Capital and/or Capitalist Society? A Tale of Two Totalities

David Harvey has inspired me for many years. In 1970 he guided my first reading of Capital Volume 1 in a New Left study group. We’ve since had many discussions, at conferences, symposia and book launches. The focus was usually the relation between two paradigms of Marxist theorizing, one (David’s) focused on capital, the other (mine) on the latter’s background conditions of possibility and thus, on capitalist society. We’ve co-taught a graduate seminar on this very theme. It is fitting, then, for me to celebrate David’s 90^th by revisiting his Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse. That book is uniquely positioned to advance our discussion. Its chief concern is to explicate the sense in which capital constitutes a totality. But it also references Marx’s notes on “precapitalist economic formations,” which focus on societal “conditions of production” and suggest another, larger totality. In what follows, I want to contrast these two paradigms and probe the relation between them. My aim is to specify what I take to be David’s distinctive contribution to Marxian theory. I also hope to clarify what each paradigm might offer us now, as we try to navigate the most severe capitalist crisis in nearly a century. Finally, I hope to show what we might gain by combining them.

For David, the principal focus of Marx’s Grundrisse is capital, defined as self-expanding value in motion. This expression, like the notion of value it references, names a socially instituted real abstraction. Historically specific and a relation as opposed to a thing, capital is conceived in David’s Companion as a circulatory process. In this process, value shape-shifts as it circulates, appearing alternately as money, plant, machinery, labor, land, raw materials, energy, commodities, revenue, profit, credit, operating and investment funds–all guises of capital, transmuting itself in unceasing and mindless pursuit of limitless accumulation. Capital, in David’s reading of the Grundrisse, is a totality, which comprises multiple moments: exchange, production, valorization, distribution, realization, consumption, and investment. None of its moments is free-standing. Each moment is constituted by and depends on its relation to the others.

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David's chief aim in his Companion is to explicate this totality and, especially, to map the routes along which capital circulates. And he gets a lot of mileage out of this effort. Here are but a few of the many important insights his work has generated.

1)        David remedies traditional Marxism’s one-sided emphasis on production. Refusing to treat production the whole story, he resituates it within the capital totality as one moment among several others, and one that cannot be understood in abstraction from them.

2)        Likewise, David spotlights a range of possible (and actual) tensions within the circulatory process. Identifying multiple ways in which its moments can be out of sync, he shows that there is no one master form of capitalist crisis. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is but one of these–and one that may be offset by the growing mass of profit. Rising mass (as opposed to falling rate) is a major driver, David claims, of the current ticking time bomb of speculation and rentierism.

3)        Multiple crisis tendencies give rise to multiple attempted fixes. Many of these, David shows, are spatial: imperial plunder, geographic expansion and contraction, public infrastructure projects that transform built environments. Other fixes are temporal–credit, futures, consumer and sovereign debt, which defer unpaid social-reproductive and ecological costs onto future wages, future tax revenues, future generations. Many such fixes amount to accumulation by dispossession or ongoing primitive accumulation, as they siphon wealth from distant lands and dump waste onto far-off futures. But none of them fixes anything once and for all. All leave in place the deep-structural source of the trouble: capital’s hard-wired compulsion to limitless accumulation.

4)        Finally, in tracking capital’s motion in time and space, David follows that elusive abstraction well beyond the usual precincts. Not limited to the likes of factories, corporations, stock exchanges, and banks, the route also runs through states, households, civil society associations, natural habits, human nature–all sites that traditional Marxism was prone to neglect.

All of these are important insights which make for an impressive legacy. But the last one is most relevant here, as it gestures to the existence of another totality. If David’s centers on capital and is relatively restricted, the other one is broader, encompassing the nexus of society and nature through which capital moves–and on which it preys.

Even while sticking strictly to capital’s flightpath, David nevertheless travels widely and takes in a lot. The journey takes us well beyond the system’s economy, winding from the latter’s usual precincts to the extra-economic territories that surround and support them and back again. As capital traverses households and habitats, civil society and state institutions en route to accumulation, the broader totality of capitalist society comes into view.

Yet capital is in the driver’s seat on this trip. Households, states, civil societies, communities, nature, etc. appear as sites for capital, which takes what it needs from them and reshapes them while passing through . Whatever autonomy these precincts harbor remains inaccessible. Aims, values, and hopes that diverge from capital’s logic recede from view, as does pushback against it. A gaze trained by and on capital will miss, in effect, another set of crisis tendencies, above and beyond those mapped by David. Not disequilibria among the moments of capital, but tensions between the smaller totality of capital and the larger one on which it feeds.

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To remedy this blind spot, we can take a leaf from another section of Marx’s Grundrisse, which figures less prominently in David’s Companion: the famous discussion of “pre-capitalist economic formations.” There, Marx constructs a series of ideal-types as foils to disclose the specificity of capitalist society. These constructs (so-called tribal, Asiatic, ancient, and Germanic economic formations) serve less to represent historical or anthropological realities than to throw capitalism’s peculiarities into relief. They differ among themselves but share a common feature. All lack sharp intuitional divisions between production and reproduction, economy and polity, society and nature. All maintain some form of community property in the conditions of production. All institute the community as the primary force of re/production and of social coordination, which organizes its members access to the land and tools they require to work–and thus to live. None of Marx’s constructs constitutes labor as merely subjective, dispossessed of the objective conditions of its realization. In these formations, rather, land, labor, and community constitute a more or less integrated complex. In capitalist societies, by contrast, that complex is disintegrated, supplanted by a set of institutionalized separations: production from reproduction, “the economic” from “the political,” (human) society from (non-human) nature,(doubly) free from dependent labor. In each pair, the second term is the disavowed ground that makes the first term possible. Labor, Marx stresses, is subjectivized, separated from the objective conditions of its realization. The latter now appear as private property in the mode of capital, compelled by its inner logic and by competition to “self-expand.”

Here, in this section of the Grundrisse, we glimpse key features of the larger totality which envelops and sustains the one David analyzes. Granted, Marx’s remarks are not systematic. But if worked up systematically, they can yield a structural account of “capitalist society.” The latter would then appear as an “institutionalized societal order.” That category equates neither to a mode of production nor to a social formation. Unlike the first of those concepts, which foregrounds forces and relations of production, the idea I’m proposing here stresses the conditions necessary for capitalist production and accumulation, those backgrounded forms of natural and social wealth on which production relies and capital free-rides. Unlike the idea of a social formation, this one treats these background conditions as constitutive of capitalism as such, hence not as historically contingent. 

Each of those points needs fleshing out. The first, on the disavowed background conditions of production and accumulation, bolsters a point that David arrives at via a different route: the so-called primitive accumulation is not a one-off bug but an ongoing feature, entrenched in the system’s design. The second point, on that design’s constitutive, non-contingent character, upends the usual view that structure and history are mutually antithetical: capitalism’s institutional divisions are not set in stone, but sites of tension and struggle, subject to contestation and recalibration, especially in periods of crisis. Exactly where and how they are drawn is historically variable, both across time and space. But that they exist in some form is not contingent; they are constitutive of capitalist society. As, too, are the “inter-realm” crisis tendencies embedded in them

Much more needs to be said about the two totalities I’ve identified here. But one thing at least should be clear: they represent complementary objects of inquiry, not mutually exclusive alternatives. Exactly how best they can be combined remains to be seen. But fortunately, we can rely on David Harvey to think with and through about that.

Happy birthday, David!

Filed under: Harvey-at-90