Old Gods, New Enigmas

Marx's Lost Theory

Mike Davis

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788732185
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler before his profile as one of the world's leading urbanists emerged with the publication of his sober, if dystopian survey of Los Angeles. Since then, he's developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial history, but as a stylist without peer. Old Gods, New Enigmas is Davis's book-length engagement with Karl Marx, marking the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth and exploring Davis's thinking on history, labor, capitalism, and revolution - themes ever present the early work from this leading radical thinker. This will be his first book on Marxism itself.In a time of ubiquitous disgust with political and economic elites, explores the question of revolutionary agency-what social forces and conditions do we need to transform the current order?-and the situation of the world's working classes from the US to Europe to China. Even the most preliminary tasks are daunting. A new theory of revolution needs to return to the big issues in classical socialist thought, such as clarifying "proletarian agency", before turning to the urgent questions of our time: global warming, the social and economic gutting of the rustbelt, and the city's demographic eclipse of the countryside. What does revolution look like after the end of history?

1

Old Gods, New Enigmas

Notes on Revolutionary Agency

In a 1995 interview shortly after the publication of The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm was asked about the future currency of socialist ideas. It depended, he answered, on whether or not a “historic force” would still exist to support the socialist project. “It seems to me the historic force rested not necessarily on the ideas but on a particular material situation … the major problem of the Left being that of agency.” In face of the declining ratio of variable capital in modern production and thus of the social weight of the industrial proletariat,

we may well find ourselves back in a different pattern to a society like the one of the pre-capitalist society, in which the largest number of people will not be wage workers—they will be something else, either, as you can see in the large part of the Third World, people who are operating in the gray area of the informal economy, who cannot be simply classed as wage workers or in some other way. Now, under those circumstances, clearly the question is, how can this body of people be mobilized in order to realize the aims which unquestionably are still there and to some extent are now more urgent in form?¹

Hobsbawm, of course, didn’t factor in the shift of global manufacturing to coastal East Asia and the almost exponential growth of the Chinese industrial working class (231 million in 2011) over the last generation, but otherwise the reduction of traditional working-class economic and political power—now including stricken BRICS like Brazil and South Africa—has been indeed epochal.² In Europe as well as the United States, the erosion of industrial employment through wage arbitrage, outsourcing, and automation has gone hand in hand with the precaritization of service work, the digital industrialization of white-collar jobs, and the stagnation or decline of unionized public employment.³ Revolutionary increases in productivity that a half-century ago, when union contracts regulated the macro-economy, might have been shared with workers as higher wages and reduced hours now simply augur further deterioration of the economic security of the majority. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the American economy in 2013 produced 42 percent more goods and services than in 1998, yet the total hours worked (194 billion) were exactly the same in 2013 as in 1998.⁴ Looking at manufacturing per se, its output share of the real GDP has remained surprisingly stable since 1960 while its share of employment has plunged since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. In absolute size, the production workforce, approximately 20 million in 1980, fell to 12 million in 2010, with almost 6 million jobs lost in the 2000s.⁵

“A new system,” André Gorz warned twenty years ago, “has been established which is abolishing ‘work’ on a massive scale. It is restoring the worst forms of domination, subjugation and exploitation by forcing each to fight against all in order to obtain the ‘work’ it is abolishing.”⁶ This increased competition for jobs (or at least the perception of such competition) has inflamed working-class resentment against the new credentialed elites and the high-tech rich, but equally it has narrowed and poisoned traditional cultures of solidarity, transforming the revolt against globalization into a virulent anti-immigrant backlash.⁷ Traditional social-democratic and center-left parties have universally failed to project alternatives to neoliberal globalization or popularize strategies for creating compensatory high-wage jobs in rust belt regions. Even if the hurricane of neoliberalism were to pass—and there is yet little sign this will happen—the automation, not just of production and routine management, but potentially of half or more of all jobs in the OECD bloc, will threaten the last vestiges of job security in core economies.⁸

Automation, of course, has been an approaching death star for generations, with major debates about technological unemployment in every modern decade. The Cassandras have included Stuart Chase and the Technocracy movement in the early 1930s; Norbert Wiener and Ben Seligman in the 1950s; the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution and its prestigious progeny, the National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress, in the 1960s; and over the following half-century, hundreds of studies, books, and articles.⁹ On the left, Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz argued that since automation was inevitable, it was time to abandon “work-based” Marxism and bid adieu to the proletariat (the title of the latter’s 1980 book). But until recently the employment impacts of labor-saving technology have been blunted by new products and industries (typically financed by military spending), the growth of administrative and public-sector jobs, and the relentless expansion of consumer credit and household debt. All evidence, however, now points to the (robo-)wolf actually at the door, especially the doors of low-income workers. The 2016 Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers warned that fully 83 percent of jobs paying less than $20 per hour face the threat of automation in the near future.¹⁰ As a direct corollary, the “precariat” has a brilliant future.

The replacement of human labor-power by the next generation of artificial-intelligence systems and robots, the so-called “Third Wave” of digital technology, will not exempt industrial East Asia.¹¹ Indeed, the job killers have already arrived. Foxconn, the world’s largest manufacturer, responsible for an estimated 50 percent of all electronic products, is currently replacing assembly workers at its huge Shenzhen complex and elsewhere with a million robots (they don’t commit suicide in despair at working conditions).¹² Philips Electronics, for its part, has advertised the debut of robotic production systems that “can make any consumer device in the world,” replacing the need for cheap Asian labor. Their prototype is a fully automated plant in Friesland that will eventually replace its sister factory in Zhuhai, near Macau, which employs ten times as many workers.¹³ GE, likewise, is pouring billions into the development of an industrial internet or “internet of things” to integrate machines and manufacturing systems with networked sensors and automated design processes using cheap data clouds. Ultimately it hopes to build “virtual twins” of all of its products, allowing engineers to test products before they are built and also letting them feed the virtual model with real-world data to improve performance. In this manufacturing mirror-world, computer-aided design would be replaced by computer-directed design, resulting in further attrition of both engineering and assembly-line jobs in Asia, as well as Europe and North America.¹⁴

Table 1.1 The Global Job Crisis¹⁵

Active global labor force (2015)	3 billion
“Vulnerable workers” (informal/unwaged)	1.5 billion
Workers earning less than $5 per day	1.3 billion
Working-age people not in labor market	2.0 billion
Inactive youth (not working or studying)	500 million
Child workers	168 million

In much of the global South, meanwhile, structural trends since 1980 have overthrown textbook ideas about “stages of economic growth,” as urbanization has become decoupled from industrialization and subsistence from waged employment.¹⁶ Even in countries with high recent rates of GDP growth, such as India and Nigeria, joblessness and poverty have soared instead of declining, which is why “jobless growth” joined income inequality at the top of the agenda at the 2015 World Economic Forum.¹⁷ Meanwhile rural poverty, especially in Africa, is being rapidly urbanized—or perhaps “warehoused” is the better term—with little prospect that migrants will ever be reincorporated into modern relations of production. Their destinations are the squalid refugee camps and jobless peripheral slums, where their children can dream of becoming prostitutes or car bombers.

The summation of these transformations, in rich as well as poor regions, is an unprecedented crisis of proletarianization—or, if you prefer, of the “real subordination of labor to capital,” embodied by subjects whose consciousness and capacity to effect change are still largely enigmas. Neilson and Stubbs, using the terminology of Chapter 25 of Capital, contend that “the uneven unfolding of capitalism’s long-term contradictory labour-market dynamic is generating a massive relative surplus population, distributed in deeply unequal forms and sizes across the countries of the world. It is already larger than the active army, and is set to grow further in the medium-term future.”¹⁸ Everywhere we look, we are reminded of Marx’s warning: “Since the purpose of productive labour is not the existence of the worker but the production of surplus value, all necessary labour which produces no surplus labour is superfluous and worthless to capitalist production.”¹⁹

Whether as contingent or uncollectivized labor, as micro-entrepreneurs or subsistence criminals, or simply as the permanently unemployed, the fate of this “superfluous” humanity has become the core problem for twentieth-first-century Marxism. Do the old categories of common sentiment and shared destiny, asks Olivier Schwartz, still define an idea of “the popular classes?”²⁰ Socialism, as Hobsbawm warned, will have little future unless large sections of this informal working class find sources of collective strength, levers of power, and platforms for participating in an international class struggle. From the standpoint of classical socialism, there could be no greater historical catastrophe than the disappearance of proletarian agency. “[If] the conception of proletariat as the motive force of the coming social revolution were abandoned,” Karl Kautsky wrote in 1906, “then I would have to admit that I was through, that my life no longer had any meaning.”²¹

It would be a gigantic mistake, however, to conclude, as the post-Marxists have, that the starting point for theoretical renewal must be a funeral for the “old working class.”(“As it stands today, the classical revolutionary subject no longer exists,” declare Srnicek and Williams, and many others.)²² To put it crudely, it has been demoted in agency, not fired from history. Machinists, nurses, truck drivers, and school teachers remain the organized social base defending the historical legacy of labor in Western Europe, North America, and Japan.²³ Trade unions, however weakened or dispirited, continue to articulate a way of life “based around a coherent sense of the dignity of others and of a place in the world.”²⁴ But the ranks of traditional workers and their unions are no longer growing, and the major increments to the global workforce are increasingly unwaged or jobless.²⁵ As Christian Marazzi complained recently, it is no longer easy to use a category like “class composition” “to analyze a situation that is increasingly characterized by the fragmentation of the subjects constituted in the world of employment and non-employment.”²⁶

At a high level of abstraction, the current period of globalization is defined by a trilogy of ideal-typical economies: super-industrial (coastal East Asia), financial/tertiary (North Atlantic), and hyper-urbanizing/extractive (West Africa). “Jobless growth” is incipient in the first, chronic in the second, and virtually absolute in the third. We might add a fourth ideal-type of disintegrating societies, caught in a vice of war and climate change, whose chief trend is the export of refugees and migrant labor. In any event, we can no longer rely on a single paradigmatic society or class to model the critical vectors of historical development. Imprudent coronations of abstractions like “the multitude” as historical subjects simply dramatize a poverty of empirical research. Contemporary Marxism must be able to scan the future from the simultaneous perspectives of Shenzhen, Los Angeles, and Lagos if it wants to solve the puzzle of how heterodox social categories might be fitted together in a single resistance to capitalism.

THE UNIVERSAL CLASS

Even the most preliminary tasks are daunting. A new theory of revolution, to begin with, begs benchmarks in the old, starting with clarification of “proletarian agency” in classical socialist thought. In the first instance, of course, self-consciousness of agency preceded theory. The faith that “labor will inherit the earth” and that “the International will be the human race” did not rest on doctrine but arose volcanically from struggles for bread and dignity. Workers’ belief in their collective power to effect radical change, whose deep roots were located in the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, was amply ratified by the fears and nightmares of the Victorian bourgeoisie. (Although this is an obvious fact, not a small number of Marx’s critics have charged at one time or another that revolutionary agency was nothing more than a metaphysical invention, a Hegelian hobgoblin, foisted upon working masses whose actions were actually dictated by simple utilitarian calculation.)

Summarizing the general view amongst Marxists, Ellen Wood succinctly characterized agency as “the possession of strategic power and a capacity for collective action founded in the specific conditions of material life.” I would add that “capacity” is a developable potential for conscious and consequent activity, for self-making, not a disposition that arises automatically and inevitably from social conditions. Nor in the case of the proletariat is capacity synonymous with endowment, such as the power to hire and fire that a capitalist receives from simple ownership of means of production. Agency in the classical socialist sense also imputed hegemony: the political and cultural ability of a class to institute a transformational project that recruits broad sections of society. “Only in the name of the general rights of society,” wrote the young Marx, “can a particular class lay claim to general domination.”²⁷

Marx’s model, of course, was the revolutionary middle class of 1789 whose historical vocation had been so famously heralded by the Abbé Sieyès: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing.”²⁸ By equating the rights of man to the rights of property, and political equality to free economic competition, the great ideologues of revolutionary France translated class interests into a stunning vision of universal freedom. The explicit identification of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class, the unique architect of progress and human emancipation, was consequently enshrined in the histories written by the celebrated trio of Restoration liberals—Augustin Thierry, François-August Mignet, and François Guizot (“the bourgeoisie’s Lenin”).²⁹ Their interpretation of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution against feudalism, the culmination of centuries of conflict between the nobility and the rising Third Estate, framed contemporary thinking about those events as well as providing a powerful ideological justification for the attenuated liberal revolution of 1830.³⁰ “As Marx himself freely acknowledged,” emphasizes Hobsbawm, “these were the men from whom he derived the idea of the class struggle in history.”³¹ In effect they had alr...