What Marx calls “Counteracting Factors,” the title of Chapter 14 of Volume 3 of Capital, includes everything capitalists do to counter and minimize the impact of all those forces tending to rupture accumulation and create crises for their efforts to complete their circuits, achieve expanded reproduction and renew their control over society on an even larger scale. This chapter elaborates beyond the six “factors” Marx analyzes in Volume 3 of Capital1 – both by bringing in material discussed elsewhere by Marx and Engels and by working systematically through the various stages of accumulation represented in the circuits and the forces that shape them. As in Chapters 4 and 5, the main focus is on capitalist efforts to deal with all those struggles by workers that rupture either individual circuits or circulate from circuit to circuit threatening the system more broadly. Looking back at the struggles already mentioned, it should be clear that because capital invades and attempts to subordinate every social activity, conflicts unfold throughout society and therefore capitalists have had to respond with a wide variety of strategies and related tactics. As a prelude to working through each stage of the circuit and their interconnections, I classify the methods capitalists use into four rough categories: force, law, ideology, and structural change. In varying degrees and mixtures, they have been deployed throughout the history of capitalist accumulation, and, as I then show in Sections 7, 8 and 9, at every stage of every circuit and elsewhere within society.
1 Force
For those of us who have learned to despise capitalism, by studying its way-too-long history of exploitation, alienation, and crimes against humanity and the rest of nature, its frequent use of force is often the first thing that comes to mind when considering the ways capitalists respond to crises. From its beginning, as Marx shows in his analysis of primitive accumulation, force was essential to the birth of capitalism. With no midwife to help, the birth of capitalism, described by Marx as coming into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” metaphorically resembles
They have deployed force to enforce laws created to codify and protect their order, from the sanctity of property to the regulation of their labor force – from putting down slave revolts and breaking up banned unions and strikes through the beating or assassination of organizers in the sphere of production, to terrorizing working class and immigrant communities in the sphere of reproduction.3 They have used force to repress ideas subversive of their rule, from the jailing, execution or assassination of dissidents to the shutting down of critical publications and the banning of books – as Marx and Engels experienced repeatedly.4 Many capitalist companies either maintain their own goons to violently repress worker organizing or hire them from independent security firms.5 Every capitalist government maintains police, military, judges, jails and prisons to maintain their law and their order, including the “order” of ethnic, gender and racial discrimination and the repression of protests against it.6 They also use force to impose structural change, e.g., colonialism, the enclosure of still-existing commons, eminent domain against individual private property to facilitate capitalist development, including the kind of slum clearance Engels
2 Laws: Writing and Enforcing
Laws, we are generally taught, are the set of rules which regulate social conduct and separate civilization from barbarism.8 “We are a nation of laws, not men,” Americans like to assert – in contradistinction not only to barbarism but also to rule by a monarch or some other kind of dictator. So, in childhood we are taught that like the rules laid down by our parents, societal laws are to be followed or obeyed. With time, study, and experience, however, we discover that not everyone has been in on writing the laws, that they have often been written to benefit some at the expense of others. Laws – subject to interpretation within the judicial system – often encode unjust relationships as well as just ones. “Law and order,” the long-running TV show, takes its title from the much longer running practice of writing and enforcing laws to maintain the existing order – in our case, the capitalist one.9 Once we realize how the laws in most civilizations we know about – including our own – have mostly been composed to organize and maintain domination over society by some ruling class, it is easy to see how considerations of justice have repeatedly provoked 1) the violation of laws viewed as unjust, 2) legal challenges to those laws, and
Over time, laws have been written, contested, rewritten or set aside and replaced to regulate virtually every aspect of capitalist society, including each stage of the circuit of individual capitals and their interactions. There are laws that concern markets for labor, the means of production and consumer goods. There are laws about the conditions of work in fields, mines, factories, offices, brothels, banks, retail sales outlets, schools, homes, and public places. So ubiquitous are laws that some tend think of passing a new law every time they confront some behavior they don’t like. This assumption of law-as-remedy has been so widespread that a syndicated cartoon strip titled “There Oughta Be a Law” ran in newspapers for four decades (1945–1985).
Enforcing of all these laws in capitalism has always involved the use of force – from forcibly stopping their violation through immediate extra-judicial violence or through judicial procedures followed by punishment, from fines through incarceration and the quasi-slavery of prison labor to the imposition of the death penalty. Inevitably, both the content of laws and the pattern of their enforcement have both been terrains of class struggle. Their very scope makes consideration of their role in relation to crises of the relationships they are designed to regulate daunting. What follows barely scratches the surface.
A considerable amount of Marx’s writing is concerned with this terrain. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Section 1, he recognized the importance of law as early as 1842, in the case of the laws outlawing the direct appropriation of wood in Prussia – a case that soon had him returning to and critiquing Hegel’s treatment of law and civil society. That return produced “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (1843–44), an essay containing a critique of various sections of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1820).11 Although in passing Marx quotes Hegel (§306) on “the uncertainty of business” and “the fluctuations in possessions,” neither Hegel in his book nor Marx in this essay take up the role of law vis-à-vis crisis.12
Despite his recognition that capitalists have dominated the writing of laws within their social system, Marx very much embraced workers fighting for the writing of at least a few laws that would benefit them. In his analysis of the battle over the length of the working day, in light of the coercive power of poverty achieved by capitalists in the labor market, which drove both adult workers and their children into wage-slavery, he wrote, “workers have to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families
Of course, the existence of laws favorable to workers has never guaranteed their enforcement. Whether and to what degree pro-worker laws have been enforced has, like the passing of the laws themselves, been a question of the balance of class power. Failing to finance the enforcement of laws constitutes a ploy used again and again, as Marx amply demonstrates and continues to this day.16 Even when legislators do vote money for enforcement, those newly elected to the executive branch, or appointed by them, have often refused to continue spending the money, gutting enforcement, and thwarting the intent of the laws. But even where “the necessary official personnel” have been funded – as in the case of the English Factory Acts – the laws themselves have often been written in ways that have created so many loopholes that the factory inspectors or later regulators have found their job almost impossible. The combination of loopholes and capitalist deviousness led to repeated legal challenges by the factory inspectors themselves, by worker-hired attorneys and barristers as well as collective protests and uprisings against unjust or unenforced laws. Thus, alongside the struggle over the writing of laws was another, which played out in courts and in the streets, over their enforcement.
Such class conflict in the judicial arena has been heavily stacked against workers in two ways. First, because the laws often reflected capitalists’ power and were written in ways that made it hard for workers to win any relief from their exploitation and second, because capitalists have largely controlled the appointment of magistrates and judges who heard most cases concerning labor, or, where judges were elected, they have dominated the selection of candidates and financing of their campaigns. So, where workers’ struggles unfolded in courts, they have been subjected, in Nate Holdren’s words, to the “tyranny of the trial.”17
3 Ideology: Ideas, Institutions and Behavior
If the scope and roles of laws governing all aspects of capitalist society makes considering their various roles vis-à-vis crises daunting, I have found accounting for the role of ideology even more so. All laws, especially those that legalize exploitation and aim to repress resistance, require both careful aiming – to facilitate or curb some activity – and, if they are to be accepted, justification. The term idéologie, coined by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) as part of his response to the French Revolution that challenged virtually all existing laws and the class structures on which they had been based, literally means “science of ideas.” From the point of view of Marx and Engels’ analysis of the antagonistic class structure of capitalist society, the concept of ideology can be applied to both strategic and apologetic ideas. Certainly, down through the ages, laws have been crafted and justified by both rulers who benefit from them and their apologists. Although Marxists have tended to use the term
Understanding ideology in capitalism to include both ideas about strategies for managing class relationships and those justifying those relationships implies a breadth of definition that englobes virtually the entirety of ideas that take capitalism as a given to be propagated and supported. Trained as an economist and having only ventured beyond my field out of curiosity and political commitment, I decline the temptation to take on that whole and, for the most part, confine my comments about the role of capitalist ideology in countering the forces that rupture various aspects of the system and throw it into crisis, to the ideas of economists, as they evolved from mercantilism through the political economy of Marx and Engels’ time.19
A preliminary note: there are ideas, and there are institutions devoted to promulgating them. They do so in at least two ways. First, they support the generation and repetition of useful ideas. Second, within capitalism in their very form they embody its paradigmatic structures and, by so doing, reinforce the inculcation and acceptance of those ideas and modes of behavior consistent with them (what some call the construction of “subjectivity”). Obvious examples are all those institutions that replicate the very capitalist mode of organizing labor: incarceration within factory-like structures and the changes in ideas and behavior that result – both intended changes, such as the internalization of disciplinary regimes and unintended changes, such as mutual recognition and rebellion. The latter, of course, was Marx’s emphasis about the consequences of capitalists herding workers into factories to better impose work but where they discover their common exploitation and organize against it. Such is also the case, as Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) has demonstrated, not only with prisons and their regimes of legal incarceration but also with institutions as diverse as hospitals, schools, and workhouses.20 In the capitalist epoch, many traditional institutions were gradually transformed from purveyors of ideas and behaviors useful to earlier ruling classes into ones elaborating and spreading those useful to capitalists. I touch briefly on only four: schools, religion, the press, and the judicial system.
The children were taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, during five years, that is, from five to ten, in the village school, without expense to their parents … the children are taught to read in such books as inculcate those precepts of the Christian religion, which are common to all denominations.23
And, of course, precepts consistent with dutiful, non-antagonistic relations with their employer.
The ideas taught the privileged, beyond basic skills, were those judged appropriate to rulers and managers, from ideas about how to govern to those justifying the exercise of such power. In the West, the later included, for a long time, education in the classical literature of Greece and Rome and the associated languages – Greek and Latin. Knowledge of these languages set the educated apart from and above the masses. Workers were to be awed by and accept the authority of clergymen, lawyers and physicians who conversed in
In all cases, from private, then public schools for workers to more elite schools and universities for the few, the structure of schools and teaching more or less replicates the structure of capitalist industry. While those institutions incarcerate both teachers and students, the latter have no control either over what is taught or how it is taught. Laws often set subjects and standards, but the day-to-day power relationships between teachers and students mirrored those in industry, effectively subordinating learning to discipline. As Friedrich Nietzsche would describe such structures in Germany in 1872: “One speaking mouth, with many ears, and half as many writing hands … the proprietor of this one mouth is severed from and independent of the owners of the many ears; and this double independence is enthusiastically designated as ‘academical freedom’.”25 In other words, one overseer and many workers following orders in the production of labor-power and, at the level of many universities, the production of research and publications.26
A second set of well-known institutions that purvey pro-capitalist ideology are churches, institutionalized religions. Once primary managers and beneficiaries of pre-capitalist cultures, such as feudalism in Europe, they adapted to become handmaidens of capitalism. Like schools, in their makeup and operations most churches conveniently mirror the top-down power structure of capitalism, with clergy doing most of the talking and teaching and congregants for the most part just listening to instructions about how to behave. In those parts of the world where the Christian church has held sway, the Reformation and the rise and proliferation of Protestant sects brought new doctrines that replaced older ones. The divine right of kings was replaced by the idea that success in business revealed God’s approval and grace.27 The Catholic condemnation of
A third set of institutions purveying pro-capitalist ideology came with the rapid rise and spread of printing and the production of widely available books, journals, newspapers, and sheet music in the nineteenth century. This dramatically widened old terrains of class struggle. Capitalist investment largely dominated the production and sale of the printed word and musical notation, making the dissemination of ideas supportive of its rule easier and easier.29 Those ideas included not just justifications for capitalist economic policies, but also those propagating a wide range of social norms compatible with capitalist accumulation – such as acceptance of the myths of its origins, schooling as training for jobs, the value and payoffs of hard work, deference to authority, appropriate behavior for women, whether as wives and mothers working in the home to maintain and reproduce the labor force or working for a wage, either at home (taking in sewing) or in some garment shop or textile factory, and so on.30
A fourth, and last, set of institutions with great responsibility for both controlling workers and convincing them of the reasonableness of that control were those of the judiciary. While force was widespread in imposing the capitalist rules of the game, punishing directly, or incarcerating or transporting workers who violated those rules, the judiciary – staffed as we have seen throughout the nineteenth century primarily by members of the ruling class – provided
Just or unjust, that system operates in periods of crisis as well as in those of steady accumulation. The kinds of interventions mentioned above – countering workers’ struggles through the enforcement of existing laws and contracts – have been even more important in moments of crisis. Whether the crisis has been caused by those struggles or upsurges in struggle are responses to crises imposing hardship on workers and their families, the judicial system has been wielded against workers with the aim of quelling upheaval and re-establishing profitable labor relations. Sometimes this is direct, as in imposing labor laws; sometimes it’s indirect, as in sanctioning the takeover of businesses with insufficient control over their workers to ride out a crisis by those with greater control.
4 Strategic Ideas
Formulated within the context of antagonistic class struggle, capitalists and their strategists have fostered the development of exploitation within concrete historical moments, changing and adapting strategies in response to workers’ successes in countering those efforts and imposing their own needs on the system. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the realm of economics. From before Marx and Engels’ lifetimes to the present, economists have peddled their ideas to ruling elites primarily in the form of policy advice. Mercantilists, often merchant capitalists themselves, provided advice to kings who wanted gold, as to how best to manipulate trade to achieve that goal. Where agriculture still dominated the economy, the physiocrats also advised kings – as to the best methods of extracting wealth from that sector.
As industrial capitalism herded workers from fields and villages into factories and subordinated the role of commerce and agriculture, political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo appropriated some elements of the strategic reasoning of their forerunners but resituated them within a wider understanding. The political economists argued that while still essential, trade, which the mercantilists held up as the main source of wealth, existed
5 Apologetic Ideas
Ideology, in the form of apologetic rationalization, has long played a key role in justifying laws to those being exploited, to those benefiting from that exploitation and to those enforcing the laws. The point of ideological justification, of course, has never been a purely intellectual endeavor, but has been aimed at achieving compliance with laws at the lowest cost possible, e.g., with minimal use of force. If you can persuade people that laws are just, they are more likely to obey them. While lawyers and university students may study Locke’s Treatises, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or Adam Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, ideological acceptance/respect for law (including the fear of the consequences of violating it) has mainly been promulgated through capitalist influence on academia and popular culture. In one of Marx and Engels’ most cited passages they characterize such apologists as a faction of the capitalist ruling class.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it … The division of labour … manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the formation of the illusions of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood) …33
As indicated, my greatest familiarity is with the work of political economists and how they have crafted their ideas not only to figure out strategies to facilitate wealth accumulation but also to justify the policies they have recommended. As capitalist development increasingly found itself confronted by the autonomous self-organization of workers, the history of economic thought provides ample evidence of how political economists modified their theory to cope.
To take an early example, John Locke’s 1690 justification for “property,” namely that people deserved to “own” what they have produced with their own hands, while suitable for artisans and independent farmers, clearly was inadequate for an industrial capitalism in which what workers produced wound up being owned by their employers.36 So apologists came up with new
But, as workers grasped the classical political economic theory that all value stemmed from labor, they began to argue that regardless of the laws – obviously crafted by capitalists and their representatives – the fruits of labor should belong not to capitalists but to those who labor, themselves. Basing themselves on the political economists’ own reasoning, they challenged both capitalist property ownership and the laws that legalized it. In so doing, they undermined the usefulness of that theory for gaining acceptance of capitalist ownership. As a result, economists abandoned the labor theory of value and replaced it – via the “marginalist revolution” – by rebasing their theory of value from labor to “utility,” thus undercutting workers’ arguments while providing a new rationale and new, more precise tools for managing both production (of C′) and markets (for LP, MP and C′).37
The creation of pro-capitalist, apologetic ideas, however, have never been a monopoly of economists, but were created and spread by many of those full and part-time journalists, novelists, poets and playwrights throughout the nineteenth century who took on the “great transformation” being engineered by the capitalist class.38 In the words of Elaine Freedgood, the hope of such writers was to “quiet the growing unease of members of the middle and upper classes and the growing unrest of the laboring classes as they experienced the increasingly de-regulated and industrialized market economy.”39
One such author was Harriet Martineau (1802–1872), daughter of a textile manufacturer, who wrote a great many short stories and books with the
Maintaining what Gramsci called the “hegemony” of such capitalist ideology, however, has often been sought not just with ideas – bought and paid for by the capitalist class – but through both laws and force when ideas fail. I sketched some of Marx and Engels’ own experience with this use of force in Chapter 2. The response to their writings that challenged others’ justifications of exploitation or argued for democracy against authoritarian rule included writing, or reinterpreting, laws to criminalize their activity, forcibly shutting down of their newspapers and journals, banning their books and the forcibly deporting them from country after country.
Force, Law and Ideology have long been primary weapons of class rule. Which weapon is wielded varies. Where capitalism has resorted to slavery – in both the past and the present – Force dominates because slaves resist, and few accept either laws that legalize it or ideas that justify it.43 Ever since workers succeeded in getting laws passed criminalizing chattel slavery, Law and Ideology have been front line weapons in organizing and justifying capital’s system of generalized economic coercion. But in the class war, Force is still mustered
6 Structural Changes
Beyond resorting to force, crafting and enforcing laws and reshaping ideology to meet new challenges to its rule, capital and its functionaries have often found themselves having to figure out new structures of production, reproduction and trade in order to maintain or regain control.
Within production, faced with workers’ success in gaining reductions in working hours – a crisis in capital’s absolute surplus value strategy – they have restructured the mix of machines, workers and raw materials, i.e., the technical composition of capital, to raise productivity, increasing relative surplus value to make up for the fall in absolute surplus value. Such structural changes within factories have also required extensive changes within the whole “supply chain” that supplies the means of production and within hiring practices as new technologies have required new worker abilities.
An example in the sphere of reproduction, has been the “education” of workers. Faced with workers’ growing success in extricating their children from fields, mines, mills and factories, capitalists adapted by developing public school systems to re-incarcerate and control the young. That control, of course, has included the inculcation of ideological illusions about the nature of capitalism and acceptance of its rules, with both aimed at instilling the obedience and discipline desired by future employers.44
In the realm of trade, of commerce, an example of “structural adjustment” were capitalists’ efforts to offset concessions extracted by workers’ struggles at home through increasing reliance on the imperialist annexation of cheap foreign labor through colonialism and the subsequent importation of the cheap raw materials produced by that labor.45 The first of these required either the
7 Offsets in the First Stage of the Circuit: Investment
Let us begin with an examination of responses to difficulties surrounding the acquisition of enough money to finance investment, which I identified as a potential source of crisis in the effort to launch or renew a circuit of capital.
7.1 Getting Enough Money
Although the problem of coming up with enough money to profitably engage in trade has been faced by merchants for millennia – as well as by governments seeking to finance their various projects, from palaces to wars – Marx and Engels were focused on the specific problems facing industrial capitalists, with the problems of merchants and governments analyzed as subsumed to the dynamics of developing capitalism. They analyzed how capitalists tried to cope with this problem of insufficiently available money, both during the rise of industrial capitalism as it sought to impose its new organization of life and during the much fuller developments of their times.
During the rise, would-be industrialists included skilled crafters bent on expanding their operations beyond guild limits and merchants extending their operations from commerce into production. Crafters usually hired workers for wages (or acquired slaves), but merchants often tapped labor using other
Within fully developed capitalism, Marx’s circuits of money capital always portray the source of money for investment as deriving from sales resulting from previous investment. In other words, M′ from past sales provides the money M to finance the next round of production. Not included in the circuits, but analyzed elsewhere, are what capitalists do with profits, M′ – M, realized in the previous period but not immediately invested in expanding operations. They are usually hoarded as either cash-on-hand or in the form of readily available, highly liquid financial assets. Both methods keep the money available as reserves, for emergencies (such as unexpected increases in the cost of LP, MP, or borrowing) or for combining with future profits to finance future expansions.49
But, because of the very real possibilities of, and predispositions to not generating enough money through sales or having saved enough to either renew or expand their operations, capitalists have had to develop alternative sources of money to offset shortages. Their primary outside sources have been governments, financial institutions, and individuals.
7.1.1 With the Help of Governments
With respect to governments, industrial capitalists learned from their merchant forerunners to appeal to governments’ self-interest. Merchants had long solicited local (or national) governments for financial support for their ventures. Such support took two forms: those that put money directly into the hands of merchants (and later industrial capitalists) and those that subsidized their operations. One iconic example of the former, often taught to American school children, was the successful appeal of Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) to the Iberian monarchs – Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile – for financial support in his project to discover a shorter, and more
As it turned out with Columbus and others, the exploration of trade routes often involved conquest and colonialism. Where these made possible the looting of existing wealth, especially gold and silver, stocks of the precious metals were extracted from the colonized by force, bolstering the stock of metal money. This was primarily possible for the Spanish and Portuguese colonialists in Latin America who, in violently conquering the indigenous, discovered already refined gold and silver (and the mines for producing more). While most of such loot went to sponsoring governments, it eventually became available to other investors as it was spent and circulated.51
Where colonial efforts discovered neither existing hoards of precious metals to steal, nor mines to exploit, as was the case for a long time in the colonies in North America,52 two alternative strategies emerged to counter this dearth. In one, both colonists and their governments engaged in letters of marque and privateering, sanctioning the seizure of the Spanish or Portuguese treasure ships. These practices were sometimes celebrated – as in the famous case of the English privateer Francis Drake (1540–1596) – and sometimes, if it got out of hand, condemned as piracy.53
As an alternative to the seizure of existing mineral wealth, merchant capitalists pushed government policies encouraging trade surpluses, i.e., those
Support for such trade policies inevitably involved government spending for the military colonization of foreign lands, for defending expanding trade on the open seas or on land, and for whatever infrastructure was needed by increased trade – all of which subsidized capitalist operations. Buying guns and ships obviously put money into the industries building them. Paying the costs of mobilizing and maintaining military forces put more money into circulation. Besides spending on military training facilities and fortifications, increased trade and colonialism also required new or improved social infrastructure, such as roads, canals, railroads, ports, etc., both for governments to rule and for business to thrive.55 With the development of industry, government investment in social infrastructure came to include the kind of
Among other policies indirectly increasing the monies available for business investment, we can include efforts to expand the supply of coin in circulation through the hiring of alchemists to conjure up precious from base metal (not successful),58 the debasement – by mixing in non-precious metals – of government-issued metal monies (frequent),59 and eventually central bank efforts to reduce interest rates and reserve requirements during periods of commercial and industrial crisis – both of which free up money for loans.60 Although the first two were soon abandoned, the third and fourth of these methods became frequent practices as governments subsidized their suppliers and repeatedly bailed out capitalists during periods of crisis, when their own efforts to generate profits came up short.
7.1.2 With the Help of Financial Institutions
Supposedly originating as merely guarded storage facilities for valuables, banks developed into what economists call “financial intermediaries”, taking
Banks first grew fat loaning money to governments for desired purchases beyond those which could be paid for out of tax revenues. In Chapter 31 of Volume 1 of Capital, Marx pointed to such “deficit financing” as key to capitalists amassing enough money to invest. Banks profit from governments repaying loans with money extracted through taxes.61 In that chapter, he only points out how this source of money can finance industrial investment, but he ignores the history of the changing practices of bankers, who gradually made more and more loans to industrial capitalists. Elsewhere, however, he did trace such changes, especially in the case of the Crédit Mobilier, an early French bank that made itself famous by claiming to be at the forefront of such change, and reported on its evolution in his journalism.
In three articles, published in 1856, Marx describes the Crédit Mobilier’s speculative manipulations. He details the various enterprises in which the Crédit Mobilier holds an interest as well as the high rate of profit being reported on these investments. The Crédit Mobilier, he claims, buys up shares in an enterprise, hypes them, and because it has done this, others buy, their prices rise, at which point it sells them off for a nice profit. In short, it engaged in manipulative “stockjobbing.”62 It was not alone.
The availability of loans from banks (or subsidies from governments) may depend on the degree to which the causes of the reduced profits that provoked the effort to get help are seen by potential sources as being countered. Banks and governments rarely act blindly but generally take into account the reasons why would-be supplicants are having problems coming up with enough money.63 If, for example, the source is workers’ struggles and banks
7.1.3 With the Help of Individuals
For a long time, there were only two ways for capitalists to tap the money of individuals. One mediated way was borrowing from banks, as mentioned above, whose funds were based on deposits by individuals. The other was personal gifts or loans, of cash or property or facilities, more common in early capitalism when most businesses were owned and run by individuals. But the rise of the joint-stock company made it possible for businesses to issue shares of proposed or ongoing business ventures in a completely impersonal manner. When needed and feasible, businesses can craft initial public offerings (IPO s) of stocks or bonds to raise money for investment, or they can sell holdings of such securities already in existence to individual “investors.”66 At the same time, with buyers having little direct knowledge of the viability of the enterprise issuing stocks or bonds, and with institutions such as the Crédit
7.2 Fixing the Supply of Labor-Power
Given the widespread and varied resistance of people to having their lives subsumed by imposed work, capitalists have used every means at their disposal – ranging from the brutally repressive to the seductive – to obtain and maintain an exploitable labor force in the face of all kinds of problems interfering with their smooth management of the supply and demand for labor, and hence its costs and profitability. In Chapter 4, Section 3, I noted how those problems included the unwillingness of many to enter the labor market, workers fleeing oppressive labor markets, and reductions in the size of the labor force making labor too expensive due to such causes as disease, starvation, military drains and reductions in birth rates and the size of families. In Chapter 5, Section 1.2, I sketched some of the reasons why the labor market is predisposed to such problems. So, how do capitalists try to offset these difficulties?
7.2.1 Countering Avoidance of the Labor Market
In Chapter 4, Sections 3.2.2.1 and Chapter 5, Section 1.2.1, I discussed avoidance of the labor market in terms of the periods of people’s lives: among children and youths, among mature adults and among adults nearing the end of their lives. Given the propensity of so many people, at different stages of life, to avoid the labor market, capitalists have deployed measure after measure to herd people into that market.
In the early centuries when capitalists began to impose their new organization of society on the world, the young, adults and aged were all treated with the same brutal methods Marx sketches in his chapters on “primitive accumulation” in Volume 1 of Capital. In Chapters 27 and 28 of Capital he describes the primary method by which capitalism imposed itself: violent force, enslaving some and expropriating the land and tools of others. Because even expropriated
Many of the expropriated were simply expelled from the countryside, reducing the rural population. Some took jobs with the emerging class of agrarian capitalists whose rise Marx analyzes in Chapter 29. In Britain, those capitalists did their best to transform a countryside hitherto characterized by landed gentry, rent-paying tenants, yeoman farmers, and commons (fields and forests accessible to all), into an agricultural industry employing waged farm workers. These expropriations and the structural transformation did not happen all at once but proceeded piece-meal (making collective resistance difficult) and continued, Marx argues, right through the nineteenth century.
As the transformation neared completion in Britain, capitalists exported their violence to colonial areas seizing ever more lands of local populations. Keeping in mind that before capitalism all peoples lived within some different kind of culture, a few with similarities (guilds paying wages to apprentices and journeymen), some radically different (in foreign colonies and among indigenous peoples on the “frontiers” of capitalist expansion), one part of transforming the world into the new capitalist order was wiping out and replacing cultures in any way inimical to the reproduction of capitalist social relationships, especially acceptance of the labor market and living by working for a wage or salary.
While these new relationships have been forced onto many adults in colonies, there have also been attempts to condition children into accepting the new order. The brainwashing of children into cultural assimilation began early with Christian missionaries, the main shock troops of cultural genocide. An early taste of this came with the rolls played by Catholic priests in Latin America. Along with their systematic theft or destruction of local cultural artifacts, e.g., pre-Columbian literature, they participated with their secular
While the systematic expropriation of Native American lands and their ultimate internment on “reservations” made their previous ways of life materially impossible, the theft of land was accompanied by the theft of children. In well-thought out efforts to wipe out their entire cultural heritage, children were forcibly stolen and incarcerated in boarding schools. There, they were forbidden to speak their own languages, to wear traditional clothes or to practice the spiritual rituals of their tribe. They were forced to cut their hair, speak the language of their jailors, dress in uniforms and learn elements of their alien culture – including the “naturalness” of the labor market.70 All this was imposed by violence but sustained by more sophisticated methods, which were formalized by the use of laws, from treaties (soon betrayed) to those of private property – to put the stamp of legality on new structures.71
To justify all these efforts to transform the world, capitalists and their apologists have kept up the association of “freedom” with the “free markets” of capitalism, including the labor market. Doing so has required the development and promulgation of ideas, of ideologies, legitimizing the labor market as the most natural and only moral way of surviving in capitalist society. After all, if you can convince people that entering the labor market is normal and expected of everyone, you can avoid the more expensive use of force. Central to this effort have been the ideas of economists – from the mercantilists through the classical political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the neoclassical economists of the late nineteenth (and twentieth) century who followed them.73 They have all denounced the preference for self-determined activity, instead of working and being exploited by some employer, as time “mis-spent” in “Idleness and Pleasure” or as “sloth” and mostly presented the labor market as an encounter of equals, in which capitalist buyers and worker sellers are free to negotiate terms.74 With no coercion involved, people should enter the labor market willingly and negotiate their wages just like the price of any other good.
Marx, of course, excoriates this representation of the labor market as apologetic myth, as hiding its real nature, the history of its imposition, and the coercive factors which have given capitalists more power than workers in that
Moreover, the pretense of paying for labor performed, hides the extraction of surplus labor, i.e., exploitation, beyond what must be paid workers to reproduce their labor-power.76 Marx points out how recognizing this distinction between labor and labor-power reveals that the labor market is a portal to exploitation, alienation and the wastage of lives – a passage to be abolished along with the whole wage-system.
A corollary of the myth of free labor markets, also aimed at overcoming reluctance to enter them, has been the pretense that they have always provided a path to upward mobility, to the bettering of one’s life. Central to this pretense has been the myth of capitalist origins.
Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living … Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins.77
This myth, however, like others central to pro-capitalist apologetics, has long been contested, not only by Marx and other anti-capitalist revolutionaries but also by social reformers seeking to make capitalism less brutal. One such was Charles Dickens (1812–1870), whose novels often mocked the mythical character of this pretense of upward mobility. A good example can be found in his Hard Times (1854) where the claims of the central capitalist – Josiah Bounderby – to have risen from an impoverished working-class background to mill owner through hard work and self-sacrifice are eventually revealed to be false.80
At the same time, as we saw in the discussion of industrial espionage in Chapters 4 and 5, for skilled workers possessing specialized and desired knowledge, capitalists have not merely opened the door to immigrants but deployed more positive, even seductive measures to woe such workers. Besides offering higher wages than those available in immigrants’ countries of origin – albeit often low from locals’ point of view – some capitalists’ recruitment methods have played up the attractions of the jobs they offer, both nature of the work
As for those still avoiding the labor market by clinging to land, capitalists continued to support any and all measures designed to favor the development of agrarian capitalism rather than small family farms or peasant communities with collectively owned land. The processes Marx describes in Chapter 30 of Capital, on the rise of agrarian capitalism, continued to haunt the countryside, forced to follow basically the same path as manufacturing industry, i.e., ever greater concentration of the control of required resources, in this case land. Concentration was hastened by the spread of banking to rural areas, not to provide aid to small farmers but rather to finance the investments of emerging agribusiness (big, more credit-worthy farmers). And when they did make loans to small farmers, with the latter’s only collateral being land, such loans took the form of mortgages. As a result, recurrent bad times provided the banks with opportunities to take over the lands of small farmers and resell them to more profitable and creditworthy agrarian capitalists, further expelling the rural population from the land and bolstering the “manpower” available to labor markets.
Given the importance of agricultural production, both to feed workers being herded into urban labor markets and for many countries a major source of gold from exports and thus – through taxation – of revenue to governments, the latter increasingly began to encourage and subsidize agrarian capitalism at the expense of small farmers and the indigenous.84 One early form of subsidy in the US was the formation of the Land Grant universities following the Morrill Act of 1862, mentioned in Section 7.1.1. Those universities were financed by and sometimes located on the roughly 11 million acres of land stolen from some 250 Native American tribes.85 These institutions developed research capabilities aimed at hastening the technological development of agriculture. As might
Against the almost universal desire of worn-out workers to escape both work and the labor market as they have neared the end of their lives, capitalists’ primary countermeasures have been two: one intentional, one a byproduct. The intentional measure has been keeping wages and salaries so low that saving enough to live on after quitting work has been very difficult or impossible, forcing people to work until they drop. The byproduct has been that aforementioned breakup of extended families that for millennia provided people with support in old age. (See Chapter 4, Section 3.3.3.2) What we now know as “pensions” – where ex-employers or governments provide post-wage income to support workers no longer earning either wages or salaries – were scarce to nonexistent for most workers until very late in the nineteenth century. The only group of workers to receive pensions early on were soldiers, which in the US began shortly after Independence in 1799 and expanded in the wake of the Revolutionary and Civil wars. Then came pensions for the guardians of capitalist property, the police, with New York City setting up a pension plan in 1857. The first private pension funds in the US came only in 1875 (American Express) and 1880 (Baltimore and Ohio Railroad), financed by both worker and employer contributions.87 As might be expected these plans were mainly aimed at the embarrassingly visible disabled and could be canceled at the employer’s whim. And, at least in the case of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, their plan came in response to the great Railroad Workers’ strike of 1877. The velvet glove of a limited pension plan followed up the more brutal use of force during the strike.88
7.2.2 Stemming Flight from the Labor Market
So many workers have fled labor markets through which they were previously employed – discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 – that capitalists have repeatedly tried to stem the resulting reduction in available labor-power.90 In Chapter 4, Section 3.2.2.2, I distinguished between motivations based on conditions in labor markets and jobs that might provoke workers to flee and those that might attract them elsewhere. How have capitalists responded to those very different kinds of motivations?
In the case of both low wages and lousy working conditions, obviously capitalists could reduce flight by paying higher wages, shortening working hours and spending money to make work safer. While common enough for managers, they have, however, always been loath to do so for poorly paid manual workers. For the most part they have only raised those workers’ wages when forced to do so, either by a dearth of workers or by laws.91 It has been the same with both shorter working hours and working conditions. Resistance to shortening the one and spending money on the second seems to have been virtually universal. For each capitalist firm, fewer hours of work reduce output, sales and profits. Thus, their enthusiastic embrace of Senior’s argument that a single hour’s reduction would wipe out all profit (See, Section 8.1.1.1). Money spent on safety equipment increases costs and reduces profits. It’s cheaper to tell workers to “just be careful.” This resistance has been just one part of the capitalist
A typically repressive capitalist move to stem worker flight has been the passage of laws restricting the ability of workers to change employers anywhere within the law’s reach. This amounted to an adaptation of traditional guild restrictions placed on apprentices and journeymen that tried to tie them to those who had trained them.93 This tendency to restrict movement was opposed by Adam Smith, one of those few cases where his arguments didn’t sit well with many capitalists. He wrote: “The statute of apprenticeship obstructs the free circulation of labour from one employment to another, even in the same place.”94 Recognizing and accepting how workers would naturally move from low wage to higher wage jobs, Smith thought this labor market dynamic facilitates capitalist development by allowing labor to move where capitalists need it most (and therefore pay higher wages). So many capitalists disagreed, putting their own corporate interests above any concern with the economy as a whole, that they were able to get laws passed blocking such flight.
A common contract imposed on individual industrial workers has bound them to the contracting employer yet provided no obligation on the part of the employer to provide either regular employment or steady payment for work performed.95 Contractual clauses making withdrawal from employment difficult – no matter how dangerous and exploitative the conditions of work – have combined with statutes making it easy for employers to bring charges against workers. These laws, which have allowed for summary enforcement by local
Of early labor laws in Britain, Douglas Hay recounts that between 1720 and 1792, Parliament passed ten different statutes providing for imprisonment for workers who “breached their contracts.”97 As with earlier Master and Servant laws, these statutes were systematically enforced, with few exceptions. Of later laws more favorable to workers, written under pressure, Marx wrote, “Parliament passed five Labour Laws between 1802 and 1833, but was shrewd enough not to vote a penny for their compulsory implementation, for the necessary official personnel, etc. They remained a dead letter.”98 Typical result: in the two years of 1854 and 1855, “5,560 workmen and women [were] summarily convicted and imprisoned in England, Wales and Ireland.”99 A similar situation obtained in France, during the regime (1830–1848) of the “bourgeois king” Louis Philippe I: “the one Factory Act passed during his reign, that of 22 March 1841 [limiting working hours for children], was never put into force … Only since 1853 and in a single department – the Nord – has a paid government inspector been appointed.”100 Eventually, despite such rigged legal systems, workers’ collective formation of both covert and overt organizations, e.g., secret pacts or public unions in which they pooled some of their meager wages, dramatically increased their ability to organize resistance, such as strikes, to fight for higher wages, shorter hours and better working conditions. On capitalist responses to the threat posed to production by such self-organization, see Section 8.1.1 below.
When it came to unemployed workers, whether they were fleeing the labor market or failed to find a job in it, the economist whose ideas appealed to and were appropriated by capitalists most fervently was Thomas Malthus, especially his arguments aimed at making life for the unemployed as hard as possible by reducing or eliminating charity, e.g., Poor Law relief.102 The objective, of course, was and has always been to drive workers off relief, out of workhouses and into the labor market as quickly as possible.103 Workers, of course, have sought more relief and better conditions – but with little success in Marx and Engels’ time – so being out of a job was truly a hardship.104
By constantly turning workers into “supernumeraries”, large-scale industry, in all countries where it has taken root, spurs on rapid increases in emigration and the colonization of foreign lands, which are thereby converted into settlements for growing the raw material of the mother country, just as Australia, for example, was converted into a colony for growing wool.105
As a result of capitalist support for emigration the British state gradually evolved various administrative agencies for overseeing emigration and passed laws such as the Passenger Acts which regulated conditions of transporting emigrants oversees. When and where emigrants were desired, recipient colonial governments supported loose enforcement of protections for emigrants and cheap passage. Where the influx became too great and caused problems, they demanded restrictions. Similarly, attitudes within the British government at home depended on perceptions of the relative importance of various needs, which were often contradictory. The need to export what were viewed as an excess population of unwanted, troublesome workers vied with protests about the conditions of transportation (unseaworthy ships, fraud and
As views of state officials varied, so did those of capitalists but always in line with their interests in having a manageable, exploitable supply of labor. For example, when crises in demand for goods caused the expelling of workers from employment, adding to those displaced by machinery, employers feared emigration of the “supernumeraries” would deprive them of workers when demand rebounded and they needed them. One such case, which Marx analyzes in Volume I of Capital, was during the crisis in the British cotton industry resulting from the American Civil War and the “cotton famine” when hundreds of thousands of “hands” were laid off. So bleak was the situation that workers organized themselves to emigrate. In Chapter 15, Section 8, Marx quotes from a “proclamation issued in 1853 by some cotton workers, for the purpose of forming an emigration society”, which points out not only how millions have already emigrated but how, even in the most “prosperous” of times, “a large percentage of the male adults … find it impossible to obtain work in factories on any condition whatsoever.”107
The response of the cotton mill owners was predictable: they vociferously opposed any emigration, demanding that the unemployed and destitute workers be kept around for “one, two or three years” until the industry revives! Letting all that “mental and trained [labor] power” leave would cripple the industry because they could not be replaced “for a generation.” In this, as Marx points out in Chapter 25, Section 3, they were backed by their economist apologists, with both Herman Merivale (1806–1874) and Thomas Malthus providing arguments in support of preventing emigration in order to keep workers in reserve for employers’ eventual need.108
And how did Parliament respond? Although in earlier times it had subsidized emigration, in this case it did “not vote a single farthing in aid of emigration, but simply passed some Act empowering the municipal corporations to keep the workers in a state of semi-starvation.”109 As a result of this blockage of emigration by laid-off industrial workers, Marx found that most English emigrants were from agriculture, most often “tenant-farmers’ sons, etc.” and their
As I discussed in Chapter 4, Section 3.2.2.2, among the “mental and trained [labor] power” sometimes fleeing through emigration were not only “hands”, but highly skilled workers – critical to the operation of specialized new equipment. Such workers capitalists were even more loath to lose because they might carry their knowledge to competitors. So, adding to opposition to the departure of less skilled labor-power, capitalists demanded and obtained laws to punish both those who sought to entice such workers away, and any enticed workers who dared to leave.111 In short, just as capitalists supported immigration when they wanted more workers, they opposed emigration when they were afraid of losing those they needed.
In the case of individual workers fleeing the labor market to set up small businesses or of collective flight to cooperatives, besides the various restrictions mentioned above, capitalists have countered in two main ways. First, setting up small businesses or cooperatives requires financing, usually beyond the resources of individuals or even small groups. The initiators of such projects must therefore often have recourse to banks or other financial resources. Taking on debt means accepting the capitalist mandate of profit-making, merely to repay loans and interest on them. Regardless of how a small business or cooperative is organized internally, it must meet this very capitalist criterion to survive. So, the labor of those escaping exploitation and alienation in waged jobs is recuperated via debt.
Second, some capitalists encourage “start-ups”, even by ex-employees, because it amounts to an out-sourcing of risk. If they are successful, larger corporations with more resources can absorb them via mergers and takeovers or outcompete them in the marketplace. In all cases, they effectively neutralize their otherness and those who fled are forced back into the labor market and recuperated. These dynamics result in an increase in what Marx called the “centralization” of capital, which enhances the power of the more successful competitors.112
Well aware of all those forces cutting into their supply of labor, capitalists and their strategists developed measures to either counteract the effects or ward them off.
7.2.3.1 Countering Disease and Starvation
With the development of theories of disease that recognized not only potential causes but the existence of transmission and circulation, governments, often spurred by capitalists, began to take more preventive steps. They ranged from the simple, traditional quarantining of ships from infected ports or of hospital patients to the inspection of places suspected of harboring disease or facilitating its transmission, such as working conditions or horrible housing.
Capitalists generally tried to deny any causal relationship between working conditions and diseases such as black lung disease, which crippled coal miners or byssinosis, which crippled workers in textile factories. They were also resistant to the work of doctors who revealed how the low wages they were paying resulted in malnutrition and greater susceptibility to disease. They were more supportive of the work of public health inspectors against pandemic diseases such as the bubonic plague, cholera, typhus, measles, tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever, smallpox, influenza, all of which periodically resulted in serious reductions in the available workforce, increased costs (of maintenance or turnover) and reduced profits. For the most part, while the functionaries of capital who could fled disease-ridden cities, they got government (taxpayers) to foot the bill for dealing with and preventing such diseases, such as the bubonic plague, which was endemic to London but once again reached epidemic proportions in 1665–66.
The work that has been done was done for a very practical hard-headed reason – that of self-interest … sick people cannot work … It may have been an enlightened self-interest but it was largely done because they [American Companies] could not get out the ore, or raise the bananas or pump the oil unless these fundamentals were taken care of.113
The ‘improvement’ of towns that the sheer fear of contagious diseases, which do not spare even ‘respectable people’, brought into existence from 1847 to 1864 no less than ten Acts of Parliament on sanitation … all the measures for the improvement of public health … by demolishing uninhabitable houses, driven the workers out of some districts only to crowd them into still more closely in other districts.114
Where capitalist philanthropies have funded initial public health efforts, the usual objective has been to first demonstrate feasibility and then foist the costs of preventing disruption caused by disease onto the government and taxpaying workers.115 While some capitalists may profit directly from the required expenditures of taxpayer money, for example in building or operating sanitation infrastructure or developing new medical treatments, the primary benefit to most capitalists derives from a healthier and more stable workforce.116
In colonial areas of the nineteenth century, where disease or fluctuations in weather have caused widespread suffering through drought or flooding, obvious countermeasures – such as the delivery of food and medical aid to local,
7.2.3.2 Countering the Military Poaching of Workers
With military recruitment geared to the needs of capitalists rather than workers, both at home and abroad and with workers serving as cannon fodder in wars, the primary source of resistance has naturally been among workers.
But the “needs of capitalists” have never been uniform and have often been contradictory. While I have highlighted conflicts between capitalists in different countries, there have also been conflicts at home, over the priority of needs in the allocation of the labor force. Whereas some capitalists have needed the military, and thus recruitment and conscription, to help control either domestic or colonized workers and protect trade, other capitalists – such as the agrarian capitalists during the Crimean War, mentioned by Marx in Chapter 4, Section 3.2.2.3.2 – have resisted having their workers drawn off because it reduces their supply of labor, raises wages and sometimes forces them to invest in labor-saving technology. In this, the interests of workers resisting conscription and their employers coincided. While Marx’s example mentions only farmers “howling” in protest, the influence of many capitalists in government has long been sufficient to achieve “exemptions” (dispenses in France) from military recruitment.
To more traditional excuses, such as infirmity, capitalists claimed not only the essentiality of some workers to the national interest but also the impossibility of replacing them. The rationale for some exemptions have been obvious enough not to ruffle the feathers of supporters of recruitment, e.g., workers in war-related industries who crank out the instruments of war. But capitalists also deemed others basic to the stability of the economy, such as coal miners or sailors on ships carrying coal whose work was vital to the emerging age of steam-driven machinery in manufacturing. By one account in Britain “by mid-[nineteenth] century over 50,000 protections were in circulation.”118
7.2.3.3 Managing Family Size
With increasing income, and its potential to reduce families’ need for children, having little effect in the nineteenth century, by far the greater threat to the capitalist management of the labor supply through the family, was resistance by women to being broodmares. It was certainly to forestall or counter such resistance that capitalists deployed every weapon at their disposal, including ideology, law, and force.
With patriarchy long pre-dating capitalism, its functionaries found many ideological weapons ready to hand and only requiring adaptation. For example, capitalists readily embraced long-standing church doctrines, such as those “domestic codes” that have given husbands dominion over wives and children. For example, Christian marriage rituals have often clearly stated that the objective of marriage is to breed children – more sheep for the church’s tithed flock – and, conveniently, more workers for capitalists’ labor force. So too, have marriage vows often demanded that women, but not men, obey their spouse.121 All these have sanctified the role of men as mediating overseers of
Consistent with this, capitalist legal codes and laws have been written to legalize this gender domination, granting more rights to men, e.g., adult male suffrage years before that of women, husband control over their wives’ property. Until fairly recently married women had zero property rights and any property acquired before marriage became their husband’s. Men could rape their wives with impunity, even have them locked up at will. Both religious and secular ideas were deployed to justify these injustices. While social codes worked against middle-class women finding independence through waged work, for working-class women they were often means of survival.122 This family hierarchy also served to justify gender inequality in the labor market where men’s wages were presumed to provide the main support of families, whereas women’s wages were treated as supplemental, less needed, and less well paid. Complementing laws codifying marriages between men and women, were those outlawing not only gay marriage but all forms of “sodomy” – assumed unproductive of children/workers – and demanding the punishment of transgressions with imprisonment or death. Of all this, Marx and Engels were undoubtedly aware, but said little.
As discussed in Chapter 5, the inevitable result of how women have been treated has been their continuing struggle against their subordination. Against day-to-day domination by men, often including violence, women have often had little recourse except escape, either psychological or physical; counterviolence, of course, has never been tolerated. Against the expectation that women should be wives and wives should breed children, women could refuse or delay marriage and, married or not, they have had recourse to various forms of birth
As Silvia Federici has shown, in considerable, nauseating detail, in her book Caliban and the Witch (2004), the capitalist repression of women’s abilities to control their birth rates started early during the first period of “primitive accumulation.” That repression included not only attacks on birth control but on women’s power more generally, especially when exercised autonomously in ways which ran counter to capitalist needs. So, in the wake of dramatic reductions in population such as that caused by the Black Death, and thus in the number of workers available to employers, repression of women’s ability to control their own bodies and reproduction took the violent form of witch hunts, sanctioned by complicit capitalists, government officials and clergy.124 Although the methods of repression changed over time, efforts to limit women’ access to various methods of birth control continued throughout the nineteenth century. Although they were undoubtedly aware of these conflicts, I’ve found no evidence of either Marx or Engels analyzing them, in either published writings or correspondence.125
7.2.4 Offsetting Overzealous Investment
When zealous investment and speculation result in the demand for labor outstripping its supply and workers take advantage of competition among capitalists and the leverage it gives them to force wages up enough to cut into
Partly, the increases in wages may help with the supply of labor-power by drawing more workers into the labor force, i.e., drawing workers out of the “latent” or “stagnant” reserve and into the “floating” reserve to look for jobs that now pay more. But Marx and Engels describe many other ways that capitalists try to control and manipulate the labor market in their own interest. Prominent have been strategies to maintain an excess supply of labor that will keep downward pressure on wages, countering workers’ struggles for higher wages or salaries. Having plenty of workers looking for jobs also makes it easier to get rid of militant workers, e.g., activists, unionizers, and replace them. Capitalist strategies for obtaining such an excess include those processes of primitive accumulation that strip people of alternatives to the labor market and penalize resistance to entering it – processes that continue to this day.126 Excess supply in the form of an unwaged reserve army has generally been maintained by annexing ever-greater sources of labor and by replenishing the reserves through population growth and the introduction of labor displacing machinery.127
But when such measures fail, and demand does outstrip supply, capitalists have some alternatives. Although in Marx’s analysis, the labor market lies in the realm of circulation/exchange, as in the case of transportation the labor market also involves work – that by workers seeking out employment, but also by workers hired by capitalists to go out and find workers. As a general rule, capitalists prefer labor markets to be so well stocked that paying someone to find workers is not needed because workers are doing the unwaged work of looking for work, knocking on factory gates or office doors, engaging in what economists today call “job search.”128 Nevertheless, where desperate
Where there is constant pressure for immigration into the labor force and governments are playing a role in either blocking or facilitating the inflow of immigrant or migrant labor, they can obviously ease or tighten restrictions to regulate the flow and the resultant supply. As in the case of Irish workers, such inflows, from whatever source, can increase competition and counter pressures
7.3 Offsetting Crises in Buying the Means of Production, M – MP
Buyer strategies for offsetting shortages of MP or deficiencies in their quality have taken several forms depending on the source of the problem. An obvious strategy to offset cutoffs in supply from one seller is to diversify sources, whether they are domestic or foreign. This was apparently the response of Irish flax growers when imports of flax seed from the colonies were cut off by the American Revolution.133 Another response to such dependence on foreign seeds, has been to maintain local production by preserving seed from one crop for the next.134 As discussed in Chapter 4, Section 3.3.6, British textile manufacturers also switched suppliers in response to the Cotton Famine during the American Civil War. They replaced American with Egyptian and Indian cotton.
Clearly, the history of colonialism shows that one of its objectives and results was to create new sources of raw materials for the industries of the colonizing countries. Not only new sources, but cheaper sources as Marx analyzes
While Marx draws principally on the colonial experience of England for his examples, the same was true for all colonial powers. Every population colonized was forced to produce raw materials for the colonizers’ home industries, whether those materials came from agriculture or from mining. Nowhere did colonialists favor the development of local sites of manufacturing production that could compete with their own industries.139
The standard economist counter to problems in barter trade has long been replacing barter with trade using money – Marx’s “universal equivalent.” However, as mentioned in Chapter 4, Section 3.3.1, that has not always been possible because some folks, from whom capitalists have wanted to obtain goods, have historically had no use for money.
In the case of the North American fur trade, I mentioned possibilities of crisis in both the supply and demand for furs. From early on the counter to inadequate supply was two-fold. (1) European traders pushed ever deeper into the continent, developing relations with more and more tribes, elaborating a complex of trade progressively diverse in sources and therefore not only increasing total supply but making it more stable. (2) Contesting colonial powers, e.g., the French and English, allied with different tribes and, often playing on pre-existing antagonisms, pitted them against each other, not only over the fur trade but over the control of whole territories.
Unfortunately for trappers and capitalists buying their furs, the only counter to the long-run problem of depletion was the eventual option of “farming” fur-bearing animals, breeding them for their fur, e.g., mink farming, which began in 1860s. That industry marginalized trappers. It would not be until the end of the nineteenth century that governments began to worry about “conservation”, e.g., President Theodore Roosevelt who established the first National Parks and National Forests in the United States. The regulated preservation of wilderness areas could protect species within them, but by that time fur production was largely industrialized.140 Like hunting more generally, trapping was largely reduced to a bloodlust hobby, rather than a commercial source of fur. Barter no longer played a role.
Similarly, trappers and merchants had no control over the primary source of demand for fur: fashion. So, for example when the felt hats made from beaver fur went out of fashion, the demand for that kind of fur disappeared with the demand for the hats. The only possible response was to switch to trapping or
7.3.2 Countering Workers’ Struggles that Reduce the Availability of MP
In Chapter 4, Section 3.3.2, on workers’ struggles that might cause a crisis in the supply of MP, I mentioned only how job actions such as strikes, slowdowns, etc., could have two effects. First, shutting down production stops additions to supply, while demand continues to grow. When whole industries are involved, the result can be serious shortages. Second, when such actions have proved successful, they have raised wages or other benefits increasing the costs of production, reducing profits for both producers of MP and for buyers who are forced to pay higher prices.
Until they were forced to negotiate with worker-organized collectives such as unions, the primary response of capitalists was repression: laws outlawing such actions, bringing in scabs from the reserve army and deploying violent force, by company goons, local militias or the military. That was largely the scene discovered by Marx and Engels when they turned their attention to investigating the class struggles of their time.
An alternative managerial response to anticipated strikes has been to ramp up production, with the objective of building up inventories that they could continue to sell even if strikes or other job actions shut down production. This has been particularly effective when inventories are not subject to deterioration. So, for example, coal mining companies have built up huge piles of coal and grain traders have filled silos to the brim to sell from during shortages, whereas before refrigeration neither fruits nor vegetables could withstand long delays in sales.
7.3.3 Countering the Direct Appropriation of MP
As indicated in section Chapter 4, Section 3.3.3, both workers and other capitalists sometimes directly appropriate means of production. Because capitalist laws accord ownership of those MP to the capitalist firms whose workers produce them, direct appropriation is treated as “theft” in both cases, with the appropriators subject to arrest and prosecution if they are caught. The obvious counters are all those means which either thwart or result in the apprehension of the “thieves.” Let’s start with direct appropriation by workers.
Among the countermeasures taken by capitalists have been surveillance and efforts to secure C(MP)’ from direct appropriation. In the case of poachers, surveillance was by forest and game wardens. In that of the “socking” of tobacco, all along its material circuit, surveillance was by overseers at each work location. Watching out for direct appropriation complemented the more general purpose of surveillance: making sure workers are doing what they have been told to do, the way they have been told to do it, using only the tools provided, in the time specified by management and not doing anything else!
An early example of capitalist thinking about surveillance was the concept of the panopticon developed by the economist Jeremy Bentham (1747–1748) – physical arrangements to maximize surveillance while minimizing its cost by requiring fewer overseers.142 Although Bentham was focused on organizing prisons to control prisoner behavior, it turned out to be an inspiring example for organizing surveillance to control workers, whether in a prison, a factory, an office, or a school and has been applied in all those workplaces. It obviously serves to thwart direct appropriation as well as putting psychological pressure on workers to keep working.143
Where they have been able to do so, capitalists have developed a variety of means to physically secure their C(MP)’ from direct appropriation. Indeed, the threat has often been a goad to innovation. Whereas it’s hard to “secure” a forest, except by fences or walls generally too expensive to be worth the effort, experimentation has led capitalists to secure many MP commodities in a variety of ways, from marking them, e.g., branding livestock, to packing
7.3.4 Reducing Time Lags
The inevitable capitalist response to the problem of time lags in the flow of information about the degree to which the quantity supplied to the market for MP matches the quantity demanded for the same MP has been to embrace every new technology that sped up that flow. As Marx’s extended analysis of “turnover” in Part Two of Volume 2 of Capital showed, the greater the speed at which each stage and the whole circuit of capital is completed, the greater the profit. Therefore, built-in to the capitalist mindset is a general desire to speed up operations – indeed, it is precisely the tendency to increase production as fast as possible – in the absence of good information about demand – that contributes to excess inventory and glut. So, while capitalists have quickly adopted new technologies of transportation for gaining more rapid access to MP and sales of output, they have also embraced faster communication. In the nineteenth century, that also encouraged replacing wagons and canal boats by railroads, sailing vessels by steam-powered ones, traditional mail by optical and then electric telegraph. The first successful cable from Britain to France was laid in 1850. The first transatlantic cable and the first cable from England to India were laid in 1866, dramatically increasing the speed of information flows about market conditions among several of the world’s largest markets. In the process, the quicker flow of information meant less likelihood of crisis-level mismatches between supply and demand.
… railway speculation, which, within the last eight years, were started in Prussia. These speculations, by raising the value of ready money, increased the depreciation of stock in trade, and were themselves, on an average not very profitable, on account of the comparatively thin population and trade of the greater part of the country. They offered, however, a still better chance of profit than other industrial investments; and thus everyone who could dispose of some capital engaged in them. Very soon these speculations assumed, as usual, a feverish character and ended in a crisis … 146
Thus, not only does the increased speed of information flows encourage speculation by tapping those flows, but the very industries that speed up the flows become themselves the targets of speculation.147
7.3.5 Offsetting Crises for Buyers of MP Caused by Nature
Where buyers of MP have no control or influence over their sources of MP, in the short term the best they can do is hedge against Nature-caused shortages and resulting high prices by diversifying their sources, so that not all would be hit by the same catastrophe at the same time. In the longer term, they have often taken over those sources, which has given them greater ability to anticipate and counter the hazards of Nature. Where the sources are domestic, this has usually been done by buying out producers or gaining control over them via contracts.148 Where the sources have been foreign, they have been taken
Securing lines of supply of MP has also involved obtaining support from the government, in everything from colonialization through armed protection for shipping to the creation of infrastructure both at home and abroad. The rail lines built across the United States that provided the means to bring grain from the “Corn Belt” to Eastern markets and livestock from Western ranches to Midwest and East Coast slaughterhouses were financed by vast land grants and secured bonds from governments, both national and local.149 Pretty much the same obtained in the case of rail lines in colonies designed to speed the export of raw materials to home industry as well as to facilitate the movement of troops to quell local uprisings against the colonizing power.150
7.3.6 Circumventing Blockades
Besides prevailing on governments – through legal action or lobbying – to reduce or remove legal obstacles to the circulation of technology or goods and services, capitalists have used industrial espionage to circumvent them, as discussed in Chapter 4, Section 3.3.3.2 on the theft of technology by capitalists.
Both capitalists and governments have used smuggling to break both legal and physical blockades. Smuggling by capitalists has been endemic wherever the imposition of customs duties or other kinds of taxes on imported goods have been put in place. Because taxes raise the prices of taxed goods, there have been markets for cheaper, contraband goods, whether they be MS or MP.151 The same methods, used to avoid expensive taxes, have been used to circumvent physical blockades put in place by governments for political reasons, usually of diplomatic enemies in times of war as during the Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil war.
A legal method of circumventing blockades was diversification of foreign markets (for exporters) and sources (for importers). Thus, besides smuggling
8 Offsets in the Second Stage of the Circuit: Production, … P …
Turning to the point of production, the job place, where capitalists own the means of production, factories, fields, mines, offices, machines, raw materials, etc., and organize workers with the objective of producing as much as they judge profitable, I have already touched on the many conflicts that arise and threaten the realization of that objective. As in the labor market, the methods capitalists deploy depend on the nature of the crisis they face, whether in the actions of the workers they have hired or in the supply or quality of their means of production.
8.1 Countering Breakdowns in Labor-Power
In Chapter 5, Section 2.1, I identified several forces acting to disrupt the extraction of work from labor-power, including the struggles of workers and apparently exogenous forces such as violent acts of nature which can harm workers. Capitalists have had to confront both of these disruptive threats and have taken action at both the level of individual firms, collectively through non-governmental organizations (such as the Chamber of Commerce in the US), and through the state. Let’s begin by examining their responses to workers’ struggles and then turn to threats from Nature.
8.1.1 Countering Predispositions of Workers to Work Less
As Marx has pointed out, workers struggle against both exploitation due to overwork (by fighting for less work) and alienation (by subverting other characteristics of jobs). To the various forms of struggle, capitalists have deployed responses on several of the levels mentioned above: force, law, ideology and structural change. Often, they have been deployed simultaneously, on two or more fronts in this class war. Which have been chosen has depended on the nature of workers’ struggles.
8.1.1.1 Countering Resistance to Exploitation
Exploitation – the extraction of surplus labor and surplus value in commodity production – is undermined by successful struggles to raise wages, those to reduce working time, and those to work less intensely. These struggles may be individual or collective, with the latter being far more effective. Obviously,
All success in reducing work time directly reduces absolute surplus value and, if on a large enough scale, causes a crisis for capital. The importance Marx ascribed to the struggle over work time is amply demonstrated by Chapter 10 of Volume I of Capital being among the longest in the book. In that chapter, he traced the nature of the struggle between waged workers and their employers: right vs right, force vs force and its secular dynamics.
But this struggle has also taken place between capitalists and other kinds of workers, e.g., indentured servants, slaves, workhouse inmates and prison labor.152 Wherever capitalists have been able to employ these kinds of workers to produce commodities, they have sought to impose as much work as necessary to gain surplus value. All these workers have resisted and their employers have had to counter their resistance. The main effort analyzed in Chapter 10 involved increasing extracted work by pushing for a longer working day, whether by informal “nibbling and cribbling” – a few more minutes here, a few more there – or by extending the formal, contracted hours of labor.153 However, in the case of unwaged or marginally waged workers, there has often been no formal working day and the amount of work extracted has simply been the byproduct of struggle.154
In the case of waged workers, as Marx showed in Chapter 10, capitalists, their apologists, and the state have used various methods to overcome or undermine workers’ resistance to long or intense labor. From early on, during the rise of capitalism, when workers were weak, we saw how capitalists were able
With respect to struggles to work less, capitalists have promulgated laws facilitating countermeasures. When and where laws permitted chattel slavery, they also sanctioned whatever violence slave-owning capitalists felt required to use. Once legal slavery was abolished, laws concerning indentured, waged and salaried workers only permitted less violent countermeasures. While imposing no constraints as to how employers organize production, no matter how exploitative and alienating, they legalized the power to respond to workers’ roles in crises of production (from accidents to struggle) not only by dismissal but also by bringing charges in court that could result in fines, corporal punishment, imprisonment, or transportation.156
But, over time, as capitalists have gathered more and more workers together at various sites of production, and as workers have recognized their common situation and organized collectively, they have more effectively threatened absolute surplus value through collective sabotage on the job, strikes, and lobbying for laws, such as the Factory Acts, to mandate shorter working days.
The initial response by capitalists to this new threat was to stiffen oversight and to get laws written and passed that banned worker attempts to organize collectively to bargain with their employers. “All combinations contracts, oaths, etc. by which masons and carpenters reciprocally bound themselves were declared null and void. Workers’ combinations were treated as heinous crimes from the fourteenth century until 1825.”157 The charge was usually conspiracy – whether the objective was raising wages, shortening the hours of work or improving working conditions. Such laws included the Le Chapelier Law of 1791 in France banning “coalitions” of workers and strikes and the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 in Britain banning both trade unions and collective bargaining.
This was the legal situation which the Chartist demands for voting rights were aimed at correcting through electoral politics. The failure of their protests and petitions, however, resulted in unions not being legalized in Britain until the Trade Union Act of 1871.159 The French Law of 1791 was only partially overturned in 1864 by the Loi Olivier, and not completely replaced until 1884 by the Waldeck-Rousseau Law legalizing collective organizations of workers (and of businesses!).160
As Marx detailed in Chapter 10, capitalists resisted every demand for less work, fighting against the Factory Acts in Parliament and the Press. Their efforts were buttressed by their apologists – especially economists – who provided arguments as to why less work would have devastating effects on the economy and thus on the welfare of society as a whole. Among those whose arguments Marx addressed directly was Nassau Senior (1790–1864). He argued against the Factory Act of 1839 limiting the use of child labor and the Factory Act of 1847, which granted the 10-hour day. His argument that reducing the working day would wipe out capitalist profits was thoroughly debunked by Marx in Chapter 9, Section 3, of Volume 1 of Capital. Senior was not, however, alone among economists in providing arguments about how much work should be forthcoming from workers.
Worker success at forcing their employers to recognize unions and bargain collectively, while forcing some capitalists to grant wage increases, reducing exploitation, has also given other capitalists a new incentive to raise wages: warding off efforts by their own workers to unionize. Higher wages, equal to or even exceeding those won by unionized workers became a price some employers have become willing to pay to avoid all the other annoyances caused by unions, e.g., conflict over working conditions, working hours, etc.
On the ideological front, economists have contributed to this new phase in the class war by providing arguments about the kinds of deals that might be cut, granting some concessions to workers but without seriously impeding the realization of surplus value and profits. As we saw in Chapter 2, Engels recognized and analyzed this shift in his 1885 update to The Condition of the Working Class in England.161 His assertion that labor unions had come to be seen as “perfectly legitimate institutions and as useful means of spreading sound economical doctrines amongst the workers” is amply illustrated by the case of William
In a lecture on “The importance of Diffusing Knowledge of Political Economy,” originally delivered to public primary school teachers in 1866, Jevons argued for the instruction of workers to begin at a very early age – “almost as soon, in fact, as a boy [sic!] has acquired the power of reading with facility.”162 The urgency Jevons saw for such education was two-fold, first it was aimed at reducing future strife such as strikes and violence, and second, the prospect of the working classes of England obtaining the right to vote raised the specter of workers successfully imposing laws such as “minimum wage” or “living wage” laws that would violate the “natural laws that govern the relations of capital and labor” and disrupt the economy, undermine liberty and drive capitalists to invest abroad.
In that lecture, and in a subsequent invited lecture given two years later to Trades Unionists’ Political Association in Manchester, Jevons spelled out in some detail which kinds of struggles he thought legitimate for union actions and which were not.163 Among those actions he felt were legitimate were: the mutual aid activities of “friendly societies,” demands for greater safety, sanitation, etc., in working conditions, and the demands for shorter working hours. In the case of working hours, Jevons clearly thought that workers were perfectly justified in wanting to take part of the fruits of rising productivity in less work. This was a major shift from Senior’s absolute opposition to any reduction in the working day.
His position on this subject was based on his marginalist theory. Although he didn’t recognize it, his position was consistent with Marx’s theory of relative surplus value via rising productivity. In both cases, the possibilities of combining increased profits with less work were endless. The only issue is how much of the gains do workers get (and in what form) and how much do capitalists get. Only capitalist greed, demanding 100 percent of productivity gains in the form of surplus value precludes any reduction in work. When Marx was writing in the 1860s, capitalists were generally holding out for that 100 percent. But by the 1880s, under pressure from unions and with the help of marginalist theory, some were beginning to see alternatives. Jevons’ only caveats were
Despite such efforts, workers taking time away from work for themselves has continued to be so prevalent on the job that whole industries of surveillance and legal prosecution have grown up to identify and minimize “time theft.”166
8.1.1.2 Countering Resistance to Alienation
Although the term “alienation” has only recently been added to the vocabulary of those capitalists have hired to study and help control their workers, e.g., managers and industrial sociologists and psychologists, the existence of worker discontent with various aspects of their jobs has always been known and dealt with by bosses in various ways. Marx’s breakdown of alienation into four kinds can serve to organize how functionaries of capital have responded to discontent. Efforts to turn alienated workers into happy ones who “whistle while they work,” like the dwarves in Disney’s film Snow White (1937), have sometimes been a joke, sometime serious.167
But, as you move up the income/control hierarchy, the degree to which managers try to impose detailed control is reduced and workers are allowed greater latitude in exactly how they utilize their tools or operate their machines. At
The alienation of workers from their products, owned by their bosses (or corporate entities) and only legally appropriable by workers through purchase, is built-in to the system and, as previously discussed, conducive to direct appropriation or sabotage. Besides surveillance to minimize such actions, some managers have also sought to foster worker identification with the company in which they are employed and its products. Two methods have been used: profit sharing and identification with the company’s “brand.” With profit-sharing, workers get a personal stake in the success of “their” company, with sales of “their” products.170 With attachment to “brand” workers are encouraged to feel like the products of their labors are “theirs,” at least in the sense of being the products of their work. As capitalist efforts to sell usually involve salespersons touting the good qualities of “their” products, it is with those qualities that managers would like their workers to identify – even to the point of being willing to testify in advertisements about those good qualities to which they are “proud” to have contributed! The rare exceptions to absolute alienation of the product have been when workers have been paid, in part, with some small portion of their product, e.g., farm workers getting part of the harvest as payment or Linebaugh’s silk workers getting excess cloth.
Because the alienation of workers from each other has always been a mainstay of capitalist management, “divide and conquer” being the name of the game, ostensible efforts to foster things such as “teamwork” have been either superficial (and mocked by workers) or risk contributing to anti-management bonding and collective resistance – of the sort Marx thought inherent in bringing workers together under similar circumstances of exploitation and
Although capitalists sometimes give lip-service to “respecting and treating their workers as human beings” with wills of their own, what Marx considers the essential “being” of the human species, managers’ need for control over what workers are doing requires carefully setting limits to whatever freedom workers are granted to exercise their collective will – to make sure workers’ “choices” remain within those limits. So, even where teams in factories, mines, or fields are allowed to organize who does what when, their choices are limited by both manager-set objectives and available tools and methods. The same is true even where workers seem to have the greatest freedom, e.g., in academic laboratories. By controlling research funds and requiring the designation of “principal investigator” (PI) in grant applications, capitalists are able to determine what gets researched, by which team of collaborating scientists, and who is held to account.
As for life outside their waged or salaried jobs, already in Marx and Engels time, capitalists were beginning to infringe on workers’ self-determination, both individual and collective, to make sure their choices would shape that life to reproduce labor-power rather than undermine it. As previously indicated, that shaping has become ever more detailed and intrusive, in families, in communities, in schools, in everyday experiences throughout the social factory.171
8.1.2 Countering Harm from Nature
Given 1) the demonstrated proclivity of nineteenth century capitalists to impose poverty-level wages and horrible living conditions on workers, 2) their equally demonstrated lack of action when millions were dying in colonies, and 3) how little they regularly allowed to be spent on “relief,” their only apparent motives for doing anything at all to counter harm to workers from natural phenomena were two-fold: threats to their needed supply of labor-power and threat of angry uprisings by suffering workers.
Along with low wages and miserable “relief”, cost-minimizing capitalists tended to spend as little as possible building factories and even less on shoddy, working-class housing, making both kinds of constructions vulnerable to fire, flood and earthquakes. (Discussed in Chapter 5 section 2.1.2) Painful experience of the dangers posed by these practices did lead to widespread protests by workers from all parts of the wage/wealth hierarchy and the creation of building codes to counter the worst results of such behavior. For example, the Great Fire of London in 1666 that decimated timber-based buildings and fear of “rebellion amongst the dispossessed refugees” led to the Rebuilding of London Act requiring some fire resistance in construction.172 Continued vulnerabilities eventually led to national standards in Britain with the Building Act of 1844 regulating many aspects of building design and construction. However, given what Engels observed and Marx found in the reports of Public Health and Factory Inspectors, it seems those standards were poorly enforced, workers continued to suffer from that failure, and labor shortages were recurrent.
Natural threats to poor construction, of course, have varied according to the geographies of empire. While earthquakes strong enough to cause serious damage to factories and human habitations were relatively rare in nineteenth century Great Britain, they were far more common and devastating in other areas, e.g., Venezuela (1812), Palestine (1837), Japan (1847, 1854, 1896), Italy (1857, 1887), Iran (1893), striking not only on land but also offshore, promulgating tsunamis that have wreaked havoc on coastal cities and communities. The same has been true with flooding due to heavy monsoons or violent storms, far more destructive along rivers and in low lying deltas than further inland. To reduce damage from flooding, dams and levees have been built – usually by capitalists under contract to governments, and paid for by tax-paying workers. When such constructions have been poorly executed and subsequently given way, the results have been even more devastating, e.g., the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864 brought on by the collapse of the Dale Kyke Dam upon its very
8.2 Countering Breakdowns in the Means of Production
Breakdowns in the means of production can be caused either by deficient quantity or by deficient quality. Difficulties with the quality of the means of production can happen in both their production and in their utilization. With the quality of the means of production, MP, being key to the costs of production of those who buy them, and thus to their bottom line, those purchasing MP pay close attention to the quality of what they buy. Knowing this, the producers of MP must pay just as close attention to the quality of the MP they are bringing to market. Once purchased, once M – C(MP) is completed and MP are fed into the production process their quality and how they are handled or miss-handled, will determine their effective costs and thus profits.
8.2.1 Countering Workers’ Actions vis-à-vis MP
As in the case of C(MS), the recognition by bosses of the threat of exploited and alienated mine, agricultural or machine workers sabotaging, to a greater or lesser degree, their production of C(MP) and reducing their quality has motivated many means of surveillance. Some methods of surveillance have been direct, e.g., overseers watching workers while they work; some have been indirect, e.g., the exercise of quality control to catch the results of any sabotage and to identify those responsible. In Chapter 5, Section 2.2.1, I mentioned the example of miners adding rock to the ore they cut when its weight determines their wage. Until outlawed, mine companies would employ children, “breaker boys”, sitting next to conveyor belts carrying the new ore, with the job of spotting and removing such rocks and other “impurities.” When workers are paid by the piece and piece-rates are kept low to encourage more intense labor, the same dynamic also encourages carelessness with the potential for damaging the pieces being produced. In fruit harvesting, for example, fast but rough
While consulting with cannery workers in South Texas, I observed an assembly line of women forking cooked spinach into cans which were then placed on a conveyer at the end of which they were weighed to make sure just enough spinach was in each can. Because each worker’s supply of cans was marked to identify the individual worker, the quality control operator checking the weight of the cans could identify any woman whose weight was either too low or too high. Similar modes of quality control have been utilized by capitalist bosses throughout every domain of production.
In the two cases Marx noted, of Surat cotton and Chinese silkworm cocoons, the filth of the first and the irregularity of the second suggest serious failure on the part of those managing their production to exert effective quality control. We don’t know exactly who was responsible, only that there was a breakdown in the production of these two MP used in the production of textiles.
8.2.2 Countering Harm from Nature
Just as capitalists try to organize and control workers to minimize disruptions they may cause, either in the production of MP or in their utilization, so too do they try to protect their production of commodities from the vagaries of Nature. Levees along rivers are raised to protect crops from flooding. Dams can do the same, but also provide controlled flows of water for irrigation or to drive machinery (or later for hydroelectric power). Typically, capitalists try to get governments to finance such infrastructure projects. When sufficient ground water is available, from dams or wells, irrigation nourishes crops in dry lands. By also protecting them from drought or flood, these measures prevent dramatic variations in the quantity and quality of crops and associated changes in price and profitability – to both MP producers and MP consumers.
Irrigation also facilitates multi-cropping in the tropics, which evens out the production of MP over the growing seasons and helps counter the problem Marx noted of capitalists finding it easier to quickly increase their machines than their supplies of raw materials. In temperate climates, capitalists complement irrigation with “hot houses”, essentially moving production inside to protect crops from variations in the weather.
Similar to artificially supplying steady amounts of water to plants (and animals) has been the practice of countering both soil depletion (as plants suck up nutrients) and any original lack of nutrients (poor soils) with fertilization, either through rotating crops, or by adding nutrients, from animal wastes or
The agribusiness practice of short-term profit maximization through monoculture, which makes the crop more vulnerable to any disease or parasite to which the one chosen strain proves susceptible, has forced capitalists to turn to poisons (pesticides or fungicides) to counter infestations of bugs or fungi feasting on crops. As parasites develop tolerance to such poisons, dosage is increased over time, and eventually operators are forced to have recourse to new poisons. The develop of ever new poisons is, of course, costly, so capitalists have done their best to shift the cost onto taxpayers (government subsidies) or to invest in their development by the chemical industry.175 So, profiting from monoculture opens the door to profits from the ever-greater amount (or type) of chemicals required to protect crops.
While all the measures listed above are taken to avoid natural erratic fluctuations in particular processes of commodity production, capitalists in many industries also use the quite different but common strategy: diversifying their sources of MP. So, if, for example, a disease ravages crops or animals in one place, or a political blockade cuts off sources from another place, access to multiple sources reduces disruption and the degree of crisis for buyers of MP. Sometimes diversification has been forced, as in the sudden cut-off of grain from the continent during the Napoleonic Wars or that of cotton during the American Civil War. But repeated experience with the dangers of having a single source has taught capitalists to diversify to avoid such moments.176
Against all these threats to the quality and quantity of their means of production, capitalists have invested in the insurance industry – both in the sense
8.3 Offsets to Crises Due to Rising Organic Composition of Capital
Because raising the organic composition of capital is based on increasing the technical composition, MP/LP, primarily by substituting labor-displacing machines for workers, this strategy creates two kinds of problems for capitalists. First, because it always involves a reorganization of production and has often been aimed at undercutting workers’ power, they resist – with slowdowns and strikes or the destruction of machinery, even whole factories. How capitalists have chosen to cope with that resistance has varied. Second, because this strategy has tended to be adopted in sector after sector, from manufacturing through agriculture to finance, the spreading displacement of workers undermines capital’s need to find jobs to keep the vast majority of the population under control – either in jobs, preparing for jobs or rearing and repairing those condemned to jobs. Let’s see how capitalists have responded to these two tendencies to crisis.
With respect to worker resistance, many have had recourse to the immediate use of force by mobilizing their goons to take out activists, or calling in the cops or militia or army to put down strikes, etc. Other capitalist managers have tried to convince workers that bringing in machinery is being imposed by competition and is therefore unavoidable. This argument was portrayed by Charlotte Brontë in her novel Shirley in which a capitalist, Mr. Moore, appeals to competition in refusing to even slow down the installation of new frames and shears into his mill.
… if I stopped by the way an instant, while others are rushing on, I should be trodden down. If I did as you wish me to do, I should be bankrupt in a month: and would my bankruptcy put bread into your hungry children’s mouths?177
Failing to convince his workers to accept his planned investment, Mr. Moore switches to the more common response in Marx and Engels’ time: appeals to
As workers have won the legalization of unions and collective bargaining, along with reduced working hours and higher wages, some capitalists have found themselves forced to negotiate with workers. However much they might appeal to “managerial prerogative”, workers have forced “shopfloor” issues, such as changes in technology onto the negotiating agenda, alongside wages, hours, benefits, etc. In these situations, thanks to economists who have shown how the increased productivity achieved by investing in new technology can finance both higher wages and more profits, some capitalists have cut deals with workers by offering higher wages in exchange for collaboration with labor-displacing changes in technology. More money to quell worker resistance to the loss of jobs with new technologies.179
With respect to the second problem – that of creating enough jobs to keep people working (both waged and unwaged) – where letting the unemployed starve is not an option (as it sometimes has been), capitalists have found several options. The primary counter has been the creation of new jobs, either through the expansion of existing industries, at home or abroad, or the creation of new ones. In the long term, although only beginning in Marx and Engels’ time, the primary source of new industries has been in the creation of services, of all sorts. Along the way, of course, The solution to unemployed workers refusing
8.4 Offsets to the Falling Rate of Profit Tendency
Marx’s most detailed assessment of offsets or counters to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall identifies five factors. His discussions of these five Engels collects in Chapter 13 on “Counteracting Factors” in Volume 3 of Capital.
The first of the five factors is the “More Intense Exploitation of Labour.” Greater intensity means working harder, working faster in a given time. The primary way capitalists achieve this, Marx shows, is through their use of machinery. For one thing, many machines can be speeded up, forcing workers to keep up by working faster.181 For another, where work on machines is reduced to mere tending (see above), workers can be forced to tend or take care of two or more machines. The classic case in the textile industry is the tending of looms, which, once set up, mostly require only the quick repair of broken threads. So, workers, often children in the nineteenth century, can be set to watching and fixing breaks in more than one loom, shuffling from one
An entirely different kind of offset deriving from the deployment of machinery has been its use in providing excuses for prolonging the working day – fighting efforts of workers to shorten it. Where machines are inside and lighting is available, machines can be run 24 hours a day, with multiple shifts of workers. Where set-up time (when no raw material is being processed) is substantial, employers try to minimize costs by keeping machines running as long as possible. All these methods are aimed at increasing the rate of exploitation, s/v, and total surplus value, s, where possible. Finally, Marx points out how the use of machines facilitates the employment of women and children and thus the extraction of more surplus labor from working-class families.
The second factor is the “Reduction of Wages Below Their Value.” Although only mentioned in Chapter 13, by evoking “competition”, he clearly has in mind anything that increases competition among workers for jobs and by so doing forces them to accept lower wages, v, which lowers (v + c), raising profits, s/(v + c). This could, for example, be true for any influx of migrant or immigrant labor. Both phenomena increase the likelihood that employers are able to drive down wages, even below levels required to reproduce employed workers at their existing level of skill and endurance. Result: malnutrition, illness, more accidents, shorter lives. The frequency of this in the nineteenth century leads Marx to call it “one of the most important factors in stemming the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.”182
The third factor is the “Cheapening of the Elements of Constant Capital.” Cheapening “c” clearly complements cheapening “v” with the similar result of lowering (v + c) and raising the rate of profit. With most of Chapter 5 in Volume 3 devoted to this subject, it is only mentioned here. Unlike some of his later followers, he does NOT conclude that this contradicts his argument about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.183 It doesn’t because no fall in the value of constant capital unconnected to a change in ML/LP will change the organic composition of capital, co/vo.
The fourth factor is “The Relative Surplus Population”, the growth of which is accelerated by the substitution of machinery for labor. That growth
The fifth factor is “Foreign Trade.” Here Marx notes its contradictory effects. When it brings in cheaper MP and MS, this will increase profits by reducing the value of c and v, that increase in profits will accelerate accumulation and therefore the tendencies for the organic composition of capital to rise and the rate of profit to fall. But he also notes how “investment in foreign trade can yield a higher rate of profit”, indeed, a “surplus profit”, much like early investors in new technology who are able to sell their goods above their value because their competitors have lower productivity. Foreign trade, of course, is often accompanied by direct foreign investment (taking over production) that, he points out, can also earn a higher rate of profit, partly because of cheaper labor (“slaves and coolies”).185 The advantages of more developed countries, which can sell their products to lesser developed ones at lower prices (“battering down the walls of China”), can, however, result in overproduction in the latter – another kind of crisis all together.186
The sixth and last of Marx’s “other factors” is “The Increase in Share Capital.” From the point of view of the company that sells “shares”, say initial stock offerings to raise money for real investment, M – C(MP, LP), the money raised is money borrowed and will have to be paid back with interest, a deduction from its profits or surplus value. For Marx, “interest”, no matter who gets it, is, like rent, paid out of surplus value.187 Stock issuance, like the financial intermediation of banks that take in deposits and loan out money for real investment, is a way of channeling money that might otherwise be spent on consumption into real investment. However, from the point of view of whoever buys the shares, whether from the issuing company or on the open market, they are making
Once we understand that at the heart of “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” lies the increasing difficulty of putting people to work, resulting from the steady increase in technical and organic compositions of capital, then pretty much everything that creates new jobs has the short-run ability to offset the tendency even if, in the long-run, such new employment proves profitable, accelerates accumulation, and “hastens the tendency.”
9 Offsets in the Third Stage of the Circuit: Sales
Having identified the possibilities and predispositions to crisis in three different kinds of markets, for slave labor-power, for the means of subsistence and for the means of production, let’s turn to the strategies used to offset, prevent or respond to these crises.
9.1 Dealing with Crises in Selling Slaves, C(LP) – M′
Given the way force has always been involved in some humans enslaving others, the resistance by slaves, whether daily slacking, sabotage, or efforts to escape or revolt have also generally been met by force. The brutality of many
Despite and partly in reaction to all this repression, the struggles of slaves, ex-slaves, and abolitionists to outlaw slavery and all its brutality went on, year after year, decade after decade, in the public arena, in the courts and in parliaments. Slavers and pro-slavery ideologs, of course, fought back in what proved, eventually, a losing battle.
The spread of anti-slavery and abolitionist ideas forced slavers and their apologists to come up with justifications for slavery. A central rationale – unsupported by scientific evidence and derided by most scientists – was that negroes are an inferior “race,” another form of primate with brains inferior to those of white humans of European descent. It was an idea that paralleled similar arguments about the inherent inferiority of women that made them, it was argued, unfit for higher level jobs. The pseudo-scientific argument that essentially classified negroes as sub-human animals, made their enslavement as reasonable as that of other non-humans, such as horses or cattle. This ideology, which would later mutate into eugenics, was often complemented by the Christian beliefs that God gave humans dominion over all of nature to use for their own purposes. However, interpretations of religion to justified slavery was not limited to Christianity but could also be found in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.
Others rejected such interpretations and argued against them on either theological grounds or differing philosophies, so conflicts over the legitimacy
One famous debate was between Thomas Carlisle (1795–1881) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). The discovery that slavery effectively continued in the West Indies led to renewed abolitionist efforts to suppress it. Against those efforts, Carlisle, a racist who believed that Anglo-Saxons constituted a superior race, published a vicious essay in 1849 supporting the official relegalization of slavery. John Stuart Mill responded with a counter essay. Carlisle’s belief that labor was a virtue and work should be imposed on any who resisted, both the waged and unwaged, was countered by Mill’s utilitarian understanding that while work was necessary and should be adequately compensated, its shirking was understandable.189
Another, albeit less prevalent pro-slavery idea was that while ownership of slaves was justified, it also involved as much responsibility for the welfare of slaves as for the welfare of other animals. This role was largely ignored by more brutal owners but embraced by those with a feudal-like sense of “noblesse oblige” toward their inferiors. Those who drew rationales for slavery from the Christian Bible, argued parallels between the divine right of husbands (men) over wives (women) and children.190 Not surprisingly, the idea more often guided the behavior of slave owners toward slaves working within their homes than toward field hands. This idea was consistent with Christian ideas that emphasized human “stewardship” over the rest of nature, not merely the right to exploitation.191 In the US, Christian justifications of slavery outlived emancipation.192
Although slavery was outlawed in most of the British Empire by 1833, it took almost thirty more years before the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863
Yet, despite these adjustments through which some capitalists succeeded in limiting the freedom of supposedly “free” labor, many other capitalists have been able to maintain out-and-out slavery, albeit illegal. In some cases, slavers have been able to do this through corruption, i.e., buying complicity from the government or its agents. Other capitalists have moved their slaves into the shadows, out of public view, sequestering them in homes, orphanages, brothels, sweat shops, remote farms, or fishing vessels at sea where they are put to work and exploited, or sold off to other capitalists for similar purposes.194
9.2 Dealing with Crises in Selling C(MS)’ or C(MP)’
As noted in Chapter 4, Section 5.2, the common, everyday problem facing producers of both consumer goods and the means of production is producing exactly the amount that, when marketed, will just equal the quantity demanded at profitable prices. If they produce too much, more than the market can bear, costly inventories will build up, prices will fall and profits along with them. When the discrepancy is great, the result can be crisis. For Marx and Engels, this possible problem periodically became a real one because of the predisposition of all capitalists to produce as much as possible, as fast as possible, despite often not having good information about either the level of their competitors’ production or current market demand (see Chapter 5 section 3.2).
Capitalists have tried to counter these problems by taking measures to better control both supply (production) and demand. On the supply side, they have sought better control by either taking over or negotiating agreements with competitors to reduce or eliminate competition. The former is one route to that “centralization” of capital Marx analyzes in Chapter 25 of Volume I of
In the absence of such arrangements, individual capitalist firms try to expand demand by using lower prices, advertising, and product innovation to draw in new customers, some from competitors, which expands their share of the market. Sometimes, capitalists in the same industry have acted collectively, investing in generic advertising for their kind of product, e.g., milk, eggs, natural gas, and supported policies which expand the market for that product, a boon to all producers.
The most obvious counter to poor information is better information. When the low quality of information is due to time lags, as Marx and Engels thought, the counter is speeding up information flows. (See, Section 7.3.4). For a long time, the only way to speed up information flows was to speed up the travel of those with the needed information. Thus, an understandable interest by both industrial capitalists and merchants in the replacement of roads or canals with railroads and of sailing or paddlewheel vessels with faster steamers. These new technologies would speed up the flow of information as well as that of commodities (reduce turnover time), essentially by speeding up the movement of people or of correspondence with knowledge of market conditions.
The development of the telegraph, Marx and Engels clearly saw as dramatically improving the speed of transmission of information about markets. But, as Marx wrote in 1855, despite transforming “the whole of Europe into one big commodity exchange”,
How firms selling C(MS)’ have dealt with such problems has differed somewhat from those selling C(MP)’, so I deal with them separately below.
9.2.1 Countering Crises in Selling the Means of Subsistence, C(MS)’ – M′
Obviously, first and foremost, capitalists try to avoid crises in selling consumer goods. They do this with strategies aimed at ensuring adequate demand for their products and gearing production to available markets.
On the demand side, as Marx showed in his analysis of primitive accumulation, by expropriating and enclosing most land and other means of production, capitalists have done their best to monopolize the production of consumer goods and by so doing force people who need or want them to buy them – which, in turn forces them to seek jobs with wages or salaries to have the wherewithal to do so. To maintain this situation, they have needed to thwart any and all efforts to reverse enclosure and prevent direct appropriation, both of which decrease demand. At the same time, they have also done what they can to increase demand by trying to get people to buy whatever they are producing. Except at the lowest level of income, capitalist sellers of C(MS)’ are well aware that workers can hold on to their money rather than spend it. Thus, their investments in marketing, advertising, and face-to-face selling in retail outlets. (See, Chapter 3, Section 3)
On the supply side, producers try to minimize their costs of production while producing goods consumers will want to buy. While some producers of consumer goods may simply add to the supply of existing goods delivered to known markets, others try to draw on the creativity of their workers to develop and market new products, create new demand, new markets, and new opportunities to realize profits. In both cases, as we have seen, the quality of consumer goods have often been revealed to be deficient, even dangerous, causing crises for capitalists trying to sell them.
Let’s look at these in turn.
9.2.1.1 Countering Struggles to Reverse Enclosure
Against efforts to reverse enclosure and escape subordination to capital, capitalists have wielded ideology, laws, and force. Ideologically, the key concept has always been the sanctity of “private property” with land seizures treated as akin to stealing personal valuables. Laws protecting property have treated both as “theft,” with the only issue being the monetary value of what is stolen and the implications for punishment. The higher the estimated market value,
[Georg “Bauernjörg” Truchsess] cut off their supply routes and tried to demoralise them by burning about 200 villages in the vicinity. Hunger and the sight of their burning homes finally brought the peasants to their knees (July 25). More than twenty were immediately executed.197
When the Diggers seized St George’s Hill in 1649, just outside London, the owners moved against them.
… parson Platt and other Lords of manors in Surrey organized raids on the colony and an economic boycott; they harassed the Diggers with legal actions … Even after the Diggers moved to Cobham Heath a few miles away the raids continued, and by April 1650 the colony had been forcibly dispersed, huts and furniture burnt, the Diggers chased away from the area.198
When the Diggers tried similar seizures elsewhere, the response was always the same violence.
That violence, however, was limited compared to the genocide inflicted on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, throughout the hemisphere, when and where they resisted enclosure or tried to reverse it. In the British Isles and continental Europe, the conflicts were mostly among landlords, agrarian capitalists, and desperate members of the reserve army of labor over private
Where resistance was fierce, the invading settler forces sometimes negotiated, even signing treaties promising to leave some land to the natives. But as with the German peasants, again and again the negotiations and treaties merely delayed enclosure and were violated to take more land. With the laws and the courts controlled by the invaders, indigenous efforts to defend their land legally proved fruitless. Over time, European settlers and their descendants took all the best land for themselves and herded the remnants of the indigenous population into “reservations” with poor land and limited resources. Although the names changed, throughout the colonial world the same story was repeated with minor variations.200
All these rationales and laws mobilized to block the reversal of enclosure, however, have been repeatedly undermined by government seizures of privately owned land. By rationalizing such seizures as in the “public interest” and legalizing them as exercises in “eminent domain”, they have twisted the usual anti-enclosure argument that commons benefit society as a whole into a justification for new enclosures. The imposition of eminent domain for purposes of public infrastructure, e.g., roads, railroads and ports, has usually been peddled as benefiting everyone, despite being primarily of value to capital to move troops and cut the costs and time of transporting C(MS)’ and C(MP)’. Moreover, as Marx and Engels pointed out, those displaced have mostly been workers. In some cases, small farmers have been pushed off land granted to railroads or highways in rural areas. In others, urban infrastructure has been
9.2.1.2 Countering the Direct Appropriation of C(MS)’
Besides pervasive ideology extolling the sanctity of private property and the myriad laws protecting it – mostly enforced by police and the judiciary to protect capitalist private property rather than the much-evoked personal property – the primary counters to the direct appropriation of consumer goods have been surveillance and the use of force to prevent, stop, or punish.
In the case of surveillance, in Marx and Engels’ time, within spaces of production it was the work of shopkeepers, company goons, or hired guards. In society at large, it was the work of sheriffs, constables, police and, in some cases the military.201 Surveillance was required all along the material circuit of production and transportation, and everywhere workers were supposed to spend their hard-earned wages to buy MS but might choose instead to take what they need or want.202
The need for the deployment of force against direct appropriation, to get finished goods to market, and to get them sold, grew with the expansion of production and markets, both at home and abroad. The police force created in Paris in 1667 was designed primarily to “procure abundance” – of goods in shops – by protecting businesses, not individuals. In England, in 1797, merchants created a police force to prevent direct appropriation from ships handling consumer goods and from the docks along the Thames in London. That private force would eventually merge with the Metropolitan Police Service, created in 1829. A similar evolution took place in other places in response
Besides policing day to day markets, capitalists have also had to contend with major, collective uprisings that have included the direct appropriation of goods by outraged and angry workers. To such revolt, capitalists have responded in two ways: 1) with violence – using police and military to put down workers and protect property – and 2) with various forms of “poor relief” to avoid future revolt.204 In the nineteenth century, minimal subsistence was doled out, mainly through “Parish relief” and “workhouses” in England and Wales (“poorhouses” in Scotland), where those without jobs or income were fed, housed and in the case of children, sometimes provided some modicum of “education” – but only in exchange for make-work, i.e., unskilled labor, such as breaking stones, crushing bones for fertilizer or picking oakum.205 Though their inmates had
As the export trade in consumer goods grew along with their production, so too did the need for armed protection of shipping, on land, canals, and rivers against hijacking, on the high seas against mutiny, piracy, and foreign powers. Guards were ubiquitous in freight shipping, not only on the stagecoaches and railroad freight cars often portrayed in Western films, but around the world defending commodities carried in camel trains, freight wagons, flatboats, keelboats, canal boats, sailing vessels and eventually steamboats. Seagoing commercial vessels were armed, both to maintain control of their crews and to repel pirates, or, during wartime, foreign warships. They often sailed in convoys for mutual protection, escorted by warships of their nation of origin.207
Obviously, force played a central role in colonialism, both in annexing land and labor for the production of raw materials for factories back home, and in opening new markets for MS. Chinese (or Indian, or Indonesian, or African) walls were hammered down, not only by the “cheap goods” noted in the Communist Manifesto, but by gunboats and troops deployed for conquest, pacification, destruction of local competition or, as in the case of the opium trade, simply forcing foreign governments to accept particular goods.
Finally, besides guards, police, and the military, where practical, physical measures have been taken to avoid losses of C(MS)’ due to direct appropriation or theft. In Section 7.3.3, I mentioned the enclosure of tobacco leaf in hogsheads during shipment. Walls were built around factories and other workplaces, e.g., shipyards. The capitalists who organized a police force to protect their goods on the London docks also built walls around those docks. Like those around manufacturing factories, they served a double purpose: making
9.2.1.3 Countering Problems with the Use-Values of C(MS)’
Capitalists’ first line of defence against questions about the use-values of their commodities has always been proactive: efforts to convince potential buyers of their goods’ glowing, spectacular qualities. In the nineteenth century, those efforts were mainly verbal assurances given by sellers directly to consumers and advertising in print, mostly in handbills, magazines, and newspapers. Until the mid-1800’s, in Britain and the United States there was virtually no government regulation of the quality of consumer goods or advertising, so “Snake Oil” of all sorts could be sold with all the advertising lies their producers could come up with.
Under the circumstances, as mentioned in Chapter 5 section 3.2.1.3, revelations of the poor or dangerous quality of products came primarily from independent sources such as Arthur Hassall in Britain, whom Marx cites about poor quality bread, or Frederick Accum who revealed the same practices decades earlier. Against such revelations, capitalists not only renewed their lies by denying claims but were not above harassing those exposing the dangers of their products. Short of expensive lawsuits against defamation few could afford, there was little or no protection for those journalists or scientists who exposed producer lies and crimes. Accum, who exposed faulty products in several industries, was so systematically harassed for his revelations that he was forced to flee England back to his native Germany.209 Hassall was luckier.
His work was discovered by Thomas Wakley, founder in 1823 and editor of The Lancet, an English medical journal. Already interested in the issue of adulteration, Wakley created the Analytical Sanitary Commission in 1851, invited Hassall to be the Commission’s chief analyst, write its reports – reports which ultimately identified companies producing adulterated products – and
But how to counter limits on the demand for even unadulterated, high-quality goods, i.e., those annoying limits eventually portrayed by economists as downward sloping demand curves, because buyers become scarce as expanding supply pushes prices below profitable levels? There have long been two obvious responses. The first has been to seek out new buyers for existing products (expand demand), often in new places, first domestically, then abroad, say in colonies where new markets were often created by destroying local production – a common dimension of imperialism. The second response has been attempts to manage demand. One way has been controlling the life cycle of commodities through “planned obsolescence” wherein products are designed to fail so more or newer ones can be sold, or the moment is planned at which they are no longer serviced and must be replaced. This avoids crisis because “death” has been factored into product development, with replacements ready for sale.213 Another way has been to diversify. Just as buyers of MP have often diversified their sources to respond to or as a hedge against possible
9.3 Dealing with Crises in Selling the Means of Production, C(MP)’ –M′
Given the objective of sellers of C(MP)’, like that of sellers of C(MS)’, is to maximize profits, the most obvious sources of crisis have been forces that reduce 1) the known quality of the MP, and thus the price at which they can be sold, 2) the quantity of MP, and thus the revenue obtainable from their sale, or 3) demand for the MP on offer.
9.3.1 Countering Crises due to Deterioration of the Quality of MP
Leaving aside measures taken in the production of MP to assure sufficient quality to sell, the primary sources of deterioration in quality during the effort to sell MP are in their storage or transportation. As indicated in Chapter 4, Section 5.2.3.3, the degree to which this can be a problem, and therefore countermeasures required, depends on the perishability of the MP. For MP such as coal or metal ores, neither storage nor shipment has any impact on their quality. On the other hand, MP such as tobacco, grains, lumber, or fibers are very much subject to deterioration; either in storage or during shipment from place of production to place of use. To counter this problem and thus preserve the value of their goods, capitalists have tried both to protect perishable goods and to shorten the time during which the MP lay in storage or the time of their transportation.
Protection during storage and transportation depends on the nature of the goods stored. The primary threats to the quality of grains, for example, endemic since long before capitalism, are weather (water), insects and rodents, so capitalists both continued the use of old, proven methods, such as tightly sealed containers, from large grain bins and storage barns to transportable barrels
As agribusiness displaced small-scale farming and the quantity of grain being produced, stored, and transported for commerce increased, along with the distances transported, new technologies were developed to handle and protect the increased amounts. For example, more traditional storage structures of wood or brick were replaced with metal silos, easier to seal and providing better protection. Wagons were replaced with specialized railroad cars, as were wooden ships and barges with dedicated metal ones. For some perishable foods, such as meat, which could only be sold locally or shipped during winter months, the development of refrigeration technology for trucks, railroad cars and “reefer ships” toward the end of the nineteenth century made year-round shipping possible. For a while, capitalists could use insulation and ice in trucks and railroad cars, but they had to wait for the development of new refrigeration technologies to make long-distance, trans-oceanic shipping of perishable goods possible.
Capitalists have also sought to preserve the quality of their MP during transportation by making use of faster transportation, whether by truck, rail, or ship. Faster transportation not only reduces the time of transportation, a quickening of turnover profitable to all capitalists, but for sellers of perishable MP it reduces the dangers of deterioration and the costs of transport, while increasing the number of potential markets.
9.3.2 Countering Reductions in the Supply of C(MP)’ for Sale
I’ve delineated several forces that potentially threaten reductions in the quantity of MP available for sale. These have included losses due to natural catastrophes and the direct appropriation of MP by workers and theft by other capitalists. Whether chronic or episodic, they have all required countermeasures by capitalists who want to avoid losses of their product and subsequent sales, revenue, and profits. On counters to natural catastrophes, see Section 8.1.2.
Whether at the original point of production or during transportation, capitalists have long taken the same kinds of measures to thwart losses of C(MP)’ that have been used to avoid losses of C(MS)’. As sketched in Section 9.2.1.2, these have included: 1) internal surveillance by overseers, supervisors and guards to make sure not only that workers do the work they’ve been assigned but that neither they nor anyone else take either MP on the job or produced MP waiting to be sold as C(MP)’ and 2) the mobilization of force through the state, justified ideologically as the protection of private property, in the form of police and even the military. To some degree, the nature of the C(MP)’ determines the measures used to prevent losses. While for high-value items in small numbers, guards at factories and on trucks or trains might suffice, lower-value bulk C(MP)’ being shipped long distances might require not only armed guards but military protection from privateers, pirates, or hostile foreign powers.
Along with all these measures to protect physical commodities have been those to protect less tangible ones, such as “proprietary” secret knowledge about methods used in production or embodied in commodities, whether goods or services. Just as early capitalists sought and obtained exclusive rights (later patents) to the use of specific production methods, to prevent others from appropriating the creations and innovations made by their workers,215 so too were copyright laws written against the appropriation of written materials.216
Given the centrality of competition in Marx’s analysis of the diffusion of technology, and his attention to protectionist measures blocking trade, I have been surprised to be unable to find any discussion by either him or Engels of either of these legal restrictions. Although ideologically rationalized to spur creativity, to the degree they have been enforced, both have slowed the diffusion of new creations to the profit of the owners of copyrights and patents and increased the cost to consumers or competitors. At the same time, they
9.3.2.2 Countering Reductions in Demand for C′(MP)’
There are several kinds of reductions in demand for MP to which their sellers have sought counters. Most common have been 1) foreseeable fluctuations in demand due to things such as changes in seasons. More dramatic have been 2) unforeseeable drops in the demand for MP or for the final products made using a given MP, and 3) the imposition of tariffs or other protectionist trade measures that cut off the ability to export to some markets.
In the case of foreseeable fluctuations in demand, e.g., less demand for feed grains and silage in the summer where livestock is let out to pasture, and thus fewer sales at lower prices and profits, normal capitalist business practice to avoid crisis is to adjust accordingly. When demand and prices drop, they hold on to their C(MP)’, albeit bearing the cost of accumulating inventories. When demand and prices rise, they sell more, drawing first on inventories then on new production.
Being able to do so requires planning ahead for adequate storage for their inventory of C(MP)’ and financing when prices, sales and revenue are low. Among obvious, visible, examples of such storage are grain bins and silos for temporarily storing silage, coal, sawdust, cement, etc. Such storage facilities may be small, e.g., located on individual farms or other local businesses, or huge, e.g., the rows of towering grain elevators owned by grain trading companies, located along railroads or rivers with gear designed for loading the stored material into rail cars or barges.218 In the case of grain or silage because they are perishable, storage requires specialized technologies, to maintain adequate
One counter to unexpected drops in the demand for some MP, or for the products for which MP is an input, has been to shift investment to the production of alternative products. In the case of the fur trade, the drop in the demand for the kinds of hats made from beaver-derived felt resulted in a drop in the demand for beaver fur. For trappers, whether Native American or Europeans, the only short-run counter was shifting their trapping/production to other kinds of animals to obtain other kinds of fur still desired by producers of other, still fashionable clothing.219 However, the demand for trapped furs of any kind also dropped with the development of “fur farming”, the industrialization of fur production by raising fur-bearing animals and then skinning them. As I pointed out in Chapter 4, Section 5.2.3.1, the development of this alternative source of furs reduced the demand for trapped furs, forcing many to abandon trapping and seek alternative sources of income.
Counters to unforeseen reductions in demand have varied depending on the source. Where markets have been cut off completely, producers have sought alternative markets for their MP, whether domestic or foreign, whether legal or illegal.220 Such was the problem facing grain producers in Napoleon’s empire when exports to Great Britain were outlawed by the French government and cut off by British blockades of French ports. The same problem faced wheat producers in the Czarist empire during the Crimean War when Anglo-French fleets cut off exports through the Black Sea and from St. Petersburg in the Baltic. Faced with legal and military obstacles to trade, smuggling and blockade running provided capitalists only risky and dangerous counters.
9.4 Countering Credit and Commercial Crises
Risk-averse, conservative managers of individual capitalist firms engaged in real investment, i.e., building or expanding production facilities, hiring new workers and arranging for increased sales, try to avoid the dangers of defaulting on debt by 1) minimizing borrowing by relying mainly on internally generated profits, 2) maximizing those profits to facilitate repayment of any necessary debt, 3) avoiding investment in what are obviously speculative adventures, and 4) maintaining reserves to cover any shortfalls in profits. Such caution is often the result of previous experience of losses when undertaking risky investments. Risk-taking managers, on the contrary, are more likely to borrow whatever is necessary for their investment schemes, including questionable ones that carry substantial risk – if they seem likely to bring high rates of profit.
The steady growth of credit instruments (securities) and markets for their sale and resale created whole new options for financial speculation, adding to those existing within the realm of real investment. As indicated in Chapter 5, Section 3.3, the temptation for risk-takers, whether capitalist managers deciding how to use their available monies or individuals deciding how to “invest” their savings, are obvious.
So, how to minimize the chances of default, resulting credit crises and their consequences? And how to counter those crises and consequences when avoidance fails?
For individual investors, the surest path is the conservative, risk-adverse one: just avoid speculative ventures of all sorts. For risk-takers who eschew such an approach, they often hedge their bets in two ways: 1) diversifying their “investments” so risky ones are offset by more secure ventures, and 2) taking a page from the risk-adverse playbook by maintaining reserves to cover potential losses. They also, frequently, count on government bailouts if things go sour.
While governments have much the same options with respect to their own debts, repeated experience with speculative booms and busts has also
So limited and so ineffective were regulations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Marx and Engels were often dismissive of such efforts. They watched again and again how the Bank of England would raise or lower its “bank rate” (interest rate), trying to stem developing crises, often in reaction to inflows and outflows of gold.221 Their skepticism was based partly on observation of how regulations, such as the Bank Act of 1844, were often set aside in crises.222 Marx’s theory of endogenous money also explained how Bank of England’s belief that it could control the amount of money in circulation – based on the quantity theory – was illusory and resulted in such failures.223 All of which convinced Marx and Engels that ultimately neither the efforts of private capitalists nor those of their stalwarts in government would prove effective in stemming the return of crises.
10 Offsets to the Circulation of Breakdown
Capitalists have always been aware of how crises in circuits at one point can circulate to other points, making everything worse. As I sketched in Chapter 5, Section 4, such circulation can occur within individual circuits of capital or from one circuit to another. With some ruptures capitalists have responded by trying to restore the way things were, simple reproduction, but with others, capitalists have been forced to accept and adapt to qualitative changes, e.g., the introduction of machines that displace labor, or the replacement of some machines with newer and more productive ones, altering the technology of production
10.1 Dealing with Qualitative Change
When capitalists fail to either forestall ruptures or “nip them in the bud”, they are often forced to cope with qualitative changes imposed by workers or other “outside” forces. As I noted in Chapter 5, Section 4.1., the source of qualitative changes within capitalist society is almost always, “in the final instance”, the self-activity of workers, often seeking creatively to break through the constraints imposed by capitalist efforts to always be in control and to maximize work and profits.
From the point of view of individual capitalists, one force that appears to be “outside” – to which Marx and Engels often pointed – was competition from other capitalists. The successful (profitable) implementation of change by others puts pressure on latecomers to make the same or similar changes. But that “outside” is only from the point of view of individual capitalists or firms, the class dynamics bringing change are “internal” to capital as a whole, lying within the antagonistic relationships between capitalists and workers. Even when workers have organized sufficiently to impose industry-wide or economy-wide changes, such as Factory Acts shortening working hours or limiting the use of child labor, dealing with such imposed changes takes place within individual firms.
Given how change always, inevitably, involves uncertainty, when faced with new contingencies, capitalists can either attempt to avoid change by clinging to familiar ways or adapt to a greater or lesser degree. When the source is worker self-activity, adaptation means harnessing this power-beyond-itself, taming and channeling worker creativity to its own objectives.224 So, when workers dream up new things they can make, capitalists only facilitate that making
Resistance to change, to adaptation, has also provided a common argument against protectionist trade measures. While supposedly buying time for improved productivity to make local production competitive, critics have often pointed to protected industries merely profiting from protectionist measures without making significant changes to increase productivity. Which capitalists choose – avoidance or adaptation – almost always depends on their evaluation of the impact of proposed changes on their control and what it does to their bottom line, estimated future profits.
With respect to control, the attachment of many bosses to “managerial prerogative” has often resulted in them ignoring suggestions by line workers that would require substantial (costly) changes and responding only to suggestions by workers trained as engineers or scientists. The latter are conditioned and trained to channel their creativity to solving only problems identified by management. But the effect of ignoring suggestions by other workers is to quash some ideas and by so doing discourage others.226 The obvious fear is of giving workers the sense of being more knowledgeable about and more in control
The greater the amount of new investment – say, in the reorganization of production or distribution – the more difficult it is to evaluate the impact of any given change, especially when both production and distribution are spread out over great distances and multiple markets – as they began to be in the Imperialist age of colonialism. In such cases, even the acceptance of some proposed change may result in only tentative, limited alterations, with the degree of follow-up being determined by initial results. Certainly, the failure of some new products to gain sufficient buyers to be profitable has provided some capitalists with reason for caution. See the discussion of product life cycles in Chapter 5, Section 3.2.1.3.
Even the recognition of new ideas as useful by capitalists who quickly have them patented or copyrighted, is no guarantee of their implementation, of actual change. The purpose of such legal protections, after all, is to ensure monopoly to their owners. But when and under what circumstances the protected ideas might be implemented is always contingent upon calculations of their effects and profitability. Inventors who sell patent rights to capitalists or writers who sign away copyright to journal or book editors may or may not see their creations materialize, depending on the new owners’ estimates of profitability.
10.2 Blunting Circulation within Individual Circuits
Having demonstrated in Chapter 5, Section 4, how crises can disrupt each stage of the circuit of individual capitals and circulate to other stages, let’s now look at what capitalists have done to counter the immediate spread of such disruption through the circuit in which they are investing. The measures they have taken have depended on both the originating cause and the mode of circulation. Continuing the pattern set out in Chapter 5, Section 4.2, let’s examine strategies
1) “M”? In Section 7.1 I sketched the many ways capitalists have sought to offset shortages in the monies they need for the investment required to initiate each circuit, whether starting from scratch or renewing their operations. Because many of those take considerable time to bring to fruition, e.g., the looting of newly colonized peoples, they cannot provide immediate relief to capitalists and prevent the effects of shortages from rippling through their circuits. The only ones that can are those providing immediate access to ready cash or credit.
Against the real possibility of failures in the previous circuit to generate enough surplus value to renew the required investment, capitalists who are able maintain reserves in the form of cash or highly liquid assets that they can draw upon to cover shortfalls. The primary alternative for those who are unable to maintain adequate reserves is credit, e.g., from financial institutions, individuals, or governments. From banks – whether private or government operated – they can try to borrow; from individuals they can try to peddle stocks and bonds; from governments they can seek subsidies in the form of transfers of money (usually easier for state enterprises). They can also lobby for policy changes – such as protectionist measures that by reducing outside competition allow them to sell at higher prices and realize higher profits. If successful in obtaining outside money and such protection, both M – LP and M – MP can be realized, preventing any circulation of interruption.
2) In the case of crises in M – LP due to shortages in available labor, caused by workers’ refusal to enter the labor market or their escape from it, the classic capitalist counter, Marx argues in Chapter 25 of Volume 1 of Capital has been the maintenance of a reserve army of desperate workers large enough to offset any such defections. Tapping that reserve, of course, has often required outlays in recruitment expenses, in both money and time (finding and evaluating possible hires). Much less preferred, and resisted where possible, is the obvious tactic of increasing wages or some other benefits to attract needed workers quickly enough to prevent any reduction in …P… or C′ – M′ – only possible without reducing other investment expenses (MP) if sufficient reserves are available. Such methods are more common for skilled jobs higher up the wage/salary hierarchy than for those lower down.
3) Capitalists often try to avoid crises in M – MP due to shortages in available MP, by buying more than is immediately needed and maintaining inventories to cover such shortfalls. To free themselves from dependence on suppliers of MP, one approach has been to take over the production of the needed MP, e.g., companies producing steel buy up and then operate iron or coal mines. Such “vertical integration” doesn’t eliminate possible shortfalls – mines can
Alternatively, shortages from one supplier, domestic or foreign, are countered by seeking and maintaining more than one source of supply. The history sketched in Chapter 2 demonstrated multiple occasions when capitalists have learned the hard way about the necessity of such diversity. Early in the nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic Wars and naval blockades, bread makers in England found themselves facing shortages of flour and forced to pay higher prices to local landlords/agribusiness. Decades later, English cotton textile manufacturers suddenly faced the need for optional sources when the American Civil War cut off supplies from what had been their main source. Assuming normal supplies of MP are always bought at the lowest price, buying from alternative suppliers may cost a bit more, but avoids any absolute shortfall whose effects would reverberate through the circuit, limiting …P…, C′, and C′ – M′, and causing a more serious crisis.
4) Turning to the production stage of the circuit, …P…, assuming no shortage of LP or MP, clearly the biggest threat facing the functionaries of capital are disruptions caused by workers’ struggles, or, in the case of agriculture, bad weather. By reducing or completely stopping production, strikes that stop …P… also limit C′ – M′, revenue, profit, and investment in the next period. The effects of bad weather depend, of course, on its severity, from merely reducing production to wiping it out completely, Experience has taught capitalists about such ripple effects, so management has long tried to either forestall or end any and all such disruptions as quickly as possible. Let’s look at these two kinds of counters.
First, with respect to workers’ struggles, forestalling means managing things with sticks and carrots so that workers don’t sabotage production or strike and shut it down completely. The threat of the stick for a long time, when strikes were illegal, was violence by company goons, local police, and the military and then by judicial prosecution. Even when and where workers have won the legal right to strike, the law hasn’t always been enforced and violence has been deployed. Where workers have won sufficient power for their legal rights to be enforced, capitalists have been more inclined to use carrots.
Failing to forestall strikes, capitalist countermeasures were usually violently repressive, attempts to nip such actions in the bud by immediately crushing them to prevent their effects from circulating. As illustrated in Chapter 2, Marx and Engels saw this repeatedly during the decades in which worker organizing was outlawed. Bringing in the police or the military to attack workers could and often has driven striking workers from factory gates or off the streets. But successfully restoring production requires either getting striking workers back to work or bringing in substitutes, i.e., strike breakers. But getting those out of work to “scab” on those on strike has required, along with the usual threat of poverty and starvation, success in turning some workers against others, undermining solidarity. Such success Marx and Engels saw in the capitalist cultivation of ethnic differences.
For example, during Marx’s time in Paris he observed, through direct contact, how different groups of workers could be played off against each other when organized separately, divided by language, culture, and history. This lack of communication, he saw, made solidarity between German and French workers difficult. He and Engels saw similar situations everywhere they went. In England, they saw how Irish workers were pitted against English ones in a fashion that made the latter hate the former.
All industrial and commercial centres in England now have a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians… This antagonism is kept artificially alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling class. This antagonism is the secret of the English working class’s impotence, despite its organization.230
Such methods undermined the potential for collaboration and lay the groundwork for using the Irish as strike breakers against English workers. Of course, given the opposition of striking workers to their replacement, armed and violent force has often been used to suppress strikers’ efforts to prevent scabs from getting into factories and restoring producti0n. However, where replacement workers refuse to be used, such methods fail.
Second, with respect to bad weather, countermeasures by capitalists have, per force, been limited to those aimed at mitigating the negative effects, often adapting traditional indigenous methods. For example, in response to drought, capitalists have continued the use of wells to provide water for irrigation but have also orchestrated the building of giant dams with the same purpose. In response to flooding by monsoon or typhoon rainfall in the floodplains of South Asia, agriculturalists have chosen “deep water” rice varieties capable of thriving even with flooding. Elsewhere, they have built dams on rivers and levies alongside them to prevent the flooding of more sensitive crops. But alongside such technological measures in production, capitalist ability to invest in expanded storage of some crops, such as grains, has facilitated speculation against bad weather, made it even more profitable than traditional hoarding by merchants, and likely responsible for some of the extensive starvation that occurred in the colonial period. (see Chapter 4, Section 3.2.2.3.1.)
The results of all such efforts have been mixed; sometimes production has been quickly restored, sometimes not. The longer the delay, the deeper the rupture and the wider the ramifications elsewhere.
If C′ – M′ comes to a halt in the case of one portion, for example, if the commodity is unsaleable, then the circuit of this part is interrupted … the successive parts that emerge from the production process as C′ find their change of function barred by their predecessors. If this continues for some time, production is restricted and the whole process brought to a standstill. Every delay in the succession brings the co-existence into disarray, every delay in one stage causes a greater or lesser delay in the entire circuit.231
As noted in Chapter 4, Section 5.2.1, not only can this problem arise for producers of both MS and MP, but conjuring new markets out of thin air is not an option. The only immediate or short-term solution for those who have overproduced for the available market demand is to lower their prices to sell, which means less revenue, lower profits, and reduced investment in the next circuit, i.e., the circulation of crisis.
Therefore, the only way capitalists in this situation can avoid the current crisis in C′ – M′ causing a crisis in the next period, e.g., bankruptcy, is to borrow money to replace their losses due to inadequate sales. Such interim financing or “bridge” borrowing essentially buys the time required to wait out temporary downturns in demand, to find new markets for current products, or shift production to new products for which markets are available. Being able to borrow in such circumstances usually requires such a past pattern of successful borrowing and repayment, as to reassure lenders and improve a firm’s credit rating. When the crisis is general, a large-scale commercial crisis, competition for available funds can be fierce. So, establishing such a pattern today provides a counter to potential failures in C′ – M′ tomorrow. Given the frequent recurrence of crisis throughout the nineteenth century, establishing good credit with commercial and industrial banks was often key to both short and long-term corporate survival.
10.3 Blunting Circulation among Interconnected Circuits
In Chapter 5, Section 4.3, I identified a number of connections among circuits of capital, through which crisis can circulate, the question now is what measures do capitalists take to avoid or blunt such circulation. Their preoccupation, of course, is offsetting the negative impact of the circulation of crises on their own operations, present and future, and only peripherally with how circulation affects workers.
1) M. When, in the midst of crisis, M must be borrowed from financial circuits, lenders are wary of the ability of borrowers to repay and tend to raise interest rates and toughen conditions for borrowers. They do this because if borrowers default on their loans, lenders’ assets shrink and they may also fail. To offset lender’s worries and increase their chances of getting loan money when they need it, capitalists try a) to have made as much profit as possible to demonstrate their creditworthiness, b) have maintained backup cash or liquid reserves for emergencies, c) take action to counter whatever difficulties they might have that trouble lenders, e.g., worker agitation, possible shortages of MP, and d) enlist government support when necessary for such counters, e.g., to put down worker strikes, to protect shipping lanes for imported MP. Where there is intense competition in borrowing, with rising interest rates and tougher conditions, businesses hope both their past and present actions will get them loans (at “prime” rates of interest) when others are turned down.
2) M – MP. Against potential reductions in either the producing or purchasing of MP, which would at least raise prices and cut profits, capitalists try to build up inventories that are greater than immediately needed. This Marx observed in the runup to the cotton crisis brought on by the Civil War in the United States. Textile industrialists in Britain also sought to influence government policies they believed would protect their supply lines, e.g., supporting the cotton-producing Confederacy. They failed but they did try. Such efforts are typical on the part of industries facing supply problems.
3) M – LP. Because disruption in M – LP in one circuit can cause disruption in others, capitalists have often tried to unite in a common front to limit such circulation, e.g., in fixing wages, opposing unions, or getting laws passed setting maximum wages or outlawing unions. This was just what Adam Smith observed and was the reason he supported counter self-organization on the part of workers. Marx and Engels, of course, also supported such self-organization, indeed did what they could to foster it, including its circulation from circuit to circuit, across ethnic and linguistic barriers. Because capitalists tended to fire militants, they also “blacklisted” them so others wouldn’t hire them. Blacklisting works where the labor pool is local and capitalists know each other. Absent such immediate connections, capitalists resort to careful evaluation in recruitment to avoid hiring potential activists. Accomplishing this often involved the use of the government, first in putting down worker actions, such as strikes or sabotage, followed by judicial repression and punishment: jail or transportation, e.g., to Australia.
4) …P…C(MS)′ – M′. How to counter crises in the production of the means of subsistence, which raises their prices, cuts real wages, and stirs up discontent, depends on the source of the crisis. When the breakdown is localized, one counter is diversifying sources, e.g., while drought or disease in one food producing area can be eventually be countered by irrigation or public health measures, immediate relief can be obtained by importing food from other, unaffected areas. (Precisely what Britain failed to do in Ireland and then in its colonies in South Asia, see Section 7.2.3.1.) Because crop failures are known to result in higher prices, both producers and merchants often hoard their supplies to further drive up prices. Capitalists faced with starving or upset workers have pressured governments to intervene against such price-gouging
5) C′ – M′ gluts. Countering the oversupply of commodities, which can involve either too much MS or too much MP, or both, is a problem, first and foremost for suppliers who, trying to sell their products in the face of inadequate demand, see their prices fall and with them revenues and profits. Buyers, of course, profit from the reduced costs. When the problem is only local producers can counter by holding on to inventory, withholding it from markets – but at the cost of storage. But where costs prove too great, one recourse is to destroy some of the excess, removing it permanently from the market and eliminating storage costs. During widespread and deep crises, where no immediate improvement in demand is expected, this solution has been far more frequent than commonly recognized.234 But even in more normal times, the recognition of excess supply has sometimes triggered collective destruction.235 Both situations contradict economists’ endless praise of the “efficiency” of capitalism.
Another counter has been for governments to intervene in either production or markets. In the former, they sometimes mandate cutbacks in production to reduce the excess of supply over demand. In the latter, they buy up excess production, supporting the price of the product being bought up and producer revenues and profits. Both methods have been used to manage the production and prices of grain destined for both consumer (cereal, bread, etc.) and producer (feed grain, seed) markets. The latter has also been used to create “strategic reserves” of MP judged essential, e.g., setting aside forests reserved for wooden ship building, or supplies of sources of energy such as coal or later oil. Such reserves keep prices up during gluts (and can be released to lower prices to offset unexpected reductions in supply).
In the Manuscript of 1864–1865, discussion of these factors begins on p. 336.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 926, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 748. Giger’s creature first appeared in the sci-fi film Alien (1979), which was popular enough to spawn a whole series. Like capital, which Marx often referred to a “vampire-like”, the creature in the film feeds off the workers in the freighter that discovers it. Like capital, its self-reproduction leaves dead bodies in its wake.
Despite some workers having won the legalization of unions in some places, the repression of other efforts has been widespread and even where they have been legalized, they have often been subject to such restrictions as to virtually neutralize their ability to fight for workers goals, e.g., the banning of strikes or closed shops and cooptation into collaboration with industry (see below). The terrorizing of immigrant communities has been recurrent and widespread throughout the capitalist world.
In recent years, it should suffice to evoke Vladimir Putin’s repeated jailing and assassination of political opponents, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s assassination and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi and the overt censorship of media by authoritarian forms of capitalism all over the world. While book banning has long been associated with Nazism, it has been increasingly deployed in the US as part of current right-wing attacks on the teaching of the history and nature of systemic racism and gender discrimination within capitalism.
The most familiar such firm in the US was the Pinkerton detective agency established in 1850 and, as previously noted, renowned for union busting. Such security firms – such as Blackwater/Academi – have evolved into providing private military forces, professional mercenaries, to anyone willing to pay, but most often to capitalist corporations and governments.
Most recently demonstrated in the US since the murder of George Floyd by multiple videos of white police killing unarmed Blacks and the repression of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests against just such racial discrimination.
All of these continue, albeit sometimes under different rubrics. Formal colonialism has often been replaced by neocolonialism that has maintained essentially the same relationships created prior to “liberation.” Settler colonialism in places like the US, Australia or Siberia, of course, has rarely been recognized as such except by its victims. Slum clearance is now called “urban renewal.” Enclosure of commons in the US is managed by the federal government through the “leasing” of public lands for private exploitation. The seizure of private lands is called the exercise of “imminent domain” for the “greater,” i.e., capitalist, good.
But then who qualifies as a barbarian and what behavior qualifies as barbaric have always been defined by those who call themselves “civilized,” from at least the Ancient Greeks to the present. It is worth remembering that the origin of the Greek word for barbarian, βάρβαρος, simply referred to languages the Greeks could not understand. In other words, the word derived from ignorance and was used to deride and demean others – including those with longstanding and highly literate cultures, even other Greeks – a practice that simply glossed over the ignorance. Ignorance, not only of other peoples’ languages but also of the rules and laws of their societies.
In the September 11, 2022 episode of John Oliver’s TV show “Last Week Tonight” he dissects exactly how TV cop shows, especially “Law & Order” glorify police and prosecutors while demeaning defense attorneys. By juxtaposing their representation on TV to actual data on police and prosecutorial behavior and results, he shows how this iconic TV show grossly misrepresents how both police and judiciary actually function in New York City and elsewhere, thus perpetrating myths about their role within capitalism.
In the wake of the Supreme Court attack on the right to abortion by overthrowing Roe vs Wade, we are seeing these conflicts play out on a massive scale all across the US. With some Supreme Court justices already discussing the possibility of banning contraception, that attack has clearly been only a first step aimed at rolling back women’s rights more generally and decomposing the power of women in the labor force as well as in society at large.
MECW, Vol. 3, pp. 3–129, 175–187.
Ibid., pp. 74, 102. Samuel Dyde’s translation is “the uncertainty of trade,” Philosophy of Right (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 162.
All these struggles, for equal rights for women, for the ending of slavery and for the rights of the descendants of ex-slaves, are still going on. In the United States, for example, attempts to deny citizen rights – to vote, to health care, etc. – to the descendants of ex-slaves and other “minorities” are currently rampant. The recent abolition of the Constitutional right to abortion – a right won by long struggles – by a US Supreme Court newly dominated by right-wing judges is an example of how all legal rights won by workers are never guaranteed but subject to cancellation when the balance of power changes against them.
The most obvious recent case is the right to abortion in the United States. For roughly fifty years it was a “constitutional” right, decided by the Supreme Court as a result of widespread demand. Then, after corrupt changes in court membership leading to its being dominated by reactionary, “conservative” justices, it was stricken from the books and abortion once again outlawed. The struggle has continued, partly around changes in both state and federal laws, partly in the streets in mass protests.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 416, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 306.
The Manuscript of 1864–1865 contains a great many examples, beyond those included by Engels in Volume 3 of Capital, many drawn from factory inspector reports of the resistance of capitalists to implementing changes workers and reformers have succeeded in getting written into law and the paltry fines levied on them by their friends on the bench. Contemporary examples abound as well, as illustrated in footnotes to Sections 7, 8 and 9 below.
See Holdren, Injury Impoverished, which analyzes the various dimensions of that tyranny. His analysis shows how once workers and reformers succeeded in getting laws passed to provide workers some compensation for injuries on the job, they were written and enforced in ways which ignored the full extent of injury, reducing the calculation of their losses to monetary measurements of income lost. This Holdren called the “tyranny of the table” because courts relied on tables setting out the monetary value of lost body parts, lost waged income, etc., while largely ignoring the full range of personal, psychological, and social costs to injured workers and their families.
Against any tendency to view the judiciary as just one part of the state as a one-sided “organ of [capitalist] class rule,” a large literature goes well beyond Marx’s analysis in Chapter 10 to reveal in great historical detail how workers’ challenges not only won victories against this stacked system but also forced changes in both laws and the judiciary itself. See the essays in Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, eds., Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, and Christopher Frank, “‘Let But One of the Them Come before Me, and I’ll Commit Him’: Trade Unions, Magistrates and the Law in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Staffordshire,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 1 (January 2005): 64–91, and the materials cited therein.
And to a lesser degree, in footnotes, to their evolution in neoclassical and neoliberal economics.
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975), (Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison). Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (1963), (The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception).
In the early twentieth century, as workers began to free their children from waged labor, through the passage of restrictions on the use of child labor, the combination of working-class pressure and a growing capitalist need to find an alternative way to manage the young and to condition/discipline them for future entry into its labor force resulted first in widespread public schooling and later in the access of working-class children to universities. Integral to this expansion of institutions of so-called “education” was their gradual restructuring – in a division of academic labor, differentiated and organized to meet the needs of capitalists. See, Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
Those needs have included the instrumentalization of criticisms of capitalism. Parallel to how capitalists have often been able to use labor unions to regulate and harness workers’ struggles, has been the limited acceptance of oppositional thought within capitalist schooling. Allowing workers to contest the existing organization of production reveals weaknesses and the opportunity to overcome those weakness; allowing limited critique of capitalism within schools serves the same purpose – as well as keeping dissidents off the streets and away from other anti-capitalist organizing. (Recently, the pressures on and the exploitation of students have driven more and more of them to recognize their “schools,” at all levels, as nothing more than edu-factories designed to transform them into useful workers.) Beyond the “repressive tolerance” highlighted by Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) has been the real service to capital provided by critics in revealing weaknesses in both capitalist strategies and apologetics. Thus, at every level, these institutions have become bastions of capitalist ideology, institutions no longer designed to reproduce a narrowly defined ruling class but rather to produce both ideologues – dedicated to solving capitalists’ problems and justifying their solutions – and a whole range of technically trained and ideologically indoctrinated workers, from technicians, engineers and scientists in factories and research laboratories to mid-level bureaucrats and high-level managers working in offices, both small and large, from those on the shop-floor to those managing whole cities, national and international policy formation and implementation. See Marcuse’s essay, “Repressive Tolerance” in Robert Wolff , Barrington Moore, Jr. and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965).
In this manner, for example, the field of economics has sometimes tolerated not only criticisms of existing institutional arrangements and policies by those proposing alternative solutions but also by those opposed to any “solution” other than the overthrow of capitalism. This can be seen in the openness of some economists and some pro-business ideologues to assessing, rather than simply dismissing, the relevance of the work of Marx, Engels, and other anti-capitalists to the understanding of crisis. Two well-known examples from the first half of the twentieth century are the works of Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) and Wassily Leontief. The partial opening of university departments of economics to “radical,” “Marxist” or “heterodox” ideas in the wake of the social movements of the 1960s and the crisis of Keynesianism provides more recent examples as student radicals were allowed jobs in academia. It is worth noting that one of the great weaknesses in Soviet-style state capitalism is the intolerance of both worker and intellectual dissent and protest. By repressing such dissent with police state methods, those regimes cut themselves off from information flows they could use to better manage class relationships. That weakness is currently being demonstrated in reactionary governments in Eastern Europe, e.g., the regime of Viktor Orbán (1963 -) in Hungary – currently a darling of and exemplar for right-wing ideologues in the US and Western Europe.
John Locke, apologist and strategist of capitalism, wrote a whole book about the best ways to educate the children of his wealthy friends, but he thought the workhouse would do very well for workers’ children, workers-in-formation. Compare his Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) with his “On the Poor Law and Working Schools” (1697).
Robert Owen, A New View of Society, or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of Human Character, and the Application of the Principle to Practice,(1813–16). Besides creating schools for his workers, Owen also improved both housing and access to consumer goods in the village, with the objective of improving worker-employer relations. “Those employed became industrious, temperate, healthy, faithful to their employers, and kind to each other. while the proprietors were deriving services from their attachment, almost without inspection, far beyond those which could be obtained by any other means than those of mutual confidence and kindness.”
There are some very nice representations of such awe – by both officers and seamen – for Latin-speaking physicians in the novels of Patrick O’Brian (1914–2000) portraying relationships in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Even today, when most discourses in these fields are carried out in vernacular languages, e.g., in church liturgies, legal briefs and prescriptions, so many Latin terms are still in use as to be taught in special classes to students training to be clergymen, lawyers, doctors, nurses and pharmacists.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Future of Our Educational Institutions” (1872), or “Lecture V” in Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, eds., Anti-Education: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016), 75.
This dual production is the subject of Krystian Szadkowski’s Capital in Higher Education (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2023).
Marx and Engels addressed the role of religion in numerous works, including from The 1844 Manuscript and Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (see the 1892 Introduction to the English edition). The classic post-Marxian work is Max Weber (1864–1920), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5).
Once again, there are exceptions. Among the best known are those orders and sects which reject the consumerism of capitalism, e.g., the Amish, and those who critique capitalism directly, e.g., Liberation Theologists preaching among the poor in the US, Latin America and the Indian Subcontinent. Of course, they too tend to replicate the hierarchy of initiated teachers and passive students even as their ideas foment resistance.
So too, in the twentieth century, have radio, television and film technology provided capitalists with new media for the communication and indoctrination of ideas they find useful – such as spreading interpretations of crisis that fit capitalist needs for acceptance and acquiescence to the policies they adopt. The space and resources won by workers in these media have been limited. There is some “community” access to the production facilities of local television and some pirate radio stations. As the cost of video equipment has steadily declined, bottom-up film making, both imaginative and documentary has grown and the Internet has made it possible to share the results widely.
All these norms, of course, have changed over time as a function of capitalist needs and workers’ struggles. An obvious example has been the norms for women’s behavior. Although derived, historically, from both secular and religious “codes” of household organization, their application depended upon circumstances. When needed in industry – to undercut men’s wages or during war time to replace men sent off to battle, women were drawn out of the home, into the waged labor force, and their labor valorized. When needed to boost the growth of that labor force their labor as wives and mothers was valued more highly – buttressed by pro-natalist laws and subsidies encouraging large families. Most recently, capitalist reaction to women’s struggles successfully expanding their rights, over property, access to jobs, participation in government, and control of their own bodies, have varied. Some have adapted, integrating new social norms into accumulation. Others, reactionary capitalists and their politicians, have launched a wide-ranging counterattack – starting with reversing the right to abortion – aimed at re-establishing a vicious patriarchal hierarchy.
Collectors of even “folk music” – that diverse array of chants, songs and ballads composed by workers and long circulated primarily by oral emulation or handwritten music notation – could take advantage of the same techniques of mechanical printing that were, at first, only used for liturgical, “classical” or “popular” music acceptable within bourgeois culture. Eventually, the same would be true with the music of twentieth and twenty-first century rebels, such as Acid Rock, Punk and Hip-hop.
Within capitalist-dominated radio and television, programs are sometimes subverted by critics and opponents of capitalism, but the arrival of the Internet has vastly facilitated the dissemination of the fruits of autonomous efforts at critique and the exploration of alternatives – a vast subversion of a physical infrastructure built for capitalist purposes of war and computer time sharing. See the original draft of H. Cleaver, “The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle,” a revision of which was published in John Holloway and Eloína Peláez. eds., Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (London: Pluto Press, 1998).
“The German Ideology”, MECW, Vol. 5, pp. 59–60.
Given how capitalism embraced, maintained, and promulgated both patriarchy and racism, those with the most access to education and the leisure to write have been white men. Men’s monopoly of that access was pointed out by Jane Austen (1775–1817) in her novel Persuasion (1818) through the voice of Anne Elliot in a debate with Captain Harville (Chapter 23). Later, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in A Room of Her Own (1929) makes the same point, adding that education and leisure must be accompanied by the physical setting necessary for creative thought. After uprisings led by literate slaves, such as Cato’s Rebellion (1739) in South Carolina or the Rebellion of Nat Turner (1831) in Virginia, most slave owners forbad teaching their black slaves to read and write. In the wake of such uprisings, laws were passed forbidding the teaching of slaves. After slavery, Jim Crow laws dictating segregation, including in schools, guaranteed that most black children would receive less training in reading and writing than their white counterparts. The horrors experienced by Native American children forced into boarding schools and deprived of their own languages and culture were even worse! See, David Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995, 2020).
A modern example of the latter case is Eric Hoffer (1898–1983). Although from a working-class background, his writings were so beloved by President Ronald Reagan – infamous for his anti-working-class policies like union-busting and the imposition of unemployment so high as to force down nominal wages for the first time in decades – that he awarded Hoffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
See, Chapter V “Of Property” in Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, “The ‘labour’ of his body and the ‘work’ of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”
A similar fate would befall utility theory in the twentieth century as workers used the theory of “marginal utility” to argue for the redistribution of income from the rich to the poor. Economists, once again, modified their theory; this time by replacing “utility” by individual “preference.” More puzzling has been the abandonment of Marx’s labor theory of value by some Marxists. See, Part I of Cleaver, Rupturing the Dialectic, on both these abandonments.
I like Karl Polanyi’s sweeping title even if in his account it is the “market” rather than capitalist subordination of life to work that subsumes and transforms society. See, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).
Elaine Freedgood, “Harriet Martineau and the Popularization of Political Economy,” Victorian Studies 39, no. 1 (Autumn, 1995): 33.
Beyond the obvious, often didactic, content of her stories, she made her intentions clear in her autobiography. Maria Chapman, ed., Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1877).
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 999, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 406. As I suggested in 33 Lessons on Capital (2019) 454–5, Marx’s dismissal of Martineau “was unfortunate because despite her role as an apologist for capitalism, a great many of Martineau’s writings called attention to and provided analyses of various aspects of the work of the unwaged. Indeed, in recent years she has been celebrated not only as the first woman sociologist but also as an early analyst of the domestic labor of reproduction.” – an essential aspect of labor to which Marx gave short shrift.
See too, Patrick Brantlinger, “The Case Against Trade Unions in Early Victorian Fiction,” Victorian Studies, Vol. 13, no. 1 (September 1969): 37–52. All this before the spread of public schooling and the systematic indoctrination of children from an early age into “the ruling ideas” – not just in literature but in every scholastic field.
Even less in the contemporary world where slavery is mostly illegal, yet still practiced.
Since the early twentieth century “progressive” period in the US, which saw the spread of public schooling, respect/acceptance of law and capitalism has been drummed into the heads of most children by the enforcement of rules (governing behavior, often dress and even hair styles), by a single high school “civics” course and by whatever cultural artifacts are served up in courses on history, or literature, etc.
The revealing term “structural adjustment” has been a late twentieth-century byword in the conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to overcome the resistance of workers in countries applying for financial support. See, H. Cleaver, “Close the IMF, Abolish Debt and End Development: a Class Analysis of the International Debt Crisis,” op. cit., and Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis and Ousseina Alidon, eds., A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (Asmara: Africa World Press, 2000).
See, Christian Wolmar, Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India, (London: Atlantic Books, 2017) and John Hurd and Ian Kerr, India’s Railway History: A Research Handbook, (Boston: Brill, 2012).
Most recently against the Houthi attacks on capitalist shipping in protest against Zionist genocide in Gaza and the complicity of Western governments. Before that along the coast of Somalia against the seizure of ships then held for ransom.
Today the putting-out system has largely been replaced by contracts between producers who finance their own operations and other firms who buy from them. A common example are farmers contracted to supply local supermarkets.
Such reserves count as part of Keynes’ “precautionary” demand for money, mentioned in Chapter 4, footnote 15. Marx and Engels noted such unanticipated increases in interest rates due to government or central bank action to stem gold outflows. Marx to Engels, February 3, 1851, MECW, Vol. 38, pp. 273–278 and Engels to Marx, February 25, 1851, MECW, Vol. 38, pp. 299–300.
Edward Hale, The Life of Christopher Columbus, from his own letters and journals and other documents of the time (Chicago: Howe, 1891), Chapter 2.
For some cliometric assessments of how much these thefts increased the money supply of Spain, see, Yao Chen, et. al., “Reconstruction of the Spanish money supply, 1492–1810” Explorations in Economic History 81 (July 2021): 2-26. Naturally, the fleets also repatriated all kinds of other “exotic” goods from the colonies, a practice which established the pattern of trans-Atlantic trade characteristic of the centuries of colonialism.
For a long time, but not forever, because as the colonial frontier in North America was pushed West, at the expense of the indigenous populations, new sources of precious metals were discovered. For example, the increase in money supplies resulting from the “gold rush” in California was duly noted by Marx, along with the incentives it gave to trade and investment. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. “Review: May to Oct. 1850,” November 1, 1850, MECW, Vol. 10, pp. 504–505.
See, Kris Lane and Robert Levine, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998) and its sources. Drake and similar privateers have been repeatedly celebrated in novels, film and TV, e.g., Rafael Sabatini’s novel The Sea Hawk (1915), the 1924 film of the same name, Errol Flynn in a second The Sea Hawk (1940) and the TV series Sir Francis Drake (1961–62).
See, the critique of the bullionists by Thomas Mun (1571–1641) in his “Englands Treasure by Forraign Trade, Or The Balance of our Forraign Trade is the Rule of our Treasure” (1664) in Thomas Mun, The Complete Works: Economics and Trade (Newton Page, 2013) and Adam Smith’s assessment of his mercantilist predecessors in The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapters I–VIII.
While cutting business transportation costs, government/taxpayer-financed road construction also makes it possible for police and military to move quickly to put down unrest or rebellion – as they did in the US during the urban uprisings of the mid-1960s. That was facilitated by the earlier development of the Interstate Highway System in the US, pushed by President Dwight Eisenhower. In urban areas, those highways were often driven through “slum” areas, disrupting or destroying working class communities. In the Global South in the 1960s, roads pushed into remote areas were justified as promoting farm-to-market commerce, but they were actually part of counterinsurgency efforts to put down peasant unrest and revolt. Such methods have continued right up to the present, e.g., the Mexican government began building new roads in direct response to the Zapatista uprising in 1994 to facilitate the military repression of their more remote communities. The current “Tren Maya” megaproject is a continuation of the practice. Peddled as an effort to bring more tourism to southern Mexico, regardless of the ecological cost, it is also clearly aimed at disrupting autonomous indigenous communities. See, Gerard Soler, “Tren Maya, the Mexican megaproject threatening the ecosystems of the Yucatan Peninsula,” Equal Times, March 18, 2022.
(July 2, 1862, ch. 130, § 4, 12 Stat. 504)
Struggles over the legitimate purposes and curriculum of the resulting institutions are detailed in Nathan Sorber, Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt: The Origins of the Morrill Act and the Reform of Higher Education (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2018).
See, “Chapter 2: The Alchemical Foundations of Credit” in Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Marx writes of debasement in Capital, Vol. 1, p. 194, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 109. In Section I of Chapter 10 of that volume, he also refers in a footnote, to “the little shilling men,” who he had previously identified in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as those who advocated repayment of debt in debased shillings as a solution to currency problems. Capital, Vol. 1, p. 342, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 241, Note 175, p. 778.
Until recently, we have been much more familiar with the opposite policies, i.e., tight money, high interest rates and augmented reserve requirements, all ostensibly designed to “fight inflation” but actually aimed at reducing investment, raising unemployment and putting downward pressure on wages and benefits. These policies have been all too familiar since the Carter-Volcker-Reagan attack on the world’s working classes in the early 1980s via “supply-side economics”, a global depression and an international monetary crisis.
See, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31, or MECW, Vol. 35, Chapter XXXI.
See his articles for the New York Daily Tribune, written in June 1856: Karl Marx, “The French Crédit Mobilier,” MECW, Vol. 15, pp. 8–13, 14–18, 19–24.
Banks usually have specialists devoted to “risk assessment” who evaluate the situation of potential borrowers and provide their findings to those making the final decision as to whether to grant loans. There have, however, been times when such findings have been ignored, to the subsequent chagrin of bank administrators. Such apparently happened during the run up to the international financial crisis of the 1980s and 1990s when negative risk assessments were ignored, loans were made, and the banks found their borrowers threatening default – deepening the spreading debt crisis. One result involved private financial institutions turning to international supranational institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Banks for both assessment of risks and the specification of the conditions which would have to be met by borrowers for roll-over loans to be granted.
This has also been true for bank loans to both local and national governments, as demonstrated in the mid-1970s in New York City when banks would only roll over its loans if the city cut city-worker wages and benefits, in the 1980s-90s when the IMF demanded cutbacks in imports of consumption goods as one condition for granting “structural adjustment” loans, or in 1994 when Chase Manhattan Bank called on the government of Mexico to “eliminate” the Zapatistas whose uprising had contributed to stock market jitters and the associated Peso Crisis.
Indeed, as we have seen in the case of the USSR and similar regimes, police-state power has been wielded regularly to limit workers’ overt struggles. The primary result, however, was to force resistance underground where it became covert but still disruptive – an important source of the notoriously low productivity in Soviet industry.
“Investors” is in quotation marks because most individuals buying stocks or bonds gain no control over businesses’ whose shares or bonds they are buying. For buyers, purchasing stocks and bonds is usually either a form of savings or a means of speculation (betting on a rise in the value of the asset). Even if a purchaser buys a sufficient majority to give them control over the issuing business, the purchases are separate from decisions about running the company. Thus, economists call the investment Marx analyzes, M – C(LP, MP), real investment to differentiate it from the money spent by purchasers of financial assets.
See the classic early account by Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London: Bentley, 1841) and Robert Aliber and Charles Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, 7th ed., (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Exceptions include countries like Saudia Arabia, Indonesia, Iran and Singapore where public flogging continues. Violence also continues within some schools and families where adults administer corporal punishment to children.
This cultural genocide through the imposition of language began in Spain with the imposition of Castilian Spanish in places where it was not spoken, e.g., Catalonia, Galicia, Basque, to help consolidate Castilian rule on the peninsula. See Ivan Illich’s account of Elio Antonio de Nebrija, with his Castilian grammar in hand, arguing to the Queen, “Language has always been the consort of empire, and forever shall remain its mate. Together they come into being, together they grow and flower, and together they decline.” Shadow Work (London: Marion Boyars, 1981) Chapter II: Vernacular Values.
David Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. 2nd edition (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995, 2020). The myth of assimilation hid its impossibility within a thoroughly racist culture that had enslaved both Native Americans and Africans and would continue to discriminate against both even after the end of slavery. NB: the Russians are currently following this pattern by abducting Ukrainian children, presumably to brainwash them into accepting a conquered Ukraine as an inevitable, integral part of Russia. This repeats the practice in the USSR of imposing Russian as a common language on all nationalities.
This process of enclosure continued to be deployed, throughout the colonial era and ever since to strip millions of peasants of their access to land and to frustrate most efforts to take it back. However, so too has resistance and repeated efforts to repeal enclosure through seizure, like the Diggers, or through formal legal land reform. Because of the role of peasants in anti-colonial struggles, new governments of national liberation have often been under great pressure to seize large estates and redistribute the land to peasants. In Mexico, repeated peasant uprisings, including their role in the Revolution of 1910–1920, forced a series of partial reforms but culminated in President Lázaro Cárdenas redistributing some forty-five million acres of land. In other places, such as India, Egypt and the Philippines, such reform was only partial and quickly abandoned. These struggles continue in many places today.
This strategy was carried over by post-independence elites in places such as India. They have maintained patchworks of varied cultures, often playing one against others, as in the case of the current Modi government’s promulgation of Hindu-nationalism against the many other cultures in India.
And the neoliberal economists of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
For Thomas Mun’s denunciation of “Idleness and Pleasure” see his Englands Treasure by Forraign Trade (1664), op. cit. For Adam Smith’s view of every “country workman” as “almost always slothful and lazy” see his Wealth of Nations (1776), op. cit., Book I, Chapter 1.
In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith did recognize that because they are better organized, capitalists can exercise somewhat greater power in labor markets. As a result, he accepted workers self-organizing to counter that power. Eventually, neoclassical economists would treat such labor markets as “imperfect”, in contrast to mythical “perfectly competitive” labor markets, with many buyers and many sellers.
The only exploitation recognized in neoclassical microeconomic theory is a wage smaller than the monetary value of a workers’ marginal product. However, in so-called “growth theory” – which partly emerged out of industrialization efforts in the USSR – the production of a surplus as the only means to expand investment and accumulation is explicitly recognized and valorized. See, Evsey Domar, Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 873, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 704.
Among the many places where this is spelled out clearly is Irving Kristol’s Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978). The same argument has also been used to justify racial disparities in “upward mobility,” namely that poor Blacks and other impoverished minorities have failed to mimic the behaviors of more successful whites and have only their own choices to blame for their poverty. See, Dinesh De Souza’s The End of Racism (1995) and other writings.
The same myth has been repeatedly perpetuated in contemporary popular culture, e.g., films such as The Secret of My Success (1987) and Working Girl (1988) about individuals who work hard and scheme their way up the hierarchy. The myth lies in the pretense that what a few can accomplish is possible for all.
Universally, in the public schools of the twentieth century and today, from kindergarten through elementary to high school, children (and their parents) have been told, semester after semester, that if only they work hard, they will gain access to higher education and better jobs. Of course, in schools as in waged and salaried employment this promise has been a myth because it is only true for a tiny minority. No matter how hard they work the vast majority are tracked into labor markets for jobs devoid of the possibility of advancement. Indeed, as capitalists have replaced one “job ladder” after another with temporary and precarious jobs, what little mobility used to be available has been fast disappearing. With only footstools in sight, the job ladder myth has been partially replaced by that of entrepreneurship and quick advancement through creative “startups” to riches and wealth. Of course, most startups, like most small businesses before them, soon go belly up, dumping their owners back into waged employment.
Or, since liberation from colonialism, from ex- or neo-colonies. Thus, the post-WWII influx of workers to Great Britain from both the West Indies and South Asia. Thus, a parallel influx to France from North Africa. In both cases, immigrant workers have been pitted against locals and the enmity of locals encouraged by flagrant racism and xenophobia.
Analyses which emphasize how immigration policies have been changed, positive to negative and back again, according to the needs of capitalist employers are provided by Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, New York: Harper & Row, 1981 and Manuel Castells, “Immigrant Workers and Class Struggles in Advanced Capitalism: The Western European Experience,” Politics and Society, Vol. 5, no. 1 (March 1975): 33-66. Those which emphasize how the struggles of immigrant workers provoke the shift from positive to negative include Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Riproduzione e emigrazione” in A. Serafini, et al., “L’Operaio multinazionale in Europa, 1974 (in English) and Yann Moulier and Pierre Ewenzyck, ““Immigration: le blocage de la mobilité autour du bassin méditerranéen,””, Critique de l’Economie Politique, Nouvelle Serie, no. 3 (Septembre 1978) (in English).
Today, such methods are common, as witnessed by high tech corporations creating landscaped “factories”, designed to be attractive places to work, often surrounded by grass, trees, bushes and flowers – a far cry from the dank, polluted, satanic mills of the nineteenth century.
On the importance of agricultural exports to the US government and the impact of that importance on US imperialism, see William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1969). For how that has evolved in more recent times, see, NACLA, “U.S. Grain Arsenal,” Latin America and Empire Report, October 1975.
See, Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-grab universities: Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system” High Country News, March 30, 2020. (Accessed 7/15/2024.)
See, Grant McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953).
Patrick Seburn, “Evolution of employer-provided defined benefit pensions” Monthly Labor Review 114, no. 12 (December 1991): 16–23.
Robert Ovetz, When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), Part I.
In the US, it took a whole wave of strikes by industrial workers and massive protests by the unemployed during the Great Depression to win general government managed pensions with the Social Security Act of 1935.
Slaves, of course, have fled wherever possible, into the hinterland to form maroon colonies or to merge with indigenous populations or to slave-free zones, sometimes through “underground railroads”, be they on land or sea. I discuss capitalist countermeasures in Section 9.1 on crises in C(LP) – M.
Marx argued that in 1853 wages only rose because of prosperity (increased demand) and large-scale emigration of workers out of England that reduced labor supply. Marx to F. Lassalle, January 23, 1855, MECW, Vol. 39, pp. 511–514.
Specifically, Chapter 5, Section 2: “Saving on the Conditions of Work at the Workers’ Expense”, where he presents a disgusting array of evidence from several industries, or MECW, Vol. 37, Chapter V, Section II.
The emphasis on “tried” is because journeymen – like later waged industrial workers – often migrated despite such restrictions. See, Stephan Epstein, “Labour mobility, journeymen organizations and markets in skilled labour in Europe, 14th-18th centuries,” in Mathieu Arnoux and Pierre Monnet (eds) Le technician dans la cité en Europe occidentale, 1250–1650 (École française de Rome, 2004) 251–269.
The Wealth of Nations, Chapter X, Part II: “Inequalities occasioned by the Policy of Europe” (New York: The Modern Library, 1937) 134. Smith clearly understood the need for a “malleable” labor force.
See, Christopher Frank, “‘Let But One of the Them Come before Me, and I’ll Commit Him’: Trade Unions, Magistrates and the Law in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Staffordshire,” op. cit.
Shockingly, such clauses are still common today under the rubric of “noncompete” clauses in contracts. See, Eric Posner, How Antitrust Failed Workers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Douglas Hay, “Patronate, Paternalism, and Welfare: Masters, Workers, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century England,” International Labor and Working-Class History 53 (Spring 1998): 29. See also, Douglas Hay, “England 1562–1875: The Law and Its Uses,” in Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, (eds), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 2004), 59–116.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 390, or MECW, Vol. 35, pp. 283–284.
Hay, “England 1562–1875: The Law and its Uses,” 60.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 390, fn. 99, or MECW, Vol. 35, pp. 283, fn 3.
The Wealth of Nations, op. cit., pp. 137–138.
Reducing or eliminating poor relief for the unemployed also weakens employed workers’ ability to negotiate wage increases – or resist wage decreases – by removing what was essentially a floor under the wage hierarchy. The same strategy has motivated opposition to, and efforts to reduce, modern welfare support for those without jobs, e.g., during the Covid pandemic and virtually every negotiation of the US Federal budget in recent decades.
The contemporary business resistance to unemployment compensation during the Covid-19 pandemic has been shaped by exactly the same sentiments. Trump and his cronies have objected to income relief for workers who have lost jobs through no fault of their own because the availability of that income might make them less inclined to look for jobs (whether old jobs still in existence, or new jobs because the old ones have disappeared completely). In the US several conservative-dominated state governments have explicitly cited that rationale for refusing federal funds and cutting off support for workers. Often, as in the cases of Texas, Georgia, and Florida, these are the same state governments that refused Federal funds for Medicaid expansion, which also benefits lower-income workers. The cut-offs, however, have NOT resulted in appreciably more workers returning to the labor market. See, Ben Casselman, “Cutoff of Jobless Benefits Is Found to Get Few Back to Work,” New York Times, August 20, 2021. Given the long history of capitalist ideology – from Malthus on – that views ANY help to the poor as dangerous, the actual effects of cutting social safety net programs are less important to many capitalists than satisfying their lust for any policy that might make workers more compliant with capitalist needs.
Contemporary counterparts of these efforts can be found in the battles that have shaped laws of the “welfare state,” i.e., who gets what money and under what circumstances. In the US, some programs are federal, e.g., Social Security and Medicare; in others, e.g., unemployment compensation and welfare, the laws are at the level of individual states and vary from one to another. Today, as a rule, unemployment compensation has been kept low enough to be a hardship for families, but sufficient to tempt some young, single workers to take a break from being exploited and have some fun for a while. (Much the way some take jobs, save up enough for a vacation and then quit!)
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 579, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 454.
See Peter Dunkley, “Emigration and the State, 1803–1842: The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government Reconsidered,” The Historical Journal 23, no. 2 (June 1980): 353–380.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 588, fn. 67, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 462, fn. 1.
Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 786–787, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 628.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 722–723, or MECW, Vol. 35, pp. 574–577. See also the contemporary account of workers’ collective efforts to emigrate at that time and the opposition of the manufacturers in Arthur Arnold, The Cotton Famine: From the Fall of Sumter to the Passing of the Public Works Act (London: Saunders, Otley, and Co., 1864) 367–371.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 1080, or MECW, Vol. 34, pp. 467–468. “Tenant-farmer sons”, of course, like daughters, are workers, just in the field of agriculture rather than manufacturing. While part of the industrial latent reserve army, both have always been integral participants in the active army of agricultural labor.
John Harris, “Industrial Espionage in the Eighteenth Century,” Industrial Archaeology Review 7, no. 2 (1984–1985): 129.
Capital, Vol. I, pp. 777–780, or MECW, Vol. 35, pp. 621–622.
Quoted in John McClintock, “Responsibilities of Industry for Health of Local Populations Abroad,” Industry and Tropical Health, II, 4–20–22, (1954): 39–42. Capitalist demands for public health measures also originated from their private foundations pushing “manpower planning” on a larger scale. Examples of both direct business interest and indirect philanthropic efforts are cited in H. Cleaver, “Malaria, the Politics of Public Health and the International Crisis”, Review of Radical Political Economics 9, no. 1 (April 1977): 81-103. The latter is analyzed in much greater detail in H. Cleaver, “The Origins of the Green Revolution” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1974), Chapters III and V dealing with Rockefeller’s anti-hookworm campaign in the American South in the early twentieth century and the later campaign against malaria during the Cold War.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 812–14, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 651–54.
An early example in the twentieth century were the efforts of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission that financed a campaign from 1909 to 1915 to eradicate hookworm disease and its debilitating effects on workers in the American South. A more recent example has been the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Water, Sanitation and Hygiene program to develop and promulgate better sanitation practices in areas not served by public infrastructure.
Our most recent illustration of this dynamic of public monies and private profits has been the Covid pandemic in which governments have spent vast sums of taxpayer money on research, the development of vaccines and the public distribution of vaccines, preventive masks, etc. to the benefit not only of those who have received the vaccines but the medical industry which received the money. Since declaring the pandemic over, that same industry is now charging for the vaccines developed with public money.
Such policies of what we can call “repressive neglect” have continued ever since.
Nicolas Rogers, “British impressment and its discontents,” The International Journal of Maritime History 30, no. 1 (2018): 60.
David Hume, “Of Some Remarkable Customs” in Political Discourses (Edinburgh: Kincaid and Donalson, 1852) 152–154. As George Caffentzis has suggested, Hume may have become aware of this issue as early as 1834 during a visit to Bristol. See, Caffentzis, Civilizing Money: Hume, his Monetary Project and the Scottish Enlightenment (London: Pluto Press, 2021) 86.
See, for example, Nicholas Rogers, “British impressment and its discontents,” op. cit., and Kevin Costello, “Habeas Corpus and Military and Naval Impressment, 1756–1816,” The Journal of Legal History 29, no. 2 (2008): 215–251.
From the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer’s prescription for the ceremony of marriage: “First, it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.” Under pressure from fed up women, in 1922 the Episcopal Church removed the word “obey” from the bride’s wedding vows.
These differences show up in many novels of the nineteenth century. Compare the situation of the central women characters in Jane Austen’s novels – those daughters of “gentlemen” who never even consider the possibility of working for a wage – with the main working-class character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) who follows her father into the mills of Manchester, or the title character in Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen (1890), who escapes her father’s patriarchal effort to trade her for a parcel of land to become a needlewoman.
As women have gained power against these modes of subordination, not only have some succeeded in telling their side of the story through novels, theatre, song and social media, but many capitalists have adapted and, as with other successful struggles by workers, sought to instrumentalize their voices in the service of profit, publishing and otherwise promoting women’s voices and stories that in earlier times were repressed and silenced. The same has been true for other previously repressed minorities such as gays, lesbians, trans, etc. Of course, other capitalists have refused adaptation and have been funding and organizing a neofascist counteroffensive aimed at silencing all these groups, forcing women back into their roles as handmaidens and broodmares.
The current neofascist counteroffensive embraces just such violence, pushing laws mandating severe punishment for both women and doctors engaging in abortion – with the repression of birth control next on the agenda.
When capitalist needs for labor have been great, they have resorted not only to the stick of repressing contraception and abortion, but the carrot of incentives to women to procreate. Pro-natalist laws and policies – including “family allocations”, which pay women money for having more children, to increase the supply of labor. Explicitly pro-natalist laws, both banning contraception and rewarding having children, have been most prominent in response to wartime losses in the labor force, e.g., after WWI and WWII. Naturally, the overturning of anti-contraception and anti-abortion laws have been mainly the result of women’s struggles. Recent reactionary efforts at reversal are obviously aimed at re-subordinating women.
Capital, Vol. 1, Pt. Eight, or MECW, Vol. 35, pp. 704–761. Besides capitalist penetration into its peripheries, we must include its tendencies toward centralization that involve, among other methods, big businesses driving small businesses and farmers bankrupt (well known cases of Standard Oil, of agribusiness, of Walmart in the US, now followed by Amazon) and precipitating their owners into the labor market.
Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 25, or MECW, Vol. 35, pp. 607–703.
In modern times, despite laid off workers having won “unemployment compensation” from the government, to obtain aid the state usually puts the onus on workers to actively search for jobs and show evidence of having solicited and obtained interviews with employers.
Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 850–3. Such subcontracting has re-emerged with a vengeance in this neoliberal period as capitalists have sought to reduce labor costs by outsourcing to avoid providing benefits as well as good wages to in-house workers. The work of “head-hunters,” personnel workers who seek out higher level, salaried employees are probably better known than that of those employed to find cheap manual labor, or, these days cheap programmers and other digital laborers, often for temporary, precarious jobs. For some types of jobs, enough capitalists have found difficulty obtaining workers that Marx’s “gang-masters” have been largely replaced by independent – “temp agencies” – businesses whose profits derive from charging workers and capitalists for their service bringing job seeker and employer together. These are often specialized in everything from office staff to traditional sex-workers. In some cases, e.g., the market for maritime workers, unions play this role, maintaining “hiring halls” where workers can get help looking for jobs, but, like temp agencies, they also serve employers by playing the role of Maxwell’s daemon, weeding out high entropy workers (troublemakers) from low entropy ones (those whose energy is reliably available for work). See, George Caffentzis, “The Work/Energy Crisis and the Apocalypse,” op. cit., Section G. The Manifold of Work: Anti-Entropy Qua Information.
Capital, Vol. 1, 838–840. The costs of obtaining extra labor-power may increase because of outlays on transportation or training – the former when recruiters must hire workers who live further away, the latter when workers must be retrained for new jobs. Two examples of the former that I have recently observed: when new factories were opened in Poznań, Poland, company buses had to be dispatched daily to bring newly hired workers from outlying villages. Another: as the cost of housing in San Francisco has risen so high that many workers must move out of the city, the value of their labor-power rises with their increased costs of commuting – an old story given the history of suburban sprawl. When factories are placed in areas of cheap labor lacking skilled workers, investment must be made in training. Where turnover is frequent, such expenditures become a permanent part of the costs of production.
Some labor was directly forced, but as Marx points out in Chapter 33, Edward Wakefield (1796–1862) offered another solution: putting a price on hitherto free land so that workers had to work for a wage in order to accumulate enough money to buy it. Capital, Vol. 1, p. 938–39, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 758–59.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 378, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 272. Replace “colonialism” with “globalization” and you have comparable phenomena today.
See, F. W. Smith, The Irish Linen Trade Handbook and Directory (Belfast: W. H. Greer, 1876), 46.
In modern times seed companies have acted to forestall such farmer self-reproduction by getting laws passed to force famers to buy their seeds. The most notorious case of attempted monopolization of seed production is Monsanto. Its scientists genetically engineered seeds whose plants produce sterile seeds that cannot produce new crops. The outrage by farmers, ecologists, etc., at these “terminator” seeds was so great that such seeds were apparently never commercially marketed. See, Genetic Literacy Project, “What’s-the-controversy-over-terminator-seeds?” online. (Accessed 7/15/2024)
Manuscript of 1864–1865, p. 340, “3. Cheapening of the Elements of Constant Capital,” and Capital, Vol. 3, pp. 342–343, or MECW, Vol. 37, p. 234.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 860, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 694. Which raw materials could be imported from distant colonies was often determined by local producers in the colonizing country. So, in the case of Ireland, the owners of sheep walks in England soon put a stop to imports of Irish wool for the British textile industry with the Wool Act of 1699. Instead of wool, that industry wanted flax, so to earn cash to supplement their meager domestic production and pay taxes Irish peasants were forced to replace sheep with flax for the market.
The long-run effect of these land seizures, pushing local peasants onto marginal land, was to dramatically increase the risk of famine in times of drought or flood. In such manner did colonialism convert minor natural fluctuations in weather into major crises for the colonized. This problem has persisted in post-colonial times because seized land has rarely been returned to the locals via land reform.
Two examples were Ireland and Prussia where peasants were forced to grow flax – to pay taxes – providing raw or partially processed material to the linen textile industry. “… when the direct taxes fall due, he [the German peasant] would find himself incapable of paying them without his spinning wheel …,” quoted by Marx from Mirabeaux’s De la monarchie prussienne sous Frédéric le Grand (1788). Capital, Vol. 1, p. 894, fn 33, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 722.
This was the reason why as people in the Global South freed themselves of colonial domination in the twentieth century, the new elites who took over, often schooled, and trained in the colonial countries, made industrialization an essential part of “national liberation” to escape their status as pure raw material producers. Increasing manufacturing to process local raw materials instead of exporting them became a central objective of national economic policy. See for example, the sequence of plans for post-colonial Indian development. The Prebisch-Singer hypothesis that raw materials producers are condemned to suffer inevitably from declining terms of trade with manufacturing good producers also grounded “dependency theory”.
This industrialization of fur bearing animals has come to be condemned by animal rights activists for much the same reasons they have condemned the raising of animals for meat, hides, feathers, chemical testing, or even for pets (Puppy mills) – namely the cruelty of methods and the failure to recognize other animals as sentient beings worthy of respect and protection. See the abundant literature by groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The resulting consumer opposition to the use of fur, combined with the development of artificial substitutes, has caused a crisis for the fur industry not unlike previous drops in demand due to changing fashion.
And still in use for ceremonial purposes in several countries’ militaries. There is also an international campaign by PETA to replace bearskins with artificial substitutes, which has been done in some countries but not others. See, https://support.peta.org/page/35880/action/1 (Accessed 7/16/2024.)
See Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, or The Inspection House (1791) on his mode of organizing prison to control prisoner behavior – a major reference point for Foucault.
The panopticon approach is easily observable today, not only in factories with large numbers organized to be under the eye of single overseers, but also in office buildings where each office is enclosed in glass, or where work sites are arranged in “cubicles” making it easy for supervisors to see what workers are doing, while burdening workers with awareness of constant oversight.
Linebaugh, The London Hanged, Chapter Five: Socking, the Hogshead and Excise. Today, the hogshead, handled manually by workers, has been replaced by massive steel containers, ubiquitous at ports, handled by cranes for transfers to and from ships, trucks, and railway cars.
Ibid., Chapter Eleven. Today, with relatively cheap steel fences, razor wire and electrification, it’s hard to find a port or factory of any sort which is not surrounded by such, with guarded gate entryways, designed to keep appropriators out or to make it hard for those inside to get out with what they have taken.
Engels, “The Prussian Constitution,” (Feb. 1847) MECW, Vol. 6, pp. 66–69. See also, Marx, “The State of Trade,” (Mar. 6, 1849) MECW, Vol. 9, pp. 3–8; Marx and Engels, “Review: May to October 1850,” (November 1, 1850) MECW, Vol. 10, pp. 492–3; Engels, “The Socialism of Mr. Bismarck,” (February 1880) MECW, Vol. 24, pp. 272–280. This phenomenon, of capitalist money being diverted from real investment into speculation became rampant after the financial deregulation of the early 1980s, leading to the collapse of the Savings & Loan Industry in 1987 and many subsequent crises.
Competition among communications companies have been fierce because of the continuing massive amount of speculation in today’s financial markets. See, Jenny Strasburg, “On Your Mark, Get Set…” The Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2011. (Accessed 7/15/2024).
These days, this is common as big grocery store chains have subsumed local farmer production – especially so-called “organic’ farms – in contracts which allow the chains to control what contracted farmers produce and how, as conditions of continued purchasing.
They also, of course, provided the means of moving both troops to the Western frontier to complete the genocide of the indigenous population and industrial goods to take advantage of growing markets among settlers.
See, Wolmar, Railways & the Raj, op. cit.
See, Andrew Cohen, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company: 2015).
Even unwaged workers in homes and schools have struggled against the work of producing labor-power, although those struggles were ones that Marx and Engels largely ignored. As women and children were expelled from the waged labor force and re-confined within households and schools the amount of this kind of labor grew but so too did struggles to reduce it.
Capital, Vol. 1, Section 5.
Common, but only recognized thanks to feminist authors, is the work of “homemakers”, usually housewives. Their “working day” has no set limits but starts with preparing breakfast and ends when nighttime feeding of infants, the provision of sexual services, or care of the sick or elderly is over.
Although “shop floor” usually refers to factory workspaces, it should be understood here to mean any point of production, whether in a factory, or an agricultural field, mine shaft, ship deck, loading dock, school classroom, home kitchen, etc.
In the example of railroad accidents despite being caused by overwork, it was (and continues to be) workers who were charged and convicted of manslaughter rather than the bosses who had forced them to work to exhaustion.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 901, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 728.
This response seems almost universal and has been widespread in regimes that repress overt worker resistance – including colonial, Soviet-style state capitalist and other authoritarian regimes. For colonial regimes, see the work of South Asian subaltern historians and that of James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990). On the USSR, see Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom (1958). For covert resistance in communist Hungary, see Mkilós Haraszti, A Worker in a Worker State (1977).
Legalization came earlier in the United States, in 1842 with the decision in Commonwealth v. Hunt, but that decision was repeatedly circumvented for decades with all kinds of union activities being declared unlawful and frequently repressed with police and military force.
Once workers in the US gained the power in the 1930s to force the capitalists in some major industries, e.g., auto and mining, to recognize unions and to negotiate contracts, laws have specified how unions can be formed, among which workers (not all have been covered by such laws), the form, if not the content, of specific negotiated legal contracts between unions and employers, and the circumstances in which strikes are permitted (versus “wildcat” strikes for which unions can be fined for violating the terms of the contract), and so on. Some of these laws are federal and apply to all workers; many are state laws and differ radically, e.g., accepting or banning “closed shops” – where once a union is formed all workers must participate.
In the US, capitalists returned to full-scale assault on labor unions during the first Reagan Administration in the early 1980s. One of its first acts was to crush the Professional Air Controllers Organization (PATCO). By firing over 11,000 workers, Reagan sent a message to business, whose managers took up the attack. Those actions were followed by deregulation that facilitated the ploy of using debt and “Chapter 11 bankruptcy” to undercut union contracts and the removal of, or refusal to enforce, safety regulations that had protected workers in many industries. The success of these attacks, never reversed under Democratic administrations, contributed to a steady decline on the percentage of workers organized in unions and capable of collective bargaining – a trend only recently showing signs of reversal.
Engels, F., “England in 1845 and in 1885,” MECW, Vol. 26, p. 297.
In R. D. Collison Black, ed., Papers and Correspondence of William Stanley Jevons, Vol. VII: Papers on Political Economy (London: MacMillan Press, 1981).
In W. Stanley Jevons, Methods of Social Reform and other Papers (London: MacMillan & Company, 1883) reprinted (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publisher, 1965), 101–121. See too, in the same collection, his essay on “Industrial Partnerships” in which Jevons supports profit sharing to stabilize capital-labor relationships and avoid conflict, strikes and political turmoil.
Jevon’s racism and class bias against workers is sketched in Michael White, “Bridging the Natural and the Social Science and Character in Jevon’s Political Economy” Economic Inquiry XXXII, no. 3 (July 1994): 429–444.
But not among capitalists. Resistance continued, theory be damned, until waves of workers’ struggles, in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and then by industrial unions during the Great Depression of the 1930s, imposed the long-sought 8-hour day and 40-hour week, at least for well-organized union workers.
While portraying the simple, over-long cigarette break in his film Modern Times (1936), Chaplin provides a glimpse of future electronic surveillance when the boss, who has been spying on Charlie’s break, suddenly appears on a screen screaming at him to get back to work! While the scene in Chaplin’s film and George Orwell’s omnipresent state surveillance in his novel 1984 (1949) were based on imaginary projections of the physical surveillance long deployed by capitalists, their prophetic quality has been borne out in contemporary electronic surveillance of workers while they are working. An early TV advertisement for America Online (AOL) zoomed in on an office worker sitting in a cubicle who turns, looks at the camera and says “The boss thinks I’m working; but I’m really browsing the web with America Online! Heh, heh.” Not only did the ad soon disappear, but capitalists were soon putting limits on such employee use of computers for their own purposes. See, for example, the website of Epay Systems, its variety of employee surveillance software and download its e-book How to Prevent Workforce Time Theft. (Accessed 7/16/2024.)
Screened in a time of militant worker mobilizations during the Great Depression, Disney’s depiction of miners as cute, lovable and happy workers must have struck members of the United Mine Workers, who had only gained collective bargaining rights in 1933, as grotesque, perhaps designed to divert the general public’s attention from the stark realities of their struggles. Recent criticism has emphasized its stereotypical treatment of dwarves but not its misrepresentation of workers’ attitudes.
Eventually, as sociologists were mobilized to study discontent in rote work on assembly lines and such, other responses were suggested. One was to rotate jobs, shift individual workers from one narrow activity to another. Another was to reorganize the work into teams. Both approaches seek to avoid boredom and to give workers a sense of the whole production process in which each worker plays only one small part. See, for example, Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
Harry Braverman’s book Labor and Monopoly Capital: the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974) provides nice examples of the extension of such detailed control into the various new methods of work that developed in the decades following Marx and Engels’ time.
Sometimes employers encourage workers to buy their company’s products by giving them employee discounts. Their own use of “their” products serves as both motivation and advertising.
Examine the endless contemporary blather about “work/life balance” and you will see how the ideal “balance” keeps you “productive” on the job, avoiding any physical or mental breakdown that might impair work performance. This view is closely related to the identification of “mental health” with the ability to hold down a job, whether waged or unwaged.
See, Thomas Reddaway, The Rebuilding of London after the Great Fire (1940) and the review by A. H. Thomas in History 25, no. 98 (September 1940): 97–112, which compares it to earlier studies. See too, John Schofield, “Buildings in the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 26, no. 2 (June 2022): 401–433.
Even today, the limits to such efforts have been clear in such catastrophes as that suffered in 2005 by New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Rebuilding the most devastated part of the city (the Black working class Lower Ninth Ward) has largely depended on grassroots efforts such as lowernine.org. (Accessed 7/16/2024.)
This has continued to the present day. See in Chapter 5, the example of the 2013 collapse of the Rama Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (footnote 37) and the treatment of corruption in the TV Show Endeavor (footnote 92).
This tendency has accelerated with modern methods of hybridization and genetic modification – as illustrated by the case of corn leaf blight mentioned earlier in Chapter 5, footnote 50. Within husbandry, “factory farming,” has resulted in a dramatically high propensity to circulate disease within dense populations of animals. To counteract that threat, capitalists have had recourse to extensive use of antibiotics and other drugs to prevent or contain disease – a measure which, in turn, has led to new resistant strains of disease that threaten both the animals and their human consumers, e.g., mad cow disease, or the new H5N1 bird flu.
This has become such a standard practice among capitalists that it has been used as an argument against blockades of sources for political reasons. Cutting off one source will have little effect when multiple alternative sources are available.
Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, A Tale (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985) 157.
In the twentieth century, the rapid development and deployment of the multinational corporation with production and sales located in several countries has complemented more traditional threats of competition from foreign based firms. Both kinds of threat continue to be used by capital to obtain worker concessions to desired, labor-displacing changes. One vivid portrayal of such methods can be found in Michael Moore’s film Roger & Me (1989) about General Motors closing down auto plants in Flint Michigan and outsourcing the jobs to cheaper labor in Mexico. (Accessed 7/16/2024.)
A dramatic example of such deals was that struck between the United Mine Workers union and mine owners in the 1950 National Bituminous Coal and Wage Agreement. The results included a doubling of productivity over the next decade along with a halving of the labor force and increased wages for those who retained their jobs. See, William Cleaver, “Wildcats in the Appalachian Coal Fields” Zerowork 1 (1975): 113–127.
More recent examples have included the Civilian Conservation Corps created by the Roosevelt Administration during the Great Depression of the 1930s and Food-for-Work, famine relief programs run by national governments, international institutions such as the UN or private charities. Although originating during the early, tumultuous years of the Soviet Union, state maintenance of employment became permanent as that state-capitalist government effectively guaranteed employment for all who wanted it.
The most familiar modern example is the assembly line whose speed is controlled not by workers but by management – mentioned previously in a footnote to Chapter 3. But the same dynamic exists for many other kinds of machines, such as those used in agribusiness. How fast machines like the early McCormick reapers or modern harvesting rigs are towed determines the work speed of the farm workers who collect cut grain or cut produce.
Capital, Vol. 3, p. 342, or MECW, Vol. 37, p. 234.
Such was the conclusion of Paul Sweezy who thought this observation invalidated the “Tendency.” See, Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1942), Chapter VI.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, the rise of the service sector in the post-WWII period was every bit as striking as the earlier rise of manufacturing against the backdrop of mostly agrarian economies. As worker success in raising wages and consumer demand made it possible for capitalists to convert one human activity after another into the production of service commodities, many of those industries that Marx had dismissed as negligible became quite important for capitalist development as a whole.
Capital, Vol. 3, p. 345, MECW, Vol. 37, p. 236.
Ibid., p. 346.
Part 5 of Volume 3 is devoted to this question.
In the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s, various financial regulations were imposed precisely to reduce such speculation and encourage real investment. The financial deregulation imposed in the early 1980s had precisely the opposite effect and contributed to a whole series of financial and economic crises in the following decades, e.g., the collapse of the American Saving & Loan Industry in 1987, the “dot.com” bubble and bust in the 1990s, the housing bubble in 2006–2008 and resulting crash.
The two essays are available together as The Nigger Question and the Negro Question (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing Reprints, 2010).
See, Elizabeth Jemison, “Proslavery Christianity After the Emancipation,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Vol. 72, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 255–268.
This racist idea would mutate in the post-Civil War South into the paternalistic attitudes of whites toward legally free but employed black servants – right up to the present day.
See, Jemison, “Proslavery Christianity After the Emancipation,” op. cit.
Eventually, chattel slavery was almost universally criminalized throughout the capitalist world. Actually ending slavery, however, has required both the discovery of slavery – in all its various forms, both overt and covert, hidden behind legal ruses, such as indenture mentioned above – and its prosecution. The struggle against it has continued to the present.
Today, such “selling off”, along with the capturing and transportation of slaves, falls under the rubric of “Human trafficking.” All illegal but immensely profitable to the capitalists who control it.
Karl Marx, “The Crisis in Trade and Industry,” (Jan. 8–22, 1855) MECW, Vol. 13, pp. 571–578.
In the United States, stealing a little is deemed a “misdemeanor” and punishment is relatively light; stealing a lot is a “felony” and the punishment is more severe. As vividly illustrated by recent NYC indictment of Trump and his organization, capitalists often inflate or deflate the value of their property for their own purposes. There are no unquestionable “market values,” yet folks are jailed on the say-so of those whose property has been stolen or directly appropriated.
F. Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany” (October 1850) MECW, Vol. 10, p. 468.
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1984) 107–124.
There was some of this attitude even within Europe, toward indigenous groups such as the Laplanders (sámi) in northern Scandinavia or ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe. See Engels’ attitudes quoted in Appendix I “Note to Polish Readers.”
Some “land reform” measures in the post-colonial, post-WWII era, formed modern apparent exceptions to capitalist opposition to reversing enclosures. In a number of countries, where demands for reform were fierce, capitalist policy makers granted some reversal of enclosure by breaking up large estates and distributing parcels of land to landless peasants. In retrospect, they were half-hearted measures designed more as temporary palliatives to ward off more rural unrest, counterinsurgency holding actions to stabilize the rural population until it was needed as active LP for capitalist development. See, Harry Cleaver, “Food, Famine and the International Crisis,” Zerowork, no. 2, (Fall 1977): 7–69.
Still true. It is said that during the big city uprisings in the US in the mid-1960s, e.g., Watts and Newark, the informal slogan was “Always loot before you burn!” The burning, that is, of stores judged to be screwing local workers with unacceptably high prices and practices. It seems likely the same attitude was prevalent in the world-wide “food riot” uprisings against International Monetary Fund imposed austerity during the debt crises of the 1980s and 1990s. See, David Seddon, Riot and Rebellion: Political Responses to Economic Crisis in North Africa (Tunisa, Morocco and Sudan) Discussion Paper No. 196, School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, October 1986. The pattern has continued: Ray Bush, “Food Riots: Poverty, Power and Protest,” Journal of Agrarian Change 10, no. 1 (January 2010): 119–129.
In modern times, surveillance has become even more pervasive through the use of alarm-triggering gadgets attached to consumer goods, video cameras watching and recording potential appropriators and computer programs tracking the use of online digital consumer goods, such as video and TV streaming.
Robert Ovetz, When Workers Shot Back, op. cit. This militarization of the police has become obvious since massive transfers of military equipment to local police has made a great many of the latter almost indistinguishable from military forces in terms of armored clothing and equipment, e.g., “swat” teams and those aimed at “crowd control.” Such have also been deployed not just to stop looting and burning rioters but also to suppress peacefully demonstrating protestors – as we have seen around the world in reaction to anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian protests.
The central city uprisings in the US in the 1960s – beginning with Watts in 1965 – were dubbed, ex-post, “commodity riots” by social scientists and one federal response, to ward off the recurrence of widespread looting, was a vast expansion of food stamps. See, the McCone Commission Report, Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? (1965), most of whose recommendations went unheeded, and Tim Reynolds, The Food Stamp Explosion, University of Texas at Austin, M.A. Thesis, 1980.
See, the Wikipedia for a brief history of these “houses”. The same kind of work has been common in prisons, far beyond and long after Victorian Britain. The phrase “making little ones out of big ones” has often referred to the prison labor of breaking stones into small pieces to be used in roadways. While some of this make-work has disappeared, e.g., picking oakum (because ships are now made of steel, not wood whose cracks needed caulking), others continue, in or out of the modern equivalent of workhouses. See, Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, Hands that Crush Stones (Ibadan: University Press, 2010), a play about women doing this work in Nigeria and their struggle for higher wages. On the other hand, penal forced labor in the United States has evolved into a multibillion-dollar industry, both private and public, in which prisoners work for pennies – a situation which has resulted in numerous strikes by prison workers and a movement against such forced labor. See, the Wikipedia article on Penal Labor in the US. (Both accessed 7/17/2024.)
Eventually, in the 1930s and 1940s, capitalists replaced such institutions with alternatives ranging from concentration camps and prisons to various welfare programs. Capitalist recognition of the sharp distinction between “need” and “ability to pay” has also been recognized in periods of drought and flood when famine relief has taken the form of the distribution of cash rather than food, where scarce food has been hoarded, sold only to those with money, with those without left to starve.
This has continued through WWII, where allied ship convoys needed protection from German U-boats (submarines), and more recently where US warships have fended off efforts by the Iranian government to disrupt oil tankers, and a Combined Task Force of national naval forces are defending ships against pirates in the Gulf of Aden and along the coast of Somalia and against Houthi in Yemen protesting genocide in Gaza.
These days physical walls continue to be used, often topped with razor wire and complemented by security cameras. Since the onset of the computer era “firewalls” form digital walls to keep hackers out. However, keeping software secrets in has required other means such as legal barriers to the “theft” of “intellectual property” by the workers producing it, by competing capitalists, or by directly appropriating consumers, e.g., P2P, Peer-to-peer sharing of digital media. See, Brett Caraway, “Survey of File-Sharing Culture”, International Journal of Communication 6, (2012): 564–584.
At least he wasn’t murdered, as many believe Karen Silkwood was in 1974, because of her revelations of the dangers at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site plant where she worked creating plutonium fuel pellets.
John Forrester, “The Lancet’s Analytical Sanitary Commission” The Lancet 322, no. 8364 (December 10, 1978): 1360–1362.
Arthur Hassall, “The Adulteration of Food and Drink Act” The Lancet 76, no. 1933 (September 15, 1860): 272–273.
Capital, Vol. 1, p. 358, or MECW, Vol. 35, p. 256.
Today this is obvious in the fashion, automotive, computer hardware and software industries. Even when a given combination of hardware and software still serve the purposes for which they were purchased, computer companies force their abandonment by refusing to continue to provide technical updates and assistance, e.g., parts for hardware or defense against malware.
See, Charles Bendig, “Ships’ Pumps: From Antiquity to the Early Modern Era,” Journal of Maritime Archaeology 15, no. 2 (June 2020): 185–207.
NB: scientific and technological innovation are accomplished by workers, sometimes by operatives, more often by engineers and scientists. Most remain hirelings, like manual workers, but when they spin off from employers and link up with financial capitalists to implement their ideas on their own, they are called “entrepreneurs.” Such was Thomas Edison (1847–1931) who set up his first laboratory in 1876. Such too, in more recent years was Steven Jobs (1955–2011) who incorporated Apple Computer Company in 1977.
See, Joanna Kostylo, “From Gunpowder to Print: The Common Origins of Copyright and Patent,” in Ronan Deazley et al., Privilege and Property: Essays on the history of Copyright (Cambridge: Open Book, 2010) 21–50. Copyrights were extended from print to audio and visual materials as they were developed.
Today, when so much industrial and commercial information is digitized and communicated within corporations electronically, much industrial and commercial espionage is conducted by hackers, either hired or freelance. In response, security firms – such as Securitas USA, which absorbed the Pinkerton detective agency, once the biggest private security operation in the world and notorious for its union-busting activities – have complemented their physical protective services with electronic ones. Well-connected corporations, of course, also benefit from the help of national security agencies in thwarting both domestic and foreign industrial espionage – as exemplified by both sides of the Cold War and in recent years by the US government crackdown on Chinese industrial espionage.
It was just such huge storage capacity of the grain trading companies that made it possible for them, but not the farmers from whom they had bought grain to profit from the notorious giant grain deal negotiated between the US and the Soviet Union in 1972. See, James Trager, Amber Waves of Grain: The Secret Russian Wheat Sales that Sent American Food Prices Soaring (New York: Arthur Fields Books, 1972).
The rise of the animal rights movement’s attacks on the use of fur has reduced demand for fur as clothing producers under pressure from both activists and consumers have switched to synthetic imitations. Parallel attacks on the use of leather in clothing, briefcases, handbags, etc., on the use of feathers in down jackets, comforters, pillows, etc., and, of course, the consumption of animal flesh have also either slowed the growth of, or reduced the demand for those all those MP. In several countries, such as Austria, the UK, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Norway and Italy, fur farming has been banned entirely. However, increased demand in countries such China and Russia has offset the reduction in demand in those countries.
When the US government cut imports of sugar from Cuba in 1960, the leaders of that country increased exports to Europe and the USSR. But when the USSR collapsed in 1991, Cuban exports were again dramatically reduced, forcing a new search for markets beyond the reach of US sanctions. In recent years, Cuba, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have all be the subject of US sanctions and have all had to find importers willing to buy their products despite those sanctions.
See, for example, Marx, “The State of Trade,” March 6, 1849, MECW, Vol. 9, pp. 3–8.
See, among others, Marx and Engels, “Review: May to Oct. 1850,” November 1, 1850, MECW, Vol. 10, pp. 490–532, Marx, “The Vienna Note – The US and Europe – Letters from Shumla – Peel’s Bank Act,” September 9, 1853, MECW, Vol. 12, pp. 292–300, Marx, “The Bank Act of 1844 and the Monetary Crisis in England,” November 6, 1857, MECW, Vol. 15, pp. 379–84, Marx, “The English Bank Act of 1844,” August 6, 1858, MECW, Vol. 16, pp. 3–7.
See, Marx’s critique of the quantity theory in Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 3, pp. 213–20, or MECW, Vol. 35, pp. 127–34.
One aspect of workers’ power that capitalists try to harness is cooperation. Its autonomy and how capital tries to harness it, is discussed at length in Chapter 13 of Volume 1 of Capital. Had he followed up with a chapter on workers’ creativity and imagination and how capital tries to harness them, there would be less fascination these days with the idea of “immaterial” labor.
There are many other ways as well, such as the way capitalists organize education to produce mostly disciplined, obedient workers rather than creative ones – so institutionalized as to frustrate even the most gifted teachers who, against the grain, cultivate creativity. See, for example, the experience of one such teacher in Herbert Kohl’s classic 36 Children (New York: New American Library, 1967).
In Bill Watkin’s “Counterplanning on the Shopfloor,” besides worker-planned breaks and play on the job, he also cites such refusal of managers to listen to suggestions by blue collar workers. More recently “neo-Schumpeterians” among both economists and managers have recognized how a far greater proportion of the labor force can contribute to innovation, given proper incentives and managerial openness to new ideas from a diverse array of workers. See, Horst Hanusch and Andreas Pyka, eds., Elgar Companion to Neo-Schumpeterian Economics (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007).
This absence of necessity has long been in the minds of many anarchists for whom self-management is a central tenent of their politics. Today, if you do an Internet search for “Who needs bosses?” you quickly discover a whole series of articles in business magazines setting out reasons why bosses ARE needed. Clearly, the fear of being recognized as unnecessary parasites haunts the capitalist class, e.g., Steve Tobak, “Why We Still Need Bosses”, Fortune, June 24, 2016.
Capital, Vol. I, pp. 448–449 , or MECW, Vol. 35, pp. 335–336, and F. Engels, “On Authority” in MECW, Vol. 23, pp. 422–425. Also, see 33 Lessons on Capital (2019) 283–290.
Not, in this case, to the needs of workers, but to those of capitalists trying to avoid crisis. Today, multinational corporations manage vertically integrated subsidiaries all over the world.
MECW, Vol. 43, pp. 471–476. Once slavery was abolished in the United States, American capitalists supported the immigration of workers from the Europe and Asia, then from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Continental European capitalists brought in workers from the Iberian Peninsula and then from colonies and ex-colonies in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. Those in England drew workers mainly from their ex-colonies in the West Indies and South Asia. These patterns persist to this day – augmented by workers from post-Cold War Eastern Europe and refugees from wars in Africa and the Middle East. In all these cases, capitalists and their minions have encouraged discrimination against each new wave of “interlopers” among local workers and in their communities.
Capital, Vol. II, p. 183; MECW, Vol. 36, p. 109.
Given the centrality of agriculture in the US economy, in 1862 the Morill Act created the Department of Agriculture (along with land grant colleges) and a year later a Division of Statistics (later the Economic Research Service, ERS) was created in to compile data needed for both agribusiness and policy makers. The ERS publishes “Situation and Outlook Reports” that track the production and stocks of various agricultural commodities both at home and abroad – to help producers decide how much of what crop to plant or bring to market and to inform government policy making. See, Sowing Seeds of Change: Informing Public Policy in the Economic Research Service of USDA (1999), Chapter 3.
Rationing was extensive in WWII, covering most basic consumer goods, from food to fuel. Complications in managing rationing, e.g., countering corrupt practices, have been portrayed in films such as Foyle’s War, most episodes (2002–2010) unfolding on the southern coast of England. More recently governments have overseen some rationing of medical equipment (masks, test kits) during the Covid-19 pandemic.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s when both local and international markets collapsed, vast quantities of produced goods were destroyed. One dramatic example was the burning of over 10 billion pounds of coffee beans in Brazil. See: Jonas Ferraresso, “90 Years Ago, Seeking Salvation, Brazil Burned Billions of Pounds of Coffee”, Daily Coffee News, September 22, 2021. (Accessed 7/18/2024.)