A Historical Political Economy of Capitalism

After metaphysics

Andrea Micocci

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317273295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In order to understand the resilience of capitalism as a mode of production, social organization, and an intellectual system, it is necessary to explore its intellectual development and underlying structure.

A Historical Political Economy of Capitalism argues that capitalism is based on a dominant intellectuality: a metaphysics. It proposes the construction of a history-based 'critique of political economy', capable of revealing the poverty of capitalism's intellectual logic and of its application in practice. This involves a reconsideration of several classical thinkers, including Smith, Marx, Berkeley, Locke, Hobbes, Hume and Rousseau. It also sketches an emancipative methodology of analysis, aiming to expose any metaphysics, capitalist or none. In doing so, this book proposes a completely new approach in materialist philosophy.

The new methodology in political economy that is proposed in this volume is an alternative way to organize a materialist approach. Some basic aspects of what is argued by the author can be found in Marx. This book is well suited for those who study political economy and economic theory and philosophy, as well as those who are interested in Marxism.

1
Introduction

1.1 On capitalism

It is customarily expected of a work on the political economy of capitalism that it should open with a discussion of what capitalism is, leading to the production of a working definition to be used in the text. This book, however, is based upon a completely different logic. Unlike the present literature in the field, it seeks to identify its subject matter by a continuous sceptical doubt of its material reality. At the core of its argument is the hypothesis that capitalism is an intellectual construction that aims to provide an ultimate system of meaning to reality: a metaphysical construction. Such metaphysics, as we will see, is logically wrong, limited and limiting to such an extent as to completely inhibit individual understanding. As a consequence, to work as a social glue, it can only exist in the belief that it is universal to mankind, thus powerfully effacing, with human understanding, material reality itself.

As a preliminary illustration of what we will endeavour to demonstrate in the rest of the book, a few suggestive images are offered here. The first is as familiar and unthreatening to most people as it is appalling under a less frivolous analysis. Its implications are momentous in politics, and it is crucial in anticipating what this book is about. Scores of people are continually dying, suffering and starving all over the world as a consequence of the absurdity of capitalist politics, and, before that, many similarly fell victim to the absurdity of non-capitalist politics, so there is nothing new there. However, in capitalism, one finds that there is always a minority willing to volunteer to ‘raise awareness’ about this or that form of death or suffering (usually, never more than one issue at a time). If that social function were truly necessary, it would simply mean that the capitalist individual lacks the capacity to partake of the joy and pain of the others, or that such a capacity can be worn at will, like a prosthesis.

Is that truly so? Is humankind in capitalism capable of alienating itself from its own feelings, which can nonetheless be regained by the sharing of a conversation, or a blood-curdling photo, documentary film or book? If that were so, the creation of a perfect society would be an easy task: one would simply ban negative sentiments and use only the socially useful ones. This paradox is one of the core questions this book faces: the relationship between the vague, yet apparently existent, things we call sentiments, intellect, instinct and society. In capitalism, we will argue, we find awareness-raisers because humans are homogenized, by a passively enforced intellectual socialization, to be less than they could be as individuals. This grants social cohesion within injustice: the presence of this last is the awareness-needing safety valve the system needs to keep in touch with its ‘speakable’ sentiments. The search for justice and equality is a tool, in other words, to preserve capitalism. We should all be seeking something else: emancipation from the intellectual insanity of capitalism itself.

The implications of this matter are momentous. The study of capitalism becomes the study of its metaphysics as a socialized intellectual system, which we will also examine in the form of ‘human understanding’. Such study must probe into the illusory security of the intellectual methods of capitalism itself. Studying capitalism can only be a process of analysis, and radical criticism, of capitalism’s structures of thought and scientific methods. Here, no compromise is possible: if you are frightened, you can only go back to the known intellectual environment. Our search will take us, in fact, to what we shall call perfectly unconceived shores instead. The reader is warned.

For a second image, the artificiality and substitutability of human sentiments are also visible if we take a bird’s eye view of one of the cornerstones of capitalist literature: the novel. Novels are narratives that constantly re-spin the same elements. Some describable human feelings, lost, gained and regained, are meant to disinter in the reader the realization that social life comprises sentiments that are socially developed and conditioned. Some novelists denounce this as a problem, some just take it as it is, some point out issues of social injustice. Even new offshoots of the genre, say, science fiction or fantasy, that claim room for the construction of new worlds seem unable to offer an intellectually alternative perspective. Sentiments and society cannot be split, and they are not. The lesson one learns from reading novels is that capitalism is sad and limiting, and you can only pine or fight for your own, or your class’s, or kin’s, share of humanity and justice, as long as it can be described in words and speech. No emancipation is offered, other than by proposing perfectly capitalist alternatives – for example, a well-known historical instance that still finds many supporters: socialism.

Economics and political economy present us with the same dismal landscape. Like the awareness-raisers, the literati and their readers, economists and political economists can only offer the results of their brooding over the unjust consequences of capitalism. As we shall submit in the course of the book, all they produce is a reshuffle of the various categories that their disciplines deal with: the logically flawed concepts of capitalism’s metaphysics. Socialism thus becomes something to do with distribution and production organization, and anarchism becomes a set of autonomous communities that trade – capitalistically – with each other and the rest. To such silly goals, further lives, sufferings and starvation are sacrificed. The reason, as we shall see, is that, in the metaphysics of capitalism, diversity is confused with utopia and otherness.

This last consideration leads us to the role of language. In capitalism, we will seek to demonstrate, language confuses rather than clarifies issues, because its words and speech, in the general, moderate dialectics capitalist metaphysics is about, are simultaneously precise and approximate. Without this self-contradictory nature, language would do things (e.g. identify objects unequivocally, thus freezing their characteristics into what they are and not what the flawed capitalist dialectics requires) that would destabilize capitalism’s mechanisms of functioning. These last points, as outlined above, mix together a cold, bounded rationality and a limited set of sentiments that need not be expressed together, or fully: to this inexact combination, language and speech must correspond.

Take an innocent metaphor: the idea of blue skies. Such an expression is simultaneously overdetermined, for blue is the colour of the sky, and approximate: celestial features connected with blue shades of colour become features of ethereal connections with feelings and idealizations (of the beauty of the universe, of religious issues, of love, of some peculiar objects, of foods and drinks, or of emotional aspects whose only common feature is that they are hard to pick up, let alone express, and whose material nature is highly uncertain), but skies are also, in children’s understanding and in some languages, white, black or even red. Such intense colours identify their dense profundity and the mystery to the human eye of whether they are finite or not. These are perfectly meaningful as metaphors, in that there is no other way of rendering the density of sensual mystery.

The complex image above conveys the third outcome of the reasoning that is being proposed: the necessity to go beyond the sad capitalist metaphysics, to posit the potential presence of what we shall term the unconceived. This last is simply whatever the human mind and senses (of which much will be said throughout the book with the means supplied by philosophy and the social sciences) conceptualize as deprived of perceived and understandable determinations. We aim to break open the metaphysics of capitalism by returning ‘human understanding’ to an attitude that does not a priori avoid – like capitalism does – the unconceived. The idea is to move from the melancholy capitalist intellectual boredom to the excitement of mystery, from the iteration of known categories to the possibility that new categories might be all of a sudden forthcoming. This is, we submit to the reader, the basis for what is meant here by materialism.

Nature, i.e. the concrete (the material), must be recovered to the human mind and body by breaking free of the boundaries of the metaphysics of capitalism. Needless to say, there is a chance that the concrete itself is an illusion produced precisely by the intellectual barriers that the metaphysics of capitalism has erected to protect itself from such. To do so, we shall show, the metaphysics of capitalism, with its dialectical features, conflates the concrete (material reality, in common parlance) and the abstract (solid logical thinking, e.g. arithmetic) into an intermediate object that is neither the former nor the latter, and prevents the contemplation of both: the metaphysics itself. This whole alienated bubble must be rendered by a language and speech that are, and can only be, simultaneously precise and approximate, to signify the equivocal ontological nature of the capitalist intellectuality and of its actual social and economic organization.

In such a framework, our task is no longer that of producing a working definition of capitalism. We have done that by saying that we are going to study its flawed metaphysics. The problem we have now is that, having doubted the material reality of it all, we are in trouble as to how to identify, and be sure we grasp, the actual items capitalism is made of. We refer, obviously, to the time-honoured economic and political categories that social scientists of all types have been studying. Can we use them in our highly sceptical framework? As our task is that of proving that we need a materialistic, historical political economy to criticize capitalism’s metaphysics, on the grounds that such metaphysics itself can be transcended, and that such a transcension could leave us completely without capitalism, we need to build a bridge between theoretical argument and empirical (doubtable, but at least at this initial stage of our argument, kind of present) reality.

A bridge solution is available to deliver us to the final theoretical argument about the emancipation from capitalist metaphysics we are seeking here. It is provided by the sceptical, Epicurean and materialistic thinkers we shall study in the course of the book, within one of their most remarkable productions: the so-called Classical political economy. As we shall analyse in detail throughout the book, Adam Smith provided the method we can provisionally adopt until we reach Chapters 5 and 6, where an alternative proposal will be put forward. For Smith’s solution, to put it with the approximation that is required at this introductory stage, capitalism is what calls itself so, whether true, imagined or potential. We will stay with this rule until Chapter 5, for it will let us put together theoretical ideas such as the market with the actual material items related to what markets materially appear like. Thus, terms such as individual and fact should be understood in this sense, unless otherwise indicated, until Chapter 5.

We will see that we need to use a language that is not the language of capitalist metaphysics, but cannot be – for emancipation is beyond what we can do here – very different to the present words and speech of capitalism. A mode of expression such as we need was started by the empiricist philosophers (we take Francis Bacon as our ideal ancestor, as discussed in Micocci, 2008/2010) and brought to its highest degree of utility for us here in the eighteenth century by such writers as La Mettrie, d’Holbach, Rousseau, Berkeley, Hume and Smith. We shall study these authors in the course of the book, but our goal is not to borrow, refine or improve upon their attempts. We need and shall use their tools like the tools of political economy: as ‘historically dated’ instruments that can only go as far as their limited historical nature. Our task is precisely that of creatively going beyond them and beyond anything we can conceive of in capitalism as we know it, to make room for what we cannot say.

In developing this argument, it will be evident that one cannot do without the work of Karl Marx. Here, a warning to the reader who is used to present-day literature in the human sciences is necessary. We shall read Marx directly, that is (as far as this is possible), without the mediation of the prejudices of his main interpreters. We shall thus discover that Marx was always an anti- or non-Hegelian thinker, i.e. a revolutionary and not a socialist. Such a Marx we have called ‘Marx the anarchist’, and he will accompany us throughout the whole book. A pleasant outcome of this way of reading Marx is that, as with the other thinkers we are going to consider, the reader cannot, and must not, even try to stick the ‘-ist’ suffix to what is being submitted here. Erudite critics might detect in all this a typically Epicurean dislike of the intellectuals. To this observation, à la Epicurus, the warning against all ‘isms’ applies with all the associated irony.

The highly inspiring view Epicurus introduced into Western philosophy, that material reality might have no better explanation than a type of chance whose logic escapes human understanding, certainly is one ideal influence behind what is being proposed here (see Micocci, 2002, 2008/2010). We shall also see that it lies behind Marx’s work. Finally, it explains why nobody can call the present theoretical proposal Epicurean. Nor can it be called a contingency-based approach, for contingency itself can be doubted, and indeed there is a chance that we could well do without it. We can summarize by saying that the present book is an invitation to stand back and watch things with a mind unburdened of the capitalist connection between intellectual activity and socialized, moral worrying. Here is another Epicurean/non-Epicurean puzzle for the pedantic reader.

It is time for us to announce, with the utmost clarity, that the message of the book is the following: capitalism as we know it works well in practice as a mode of production, and might even last a long time, but the price of its functioning is the repression of human prerogatives and the annihilation of individuality. Its speech-based, flawed logic pervades every nook and cranny of human understanding, killing it. This lets the capitalist observer notice its internal injustices and atrocities, do something about it and get nowhere, justice-wise. Precisely this continuous process of mending mistakes that appear system- and life-threatening while they are not (for they are always vulgar, Hegelian, dialectical relationships) is the reason for the survival of capitalism. Such anxiety to always work and do good is also the cause of capitalism’s evil-doing.

Those who love capitalism as we know it do not, as a consequence, love capitalism as a concept. Pro- and anti-capitalist activists are sadly deceived when they think they are operating to put their utopias into practice. They are instead participating in those sad iterations of the same flawed, speakable actions that we can have intuition of from what has been anticipated so far, and that will be explained in detail throughout the course of this book. The only liberation we can seek, provided, that is, that we do not like capitalism as we know it for reasons more general than its cruel injustices, is an intellectual emancipation from it. We have called it silence, and it is outlined in Chapter 5. As an intuitive, provisional image, for the time being, we can offer Hume’s idea of ‘liberty as chance’.

Let us move on, starting from this new, provocatively Epicurean expression. The first thing to do is to make a few preliminary remarks about method.

1.2 This book’s method

The first explanation that is due to the careful reader is whether the materialism that is developed here is also a type of naturalism. In a general sense, and for the present, initial purposes of clarity, the answer is a qualified yes. The idea of capitalism as we know it, erecting barriers to keep nature (the material and its unpredictable and inconceivable catastrophes) out, implies that it is nature that we want to recover. Such an interpretation might appear strengthened by our having referred to the importance of the sentiments, instinct, senses and intellect connection, but it is not so easy.

If, as we shall endeavour to show, the metaphysics of capitalism (this term, and the basics of the reasoning, come from Micocci, 2002, 2008/2010, 2012, which are thoroughly re-elaborated here) is flawed in the direction of providing a limited and limiting, iterative understanding of reality, then one cannot help having doubts about reality itself. Worse, we could never know how to prove when we have finally grasped material reality itself, for below the one metaphysics we have criticized there might be yet another, even subtler and more flawed. Let us put it plainly: the true problem we are considering here is the insidious connection between individual and social understanding and the senses. All the dangers to human understanding that we shall face, and that can be envisaged from any perspective, even other than the one offered here, come from human society and its metaphysics.

In other words, in capitalism, the main hindrance to a solid understanding of the empirical (which includes the possibility that the empirical itself, the material, may not exist) is the individual–society connection. No philosophical or scientific problem can be solved without looking at this character of all intellectual problems. This is the historical basis on which the materialism used here is built. The more pervasive and organized and efficient society is, the more it impinges upon human rationality and human feelings, the more we are incapable of knowing reality, for this is substituted by metaphysics. That means the challenging notion that we may not know anything about reality itself, not even its material existence. Knowledge, if the logic of this book is correct, is an antisocial operation.

The alternative conception of a reality potentially ruled (in our minds, that is) by ‘liberty as chance’ necessarily implies that knowledge must be a process of individual emancipation from the social and the political. These last are not human values, but intellectual and sentimental fetters. The role of political economy, and the reason why it should be materialistic and historical, should now be unequivocal. Political economy is a tool to analyse, in a negative way, the metaphysics of capitalism (i.e. capitalism itself), without replacing it with similar systems of thought, let alone projects of actual social systems. That is what is meant by historical: it must always be a backward-looking enterprise. Its role is that of sitting upon the debris of the past political economy it has itself caused.

To continue with our qualified naturalism, we can compare such political economy to the apical meristem of developed plants: a remarkably creative cellular formation that reproduces itself by always leaving its own production behind, down at the bottom. This process materializes the whole plant, while the meristem keeps moving upwards, oblivious to what happens to what it leaves behind and what holds it. The limitations of language compel us to use, to signify the solution to this complex and unresolved set of tangled problems, a word that has always had bad publicity: anarch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Capitalism as we know it and its metaphysics
• 3 Nature and liberty
• 4 Economic discipline
• 5 Silence
• 6 Conclusions
• Index