“How on earth did we end up today with a global system which readily betrays signs of laboriously gearing up for a Third Conflict? A system packed with production facilities, bloated with financial mass, complete with a network of diplomatic control. An out-and-out ‘superstate’ wielding its influence over three-quarters of the world, equipped with a propaganda machine that suffocates the entire surface of the planet, its atmosphere and – for those who believe – the imponderable field of the ‘spirit’ itself. A system whose military clout positively dwarfs that of anything in the past. A system tagged with the most foolish and brazen of expressions as the ‘free world’…”
(“Schifo e menzogna del mondo libero” [Free World Muck and Lies], Battaglia comunista, no. 15, 1950)
The global system in the making at the time our text was published in 1950 bore a strong resemblance to that of today. The movement towards a Third War has laboriously clawed its way through a proliferation of locally fought wars, and once the ‘bipolar antagonist’ (Russia) had been effortlessly disposed of without any military effort, the crusade for domination and colonization became global in direction. And behind this system is the most powerful armed force human history has ever seen (1).
All military, technological, propagandistic and economic means have been conceived and exploited with a view to enforcing the principles of the ‘free world’ so that no one can give the slip to the concept of ‘freedom’ championed by a nation whose destiny is ‘manifest and exceptional’: a nation whose early dealings with Native Americans and Africans did little to dispel the idea of its essentially colonialist, slave-owning leanings; a nation tasked with visiting a similar fate upon all peoples of the world – a mission yet to be accomplished, but which is now at a turning point. It wouldn’t be too absurd to suggest that we have been in the Third War for some time now (the conditional is de rigeur for at least two reasons: firstly, for the moment at least, despite increases in military spending, especially among the main imperialist powers, we have yet to see concrete evidence of the militarization typical of war economies; and secondly, national mass mobilizations within countries are still quite contained), and that what near future holds is the string of battles that will determine its outcome.
Gathering steam, the ‘free world’ avails itself of forces armed to the teeth and equipped with highly sophisticated technologies so as to stake its superiority over forces that dare put up resistance. This progression is accompanied by a technical knowledge which marks the triumph of man's domination over man: under capitalism, from a certain point on, all technical progress translates into a more compelling submission to its laws. In the factory, workers experience the transition from formal to real subordination via mechanisation and the application of science to production, while in society this transtion occurs with the extension of the machine system and the application of science to all aspects of social life. Let us refer back to the same text quoted in the opening:
“For Franklin [the man who embodies the idea of a ‘free America,’ the matrix of the New World, ed.], man is a ‘toolmaking animal’ by nature. What could be more bourgeois? The author of this cynical definition died in 1790, but imperialism takes its origins from the making of many, many tools. Oh ye who long for the Franklins – the atom bomb is a tool too.”
The Bomb is the non plus ultra of tools or instruments. It is a synthesis and materialization of the process of subjugation. Any resistance comes at the cost of apocalypse, but its unlimited power is also its limit. As a tool it can only be employed to demonstrate power – anything beyond that and domination itself is annihilated along with the dominated. Perhaps the privileged few at work in bourgeois high finance have kitted out luxury bunkers and expect to survive, but when no-one is left to exploit they’ll be hard pushed to find anything over which to exercise their dominion. The Bomb is the highest expression of tool as it is understood in Capitalist society: but it is also encapsulates the limits of Capital. Through the generalization of instrumentation, especially when it can be operated autonomously, and even more so when it is immaterial and comes endowed with a kind of intelligence that dispenses with humans, rendering them superfluous, inadequate and obsolete (2), Capital destroys itself, indeed, the very foundations of the valorization that provides its movement with meaning. Now that the Bomb is once again being mooted as a realistic alternative, we might reasonably assume this is symptomatic of the limits to its advance being reached: beyond this point lies a choice between revolution and ruinous catastrophe.
Nowadays, technological domination – a by-product of a science that is anything but ‘neutral,’essentially conceived and developed to create tools geared towards creating profit and domination – goes well beyond the strictly material production of goods. It relates, for ‘those who believe, to the imponderable field of the spirit’; domination is inseparable from the control of thoughts, emotions and the feelings of the dominated. Also here the transition from formal to real domination has come about with the onset of an extensive and all-permeating instrumentation capable of reaching and forging the masses and the individual – ideally as soon as they are out of the cradle. Being ceaselessly connected means individuals are reduced to a terminal of that general intellect (3) currently in the hands of a smattering of large financial groups whose monstruous monopolisation of machines geared towards monitoring thoughts, behaviours and consumer habits has enabled them to notch up the healthiest of profits. At the same time, they are persuaded to indulge in virtual worlds that exist independently of the real world and are disconnected from relationships formed in concrete reality. Some time ago now, someone who was formed at our ‘school’ deduced that the extension of real domination well beyond the working day to the whole lifetime of workers would bring an end to any residual resistance on their part to the great Moloch, as identified with Capital and its laws: the anthropomorphosis of capital (4). At that point, he concluded, there would be an end to the class struggle, to the proletariat and to the historic possibility of overhauling capitalism as indicated by Marx. The individual human remained, facing the unfettered power of Capital, but chances to escape it were confined within the conscience of its domination, and in the possibility of doing “as if”: living “as if” being in the future community, of humanity which has recovered itself.
It would be all too easy to call out this strange theorist of invariance for leaving so little of the historical doctrine unchanged; for having decreed the abandonment of the prospect of proletarian revolution, confident that this was the sentence of History; and for having entrusted the fate of humankind to the greatly circumscribed limits of individual choices, of groups or ‘communities’. Were this the case, what slim hopes would remain for the fate of a species forced to experience a enormous catastrophe? A species (assuming it survived) that would nevertheless be condemned to regression, re-tracing its footsteps down the centuries and stumbling along paths of emancipation that, hopefully, will not follow the disastrous one presently being travelled along.
An acceptance of those theories would lead one to conclude that human history has reached a dead end, a possibility that the Marxist vision had by no means excluded as early as the founding Manifesto of 1848, where it was suggested that the failure of the revolution would see all classes united in ruin. This alone would be enough to knock some sense into those who attribute to Marx a teleological vision, as a matter of fact indebted to the ‘progress’ which capitalism has undoubtedly brought about. Marx and Engels surely have honoured the historical role of capitalism, but at the same time they have revealed its unresolvable contradictions, its finite limits as a mode of production and, therefore, the need for it to be superseded. When Marx recognizes the limit of Capital as being an obstacle to the development of productive forces, and therefore historically transitory and destined to fade away, he doesn’t lay down an absolute quantitative limit to the mass of production and the means that generate it. He expresses the essence of Capital in the fact that it presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’; the obstacle lies wholly in the mercantile form and its being an expression of value, which ensures that production is cyclically excessive in relation to the possibilities of valorization, but also remains inadequate in terms of meeting human needs – even in phases of ‘expansion’ – essentially because of its form. On positing thereafter insurmountable limits when it comes to “mass consumer capacity”, he points on the one hand to the waste implicit in excess productivity that can’t be consumed prior to its value being realized and, on the other, to the fact that the human capacity for consumption is by no means infinite – it too has quantitative limits that are human.
But the immense accumulation of commodities must needs continue to expand and satisfy Capital’s insatiable craving for valorization. On the one hand, this entails an absolute increase in production and the corresponding “continual expansion of the circle of circulation”. The result of this is that the “selfsame circulation presents itself as a moment of production” and that “the tendency to create the world market is immediately present in the very concept of capital. Here every limit appears as an obstacle to be overcome”; on the other hand, it entails that “the production of relative surplus value, or rather, the production of surplus value based on the increase and development of productive forces, demands the production of new consumptions” – including ‘the production of new needs and the discovery and creation of new use values’ (Marx, Grundrisse, II. Our translation, emphases in the text).
Marx himself attributes an ‘enormous civilizing influence’ to this process: it recognizes no geographical limits, nor limits to human needs as defined in the name of some idea of “human” that lays down boundaries, be they physical, philosophical, religious or moral. So the idea of “man” changes its contours, being gradually defined anew in line with the needs and related desires that emerge following the extension of production to ever newer fields.
“By virtue of this inclination, capital is driven to go beyond national barriers and prejudices, as well as the idolatry of nature, the traditional satisfaction – proudly restricted within narrow limits – of existing needs, and the reproduction of the old way of life. In relation to all of this, capital operates destructively, carrying out a permanent revolution, doing away with any obstacles that impede the development of productive forces, the expansion of needs, the variety of production and the exploitation and exchange of the forces of nature and the spirit’ (Marx, Grundrisse, cit.).
The advancement of the “free world” follows hot upon the heels of the laws underlying the capitalist mode of production, extending spatially and in depth as it takes root in human behaviours; quantitatively – as immense accumulated mass of commodities that’s erupted from the volcano of production – and qualitatively, as forge of new products and needs.
New and different needs and desires have replaced those that defined what it meant to be human before Capital muscled in and became the general system, and for Marx their proliferation is proof of the extraordinary transformative action of Capital. Yet historically, this relentless march forward must come up against limits that can only be overcome by revealing the unsustainability of capitalism for our species. Upon considering the variety of new products and needs that Capital has spawned since it historically foisted itself upon us as a general mode of production, we can see that up to a certain stage in its history – and limited to the most advanced capitalist areas – the production of new commodities and corresponding needs brought about a general improvement in living conditions. This phase, albeit at different stages of development, covered the period from the era of the Industrial Revolution to the 1970s. Its demise coincided with the end of the post-war recovery, giving way to a new phase centered on financialization and the outsourcing of production to new and more lucrative areas in terms of profit rate. In the old metropolises, transformed from productive areas into consumer areas largely dependent on foreign productions, new areas of consumption were focused to a considerable degree upon services, especially those associated with so-called “free time” (or, more accurately speaking, “time freed up” from the necessities of reproduction as a result of the development of social productive forces, see note 3): an area of life that Capital would come to overshadow more and more, encouraging consumers to entertain increasingly superfluous, if not harmful, needs. Productive growth seeks largely to satisfy bogus needs and consequently gives new bases to Malthus’s law of population growth embraced by the ultra modern bards of welfare:
“The ultra modern have replaced parasitic bands of nobles and their retinue with the same nondescript mass of national consumers, forcing them to consume like fools: not much grub, but plenty of stuff to meet their bogus needs. They believe that an excited and addicted (yet poorly nourished) mass will have fewer kids, and their renowned ‘per capita’ product will remain high” (from our text ‘Production Volcano or Market Swamp?’, Il programma comunista, nos.13-19/1954).
From the 1990s on, the latest developments in IT meant that centralized control over financial flows, production time and consumption patterns on a global scale became easier. A further phase opened with the great crisis of 2008-9 which, instead of being followed by a robust recovery, gave rise to an asphyctic trend partly compensated for by a huge expansion in fictitious capital sired by the central banks with their “easy money” policy, a highly precarious state of affairs. The metropolises – and notably the United States – went into parasite mode as consumers perpetually indebted to the rest of the world, a situation that clearly couldn’t continue. Parasitic they were, but nonetheless essential to the continuation of the global accumulation mechanism: the whole complex system of globalized production would now revolve around the volcano of Chinese production and the market swamp in American metropolises..
As far as the movement of capital and goods on a planetary scale was concerned, the assignment of different and complementary roles in the global system confirmed the pre-eminent position of financial capital of the Atlantic metropolis (USA), but brought about a growing divergence of interests between areas of surplus value production and those of parasitic consumption, thus paving the way for an increasingly bitter struggle for a share in global surplus value quotas. Indeed, the abnormal growth of fictitious capital generated by the financial machine could not compensate for the production losses of hegemonic capitalism indefinitely. Hence the perpetual state of war imposed by the United States in those areas of the planet that are strategically important for the growing economic and political influence of its latest rivals, China above all.
During 2019, everything pointed in the direction of an impending inflationary crisis – partially brought about by expansive monetary policies that threatened to cause the collapse of the global financial system – and Capital was forced into a new emergency strategy shortly after that of the “Global War on Terror” launched in the wake of the Twin Towers attack. The Covid pandemic crisis led to a brutal slowdown in global trade and consumption, thus temporarily avoiding an explosion in prices, and allowed governments to engage in previously unseen forms of social disciplining. Alongside the well-known restrictions in the name of “Science” and “Public Health”, vaccines were imposed for consumption. Wallowing in public money, Big Pharma notched up huge profits while the State fell increasingly into the clutches of large financial oligarchies. A stricter and more centralised control over society was established and new needs were legislated into existence. Thus began the era of imposed needs which, from that time on, would be levied in accordance with whatever emergency happened to be passing by: yesterday the pandemic, today a climate crisis that justifies an immeasurably expensive “green” policy shift that global financial elites look set to benefit from in any number of ways. Then there is war, which rams goods and consumerism of a different nature down people’s throats…
No longer able to find satisfaction in the induction of new fictitious needs through the launching of essentially superfluous new products, Capital explores new avenues of persuasion and extends its remit to the most intimate area of human life – that of the body, health, sexual identity and procreation. What we are looking at here are vital needs that directly impact our biological – and, “for those who believe”, spiritual existence. Even the body becomes an object of expropriation when health mandates take on the character of out-and-out forced medical treatments extended to individuals wholly of sound mind. All this while national healthcare systems are torn apart and reconfigured along the lines of American insurance models, thus rendering the prime asset – healthcare – inadequate in a Malthusian sense. Fictitious, too (even if they concern highly sensitive areas of human life), are those needs bound up with the trafficking of yet unborns and the wall-to-wall promotion of a fluid sexual identity, indeterminate and adaptable to variable models of behaviour and consumption.
The world has become one immense marketplace, and even the most significant moments of the human life cycle – from the cradle to the grave – have been dolled up as merchandise peddled as inalienable ‘rights’. Anything can be monetized. If an event like birth is marketed as a commodity, it immediately creates a need and a corresponding market, ennobled by the questionable “right to have children”, even when the physiological requirements are absent. The freedom imposed by capital is the “freedom of the commodity”, the absolute power of the commodity over human existence, the transformation of all areas of life into merchandise, the total commodification of existence. Ultimately, this is what is meant by the great advance, the mission of the “free world”. Outclassed by emerging capitalisms in the production of surplus value, western financial capital champions the commodification of all aspects of life: driven by indebtedness, this involves a widespread expropriation of those assets (houses, land and small businesses) that constitute reserves or sources of income for large segments of the population, and the destruction of whatever remains of welfare (healthcare, education and social security) in what are thought to be affluent societies, and that have become targets for privatization. This is the battlefield where Western capital flexes its muscles on the home front, a war it seeks to impose on the entire world.
The commodification of existence goes hand in hand with an ever growing dehumanization (alienation, reification). Precisly because the capitalist mode of production has reduced workers to labour-power commodities and consumers of goods produced by means of commodities, so too have human beings become a commercial category subject to the law of supply and demand. In a system geared towards the maximum realization of value incorporated in commodities, and where human beings are rendered as functional to this purpose as possible, less and less is the human need to be satisfied by commodities, more and more is the need for commodities to be given value satisfied.
When commodities conquer man, they fulfil themselves as an exchange value but also as a use value; were this not the case, they would merely be inert matter or a worthless service. In order for this to occur, commodities must impose themselves on man, conquer his senses, mold his thoughts and desires and replenish the world of longing with unnecessary goods presented as being indispensable. When need cannot be brought about in the senses and psyche by means of deception or suggestion, commodities can be imposed through the evocation of catastrophes and emergencies, to which resistance is futile. Where necessity is non-existent, it must be created. The “right” to commodities becomes a “duty”. Doomsday looms large and the floodgates are wrenched open: pandemics, wars and cataclysms follow hot on the heels of one another in an endless pageant of fear. Fear pushes people to accept any promise of survival, if not salvation (an unseemly term perhaps, evoking notions of palingenesis alien to the prosaic world of commerce). And it is here, more than anywhere else, that commodities are able to impose themselves most readily, transforming humans into lifeless consumers with no will of their own. Deprived even of the miserable faculty of being able to choose between competing commodities, people are given what Moloch has decided for them, be it the all-redeeming vaccine or the car presented as non-polluting (which they cannot afford and lands them in debt). As for bombs, well, they impose themselves in various degrees of destruction when they finally land on the heads of the poor fellows. Their exchange value has already been realized while the explosion exhausts their use value. Although it may not always be possible, it is at the very least much desired that this happens with growing frequency, if only to empty the arsenals and fill them anew with the latest shiny bombs. Like every other commodity, bombs also conquer and transform humans, though in a more radical way: either they are destroyed by them, or they end up with indelible marks on their bodies and psyches. What is certain is that like so many other available commodities, bombs do not improve them…
Commodities bring about varying degrees of change in humans. These changes might range from poisoning and sex changes to dumbing down and total annihilation. The latest fad is what has been hyped as “transhumanism,” a sort of hybrid hooking-up between man and technology, and is being touted as the final frontier of human evolution. But it stinks a lot of the well-known story of Frankenstein. If these supposedly epochal transformations do come about, the human of the near-future looks like being somewhat dull-witted and anything but sharp... Not that there is anything particularly new about the average human specimen being an imbecile: in the text cited earlier, ‘Volcano of Production or Swamp of the Market?’, the theory of stupidity elaborated by a certain British individual around the middle of the last century is referenced: “After lengthy studies, he claims to have observed an increase in idiocy over the past forty years.” So the phenomenon could be dated back to the early 1900s: “Say no more: he is right”.
After millennia of pre-History and History, and the lofty Renaissance peaks of geniuses like Pico della Mirandola et al, the outlook is bleak. We do not count ourselves among those who believe such a state of affairs has been cunningly orchestrated by a conspiracy of secret, all-powerful elites (some proponents of this theory argue they are of extra-terrestrial or possibly divine origin: how else could such power be explained?). No, from our simple, materialistic Marxist viewpoint, we believe this situation arises from the inescapable evolution of the commodity, whose influence is all-pervasive, assigning value to everything as money, the only representation of value that is allowed: all other values (social, ethical, religious...) must be removed because they only serve to prevent the affirmation of the market’s only truth. Understood in these terms, “progress” dispatches with all the old certainties, disenthralls humanity of its myths and leaves it at the mercy of commodities. It also frees humanity of its critical intelligence and its capacity to make judgements based on considerations of a non-commercial nature, as well as its ability to empathise with others. Surely Marx recognized the civilizing influence of Capital as it broadened its remit: but he was never close to equating improvements in humanity’s overall condition with the trajectory of material progress. He dreaded, rather, the consequences of a generalised brutalization:
‘Humanity becomes the master of nature, but man becomes a slave to his own baseness. Even the pure light of science can only shine against the dark background of ignorance, or so it seems. It would appear that all our discoveries and progress have only led to material forces being endowed with spiritual life, while human existence is downgraded to mere material force.’ (K. Marx, cited in Alfred Schmidt, Il concetto di natura in Marx, Laterza, 1969, p.3).
***
In the capitalist sphere, the development of productive forces cannot be curbed because it requires that the commodity form enjoy continuous extension and generalization. Since it must necessarily grow, there can be no limit (see our text “Dottrina del diavolo in corpo [Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil]”, in our former journal Battaglia Comunista, no.21/1951; available in Eglish at https://sinistra.net/lib/bas/battag/ceke/cekeogezue.html). Everything that is produced and provided as a service is not for humans, but for the commodity, and for the realization of the value contained within it. Tell-tale signs of this essential characteristic of the commodity include the tendency to impose certain consumption patterns and needs and to conquer areas that are still partly outside its jurisdiction (health, education, culture, art and, indeed, life itself). Now, nothing new here in the history of Capital. Between the years 1839–42 and 1856–60, British imperialism dehumanized hundreds of thousands of Chinese through drug addiction: the so called Opium Wars saw China forced to open up to foreign trade. A limit to the development of productive forces continues to exist as long as an idea of ‘human’ exists, beyond which the human is transformed into something else, into non-human. A point is reached where Capital finds it necessary to demolish the integrity of human beings, reducing them to feeble-minded exploiters cum-exploited on the production-consumption circuit. In the developed West, the fast-growing numbers of those hooked on psychiatric drugs – not to mention drugs themselves – is clearly symptomatic of this aimless drifting. There may well be an emergency, but it’s due less to global warning than to global idiocy. The temptation exists to downgrade the philosophical formula “anthropomorphism of capital” to the more accessible global idiocy – far less philosophical, agreed, but much less definitive and pretentious.
And so, beyond all the narrow-minded rhetoric tied to its past, present and future triumphs, the meaning of “free world” becomes clear. “Freedom” is all about transcending human limits, taking into account whatever is natural in man over and beyond that “second nature” which he himself creates and to which he is now enslaved. So “freedom” is essentially violence towards nature and man, advancing with no regard for either. Thus can we understand the wayward drift towards non-sense of the LGBTQ ideologies and the wild squawking of the climate doom-mongers who, more or less knowingly, are in thrall to powers intent upon drastically reducing proletarian consumption and, perhaps, annihilating a few billion of us with bombs or other more user-friendly deadly concoctions. A Malthusian solution par excellence for “saving the planet”… until something better comes along.
“Free world” rhetoric has totally taken on board the classic cause celebre of the so called “left”, “freed” at last from the burdensome trammels of class struggle: sexual liberation, environmentalism, civil and gender rights, and any other licence that might not call into question the nature of class in this world of ours. Even “revolution” – in its most superficial sense (coloured) –, used with a view to conquering those “rights” supposedly championed by the West, is exploited to turn spontaneous opposition to so-called “tyrannical” regimes in its own interests. To say nothing of those wars that are always waged in the name of “freedom” against “rogue” states whose primal sin consists of refusing to bow down before the Atlantic bosses and their vassals. Consider how the idea of “solidarity” – one of the “values” most vaunted by the “left” – was used during the Covid pandemic: anyone refusing the vaccine was branded as a plague carrier to be denounced to the authorities, a public health threat or an egomaniac indifferent to the fate of the collective. The mechanism whereby the good – the majority – were separated from the bad (few and far between) worked, and has been employed anew during the wartime emergency that replaced the pandemic almost overnight.
At its climax, the unashamedly foolish and deceptive term “free world” is used to turn meaning on its head. Democracy is the outer shell of a system that is rapidly turning into open totalitarianism (7): the “free” press is completely at the beck and call of movers and shakers pressing the buttons in the powerhouses of finance; the “duty” to welcome immigrants is imposed by an international market in human trafficking that alleviates the global surplus of commodity labour-power; and national sovereignty is denied by a “super-state” whose political, economic, health and military structures are taking on an increasingly oppressive character. This is the inevitable result of financial power being centralized in the hands of just a few corporations which exert control over a global network of enterprises: leveraging the structures of the aforementioned “super-state”, these entities are able to dictate to governments agendas that are oriented towards the commodification of all aspects of life.
The “super-state” that emerged from the triumph of American capitalism in the Second World War was one thing in 1950 (the publication date of the text, from which we took our cue) but it has expanded and strengthened to become increasingly influential. The UN, the EU and NATO are the standard bearers of the “free world”, elevating themselves to arbiter-status when it comes to deciding the world’s fate. Elbowing their way forward in the drive to impose the free market (although in its monopolistic phase) to the whole world and in any aspect of life, they take no prisoners, destroying anything that gets in their way.
For seventy years this global system has been lawmaker, capitalising on the objective superiority of the Atlantic dominus and sticking its oar in everywhere – a tendentially single and integrated worldwide imperialist system (not to be confused with the banality of the “unitary imperialism” à la Lotta Comunista S.p.A. or the imaginative ‘Imperium’ of Toni Negri & Co.), with a functional division of roles, yet not unfailingly aligned with the laws imposed by the dominant centre. During its advance, the “free world” has swept aside all obstacles and leached through into every corner of the globe, creating a veritable global system not only of trade but also production, through global value chains. But this has also led to an upsurge in powerful antagonists that are now determined to impede any further advances in the destructive and assimilative process so congenial to hegemonic capitalism – the flag-bearer of the “free world”.
The powerful antagonists on the rise today are capitalist forces that, in the name of national, traditional, religious, and constitutional interests and values, seek to cramp the “free world” as it rushes headlong. Whether they do this in the name of God, tradition, the nation or law is of scant importance: to each its own Holy War. What does matter is that their efforts to oppose the concentration of power – a concentration that interprets the extreme instances of capitalist development – are an expression of real class forces. This holds true for both the “free world” and for those nations which currently have to face the rush of hegemonic imperialism trying to reassert its own global supremacy.
Among these nations, Russia and China – albeit throroughly capitalist – are significant obstacles. Among the class forces, sectors of the proletariat have signed up to conservative – even reactionary – forms to give voice to their struggle. We see this happening in Europe too, and we mustn’t be surprised. From the perspective of bourgeois progressivism, the Luddites were seen as conservative and reactionary when confronted with the advances in machinery that deprived workers of control over the labour process. This was merely the dawn of a class movement that would lay down the theory and organization of the proletarian revolution we still refer to today. Even in 1917 Russia, reactionaries were a mainstay among the masses but, according to Lenin, this did little to compromise the pre-revolutionary nature of the situation:
“When there is a great social crisis – that is, when people no longer wish to live in the old way – Lenin shows that this ‘unwillingness’ can, nay, must reveal itself in both revolutionary and reactionary directions. Indeed, he continued to argue with Zinoviev that a revolutionary situation would not even be possible in the absence of masses turning in a reactionary direction, thus squaring the subjective factor.’ (G. Lukács, L’uomo rivoluzionario [The Revolutionary Man], quoted from the Italian edition, 1973).
It is often true that forces visibly opposed to the advances of commodification (as we have sought to define it in these pages) have been – and continue to be – “right wing” or declare themselves to be removed from entrenched political and ideological categories. When put to the test, all these forces have ultimately collapsed and, in the future, will give way to the dictates of “super-state” institutions and international “financial markets”. In the battle which is yet to be fully waged, the proletarian way of looking at things will emerge in all its revolutionary glory, imposing itself as the only realistic perspective if the war against the barbarities of Capital is be undertaken with success.
***
The limit to the development of social productive forces which Marx recognized as being an unsurpassable vice of the capitalist mode of production must not, however, be interpreted in an absolute sense as an inability to further expand the mass of production. Throughout history capitalism has never disguised its appetite for wishing to destroy anything that hinders its expansion of the realms of production of commodities, be they material or immaterial. What Capital does not know how to do, and indeed, is unable to do, is to adapt production to social consumption centred upon concrete human needs – to the potential development contained in the social production of goods and their social fruition. A perspective of this kind requires that human beings be renewed through a re-discovery of their inherently social nature: during the era of class society, this nature has been hidden and enfeebled, but it has never been definitvely erased. If the social nature of man is progressively denied by the forces of Capital in the present age, this is because Capital itself has created the conditions for the re-affirmation of social man and because growing numbers of human beings feel this need.
Marx condemns the idolatry of nature, but he makes every effort to re-affirm the social nature of human beings, against the socially destructive trajectory of Capital, which cannot be reversed simply by raising the banners of morality, tradition, the nation or the defence of nature. Those who believe it may brandish their religious symbols with a view to exorcising the diabolical power of money. To us, it remains a question of class power. Unfortunately, today this power is not yet a prerogative of the global proletariat: it is the prerogative of those concentrations of power opposed to the centre of global capitalism, and which would like to substitute it while maintaining the world system as it stands. No matter how aware we are of the difficulties and contradictions of this ongoing process, and of the fact that the whole thing is unfolding wholly within the confines of capitalist dynamics, we cannot help but observe the clash – this widespread turmoil in worldwide equilibrium – with immense interest.
During its destructive, revolutionary journey, Capital encounters obstacles and readies itself to overcome them, but “the fact capital actually establishes each of these limits as an obstacle and has, therefore, ideally overcome it, doesn’t mean it has really overcome it; and since each of these obstacles contradicts its purpose, the production of each obstacle moves among contradictions that are continually overcome but, equally, continually established. But there’s more. The universality towards which Capital is irresistibly drawn, contains in its selfsame nature obstacles that, at a certain moment in its evolution, will make evident the fact that capital is itself the greatest obstacle to this tendency, thus paving the way towards its suppression through itself.’ (Marx, Grundrisse, cited, our translation).
Through itself: i.e., by leveraging its own contradictions, and not those of Our Father who art in Heaven or the “values” that Capital has itself already consigned to the loft. Amidst grand upheaval, countries that once grovelled beneath the diktat of the Atlantic West have ended up in the arms of new groupings as they try to shake off their shackles and free themselves of western finance: obviously, this is a fact, and a destabilizing fact at that! From the point of view of national forces, this can be seen as an obstacle that is external to the destructive progression of the most advanced forces of capitalism, or the “free world” that is already in acute economic and – ‘for those that believe’ – spiritual decline. However, insofar as they are forces that developed within the world-system (themselves a product of the development of social production forces), they establish themselves as internal obstacles to its complete realization. The unparalleled limit of capital is internal, in the development reached by the productive forces that can no longer be harnessed within the old world-system and, in the future, within the limited mercantile, commodity form. When the battle-front will shift to this terrain – against commodities – that will be the moment of open class struggle, whose powerful return we eagerly await.
Notes
1 – In the article “Perpetual Wars You Aren’t Supposed to Notice”, W.J.Astore, an ex-officer in the US army, outlines a perspicacious profile of the institution that most clearly represents the concentration of American power. Here is an extract: “No other nation in the world sees its military as (to borrow from a short-lived Navy slogan) ‘a global force for good.’ No other nation divides the whole world into military commands like AFRICOM for Africa and CENTCOM for the Middle East and parts of Central and South Asia, headed up by four-star generals and admirals. No other nation has a network of 750 foreign bases scattered across the globe. No other nation strives for full-spectrum dominance through ‘all-domain operations,’ meaning not only the control of traditional ‘domains’ of combat — the land, sea, and air — but also of space and cyberspace. While other countries are focused mainly on national defense (or regional aggressions of one sort or another), the U.S. military strives for total global and spatial dominance. Truly exceptional!” (https://strategic-culture.su/news/2023/08/10/the-perpetual-wars-you-arent-supposed-to-notice/).
2 – The reference is to Gunther Anders, L’uomo è antiquato, Italian translation, 2007.
3 – “The development of fixed capital demonstrates the degree to which general social knowledge (or knowledge) has become an immediate productive force, so the conditions of society’s selfsame life process are now controlled by the general intellect, and re-modelled in accordance with it; and also the degree to which social productive forces are produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but as immediate organs of the social praxis, the real life process”. Here Marx seems to expect, as a result of developments in social productive forces, that Capital shifts its control over production to control over society as a whole, a transition from formal domination to real domination, extending from the production process to the whole of society. During this phase, Marx states in Grundrisse, “it is the development of the social individual that stands out as the crucial form of support behind production and wealth.’ As soon as Capital starts exercising complete control over the whole process of production and circulation – a contradictory unity, as far as Marx is concerned – even so called “free time” (which, if the truth were told, is only time freed from the work that is essential for the reproduction of labour power and society in its entirety) becomes a period of time integrated to capitalist reproduction. If Capital failed to maintain a tight and all-encompassing grip of the time freed up to guarantee this integration – not a formal control, but one maintained through instruments provided by the general intellect – the fundamental contradiction that decrees the inherent limitations of the capitalist mode of production and its necessary supersession would explode: “to the reduction of work required of society at a minimum […]what follows up is the formation and artistic, scientific et al. development of individuals as a result of freed up time and the means created for them all. Capital is, itself, the contradiction in process because it tends to reduce working time to a minimum while at the same time establishing working time as the only measure and source of wealth.”.
4 – Obviously we are referring to Jacques Camatte, who in the 1960s was a member of our Party, before leaving it mid-decade, hence misunderstanding and misinterpreting Marxism. His is the expression anthropomorphosis of Capital which implies (wrongly and purportedly, in our view!) the identification of the human being with Capital.
5. The struggles of the 1970s may have been concerned with affirming sexual freedom, but capital nowadays has imposed an ideology of unlimited sexual consumerism involving enslavement to all manner of stimuli deriving from various catalogues of “perversion.” The struggles of the ‘70s supported the right to enjoy sexuality divorced from procreation; today capital makes money out of the separtion between procreation and sexuality. The former can come about without the need for sexual intercourse, in laboratories that are little more than factories of living beings; or maybe it can simply be outsourced to firms specialised in recruiting surrogate mothers. Even birth takes on the form of of a commodity, and death too: are there not clinics that provide for assisted suicide? No-one wishes to question the aspiration for a dignified death, but it will be noted how the term “commodity” has come to include all aspects of our existence, from conception to death.
6. We find ourselves in agreement with the following words: ‘Nothing should limit the right to buy, want and be anything one wishes. Every desire is an acquired right and is blessed by the religion of capital. The market nourishes itself on rights, amplifying them in order to sell its products.’ (https://www.sinistrainrete.info/articoli-brevi/26210-salvatore-bravo-totalitarismo-della-chiacchiera.html).
7. Under a banal administrative law, in Italy the imposition of experimental serums has abolished the principle of Habeas corpus, avouched by bourgeois revolutions, and a foundation stone of the modern relationship between the State and the citizen.
(From: ‘il programma comunista’, n.1/2024)