Disassembly Required. Geoff Mann
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Francois Quesnay, Richard Cantillon, and Jean-Baptiste Say (of “Say’s Law,” on which more to come in the section on J. M. Keynes below).
7 “Factors of production” is still a common term in economics today (although one hears much less about land). The term “economic growth” has, however, only been in common usage since World War II.
8 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 484–85.
9 The term “neoclassical” with respect to economics was coined in 1900 by the American economist Thorstein Veblen, the same person who first discussed “conspicuous consumption.”
10 This helps explain some interesting features of monetary history that sometimes confuse us moderns, like the enormous stone “coins” of some ancient cultures. These were not money as we understand it today; rather, in essentially non-monetary social formations, “monetary” exchange was confined to very specific exchange conditions. These involved, unsurprisingly, significant ceremony—like the movement or change in ownership of a ten-ton “coin.”
11 W-G-W, Ware-Geld-Ware, in Marx’s German.
12 One thing to keep in mind, however, is that it would have to be all workers who enjoyed this transformative wage; history suggests that if it is just a fraction of workers, then the lucky few who earn “enough” tend to become much less interested in transformation.
13 It is interesting to note that Marx argued that the “valuation” of labour’s contribution to capitalist production processes could not be called “unjust,” since the meaning of justice is determined by the social relations of production in specific historical conditions. In capitalist society, “justice” is a capitalist standard. There are no “unjust” wages in capitalism, according to Marx; what was unjust (and clearly not by capitalist standards, but by the revolutionary ethics Marx espoused) was the wage relation itself.
14 For those familiar with a little bit of economic terminology, this is the basis of what is now called “general equilibrium” theory, the hallmark of modern neoclassical analysis. The “general” part refers to the entire set (the “vector”) of prices within an economy. The idea that those relative prices can find a system-wide equilibrium is the heart of the neoclassical theory of value, a theory often called “Walrasian,” after the seminal contributions of Léon Walras, a nineteenth-century Swiss economist. Walras did more than perhaps anyone else to reshape economics along the lines of a natural science like physics. If we had to choose one text as the foundation of modern, mathematized, neoclassical economics, it would have to be his Elements of Pure Economics (1877). “Pure” presumably meant “assuming away all that complicated real-life stuff.”
15 As we will see, the end of Keynesianism, and “return” of neoclassical economics in the postwar era, has also involved the reassertion of the theory of monetary neutrality, although it is now dressed up in a range of complex conceptual costumes (e.g., money-in-the-utility-function) that obscure it.
16 It sounds crazy, but this idea still circulates in powerful circles. Not only do some modern economists still believe it—see the passages below on the Chicago School—but even those who don’t must assume that if it weren’t for “imperfections,” markets would be perfect, and there would be no idle resources, like unemployed workers, hanging around.
3. State Power and the Power of Money
This chapter and the next analyze four key components of capitalism—the state and money (Chapter 3), and markets and firms (Chapter 4)—to show their interdependence and contradictions. All are essential to capitalism’s remarkably dynamic history, and to its robustness in the face of so much change. While it is clearly important that these relations interlock effectively enough to produce a real “system,” at the same time, the ways they fall short of the dreams of orthodox economics are, in some cases, the reason the system works. Sometimes, the elements of the capitalist mode of production that fail to fully play their assigned role actually help the system reproduce itself. In fact, if capitalism worked exactly as some orthodox theories suggest, it would not have lasted very long at all.
The State
Capitalism is premised upon two kinds of power: (1) private economic power that comes from the control of property and profit-making; and (2) coercive power exercised by states in (and often beyond) bounded national territories.17 These two types of power exist side by side, but they have an inconsistent relationship, by turns complementary, conflictual, or indifferent. There are, however, a couple of things we should keep in mind about them.
First, we should be clear what power means, and how the two kinds work in practice. I am using the word “power” in the somewhat mainstream sense to describe authority or control and the way in which it is exercised, not in the “positive” or “productive” sense associated with influential French philosopher Michel Foucault. In other words, I mean both the form power takes, and the ways it is held.18 So, when we think of private economic power in capitalism, we are thinking of the form that power takes and the ways it is exercised, i.e., the power enterprises and individuals can exercise over human relations by means of their access to, possession of, and/or control over money, means of production, labour power, etc. They exercise this power in an attempt to help things turn out the way they prefer.
When we think of state power over territory, we think precisely of what defines the state as the state. In sociologist Max Weber’s classic definition, the state is that set of institutions which enjoys “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”19 This power is coercive: the state, by virtue of its control over the police, law, military, etc., has the power to coerce you, if you are inside its territory, to do or not do certain things, and to punish you if you don’t follow the rules, which the state itself determines. Virtually all capitalist states limit these powers via laws, constitutions and “bills of rights,” for example requiring the police to have a warrant to enter and search your home. But the state (at least in theory) remains the sole possessor of this territorially defined coercive power.
One of the key features of modern political life that anticapitalists must think hard about, however, is the fact that in capitalist liberal democracy, state power is rarely straightforwardly coercive. In practice, states require, and actively seek, legitimacy from their citizens. Through a variety of mechanisms—the most obvious are elections—capitalist liberal democratic states try to build some consensus around their power, so that subjects see it as fair, right, or natural. Indeed, I would suggest that any attempt to create a mass-based oppositional politics, at least in the global North, will fail if it frames liberal democracy as simply an instrument of elite class rule or as a fancily-clad capitalist police state. There are moments—like the oppressive response to the G-8 protests in Genoa in 2001—when it might seem so, but in terms of a larger and more incisive political critique, the state = coercion argument is shallow, and has limited purchase.
This is not to say that the coercive part goes away. You might think, quite reasonably, that since coercion is always hovering in the background, the consent part is a bit of a joke: if you don’t consent, you get coerced, meaning the consent is not all that consensual. At the level of the isolated individual, this is true. But if you think about it at a collective level, the consent part is much more evident. If every single person refused to consent, the state’s coercive power would almost certainly