Books
From the economic crisis to fanaticism, three new publications explore the meaning of capital
What greater engine of super-hybridity is there than capital? In some
of the famously ambivalent passages in The Manifesto of the Communist
Party (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels characterize it as a force
that would liquidate all traditions and territorialities. But what of
capital itself, this ‘Frankensteinian surgeon of the cities’, as
Jean-François Lyotard memorably described it? How is it to be defined?
In Capital As Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (2009), Shimshon
Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan argue that most existing definitions of
capital are inadequate. Although sympathetic to Marxism, Bichler and
Nitzan believe that it shares a fatal weakness with its old adversary,
liberalism, in retaining a distinction between economics and politics,
both of which assume capital can be ‘cashed out’ in economic terms. For
Marxists, capital can be ultimately reduced to the ‘abstract labour’
that has produced it; for liberals, it has an equivalent value in
‘utils’ (units of usefulness). But, for Bichler and Nitzan, the attempt
to root capital in some real quantity must fail. Their claim, extremely
pertinent in the wake of the recent global financial crisis, is that it
is not possible to maintain any effective distinction between so-called
real capital (tangible goods and services) and ‘fictitious’ capital
(speculative financial products), because capital is essentially
finance. They are casually dismissive of Postmodern theory, but many of
the themes they broach here – the failure of the Marxist labour theory
of value, the irreducible fictionality of capital, capital being
inadequately defined in terms of ‘production’ – were, in fact, at the
heart of the work of Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Antonio Negri and Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the 1970s. But Bichler and Nitzan have a
lucidity sometimes lacking in their rivals in continental theory, and
their approach is fresh. They call upon the work of the theorist
Thorstein Veblen, and in particular his crucial distinction between
industry and business. Far from enabling industry (which for Veblen
comprised the truly creative forces in society), business can only
profit by containing (or, in Veblen’s terms) sabotaging, the creativity
of industry: Microsoft, for instance, has accrued its vast wealth not by
producing software but by limiting access to it.
Capital as Power is as bold in its thesis-making as it is detailed in
its argument: the book has both a fine-grain engagement with economic
theory and a broad historical sweep, which touches upon topics as
diverse as the development of credit and the evolution of systems of
power. Capital
is not an economic quantity, but a nomos, a world constructed by social
and legal institutions. Capital now plays the role that God once did in
theocratic societies. As Bichler and Nitzan argue: ‘Instead of the Holy
Scriptures, we now have the universal language of business accounting
and corporate finance. The power of God, once vested in priest and king,
now reveals itself as the power
of Capital vested in the “investor”.’
This concept of capital as religion is threaded through Alberto
Toscano’s Fanaticism: On The Uses of an Idea (2010). Succinct yet
expansively allusive in scope, dense yet highly readable, Fanaticism is a
multi-levelled investigation into the role that the idea of the fanatic
has played in political discourse. The last decade’s ‘war on terror’
was presented by its supporters as a struggle between an achieved
Enlightenment and atavistic fanaticism. It’s this unreflective
opposition – between a liberal democratic capitalism which calls itself
Enlightened, and an Other which it abjects as fanaticism – that Toscano
unsettles. Via an engagement with philosophers including David Hume,
Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, and movements such as millenarianism and
abolitionism, Toscano shows that Enlightenment was never able to
extricate itself from fanaticism which, rather than being just an
irrational mania, was often construed as an excess of reason, a passion
for abstraction. The pathologization of political extremism as a form of
religious mania has resulted in some odd reversals, which Toscano dryly
notes: first, communism was denounced as a new Islam; then, Islam was
denounced as the new communism. For Toscano, the distinctive
contribution of Marxism – its ‘critique of the critique of religion’ –
was not to attack religion directly, as other supposed radicals had, but
to treat it as symptomatic. Eliminating religion wouldn’t eliminate the
social conditions that gave rise to religion in the first place.
Moreover, it isn’t (just) that revolutionaries share something with
religious converts. More importantly – and just as Bichler and Nitzan
argue – capitalism’s commodity fetishism constitutes a disavowed
‘religion of everyday life’. Enlightenment can only falter while this
religion remains in place.
‘If the alternative globalization movement of the late 1990s declared,
another world is possible, then why not say another communism is
possible?’ So asks Marxist geographer David Harvey in The Enigma of
Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (2010). Harvey argues that capital
doesn’t solve its crises (it merely moves them around the globe) but
neither is it destroyed by them. However, there is one problem, Harvey
argues, which capital is now struggling to find even a provisional
solution for. It has until now relied upon a three percent compound rate
of growth, but its very success and its dominion over increasing areas
of the planet, means that it’s becoming ever harder to continue to find
this rate of growth. The recent credit crisis was a consequence of
capital’s strategy for subduing labour: credit allowed wages to be kept
down without standards of living falling. Harvey construes the latest
crisis not as the inevitable beginning of the end for capitalism, but as
a moment of opportunity. The great contribution of The Enigma of
Capital is its analysis of how capitalism co-evolved from a number of
convergent tendencies and process. Following Marx, Harvey identifies
seven different areas of activity which Capital had to revolutionize in
order to come to dominance: technological and organizational forms of
production, exchange and consumption; relations to nature; social
relations; mental conceptions of the world; labour processes and
production of goods and services; institutional, legal and governmental
arrangements; and the conduct of daily life. Harvey argues that
anti-capitalism has often made the mistake of concentrating one or two
of these at the expense of all the others. But revolution will only
succeed if it follows capital’s co-evolutionary method: the only way for
anti-capitalism to overcome capital’s super-hybrid is for it to become a
super-hybrid itself.
Mark Fisher
frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com.
