the one percent”, but the social totality and the revival of its animating dynamic on a new, more humane basis.” Walker, "Redistribution is not enough" (italics mine)

“Walker's program, though, is precisely to try and shape those new conditions of accumulation, which does require an active politics that seeks to mobilize rather than interiorize the critique of capital. If I recall correctly, when Walker first proposed that the pressing question was not the overcoming of capitalism, but re-establishing it on a more "humane" basis it was on two grounds: 1) it is unclear that the dissolution of capital under current objective and subjective conditions would lead to a more humane society and not our worst dystopian nightmare 2) that capitalism always tends towards crisis and that when "humane capitalism" did reach its crisis point, conditions would be more amenable for a positive overcoming.” AB, comments on the above.

“I think we can all agree (please correct me if I'm wrong) that popular subjectivity is generated by social conditions, and that present-day social conditions make socialism wildly implausible to the overwhelming majority of the world's population.
On that assumption, a Marxian strategy would aim at achieving social conditions that made the overcoming of capital seem a compelling answer to the insoluble problems posed by modern society.” Walker, additional comments on the above.

The above three quotes provide a succinct presentation of what seems like the predominant perspective on this blog. The goal, “try and shape those new conditions of accumulation” on a more "humane" basis” which also creates “social conditions that made(sic) the overcoming of capital seem a compelling answer to the insoluble problems posed by modern society”, has some very loaded presuppositions which I hope to bring out and unpack.

• The crisis that began in the 1970's can be encapsulated in the concept of Neo-Liberalism as a kind of “regime of accumulation” or maybe better a “regime of the crisis of accumulation previously known as Fordism”.
• Neo-Liberalism is on its last legs and a new regime of accumulation will automatically come into being, and it will either be more or less humane.

The crisis of valorization that crystallized in the 1970's has not ended. For a new period of valorization to begin we would need to see the destruction of even more capital, including human capital, and a degree of immiseration that would enable new capital, with a higher organic composition and new labor processes, to be implemented on a global scale. There are several strong indicators (and that is all I am referring to these as) that a new cycle of accumulation has not begun. 


A new cycle of accumulation generally involves a dramatic shift in the core labor processes which are at the heart of a new period of accumulation. A new cycle of accumulation has also tended to involve a transformation of the sources and organization of energy, such as those which took place in the late 19^th century and again in the mid-20^th century. Dramatic changes in the modes of transportation and communication are also typical. Each period has also been marked by the establishment of a new hegemonic power, which is not only politically hegemonic, but establishes its monetary hegemony. One would also expect to see a general global rise in the rate of profit, at least for those new industries at its heart. The shifts we have seen in the last 40 years have largely involved intensification made possible by computerization and the direct application of scientific knowledge to existing production processes. The potential transformation of energy production and organization has not taken place, though the technology certainly exists. While dramatic changes in communication have taken place, the same cannot be said for transportation. Despite the loss of hegemony by the United States, there is no entity stepping into its place, either militarily or in terms of currency, though at least one obvious contender is on the horizon: China. Finally, while the rate of profit has improved in some places, as has productivity, it is not because of new economic sectors so much as the aforementioned rationalization of the labor/valorization processes inherited from the mid-20^th century.

What is particularly interesting is that the hi-tech (computers, machine tool, etc.) and big science sectors (pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, chemical, etc.) also employ fairly small numbers of people overall. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics or STEM, according to the BLS, accounts for 6% of U.S. Employment as of May 2009 (http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/05/art1full.pdf). By comparison, the 10 largest occupations in the U.S. accounting for over 20% of employment were, in order, retail salespersons, cashiers, office clerks, combined food prep and serving workers, registered nurses, customer service reps, custodial workers, laborers and freight stock handlers, administrative assistants. All of these occupations except R.N.s averaged between the minimum wage and $16/hr, with an average closer to $12/hr overall. (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf) In the EU, what they refer to as High-Tech manufacturing employed 1.1% of the total workforce and High-Tech knowledge-intensive services employed 2.6% of the total workforce in 2009. (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/High-tech_statistics )

Not surprisingly, China is pushing in the opposite direction, as it has become the second largest spender on R&D and their share of high-tech exports grew from 6% in 1995 to 22% in 2010, while the U.S. dropped from 22% in 1998 to 15% in 2010 (China passed Japan, the other major player in R&D, several years ago.) (http://www.manufacturing.net/news/2012/01/report-us-lost-28-of-high-tech-manufacturing-jobs) Several key points about China need to be kept in mind, however: China remains heavily export-dependent, especially to a U.S. which is at record debt levels both institutionally and at the household level; China will not be able to develop an adequate internal market unless it can resolve the agricultural question, as just over 50% of the population remains rural (and urbanization does not automatically entail gainful wage-labor, as is evident in Africa, Latin America, and the rest of Asia); Chinese wages are growing rapidly, which is beginning to push some industry to other parts of Asia and Africa; China currently faces serious bank insolvency issues.

Instead of the required and historically rather abrupt destruction of capital there has been the extended avoidance of any kind of rapid, uncontrolled de-valorization, which is to say, an attempt to de-valorize constant and variable capital slowly and with only local and regional collapses, but nowhere a global collapse, and largely outside of the most important economies. Technology which has enabled the further reduction of the need for living labor, most notably computerization of production, distribution, and circulation, has gone hand in hand with a financialization of the economy and the massive expansion of credit instruments, and therefore debt. Capitalism has stayed afloat on the basis of borrowing to expand, of titles to money proliferating, all on the promise that valorization will resume at a scale that will allow all of this debt to be paid off. Suffice to say that the resumption of valorization on a new basis and on an adequate scale has not taken place.

This is a longer way of saying that there is nothing automatic about the resolution of a crisis because capital's crisis is always a social crisis, not merely an economic one. It entails uprooting and destroying not just physical capital, but patterns and relations that have crystallized over decades.

This presents a problem for the perspective I noted above because if we have not hit the bottom, if we have not already entered a new cycle of accumulation, and if a new cycle of accumulation is not automatic and revolution is foreclosed, then it is a perspective that has to help capital clear the way. This is actually not a new perspective. The unions and community organizations recognized this problem in the 1970's and 80's. If it was something that was only accepted somewhat begrudgingly by these organizations, they soon accepted that their new role was no longer to defend the guaranteed gradual improvement in the standard of living of their membership or community, while insuring continuously increasing profits for capital. Their new role, especially in the 1980's, became to manage and mitigate struggles against the streamlining of capital through reductions in the workforce, slowing of wage growth (even to the point of it becoming negative), and placing more of the burden of benefits on the workforce. The unions played a partnership role in the design and management of layoffs, wage and benefit reductions, and work restructuring. If from WWII forward, the labor-management productivity agreement rested on the unions enforcing productivity gains and a relatively quiescent labor force in exchange for regular increases in wages and benefits, here the goal was merely to manage the restructuring of the capital-labor relation humanely and with as little unrest as possible. As the unions and community organizations frequently argued, “You can't bite the hand that feeds you.”

The problem that became evident in the 1960's and early 1970's however was that the unions could not necessarily make good on their part of the bargain, the part ensuring that social struggle remained within certain prescribed boundaries. Wildcats erupted in industry after industry and the unions were as often the targets as the companies. “Riots” shook one city after another. Not infrequently, the strikes were against white, male domination of the unions which had themselves long been involved (with some exceptions) in enforcing race and gender ceilings in the workplace, in whole industries, and in the unions themselves. In order to earn its stamp of reliability the CIO had undermined its own Southern labor drive after WWII by working with the KKK to break the integrated CP-led unions in the South (see Michael Goldfield's book The Color of Politics). The AFL, having been key in writing the anti-Chinese immigration legislation of the 1890's and having long been known for segregated and gender-exclusive unions and labor-management cooperation, didn't really need to prove anything on this score at least.

What the unions failed to prove was that the control they had was sufficient and that the unions hadn't, despite their relative compliance, become an absolute barrier to the devalorization capital required. Jimmy Carter and the mining companies fired the opening salvo in 1978 by trying to break the national miners' strike with scabs and direct federal involvement, but only with Reagan's breaking of the air traffic controllers, even at the expense of air travel safety, was the orientation towards breaking the unions made clear. The story since has been one of a retreat that has mostly looked like a rout.

The community organizations which sprang out of the 1950's and 60's were a different matter. Central to organizations which could not generally rely on funds from their own membership to run things like community centers and neighborhood improvement programs, many of them became de facto agencies of the state. Community organizations frequently play a role similar to that of NGOs in that they are literally non-governmental organizations, but they depend on good relations with the state and also with the source of their funding. Frequently they also provide services to the community without however being accountable to the community outside of community participation.

• A new, more humane regime can rebuild the working class as potential political subject.

The underlying assumption is that a healthy capitalism will recreate the conditions that will lead to the kind of politics we associated with unions, community organizations, and working class political parties. What if this underlying assumption is simply in error, tied to the assumption that a healthy capitalism will always produce a class identity that can produce its own organizations within capitalist society? There is no guarantee that a new epoch of accumulation would necessarily entail a return to the kind of working class that exists now only in the images of the 1930's-70's. To think this is likely is to confuse the relationship of labor to capital with the actual organization of labor which is transformed with changes to the labor process globally. Changes in the labor process have always led to changes in the forms of appearance of labor, its organizations, the specific kinds of struggles that have taken place.

It should be enough to look closely at the specific kinds of organizations which arose in different periods to realize that even for organizations that are nominally the same such as unions, the craft unions which predominated in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were radically different from the industrial unions of the early to mid-20^th century.

• A revolutionary challenge to capitalism is simply not on the table.

Another assumption which has not yet been validated is that just because we have not recently seen struggles taking as their issue the overthrow of capitalism and a communist future, this does not mean that conflicts are not arising and struggles not taking place which could alter this landscape with little or no warning. There is a subset of this point: Why should we think, under the current conditions, that struggles for reform are easier and more likely than struggles to overthrow capitalism? At the moment, there seems to be little to indicate that those who want reform have any notion of how to move forward except through 1) increasingly weak non-governmental organs of the state such as the unions and community organizations, or 2) a Democratic Party which has no reason and no pressure to pursue a policy other than the ones it has followed since the 1970's. What if the struggles for basic reforms have, at the moment, come up against themselves as a kind of limit?

As a tertiary point, this focus would seem to be extremely nationalistic, along the lines of David Harvey's suggestions for a New New Deal in Neo-Liberalism: A Brief History. I don't say this because the analysis is not to some extent global, but because the entire perspective on practice assumes the kinds of organizations present in the U.S. and seems entirely focused on the U.S.

What if the current political dynamic is better represented as a crisis of Enlightenment tendency to extend citizenship to everyone within the limits of the nation state, and the assimilation of the human condition to this citizenship, has come under attack? My entire point in discussing the present-day political spectrum in these terms has to do with what seems like a broad-based consensus among social democrats/Left-populists, liberals, conservatives, and the Right-populists that civil society has won, that everyone must accede to the demands of The Market. Liberals and Left-populists take the view that politics is all about the rational administration of this state of affairs, that the state should set limits and ensure good behavior but only to make sure that private interests do not destroy themselves.

The problem I am posing in terms of practical activity is not non-participation in unions, community organizations, support groups, or even elections. What is at issue is a way of thinking about our participation or non-participation. My perspective is that regardless of what we are involved in, our perspective cannot be Marxian and oriented towards saving capitalism from itself with a progressive program of capitalist accumulation. That view puts capitalism first, with the practical conclusion that we go into the institutions. The Long March through the Institutions-line is neither new nor is its history inspiring, except in a wholly negative way. It is a history that its participants would rather not talk about, and certainly not critically. The New Left groups and individuals, each in their own way and with some exceptions, took this line long ago with the delusion that they would steer the institutions rather than the institutions bringing them into line. Instead of resisting the decline of the last 40 years, they presided over it and in many ways where they succeeded, they succeeded in making the decline less dramatic, and so more palatable and less shocking.

There is a difference between participating in struggles and orienting oneself towards struggles versus participating in and orienting towards organizations. The former, as I have expressed repeatedly, accepts the contingency of collective action. It puts us in the position of being dependent not just on “objective conditions”, but on other people. It does not require that we be passive in the sense of not speaking our minds, not being a part of the lives of people around us. Quite the contrary, since not having to find an immediate practical action to take on all matters frees us from the kind of voluntarism that comes with laying claim to being a militant. The latter does allow us to do something, and this need to feel like we are doing something, to feel in control, to feel like we are making a difference is very tempting because we feel better about ourselves, that we have found some hidden source of meaning. It feeds a cruel optimism.

The history of the post-WWII national revolutions is very instructive on what happens when the change in political power is predicated on a popular upsurge. The need to provide more humane conditions to appease the demands of a mobilized population come into conflict with the private interests of individual capitals and capitalists.  Where conditions are unfavorable for accumulation, two things tend to happen: capital effectively goes on strike and refuses to invest (a situation we are familiar with today in the U.S.) and/or capital moves (capital flight) to safer havens.  In most of those revolutions it became clear a few years in that the state would have to nationalize large parts of the economy under its direction in order to meet some of the demands and at the same time in order to pursue accumulation.  The results were quite often disastrous in the short to medium term, though in the long run it has provided some developmental advantages, at least for China, a model I assume is not looked favorably upon.

This is actually part of what is significant for the idea presented above.  Of the developing nations which were associated with a rising standard of living and an aggressive workers’ movement, they were Brazil, Argentina, South Korea, South Africa, Thailand, that is, the regimes which had not had nationalist revolutions which were nominally “socialist”, but non-colonial states which remained in the ambit of the global market.  Each of them however was also marked by military dictatorships or apartheid in the case of South Africa.  We could arguably include Mexico in this group as that revolution happened much earlier, but was neither against overt colonial domination nor did it lay much claims to being socialist, but did entail some limited nationalizations.  Mexico, unlike China, Yugoslavia, Algeria, Angola, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, and many of the other states that today sit on the bottom of the global order in terms of poverty, never attempted an autarkic policy of development.

The most developed countries have not been immune to this process of development.  The tendency is for the powers which developed first to be eclipsed by newer powers with the latest technology, relatively cheap labor, better access to natural resources, and a larger population making for a larger potential internal market.  The main example of what happens when they cease to be the locus of accumulation is their relative decline.  In the case of England, the first real hegemonic power in the history of capitalist society, this has been a dramatic financialization of the economy compared to its competitors in Germany and France.  Germany and France, like Japan, as advanced as they were, lacked the population to develop internal markets that would exceed England significantly and certainly which could not compete with the U.S.  Ironically, this has allowed them to remain industrial powers, but in a limited manner.  The U.S., the second real hegemon, has lost its status as the hegemonic power.  The countries most likely to take over that role are China and India because the prospects of Unified Europe, never particularly likely under capitalism, seem even more remote as the Eurozone is buffeted by crises no small part of which are connected to the existence of the E.U. as a weak federation of states without uniform laws, taxes, development, etc.  Even with these, Europe would be only slightly larger than the U.S. and very small compared to China and India.

The last two battles over hegemonic status meant two world wars, as England’s decline was signaled with WWI and its fate sealed by the victory of its ally in WWII.  This was also a settling of accounts with the workers’ movement in two parts.  WWI signaled the end of Social Democracy and the Social Democratic unions as anything other than Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the wealthy democracies, and the formation of a radical model of development led by the smashing of the absolutist and imperial regimes and their replacement by a bureaucratic capitalist state in the nations without the experience of a bourgeois democratic and Enlightenment tradition, generally on the fringes of the world market.  WWII signaled the death of Bolshevism as anything other than a thoroughly capitalist opponent, a competing model of development, but clearly posing no actual threat to capitalist society.  Even in Italy and France, where the Communist Parties attained a significant degree of independence from the Soviet state, they would never actually be able to propose a credible alternative accumulation and acted much as Social Democracy had acted before the 1920’s.

Combining the conditions of humane development and expanded accumulation seems not only to have no precedent, but to literally be at odds with each other for reasons that have been mentioned on this list already.  Namely, improvements in quality of life, if they are to come about, only come about at the end of the ruthless subordination of labor to capital.  Attempts to do this have resulted in terrifying regimes.  That China has come out the better in the world market seems to have more to do with its potential internal market and centralized dictatorship than with any more humane development.

We must face this squarely.  The U.S. is simply not going to be the generative force behind the next wave of accumulation, if there is one.  Which means that for all of the plans for a more humane regime of accumulation, the U.S. role in it will be less important than the rising powers.  Since no power goes gently into that good night, it will lead to greater conflicts between the U.S. and its competitors in which individual capitals in the U.S. will seek to protect their global share by any means, and collectively so through the state.  It is no accident that conditions become more brutal in every aspect, not merely in terms of poverty but maybe more importantly the progressive destruction of a sense that a better world is possible, that it is even desirable.

Revolution is not imminent, but the recognition of this does not entail that our task is to push for a renewed accumulation that is also humane.  There is no way to open a new epoch of accumulation that is more humane, not only because it is not economically possible but because ‘humane’ is about so much more than material conditions of life.  I say this without the slightest doubt that, on this 50 year plan, much less of a humane quality of life will be possible because we will have done so much more irreversible damage in the meantime.  No, alongside this brute fact is the incapacity of a large part of humanity to recognize this brute fact.  Even among those who recognize this brute fact, there is an unwillingness, almost a disinterest, in addressing it seriously.  I add on the adverb ‘seriously’ because if we were apply every element of the Kyoto Accords or what was proposed at Copenhagen, they would not be nearly enough.  Still, the threat is in the refusal to recognize the danger at all.  We are sitting in a burning room and many of those with us want to convince us that we should not be afraid because fire is the sign of civilization and why wouldn’t we want more civilization.  Others, not an inconsiderable number of them, either welcome the impending spiritual purification by fire, but most especially that we should start by sending the unworthy into the flames first.

If a more humane world, one in which men and women can imagine themselves as dignified beings, is the goal, then we have also to be aware that we are fighting against a slide deeper into barbarism.  Tocqueville wrote long ago about this: “We should not console ourselves by thinking that the barbarians are still a long way off. Some peoples may let the torch be snatched from their hands, but others stamp it out themselves.”  Or as James Baldwin put it in If Beale Street Could Talk, “These hidden men are the hidden price for the hidden lie: the righteous must be able to locate the damned.” (p.207).

I like two formulations of Adorno’s (the first written with Horkheimer): They describe their book The Dialectic of Enlightenment as an attempt to understand why “humanity founders in a new form of barbarism instead of entering a truly human condition.”  Adorno would later write in Critical Models that the “sole adequate praxis would be to put all energies toward working our way out of barbarism”. 

This is our task and it is a very different one from what has been put forward so far.  We will not work our way out of barbarism with renewed accumulation.  We will only work our way further in because our problem is not the lack of labor, the lack of accumulation, the lack of community, the lack of (proletarian) identity. 

I have been accused of suggesting that we bite the (invisible?) hand that feeds us, and that this is a little crazy.  It may be crazy for a dog, but it is never craziness for a human being to bite the hand of one who would treat her like a dog.

Chris Wright