Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, Verso, 2023. Pbk £16.99, Ebook £6.00
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RATING: 92
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Our reckless heating of our planet has a strong claim to be the most significant global trend of the last few decades. But if there is anyone around to look back a hundred years from now, they will identify along with it the way in which the massive conversion of the world’s poor into workers for capital has transformed the global economy. The two are related, but the first has attracted far more critical interest than the second. Instead, the increased attention rightly paid to gender, race, slavery, and colonialism and its legacies has largely gone along with a turning away from the critique of political economy, and a perennially renewed and quite mistaken faith in the proposition that what is unhelpfully called ‘neoliberalism’ has failed, and must be on its last legs. It has failed people all around the world, for sure, but at the same time it has done capital a world of good. So Søren Mau’s magisterial return to Marx (particularly the Grundrisse, and the three volumes of Capital), and specifically to the mechanisms through which people are turned into and reproduced as workers, is timely and very welcome. The entire book, Mau says at one point, can be seen as being addressed to this issue: ‘proletarians do not automatically become workers - they have to be made into workers' (131). Violence and ideology have their parts to play, but: 'Whereas violence, as a form of power, is rooted in the ability to inflict pain and death, and ideology in the ability to shape how people think, economic power is rooted in the ability to reconfigure the material conditions of social reproduction (5), and stems from ‘the essential determinations of the capitalist mode of production' (15). He is aware, of course, that 'for Marx, "the economy" is social through and through', and quickly dismisses ‘economistic’ conceptions of the economy, so he might just as well have described 'mute compulsion' as the social power of capital, and I rather wish he had. But that is by the way.
Mau affiliates himself with value-form theory, which interprets Marx’s critique of political economy as ‘a qualitative theory of social forms aimed at uncovering and criticising the social relations underlying the capitalist mode of production’, and sees Marx’s theory of value ‘as a theory of the transformation of capitalist social relations into real abstractions imposing themselves on social life through an impersonal form of power’ (65-6). His starting point is the Neue Marx-Lektüre developed by Backhaus, Krahl, and Reichelt from the 1970s, and more recently taken up by Michael Heinrich, who contributes a brief foreword, and is identified by Mau as ‘a central interlocutor’ (66). I confess to being unfamiliar with most of the secondary literature discussed, including everything published only in German. Heinrich's Die Wissenschaft vom Wert: Die Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolution und klassischer Tradition (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999) is just one of many such texts (see footnote 57, pp. 64-5). What is more, Mau ranges far beyond value-form theory, drawing on key texts in Marxist ecology, ‘political Marxism’, Marxist feminism, and much else besides. Throughout, exposition of the ‘essential determinations of the capitalist mode of production’ mingles with sustained critical engagement with secondary literature. As my concern here is with his analysis of the former and their implications for social reproduction, I don’t engage with the latter, save to say that it is clear and measured, and, as far as I can judge, sound in the judgements made.
Mau’s title reflects his preferred rendering of ‘stumme Zwang‘ (usually 'silent compulsion') in Capital (Penguin, 1976: 899): ‘The silent [mute] compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Extra-economic, immediate violence is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the 'natural laws of production', i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them' (cited p. 3).
From this point, Mau develops his argument in three parts. Part I (Conditions) explores ‘the real conditions’, or material foundations, of the economic power of capital. Part II (Relations) examines horizontal relations among units of production and among immediate producers, and vertical relations between ‘the immediate producers and those who control the conditions of social reproduction’ (18). Part III (Dynamics) deploys the idea of real subsumption to examine labour markets, populations, nature, and the world market.
Conditions
Mau sees Marx as understanding ‘capital’ as 'a historically specific social logic', to be understood as 'a movement [of valorisation], and not as a static thing' (37), and himself proposes that: ‘The power of capital can ... be defined as capital's capacity to impose its logic on social life; a capacity which includes and ultimately relies upon, but is not reducible to, relations among social actors in a traditional sense, such as the relationship between capitalists and proletarians or the relationship between an employer and an employee' (46). He sets out the 'real conditions of the economic power of capital' in chapters 3-5, on 'The Social Ontology of Economic Power', 'The Human Corporeal Organisation', and 'Metabolic Domination', their goal being to 'trace the possibility of economic power back to the nature of social reality' (71). Mau accepts that 'the social ontology underlying Marx’s critique of political economy does imply and rely on a notion of human nature', but argues at the same time that ‘this notion of human nature cannot possibly function as the basis of a critique of capitalism' (90). He then turns to The German Ideology, restoring the more accurate translation of 'corporeal organisation' [körperliche Organisation] in place of 'physical organisation' in the passage 'The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical [corporeal] organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature' (Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 31). Marxists, he says, have been 'oddly silent on the issue of the body', and he follows Fracchia (2005: esp. 58-9) in discerning here 'what amounts to a "corporeal turn" in Marx's thought' (95). I wouldn't go that far, but again, it's by the way. He goes on to address the significance of tools and tool-making, with tools seen, with good supporting evidence, as 'at the same time a part of the body - an organ - and separated from it'. The key insight here is that: 'Because of human dependence on tools, the constitutive moments of the human metabolism are much easier to separate and temporarily dissolve than the metabolisms of other animals (and plants for that matter) - a circumstance which is ... absolutely crucial for understanding how such a thing as economic power is possible' (99). Crucially, 'already at the level of their "corporeal organisation", human individuals are caught up in a web of social relations mediating their access to the conditions of their reproduction' (100, emphasis original). In turn: 'The double mediation at the heart of the human metabolism - the mediation of tools and the mediation of social relations - explains why it can take infinite different forms. ... Human corporeal organisation opens up an immense space of possibility founded on a necessity: a metabolism must be established, but its social form is never simply given' (101). Chapter 5, 'Metabolic Domination', then completes 'the outline of the socio-ontological framework necessary for understanding the mute compulsion of economic relations' (usefully summarised 117-9). It opens with the suggestion that Marx's distinction between the 'natural' and the 'social' rests on the idea that 'the social is that which can be changed by humans, and the natural is that which is necessary from the point of view of human society' (105). Importantly, this 'does not imply the claim that their boundaries are fixed. Social relations give rise to technologies which enable human beings to control and manipulate natural processes which were hitherto outside their reach' (ibid). Marx, Mau then says, shifted from a perspective in which changes in the productive forces brought about changes in the social relations of production to one in which he 'began to regard the development of the productive forces as a result of the relations of production' (107): 'What drives history is not the immanent and necessary development of the productive forces, but human beings acting within a set of determinate social structures from which certain tendencies arise' (108). What are at issue, then, are 'the essential and historically specific determinations [or the 'natural laws'] of a mode of production' (109) - the principal subject of the book.
‘The economy in Marx's sense,’ Mau says, ‘is ... the sum of activities and processes through which social reproduction is organised; and the logics which govern these processes are inherently social and historical' (112-3). In sum:
'What is characteristic about the economic sphere, if we want to call it that, is not the logics which governs [sic] it but the social function of the activities which constitute it, that is, the fact that the very existence of society depends on them. This is the basic idea of Marx’s materialism. The latter does not claim that the social relations which govern social reproduction also automatically govern other spheres of life, or that social forms of consciousness are mere reflections of it. What it does claim, however, is that relations of production exert a very powerful influence on other aspects of social life by virtue of their absolutely fundamental role in the reproduction of the very existence of social life' (113).
Against this background, the final section of the chapter, 'How to Extract Surplus Labour' introduces 'the fateful capacity of human beings to produce more than is necessary for their own survival' (114, emphasis original), adding that 'The mere possibility of surplus labour ... can only explain the possibility of class domination, never its actuality. In order for this potential to be realised, some people have to succeed in extracting surplus labour from others' (ibid), perhaps by direct violence or by psychological and ideological manipulation. However: 'Given the precarious nature of the human metabolism ... there is also a third possibility, which is to 'exploit this ontological fragility and insert oneself in the gap between life and its conditions. This is exactly what economic power does' (ibid). This may sound a little abstract, but the argument is clear when formulated in terms of specifics: the tools and machines that serve as extensions of the human body, and make possible increased productivity and the production of a surplus are susceptible by virtue of being separate from the body to being appropriated as private property. Mau cites Andreas Malm (2016: 280, emphasis original) here:
'No other species can be so flexible, so universal, so omnivorous in relation to the rest of nature – but for the very same reason, no other species can have its metabolism organised through such sharp internal divisions. If a broad set of extra-somatic tools is a distinctive feature of Homo sapiens sapiens, it is also the point where that species ceases to be a unity … A material, a machine, a prime mover can become private property. The individual might need them like she needs her own lungs, but they are outside of her body, caught by others in a net, versatile and off-limits, and so she may have no choice but to go via a master to access them: she is snared in property relations' (cited pp. 114-5).
Mau draws the conclusion that: 'Power relations are embedded in the material structures of production in tools, machines, and energy – not because these structures carry an immanent technical rationality, imposing themselves on society, but because they are a part of the social relations of production' (117). And while this explains the possibility of economic power, it remains to be seen how capital exploits this possibility.
Relations
Part II (Relations) opens with the commodification of labour power, 'the condition of possibility of what Marx calls the capital relation' (124). Mau briefly recalls the violence which attended the establishment of wage labour, and the parallel 'war against women' documented by Silvia Federici (2004), then explores the implications of Marx's assertion that: 'Only where wage-labour is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society as a whole' (Capital, p. 733, cited p. 127). Here he goes beyond wage-labour considered in isolation as exploitation, to offer an understanding of class 'as a shared relation to the conditions of social reproduction', in a passage that places control over the conditions of social reproduction at the centre of his analysis:
'Capital needs workers. A steady supply of labour power presupposes that the people needed as wage labourers are deprived of the possibility of reproducing themselves outside of the market. This, in turn, presupposes the dispossession of everyone who could potentially support those needed by capitalists as wage labourers. The set of people dependent on the market is, in other words, not necessarily identical with the set of people capital needs as wage labourers; the latter is only a subset of the former. ... In this context, class domination ... refers to the relation between those who control the conditions of social reproduction and those who are excluded from the direct access to the conditions of social reproduction' (129).
This is an elegant and productive way of linking the 'essential determinations of the capitalist mode of production' to current debates on social reproduction, underpinned by the idea that capitalism is the ‘institutionalisation of insecurity' (130). It brings us back to the point noted above - the fact that propertyless proletarians do not automatically become workers, but have to be 'made into workers', and the conception of the whole of the book as an answer to the question of how this transformation takes place (131). At its heart is 'a fundamental condition of the capitalist mode of production: the radical separation between life and its conditions which allows capital to insert itself as a mediator between them' (132). Proletarians can only gain access to their vital needs through the sale of labour power to capital, so are 'compelled to sell themselves voluntarily' (Capital, p. 899). Mau describes proletarians as being 'in debt' to capital from birth, already dependent on capital ('the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist', Capital, p. 723, cited 134): 'The debt incurred by the worker at birth is thus a kind of transcendental debt in the sense that it forms a part of the necessary conditions of possibility for social reproduction in a society ruled by the logic of capital' (135). So, 'it is certainly true that debt has taken on new forms and functions in the neoliberal era, but it is crucial to acknowledge that the transcendentally indebted subject has been a part of capitalism from its very beginning' (ibid). And the comprehensive character of the economic power of capital is reflected in the fact that proletarians are bound to the impersonal power of capital as such, rather than to any individual capitalist; its essential determinations conduce to a logic in which it 'not only structures the conditions of possibility of social reproduction; it also actively intervenes in the processes and activities that make up social reproduction, from the most minute level in the workplace to global restructurings of the entire capitalist system' (142).
After a chapter on 'Capital and Difference', discussed below, the argument resumes in Chapters 8 and 9, 'The Universal Power of Value', and 'Value, Class, and Competition', as Mau examines 'the forms of power springing from the horizontal relations of production [between capitalists or productive units, and between workers], ‘including the very important but frequently ignored question of the precise relationship between these and the vertical class relations examined in chapter six' (19). The starting point for the first is the observation that 'The theory of value is ... not intended to be an explanation of prices but rather to be a qualitative analysis of the organisation of social reproduction in capitalist society ... a theory of the social form of labour in capitalism' (180-81):
'To say that value is a concept designed to capture the social form of labour in capitalism thus means that it is designed to capture the specific manner in which individual acts of labour are socially validated and incorporated into a system of social production; the theory of value is, in other words, a theory of the social interconnections between producers in the capitalist mode of production' (181). Specifically: 'The fundamental insight of Marx’s theory of value is that the peculiar unity of social and private labour in capitalism transforms social relations among producers into a quasi-autonomous system of real abstractions imposing themselves on everyone by means of an impersonal and abstract form of domination [the exchange of commodities, or the market system]' (185). This system generates 'compulsory standards and demands that producers must meet in order to survive ... In order to hold on to a market share that allows them to survive, they will have to live up to a certain level of productivity. In order to avoid spending more time than what is socially necessary for the production of a commodity, they are forced to adopt certain techniques, technologies, organisational forms, and so on. If a producer introduces labour-saving technologies, other producers will have to follow suit, move to another branch, work more, or perish' (185-6). With this, the nature of the connection between value and competition is established, and the exposition of the principal argument of the chapter is complete. A comment on fetishism follows (188-94), and a critique of Postone (194-9) is rounded off with a useful summary statement:
'For Marx, value is a social form that results from the organisation of social production through the market. That does not mean that he conceives of value as merely a category of the market. Indeed, while value arises from the market-mediated relations between the units of production, that does not prevent it from having immense effects on what goes on inside of these units, that is, on the concrete character of the labour process. Changes within the sphere of production, in turn, act on the market. Marx always emphasises that "the movement of capital is a unity of the process of production and the process of circulation". The causal relations between the sphere of circulation and the sphere of production run in both directions, and for that reason, we cannot reduce every aspect of capitalism to market relations. But the market still remains an essential feature of capitalism for Marx' (198).
Following, Chapter 9 explores the relationship between the 'universal domination of everyone by the value form' (because of the organisation of social production on the basis of the exchange of the products of labour of private and independent producers, who are therefore 'separated from each other while still remaining dependent upon each other') and the 'domination of proletarians by capitalists' (200-201). First, class 'cannot be reduced to an effect of value relations, nor can value be reduced to a result of class domination' (209). Second, 'proletarians are subjected to capitalists by means of a mechanism of domination which simultaneously subjects everyone to the imperatives of capital' (211). The market itself is a mechanism of domination for all participants, but within it, capitalists dominate workers. The key is the different but related impact of competition on capitalists and workers respectively. Third, competition executes the laws of capital, but it does not create them (213). It acts in a number of ways as a 'universalising mechanism', forcing individual capitals to constantly strive to cut costs in order to secure a surplus profit, and in turn forcing other capitals in the same branch of activity to follow suit, 'thereby engendering a new compulsory level of productivity'; securing the formation of a general rate of profit through migration of capital between different branches; subjecting wages to the equalising movements of the market'; and prompting the expansion of capitalist relations of production in two ways: 'extensive expansion, that is, the incorporation of larger parts of the global population into the circuits of capital; and intensive expansion, namely the integration of larger parts of social life into the circuits of capital' (217-8). Mau concludes, citing the Grundrisse (pp. 414 and 408): 'Insofar as competition "conceptually ... is nothing other than the inner nature of capital", we can also conclude that "the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself' (218). So: 'Competition should … be understood as one of the mechanisms of the economic power of capital. It is an abstract, universal, and impersonal form of domination to which everyone is subjected' (220). Not only that: it is ‘a class-transcending form of power, but not only does it presuppose class domination; it also strengthens and intensifies it, since it forces the capitalist to discipline and subjugate workers within the sphere of production’ (221).
Dynamics
This thought, which closes Part II, ‘Relations’, provides in turn the key to Part III, ‘Dynamics’, which at under 100 pages could almost stand alone as an introduction to the contemporary relevance of Marx’s work. The ‘synchronic analysis of the essential social relations presupposed by the subjection of social production to the logic of valorisation’ now gives way to a dynamic perspective which brings us to the heart of Marx’s project: ‘Capitalist relations of production set in motion certain dynamics, or ‘laws of motion’, which express themselves on all levels of the economic totality, from the most minute processes in the workplace to global restructurings of capital flows’ (225). In a (good) way this is ‘Marxism 101’, and a statement with which practically anyone familiar with Capital would immediately agree. Mau’s achievement is to ground it in the foregoing synchronic analysis, and apply it, brilliantly, to the trajectory of capitalist development to the point it has reached today. The underlying thought is that the presuppositions of the capitalist mode of production are also its results – its laws of motion continually reproduce the circumstances and processes on which it depends, so that ‘one of the sources of the power of capital is the very exercise of this power’ (226, emphasis original). Mau develops this thought by extending the idea of real subsumption from the capital-labour relation to nature, and, via consideration of the ‘logistics’ revolution, to the world market, and comes finally to the connection between surplus populations and crisis. It becomes apparent, as he does so, just how much the capitalist mode of production has tightened its grip over humanity in the last 50-60 years, and to that extent, it makes sobering reading. But it also clears the ground for an accurate diagnosis of the relationship between capitalism and global social reproduction today.
Mau starts, necessarily, with the real subsumption of labour to capital – the shift from taking command of existing production without transforming it (‘formal’ subsumption) to transforming the production process in accordance with the logic of capital, classically in a factory setting, and inaugurating ‘the specifically capitalist mode of production’. Real subsumption in this context is a response both to worker resistance, and to the pressures of competition, and Mau depicts it as ‘a power technique, a mechanism for reproducing the capitalist relations of production’, breaking the labour process down into its simplest elements, making workers subservient to continually transformed production regimes (237-40) and clock time (240-43), and subjecting them to deskilling (243-7). Proposing to extend the concept further, he resists the suggestion that ‘capital has taken hold of all dimensions of social life’, and suggests that ‘we should stick to Marx’s concept of subsumption as referring to the way in which the logic of capital relates to the social and material structure of the production process’ (250-51). This is the prelude to two excellent chapters, ‘The Capitalist Reconfiguration of Nature’ and ‘Logistical Power’. The first builds towards a discussion of ‘The Real Subsumption of Agriculture’, new technologies, new divisions of labour and the emergence of a global capitalist production regime, all since the 1940s (258-72). Taking off from the insightful observation that: ‘There is a good reason why Marx did not have much to say about real subsumption of labour and nature in agriculture: it barely existed in the nineteenth century’ (259), Mau reaches the conclusion that: ‘When capital seizes hold of agriculture and subjects it to real subsumption, it significantly tightens its grip on social reproduction’ (271). This is a superb chapter, and the second complements it, setting the revolution in logistics in the broader context of capital’s immanent drive to expansion and in the process reminding us how the world market has been transformed over recent decades:
‘In chapter ten, we saw how the real subsumption of labour implies an increasing division of labour within the workplace, with the consequence that capital supplements its appropriation of the objective conditions of labour with the appropriation of the social conditions of labour. A similar process takes place on a global level and has been significantly accelerated by the logistics revolution. Similar to the way in which capital “seizes labour-power by its roots” within the workplace, it seizes local, regional, or national economies by their roots and subjects them to the familiar process of fracture and reassembly: it breaks up production processes and sectors into pieces. spreading their fragments all over the globe in order to reunite them through planetary supply chains. The consequence of this is that the conditions necessary for social reproduction to take place on a local or regional level might be scattered all over the world, with the means for their mediation under the firm control of capital. Logistics thus allows capital to supplement its appropriation of the objective and social conditions of labour with the appropriation of the spatial or geographical conditions. This amounts to a kind of real subsumption, yet on the level of the global totality rather than on the level of the workplace’ (288).
The pay-off comes in the final section of the chapter, ‘The Production of Capitalism’ (293-5):
‘In this and the two preceding chapters, we have discovered something important about the economic power of capital: namely that it is partly a result of its own exercise. The economic power of capital stems not only from the relations of production but also from the social and material reconfigurations resulting from those relations. Indeed, when capitalist production first emerged on the stage of history, it did so in a world shaped by non-capitalist social logics. It had to base itself on political institutions, customary arrangements, technologies, divisions of labour, cultural forms, and international relations inherited from a world where the valorisation of value was not the “all-dominating economic power” it later became. Initially, capital was a social form imposed on pre-capitalist content. As soon as its grip on the conditions of social life was established, however, this form revealed itself to possess a strong propensity to materialise itself, to transcend its own formality and incarnate itself in a mesh of limbs, energies, bodies, plants, oceans, knowledges, animals, and machines – a process which continues to constantly reshape the world to this day. This is what the concept of real subsumption captures’ (293-4).
Or as Marx put it, ‘The capitalist process of production … seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer’ (Capital, p. 724, cited here 295). The economic power of capital grows through its own exercise – ‘’Capitalist production is the production of capitalism’ (295). This unique characteristic of capitalism, I would add, it is what makes it the indispensable and only foundation for a theory of history.
However, a piece of the puzzle is still missing: As frequently trailed throughout the book, the capacity of capitalism to shape and dominate social reproduction in the course of its own reproduction depends crucially on its innate tendency to produce a population surplus to its requirements, as it continually expels workers in the course of its development. Mau turns to this tendency - which Marx described as the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’ - in Chapter 13, and proceeds from there to interpret crises as a source of power. Mau identifies, via David Harvey, two models of accumulation in Chapter 25 of Capital. The first ‘abstracts from the development of the productive forces in order to demonstrate how capital necessarily generates a certain level of unemployment, independently of changing productivity levels’ (297), in a cyclical pattern: rising wages lead to declining accumulation, prompting a fall in wages, and so on. In the second, ‘Marx considers the effects of productivity increases on unemployment, concluding that in the long run, the relative surplus population tends to grow. This is what he refers to as the “general law of capitalist accumulation”’:
‘Again, the argument is quite simple: competition forces individual capitals to increase productivity by introducing labour-saving technology, and, as these technologies become generalised across sectors or the entire economy, the technical composition of capital increases. Assuming that the falling demand for labour as a result of increasing productivity is stronger than the rising demand of labour as a result of the expansion of production, the capitalist economy as a whole will, in the long run (i.e., across multiple business cycles), shed more workers than it will absorb. Ever-larger segments of the relative surplus population will thus become “absolutely redundant” for the valorisation of value’ (298).
At this point, Mau’s argument takes a turn with which I disagree, and to which I return below. He argues (298-9), via Michael Heinrich, that Marx’s assumption that the industrial reserve army will tend to grow over the long term cannot be strictly substantiated (as the demand for new labour arising from expanding production (the employment effect) may outweigh the expulsion of living labour as a consequence of labour-shedding productivity increases (the redundancy effect). He then goes on to register the existence of a ‘global surplus population’ of ‘around 1.3 billion people, accounting for roughly 40 per cent of the world’s workforce’ (Benanev, 2015: 25, cited p. 299), and comments that: ‘It turns out, then, that Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation actually provides a rather precise account of the forces at play in the neoliberal era’ (300). Having accepted, however, that the second model of accumulation identified above ‘cannot be substantiated as a claim about the core structure of capital’, he gives greater priority to the first:
‘What we are able to conclude on the basis of an analysis of the ideal average of the capitalist mode of production, then, is that a surplus population is a necessary condition of capitalist production, and that capital itself gives rise to cyclical dynamics which ensure its continuous existence. When rising wages begin to threaten profits, competitive pressures force accumulation to slow down or compel capitalists to introduce labour-saving technology. The result is a rise in the supply of labour power and a drop in wages, which leads to the restoration of the conditions of accumulation’ (300-301).
Mau then highlights the strategy, on the part of capitalists, of exploiting divisions between workers in its drive to shape competition between them to its own advantage, giving as an example Marx’s discussion of their exploitation of antagonism between English and Irish workers in centres of industrial production in England (301-3).
On crises, Mau follows Clarke (1994), arguing that ‘a crisis is not only the point at which accumulation is interrupted; it is also a mechanism by means of which capital re-establishes the conditions of another round of accumulation (307)’; crises reflect ‘the permanent instability of social existence under capitalism’ (ibid, citing Clarke, p. 280), and generally result from over-production arising from the pressure on individual capitalists to maintain or increase their market share by out-competing rival producers; but beyond that, their immediate or proximate causes cannot be identified without taking account of ‘the specific and contingent details’ of the situation in which they arise (ibid). In short, for reasons usefully set out at length pp. 310-11, crises ‘are not only a result of the mute compulsion of competition; they are also a source of this power’ (310). Mau concludes that crises ‘should be regarded as one of the impersonal and abstract power mechanisms through which capital imposes itself on social life,’ perhaps even ‘the best example of the impersonal character of the economic power of capital’ (314):
‘One way to think of the relation between crisis and power is therefore to see crises as levers of the mechanisms of domination examined in the preceding chapters. Crises intensify capital’s expansive drive; they compel capital to draw more and more people and activities into its circuit by means of privatisation and accumulation by dispossession, or through the commodification of activities which have hitherto remained outside the direct command of capital. In this way, crises tend to expand and fortify the form of class domination we examined in chapter three [‘The Social Ontology of Economic Power’]. This also leads to a strengthening of the mechanisms of domination described in chapter four [‘The Human Corporeal Organisation’], as the expansion of capitalist class domination increases competition and market dependence, imposing the commodity form on new spheres of life. Finally, by tightening the grip on individual capitals, crises also accelerate the real subsumption of labour and nature as capitalists struggle to survive the massacre on the market. In addition to these intensifications of mechanisms which operate throughout all phases of accumulation cycles, crises also have their own specific power mechanism: the annihilation of capital’ (315, emphasis mine).
Mau is quick to add that these dynamics may not always prevail, and that a crisis can also be ‘a sign of the weakness of the power of capital’. But in any case: ‘A crisis of capital is always also a crisis of proletarian reproduction, and therefore a situation in which the incompatibility between the convulsions of accumulation and the need for a secure and stable life achieves its most glaring expression’ (316). Mau aligns himself, then, with those who have recently argued that ‘crises tend to strengthen capital’s hand’ (317, citing Endnotes 2013, p. 29; cf. Benanev and Clegg, 2018).
‘The emergence of the capitalist mode of production did not, then, lead to an evacuation of power from the economy; it rather signalled a new configuration of power in which the coercive power required to guarantee property relations was centralised in the hands of the state and thereby formally separated from the organisation of production and the extraction of surplus labour, which now became organised by means of an abstract and impersonal form of domination. This historically novel way of structuring the reproduction of social life turned out to be tremendously tenacious, versatile, and infused with a fiercely expansionary drive. Today, four centuries later, it is more entrenched than ever before’ (321).
Critique
Mute Compulsion is truly excellent, as far as it goes, but it does not go quite far enough. There is more that can be said, first on the specific issue of ‘capital and difference’, and second on the broader issue of ‘surplus' population. Chapter 7, ‘Capital and Difference’, is awkwardly inserted at the midpoint of the book, and I initially passed over it, in order to turn to it once the full argument of the book was laid out. It provides a substantial discussion of the recent literature on social reproduction theory (152-66) and a much sketchier one on the significance of race (166-70). On the first, Mau thinks that ‘we should follow scholars such as [Michèle] Barrett, [Tithi] Bhattacharya, Iris Young, and Cinzia Arruzza, and view the familiar binary and hierarchical system of gender as a social phenomenon which does not originate in the logic of capital, yet nevertheless reproduces and is reproduced by it’ (163); and on the second, he suggests that it is ‘perfectly possible to hold that racism is a social phenomenon which does not originate in the capital form yet is conducive to and reproduced by the latter’ (167). And, addressing these and other ‘socially significant hierarchies and differences’, he concludes that ‘there is a strong case to be made for the view that capital has an inherent and necessary tendency to nurture and reproduce social differences’ (171).
Neither here nor in the rest of the chapter does Mau attempt to address either gender or race from the perspective of the broader analysis of ‘mute compulsion’ in the book – in fact, he explicitly backs away from doing so (171-3). But, first, his early statement that economic power ‘is rooted in the ability to reconfigure the material conditions of social reproduction’ (5) suggests that he should at least consider whether capital has an inherent and necessary tendency to nurture, reproduce and transform social differences’. And indeed he gives numerous empirical examples of transformation in relation to gender (155-6), only to move on prematurely to a more speculative discussion. Some salient features of contemporary social reproduction, such as the drawing of women into the global proletariat, the massive expansion of places for women in higher education and corresponding expansion of graduate and professional employment, the global decline in levels of fertility, and the synchronised shift in advanced economies to a pattern where women tend to have a first child in their thirties, if ever (Cammack, 2020) go unexplored. There is strong evidence here of capital’s capacity to impose its logic on social life, and specifically on the conditions of social reproduction, and it fits perfectly with Mau’s suggestion that ‘we should stick to Marx’s concept of subsumption as referring to the way in which the logic of capital relates to the social and material structure of the production process’ (250-51). This is all the more the case if we recall the insistence in the German Ideology that ‘production’ is to be understood as the ‘production of life’, explicitly including procreation. Here, Mau’s argument that social relations ‘give rise to technologies which enable human beings to control and manipulate natural processes which were hitherto outside their reach’ (105) is directly applicable. He concurs with the frequently made argument that Marx had a ‘blind spot’ where gender was concerned (152), but argues elsewhere in stark contrast that: ‘‘There is a good reason why Marx did not have much to say about real subsumption of labour and nature in agriculture: it barely existed in the nineteenth century’ (259). The same applies to procreation, but things have changed (Gimenez, 2019, Chapters 7 and 8; Cammack 2020: 83-5), so on all these counts Mau has missed an opportunity to apply his framework to these and other forms of difference, and the chapter is much the weaker for it.
A further aspect of procreation provides a link to the second issue I raise here, that of ‘relative surplus population’. One notable feature in relation to dramatically falling birth-rates is that representatives of capital and advanced capitalist regimes, in contrast to populist/nationalist regimes, seem unconcerned by the prospect of static or declining populations. In one parochial example, the British Conservative government has recently declined to reconsider its upper limit of two children for receipt of child benefit (a position quickly and shamefully endorsed by the leader of the Labour Party), having previously announced increased benefits intended to entice recent mothers in their thirties to return to the workforce. Women are slated to be workers first and mothers second if at all, whatever the consequences for the generational supply of new labour. Just as in Marx’s day (when the received wisdom, caustically mocked by Marx and Engels, was that there were ‘too many people’), capital seems happy to ‘leave [procreation] to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation’ (Cammack 2020: 85-9, citing Capital, p. 718). It is scarcely surprising. Benanev’s estimate of a ‘global surplus population’ of 1.3 billion is consistent with many others, and when taken in conjunction with capital’s greatly increased access to workers around the world as a result of revolutions in logistics and mobility more broadly, you can see why the logic of capital is consistent with a wholehearted focus on turning all available proletarians into workers, whether by indifference or hostility towards procreation, or by eager pursuit of the ‘free-floating surplus population of migrants’ (284). The World Bank’s latest World Development Report, Migrants, Refugees and Societies (World Bank 2023) lays out this logic at length. The Bank, with its acute and generally under-appreciated grasp of the long-term needs of global capital, is focused obsessively on the education, skills, productivity and mobility of future workers, but exhibits no concerns whatsoever over their absolute numbers: the focal point of its Human Capital Project and Human Capital Index is explicitly ‘the productivity as a future worker of a child born in 2018’ (Cammack 2022: 146). This reflects the view that there are bound to be sufficient numbers of people, and that the priority is to turn them into available and productive workers for capital.
This entirely vindicates Mau’s argument, and abundantly confirms its significance. But he does not take it as far as he could, because of a degree of imprecision in his approach to the issues of the relative surplus population on the one hand, and the tendency for capital to expel workers in the course of its development on the other. The tendency to expel workers is an inherent characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, best understood as related to those already really subsumed to capital. Such workers form only a small proportion, however, of the relative surplus population at any point in time, short of some long distant and perhaps unimaginable moment when all workers are really subsumed to capital. So I think he is wrong to follow Heinrich, and imagine that the ‘employment’ effect might outweigh the ‘redundancy’ effect. In the limit case of a pure capitalist mode of production this is a logical impossibility, as workers expelled in the course of its development would be the only ones available for employment. But more to the point, in circumstances in which the latent reserve army of labour significantly outnumbers those really subsumed to capital, as it does now and will do for the foreseeable future, not least because it is global in scale, there is effectively an unlimited supply on which capital can draw. Furthermore, Marx explicitly abstracted away from the recurring rise and fall of employment arising from the industrial cycle (Capital, p. 794) in developing his ‘general law of capital accumulation’; and in the same discussion he identified, as a principle contribution to the ‘floating’ relative surplus population, those workers expelled in favour of new recruits as their productivity begins to fall: ‘Capital demands more youthful workers, fewer adults’. Noting that it was ‘precisely among the workers in large-scale industry that we meet with the shortest life-expectancy’, he commented that
‘Under these circumstances, the absolute increase of this section of the proletariat must take a form which swells their numbers, despite the rapid wastage of their individual elements. Hence the rapid replacement of one generation of workers by another (this law does not hold for the other classes of the population). This social requirement is met by early marriages, which are a necessary consequence of the conditions in which workers in large-scale industry live, and by the premium that the exploitation of workers’ children sets on their production’ (ibid: 795).
Self-evidently, this is a conjunctural analysis, at a quite different level of abstraction from the proposition that the capitalist mode of production, through the logic of its operation, expels workers in the course of its development. If we were to make the same conjunctural analysis today, the crucial elements to consider would be the ‘compelled but voluntary’ shift to late marriage and smaller families among the proletariat, the greater capacity on the part of capital to access labour on a global scale, and as a consequence, the even greater indifference of capital to the issue of procreation, and the greater intensity of interest in the skilling and mobility and of people.
The ups and downs of growth or industrial cycles are important, because they exacerbate the instability of capitalist development and of employment, and Mau addresses this best when he examines the role of crises. But the innate tendency of capital to expel workers in the course of its development is fundamental, and should be restored to its proper place in the analysis of the circumstances affecting social reproduction.
If these points are valid, three conclusions follow. First, the significance and value of Mau’s framework for the analysis of the relationship are confirmed, but it can still be further refined and developed. Second, the issue of ‘population and capital’, the subject of a pioneering investigation by Martha Gimenez ([1977] 2019: Ch. 6) is of paramount importance. And third, theorists of social reproduction should consider critically the adequacy of the notion of the reproduction of the labour force from day to day and from generation to generation as a basis for determining its implications for gender roles and the oppression of women. The reproduction and mobility of the global labour force may be a better point of reference today.
References and further reading
Benanev, Aaron. 2015. ‘A Global History of Unemployment: Surplus Populations in the World Economy, 1949-2010’, PhD diss., UCLA.
Benanev, Aaron, and John Clegg. 2018. ‘Crisis and Immiseration: Critical Theory Today’, in Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane, eds, The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Sage, London.
Cammack, Paul. 2020. 'Marx on social reproduction', Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Cammack, Paul. 2022. The Politics of Global Competitiveness, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Capital & Class. 2023. ‘A symposium remembering Simon Clarke’, 47, 2, 156-223.
Clarke, Simon. 1994. Marx’s Theory of Crisis, Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Endnotes. 2013. ‘The Holding Pattern’, Issue 3, 12-54.
Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, New York: Autonomedia.
Fracchia, Joseph. 2005. 'Beyond the human-nature debate: Human corporeal organisation as the first fact of historical materialism', Historical Materialism, 13, 1, 33-61.
Gimenez, Martha. 2019. Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction, Brill, Leiden and Boston.
Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Verso, London.
Malm, Andreas. 2018. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, Verso, London.
World Bank. 2023. Migrants, Refugees and Societies, World Bank, Washington DC.
Mau affiliates himself with value-form theory, which interprets Marx’s critique of political economy as ‘a qualitative theory of social forms aimed at uncovering and criticising the social relations underlying the capitalist mode of production’, and sees Marx’s theory of value ‘as a theory of the transformation of capitalist social relations into real abstractions imposing themselves on social life through an impersonal form of power’ (65-6). His starting point is the Neue Marx-Lektüre developed by Backhaus, Krahl, and Reichelt from the 1970s, and more recently taken up by Michael Heinrich, who contributes a brief foreword, and is identified by Mau as ‘a central interlocutor’ (66). I confess to being unfamiliar with most of the secondary literature discussed, including everything published only in German. Heinrich's Die Wissenschaft vom Wert: Die Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolution und klassischer Tradition (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999) is just one of many such texts (see footnote 57, pp. 64-5). What is more, Mau ranges far beyond value-form theory, drawing on key texts in Marxist ecology, ‘political Marxism’, Marxist feminism, and much else besides. Throughout, exposition of the ‘essential determinations of the capitalist mode of production’ mingles with sustained critical engagement with secondary literature. As my concern here is with his analysis of the former and their implications for social reproduction, I don’t engage with the latter, save to say that it is clear and measured, and, as far as I can judge, sound in the judgements made.
Mau’s title reflects his preferred rendering of ‘stumme Zwang‘ (usually 'silent compulsion') in Capital (Penguin, 1976: 899): ‘The silent [mute] compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Extra-economic, immediate violence is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the 'natural laws of production', i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them' (cited p. 3).
From this point, Mau develops his argument in three parts. Part I (Conditions) explores ‘the real conditions’, or material foundations, of the economic power of capital. Part II (Relations) examines horizontal relations among units of production and among immediate producers, and vertical relations between ‘the immediate producers and those who control the conditions of social reproduction’ (18). Part III (Dynamics) deploys the idea of real subsumption to examine labour markets, populations, nature, and the world market.
Conditions
Mau sees Marx as understanding ‘capital’ as 'a historically specific social logic', to be understood as 'a movement [of valorisation], and not as a static thing' (37), and himself proposes that: ‘The power of capital can ... be defined as capital's capacity to impose its logic on social life; a capacity which includes and ultimately relies upon, but is not reducible to, relations among social actors in a traditional sense, such as the relationship between capitalists and proletarians or the relationship between an employer and an employee' (46). He sets out the 'real conditions of the economic power of capital' in chapters 3-5, on 'The Social Ontology of Economic Power', 'The Human Corporeal Organisation', and 'Metabolic Domination', their goal being to 'trace the possibility of economic power back to the nature of social reality' (71). Mau accepts that 'the social ontology underlying Marx’s critique of political economy does imply and rely on a notion of human nature', but argues at the same time that ‘this notion of human nature cannot possibly function as the basis of a critique of capitalism' (90). He then turns to The German Ideology, restoring the more accurate translation of 'corporeal organisation' [körperliche Organisation] in place of 'physical organisation' in the passage 'The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical [corporeal] organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature' (Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 31). Marxists, he says, have been 'oddly silent on the issue of the body', and he follows Fracchia (2005: esp. 58-9) in discerning here 'what amounts to a "corporeal turn" in Marx's thought' (95). I wouldn't go that far, but again, it's by the way. He goes on to address the significance of tools and tool-making, with tools seen, with good supporting evidence, as 'at the same time a part of the body - an organ - and separated from it'. The key insight here is that: 'Because of human dependence on tools, the constitutive moments of the human metabolism are much easier to separate and temporarily dissolve than the metabolisms of other animals (and plants for that matter) - a circumstance which is ... absolutely crucial for understanding how such a thing as economic power is possible' (99). Crucially, 'already at the level of their "corporeal organisation", human individuals are caught up in a web of social relations mediating their access to the conditions of their reproduction' (100, emphasis original). In turn: 'The double mediation at the heart of the human metabolism - the mediation of tools and the mediation of social relations - explains why it can take infinite different forms. ... Human corporeal organisation opens up an immense space of possibility founded on a necessity: a metabolism must be established, but its social form is never simply given' (101). Chapter 5, 'Metabolic Domination', then completes 'the outline of the socio-ontological framework necessary for understanding the mute compulsion of economic relations' (usefully summarised 117-9). It opens with the suggestion that Marx's distinction between the 'natural' and the 'social' rests on the idea that 'the social is that which can be changed by humans, and the natural is that which is necessary from the point of view of human society' (105). Importantly, this 'does not imply the claim that their boundaries are fixed. Social relations give rise to technologies which enable human beings to control and manipulate natural processes which were hitherto outside their reach' (ibid). Marx, Mau then says, shifted from a perspective in which changes in the productive forces brought about changes in the social relations of production to one in which he 'began to regard the development of the productive forces as a result of the relations of production' (107): 'What drives history is not the immanent and necessary development of the productive forces, but human beings acting within a set of determinate social structures from which certain tendencies arise' (108). What are at issue, then, are 'the essential and historically specific determinations [or the 'natural laws'] of a mode of production' (109) - the principal subject of the book.
‘The economy in Marx's sense,’ Mau says, ‘is ... the sum of activities and processes through which social reproduction is organised; and the logics which govern these processes are inherently social and historical' (112-3). In sum:
'What is characteristic about the economic sphere, if we want to call it that, is not the logics which governs [sic] it but the social function of the activities which constitute it, that is, the fact that the very existence of society depends on them. This is the basic idea of Marx’s materialism. The latter does not claim that the social relations which govern social reproduction also automatically govern other spheres of life, or that social forms of consciousness are mere reflections of it. What it does claim, however, is that relations of production exert a very powerful influence on other aspects of social life by virtue of their absolutely fundamental role in the reproduction of the very existence of social life' (113).
Against this background, the final section of the chapter, 'How to Extract Surplus Labour' introduces 'the fateful capacity of human beings to produce more than is necessary for their own survival' (114, emphasis original), adding that 'The mere possibility of surplus labour ... can only explain the possibility of class domination, never its actuality. In order for this potential to be realised, some people have to succeed in extracting surplus labour from others' (ibid), perhaps by direct violence or by psychological and ideological manipulation. However: 'Given the precarious nature of the human metabolism ... there is also a third possibility, which is to 'exploit this ontological fragility and insert oneself in the gap between life and its conditions. This is exactly what economic power does' (ibid). This may sound a little abstract, but the argument is clear when formulated in terms of specifics: the tools and machines that serve as extensions of the human body, and make possible increased productivity and the production of a surplus are susceptible by virtue of being separate from the body to being appropriated as private property. Mau cites Andreas Malm (2016: 280, emphasis original) here:
'No other species can be so flexible, so universal, so omnivorous in relation to the rest of nature – but for the very same reason, no other species can have its metabolism organised through such sharp internal divisions. If a broad set of extra-somatic tools is a distinctive feature of Homo sapiens sapiens, it is also the point where that species ceases to be a unity … A material, a machine, a prime mover can become private property. The individual might need them like she needs her own lungs, but they are outside of her body, caught by others in a net, versatile and off-limits, and so she may have no choice but to go via a master to access them: she is snared in property relations' (cited pp. 114-5).
Mau draws the conclusion that: 'Power relations are embedded in the material structures of production in tools, machines, and energy – not because these structures carry an immanent technical rationality, imposing themselves on society, but because they are a part of the social relations of production' (117). And while this explains the possibility of economic power, it remains to be seen how capital exploits this possibility.
Relations
Part II (Relations) opens with the commodification of labour power, 'the condition of possibility of what Marx calls the capital relation' (124). Mau briefly recalls the violence which attended the establishment of wage labour, and the parallel 'war against women' documented by Silvia Federici (2004), then explores the implications of Marx's assertion that: 'Only where wage-labour is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society as a whole' (Capital, p. 733, cited p. 127). Here he goes beyond wage-labour considered in isolation as exploitation, to offer an understanding of class 'as a shared relation to the conditions of social reproduction', in a passage that places control over the conditions of social reproduction at the centre of his analysis:
'Capital needs workers. A steady supply of labour power presupposes that the people needed as wage labourers are deprived of the possibility of reproducing themselves outside of the market. This, in turn, presupposes the dispossession of everyone who could potentially support those needed by capitalists as wage labourers. The set of people dependent on the market is, in other words, not necessarily identical with the set of people capital needs as wage labourers; the latter is only a subset of the former. ... In this context, class domination ... refers to the relation between those who control the conditions of social reproduction and those who are excluded from the direct access to the conditions of social reproduction' (129).
This is an elegant and productive way of linking the 'essential determinations of the capitalist mode of production' to current debates on social reproduction, underpinned by the idea that capitalism is the ‘institutionalisation of insecurity' (130). It brings us back to the point noted above - the fact that propertyless proletarians do not automatically become workers, but have to be 'made into workers', and the conception of the whole of the book as an answer to the question of how this transformation takes place (131). At its heart is 'a fundamental condition of the capitalist mode of production: the radical separation between life and its conditions which allows capital to insert itself as a mediator between them' (132). Proletarians can only gain access to their vital needs through the sale of labour power to capital, so are 'compelled to sell themselves voluntarily' (Capital, p. 899). Mau describes proletarians as being 'in debt' to capital from birth, already dependent on capital ('the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist', Capital, p. 723, cited 134): 'The debt incurred by the worker at birth is thus a kind of transcendental debt in the sense that it forms a part of the necessary conditions of possibility for social reproduction in a society ruled by the logic of capital' (135). So, 'it is certainly true that debt has taken on new forms and functions in the neoliberal era, but it is crucial to acknowledge that the transcendentally indebted subject has been a part of capitalism from its very beginning' (ibid). And the comprehensive character of the economic power of capital is reflected in the fact that proletarians are bound to the impersonal power of capital as such, rather than to any individual capitalist; its essential determinations conduce to a logic in which it 'not only structures the conditions of possibility of social reproduction; it also actively intervenes in the processes and activities that make up social reproduction, from the most minute level in the workplace to global restructurings of the entire capitalist system' (142).
After a chapter on 'Capital and Difference', discussed below, the argument resumes in Chapters 8 and 9, 'The Universal Power of Value', and 'Value, Class, and Competition', as Mau examines 'the forms of power springing from the horizontal relations of production [between capitalists or productive units, and between workers], ‘including the very important but frequently ignored question of the precise relationship between these and the vertical class relations examined in chapter six' (19). The starting point for the first is the observation that 'The theory of value is ... not intended to be an explanation of prices but rather to be a qualitative analysis of the organisation of social reproduction in capitalist society ... a theory of the social form of labour in capitalism' (180-81):
'To say that value is a concept designed to capture the social form of labour in capitalism thus means that it is designed to capture the specific manner in which individual acts of labour are socially validated and incorporated into a system of social production; the theory of value is, in other words, a theory of the social interconnections between producers in the capitalist mode of production' (181). Specifically: 'The fundamental insight of Marx’s theory of value is that the peculiar unity of social and private labour in capitalism transforms social relations among producers into a quasi-autonomous system of real abstractions imposing themselves on everyone by means of an impersonal and abstract form of domination [the exchange of commodities, or the market system]' (185). This system generates 'compulsory standards and demands that producers must meet in order to survive ... In order to hold on to a market share that allows them to survive, they will have to live up to a certain level of productivity. In order to avoid spending more time than what is socially necessary for the production of a commodity, they are forced to adopt certain techniques, technologies, organisational forms, and so on. If a producer introduces labour-saving technologies, other producers will have to follow suit, move to another branch, work more, or perish' (185-6). With this, the nature of the connection between value and competition is established, and the exposition of the principal argument of the chapter is complete. A comment on fetishism follows (188-94), and a critique of Postone (194-9) is rounded off with a useful summary statement:
'For Marx, value is a social form that results from the organisation of social production through the market. That does not mean that he conceives of value as merely a category of the market. Indeed, while value arises from the market-mediated relations between the units of production, that does not prevent it from having immense effects on what goes on inside of these units, that is, on the concrete character of the labour process. Changes within the sphere of production, in turn, act on the market. Marx always emphasises that "the movement of capital is a unity of the process of production and the process of circulation". The causal relations between the sphere of circulation and the sphere of production run in both directions, and for that reason, we cannot reduce every aspect of capitalism to market relations. But the market still remains an essential feature of capitalism for Marx' (198).
Following, Chapter 9 explores the relationship between the 'universal domination of everyone by the value form' (because of the organisation of social production on the basis of the exchange of the products of labour of private and independent producers, who are therefore 'separated from each other while still remaining dependent upon each other') and the 'domination of proletarians by capitalists' (200-201). First, class 'cannot be reduced to an effect of value relations, nor can value be reduced to a result of class domination' (209). Second, 'proletarians are subjected to capitalists by means of a mechanism of domination which simultaneously subjects everyone to the imperatives of capital' (211). The market itself is a mechanism of domination for all participants, but within it, capitalists dominate workers. The key is the different but related impact of competition on capitalists and workers respectively. Third, competition executes the laws of capital, but it does not create them (213). It acts in a number of ways as a 'universalising mechanism', forcing individual capitals to constantly strive to cut costs in order to secure a surplus profit, and in turn forcing other capitals in the same branch of activity to follow suit, 'thereby engendering a new compulsory level of productivity'; securing the formation of a general rate of profit through migration of capital between different branches; subjecting wages to the equalising movements of the market'; and prompting the expansion of capitalist relations of production in two ways: 'extensive expansion, that is, the incorporation of larger parts of the global population into the circuits of capital; and intensive expansion, namely the integration of larger parts of social life into the circuits of capital' (217-8). Mau concludes, citing the Grundrisse (pp. 414 and 408): 'Insofar as competition "conceptually ... is nothing other than the inner nature of capital", we can also conclude that "the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself' (218). So: 'Competition should … be understood as one of the mechanisms of the economic power of capital. It is an abstract, universal, and impersonal form of domination to which everyone is subjected' (220). Not only that: it is ‘a class-transcending form of power, but not only does it presuppose class domination; it also strengthens and intensifies it, since it forces the capitalist to discipline and subjugate workers within the sphere of production’ (221).
Dynamics
This thought, which closes Part II, ‘Relations’, provides in turn the key to Part III, ‘Dynamics’, which at under 100 pages could almost stand alone as an introduction to the contemporary relevance of Marx’s work. The ‘synchronic analysis of the essential social relations presupposed by the subjection of social production to the logic of valorisation’ now gives way to a dynamic perspective which brings us to the heart of Marx’s project: ‘Capitalist relations of production set in motion certain dynamics, or ‘laws of motion’, which express themselves on all levels of the economic totality, from the most minute processes in the workplace to global restructurings of capital flows’ (225). In a (good) way this is ‘Marxism 101’, and a statement with which practically anyone familiar with Capital would immediately agree. Mau’s achievement is to ground it in the foregoing synchronic analysis, and apply it, brilliantly, to the trajectory of capitalist development to the point it has reached today. The underlying thought is that the presuppositions of the capitalist mode of production are also its results – its laws of motion continually reproduce the circumstances and processes on which it depends, so that ‘one of the sources of the power of capital is the very exercise of this power’ (226, emphasis original). Mau develops this thought by extending the idea of real subsumption from the capital-labour relation to nature, and, via consideration of the ‘logistics’ revolution, to the world market, and comes finally to the connection between surplus populations and crisis. It becomes apparent, as he does so, just how much the capitalist mode of production has tightened its grip over humanity in the last 50-60 years, and to that extent, it makes sobering reading. But it also clears the ground for an accurate diagnosis of the relationship between capitalism and global social reproduction today.
Mau starts, necessarily, with the real subsumption of labour to capital – the shift from taking command of existing production without transforming it (‘formal’ subsumption) to transforming the production process in accordance with the logic of capital, classically in a factory setting, and inaugurating ‘the specifically capitalist mode of production’. Real subsumption in this context is a response both to worker resistance, and to the pressures of competition, and Mau depicts it as ‘a power technique, a mechanism for reproducing the capitalist relations of production’, breaking the labour process down into its simplest elements, making workers subservient to continually transformed production regimes (237-40) and clock time (240-43), and subjecting them to deskilling (243-7). Proposing to extend the concept further, he resists the suggestion that ‘capital has taken hold of all dimensions of social life’, and suggests that ‘we should stick to Marx’s concept of subsumption as referring to the way in which the logic of capital relates to the social and material structure of the production process’ (250-51). This is the prelude to two excellent chapters, ‘The Capitalist Reconfiguration of Nature’ and ‘Logistical Power’. The first builds towards a discussion of ‘The Real Subsumption of Agriculture’, new technologies, new divisions of labour and the emergence of a global capitalist production regime, all since the 1940s (258-72). Taking off from the insightful observation that: ‘There is a good reason why Marx did not have much to say about real subsumption of labour and nature in agriculture: it barely existed in the nineteenth century’ (259), Mau reaches the conclusion that: ‘When capital seizes hold of agriculture and subjects it to real subsumption, it significantly tightens its grip on social reproduction’ (271). This is a superb chapter, and the second complements it, setting the revolution in logistics in the broader context of capital’s immanent drive to expansion and in the process reminding us how the world market has been transformed over recent decades:
‘In chapter ten, we saw how the real subsumption of labour implies an increasing division of labour within the workplace, with the consequence that capital supplements its appropriation of the objective conditions of labour with the appropriation of the social conditions of labour. A similar process takes place on a global level and has been significantly accelerated by the logistics revolution. Similar to the way in which capital “seizes labour-power by its roots” within the workplace, it seizes local, regional, or national economies by their roots and subjects them to the familiar process of fracture and reassembly: it breaks up production processes and sectors into pieces. spreading their fragments all over the globe in order to reunite them through planetary supply chains. The consequence of this is that the conditions necessary for social reproduction to take place on a local or regional level might be scattered all over the world, with the means for their mediation under the firm control of capital. Logistics thus allows capital to supplement its appropriation of the objective and social conditions of labour with the appropriation of the spatial or geographical conditions. This amounts to a kind of real subsumption, yet on the level of the global totality rather than on the level of the workplace’ (288).
The pay-off comes in the final section of the chapter, ‘The Production of Capitalism’ (293-5):
‘In this and the two preceding chapters, we have discovered something important about the economic power of capital: namely that it is partly a result of its own exercise. The economic power of capital stems not only from the relations of production but also from the social and material reconfigurations resulting from those relations. Indeed, when capitalist production first emerged on the stage of history, it did so in a world shaped by non-capitalist social logics. It had to base itself on political institutions, customary arrangements, technologies, divisions of labour, cultural forms, and international relations inherited from a world where the valorisation of value was not the “all-dominating economic power” it later became. Initially, capital was a social form imposed on pre-capitalist content. As soon as its grip on the conditions of social life was established, however, this form revealed itself to possess a strong propensity to materialise itself, to transcend its own formality and incarnate itself in a mesh of limbs, energies, bodies, plants, oceans, knowledges, animals, and machines – a process which continues to constantly reshape the world to this day. This is what the concept of real subsumption captures’ (293-4).
Or as Marx put it, ‘The capitalist process of production … seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer’ (Capital, p. 724, cited here 295). The economic power of capital grows through its own exercise – ‘’Capitalist production is the production of capitalism’ (295). This unique characteristic of capitalism, I would add, it is what makes it the indispensable and only foundation for a theory of history.
However, a piece of the puzzle is still missing: As frequently trailed throughout the book, the capacity of capitalism to shape and dominate social reproduction in the course of its own reproduction depends crucially on its innate tendency to produce a population surplus to its requirements, as it continually expels workers in the course of its development. Mau turns to this tendency - which Marx described as the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’ - in Chapter 13, and proceeds from there to interpret crises as a source of power. Mau identifies, via David Harvey, two models of accumulation in Chapter 25 of Capital. The first ‘abstracts from the development of the productive forces in order to demonstrate how capital necessarily generates a certain level of unemployment, independently of changing productivity levels’ (297), in a cyclical pattern: rising wages lead to declining accumulation, prompting a fall in wages, and so on. In the second, ‘Marx considers the effects of productivity increases on unemployment, concluding that in the long run, the relative surplus population tends to grow. This is what he refers to as the “general law of capitalist accumulation”’:
‘Again, the argument is quite simple: competition forces individual capitals to increase productivity by introducing labour-saving technology, and, as these technologies become generalised across sectors or the entire economy, the technical composition of capital increases. Assuming that the falling demand for labour as a result of increasing productivity is stronger than the rising demand of labour as a result of the expansion of production, the capitalist economy as a whole will, in the long run (i.e., across multiple business cycles), shed more workers than it will absorb. Ever-larger segments of the relative surplus population will thus become “absolutely redundant” for the valorisation of value’ (298).
At this point, Mau’s argument takes a turn with which I disagree, and to which I return below. He argues (298-9), via Michael Heinrich, that Marx’s assumption that the industrial reserve army will tend to grow over the long term cannot be strictly substantiated (as the demand for new labour arising from expanding production (the employment effect) may outweigh the expulsion of living labour as a consequence of labour-shedding productivity increases (the redundancy effect). He then goes on to register the existence of a ‘global surplus population’ of ‘around 1.3 billion people, accounting for roughly 40 per cent of the world’s workforce’ (Benanev, 2015: 25, cited p. 299), and comments that: ‘It turns out, then, that Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation actually provides a rather precise account of the forces at play in the neoliberal era’ (300). Having accepted, however, that the second model of accumulation identified above ‘cannot be substantiated as a claim about the core structure of capital’, he gives greater priority to the first:
‘What we are able to conclude on the basis of an analysis of the ideal average of the capitalist mode of production, then, is that a surplus population is a necessary condition of capitalist production, and that capital itself gives rise to cyclical dynamics which ensure its continuous existence. When rising wages begin to threaten profits, competitive pressures force accumulation to slow down or compel capitalists to introduce labour-saving technology. The result is a rise in the supply of labour power and a drop in wages, which leads to the restoration of the conditions of accumulation’ (300-301).
Mau then highlights the strategy, on the part of capitalists, of exploiting divisions between workers in its drive to shape competition between them to its own advantage, giving as an example Marx’s discussion of their exploitation of antagonism between English and Irish workers in centres of industrial production in England (301-3).
On crises, Mau follows Clarke (1994), arguing that ‘a crisis is not only the point at which accumulation is interrupted; it is also a mechanism by means of which capital re-establishes the conditions of another round of accumulation (307)’; crises reflect ‘the permanent instability of social existence under capitalism’ (ibid, citing Clarke, p. 280), and generally result from over-production arising from the pressure on individual capitalists to maintain or increase their market share by out-competing rival producers; but beyond that, their immediate or proximate causes cannot be identified without taking account of ‘the specific and contingent details’ of the situation in which they arise (ibid). In short, for reasons usefully set out at length pp. 310-11, crises ‘are not only a result of the mute compulsion of competition; they are also a source of this power’ (310). Mau concludes that crises ‘should be regarded as one of the impersonal and abstract power mechanisms through which capital imposes itself on social life,’ perhaps even ‘the best example of the impersonal character of the economic power of capital’ (314):
‘One way to think of the relation between crisis and power is therefore to see crises as levers of the mechanisms of domination examined in the preceding chapters. Crises intensify capital’s expansive drive; they compel capital to draw more and more people and activities into its circuit by means of privatisation and accumulation by dispossession, or through the commodification of activities which have hitherto remained outside the direct command of capital. In this way, crises tend to expand and fortify the form of class domination we examined in chapter three [‘The Social Ontology of Economic Power’]. This also leads to a strengthening of the mechanisms of domination described in chapter four [‘The Human Corporeal Organisation’], as the expansion of capitalist class domination increases competition and market dependence, imposing the commodity form on new spheres of life. Finally, by tightening the grip on individual capitals, crises also accelerate the real subsumption of labour and nature as capitalists struggle to survive the massacre on the market. In addition to these intensifications of mechanisms which operate throughout all phases of accumulation cycles, crises also have their own specific power mechanism: the annihilation of capital’ (315, emphasis mine).
Mau is quick to add that these dynamics may not always prevail, and that a crisis can also be ‘a sign of the weakness of the power of capital’. But in any case: ‘A crisis of capital is always also a crisis of proletarian reproduction, and therefore a situation in which the incompatibility between the convulsions of accumulation and the need for a secure and stable life achieves its most glaring expression’ (316). Mau aligns himself, then, with those who have recently argued that ‘crises tend to strengthen capital’s hand’ (317, citing Endnotes 2013, p. 29; cf. Benanev and Clegg, 2018).
‘The emergence of the capitalist mode of production did not, then, lead to an evacuation of power from the economy; it rather signalled a new configuration of power in which the coercive power required to guarantee property relations was centralised in the hands of the state and thereby formally separated from the organisation of production and the extraction of surplus labour, which now became organised by means of an abstract and impersonal form of domination. This historically novel way of structuring the reproduction of social life turned out to be tremendously tenacious, versatile, and infused with a fiercely expansionary drive. Today, four centuries later, it is more entrenched than ever before’ (321).
Critique
Mute Compulsion is truly excellent, as far as it goes, but it does not go quite far enough. There is more that can be said, first on the specific issue of ‘capital and difference’, and second on the broader issue of ‘surplus' population. Chapter 7, ‘Capital and Difference’, is awkwardly inserted at the midpoint of the book, and I initially passed over it, in order to turn to it once the full argument of the book was laid out. It provides a substantial discussion of the recent literature on social reproduction theory (152-66) and a much sketchier one on the significance of race (166-70). On the first, Mau thinks that ‘we should follow scholars such as [Michèle] Barrett, [Tithi] Bhattacharya, Iris Young, and Cinzia Arruzza, and view the familiar binary and hierarchical system of gender as a social phenomenon which does not originate in the logic of capital, yet nevertheless reproduces and is reproduced by it’ (163); and on the second, he suggests that it is ‘perfectly possible to hold that racism is a social phenomenon which does not originate in the capital form yet is conducive to and reproduced by the latter’ (167). And, addressing these and other ‘socially significant hierarchies and differences’, he concludes that ‘there is a strong case to be made for the view that capital has an inherent and necessary tendency to nurture and reproduce social differences’ (171).
Neither here nor in the rest of the chapter does Mau attempt to address either gender or race from the perspective of the broader analysis of ‘mute compulsion’ in the book – in fact, he explicitly backs away from doing so (171-3). But, first, his early statement that economic power ‘is rooted in the ability to reconfigure the material conditions of social reproduction’ (5) suggests that he should at least consider whether capital has an inherent and necessary tendency to nurture, reproduce and transform social differences’. And indeed he gives numerous empirical examples of transformation in relation to gender (155-6), only to move on prematurely to a more speculative discussion. Some salient features of contemporary social reproduction, such as the drawing of women into the global proletariat, the massive expansion of places for women in higher education and corresponding expansion of graduate and professional employment, the global decline in levels of fertility, and the synchronised shift in advanced economies to a pattern where women tend to have a first child in their thirties, if ever (Cammack, 2020) go unexplored. There is strong evidence here of capital’s capacity to impose its logic on social life, and specifically on the conditions of social reproduction, and it fits perfectly with Mau’s suggestion that ‘we should stick to Marx’s concept of subsumption as referring to the way in which the logic of capital relates to the social and material structure of the production process’ (250-51). This is all the more the case if we recall the insistence in the German Ideology that ‘production’ is to be understood as the ‘production of life’, explicitly including procreation. Here, Mau’s argument that social relations ‘give rise to technologies which enable human beings to control and manipulate natural processes which were hitherto outside their reach’ (105) is directly applicable. He concurs with the frequently made argument that Marx had a ‘blind spot’ where gender was concerned (152), but argues elsewhere in stark contrast that: ‘‘There is a good reason why Marx did not have much to say about real subsumption of labour and nature in agriculture: it barely existed in the nineteenth century’ (259). The same applies to procreation, but things have changed (Gimenez, 2019, Chapters 7 and 8; Cammack 2020: 83-5), so on all these counts Mau has missed an opportunity to apply his framework to these and other forms of difference, and the chapter is much the weaker for it.
A further aspect of procreation provides a link to the second issue I raise here, that of ‘relative surplus population’. One notable feature in relation to dramatically falling birth-rates is that representatives of capital and advanced capitalist regimes, in contrast to populist/nationalist regimes, seem unconcerned by the prospect of static or declining populations. In one parochial example, the British Conservative government has recently declined to reconsider its upper limit of two children for receipt of child benefit (a position quickly and shamefully endorsed by the leader of the Labour Party), having previously announced increased benefits intended to entice recent mothers in their thirties to return to the workforce. Women are slated to be workers first and mothers second if at all, whatever the consequences for the generational supply of new labour. Just as in Marx’s day (when the received wisdom, caustically mocked by Marx and Engels, was that there were ‘too many people’), capital seems happy to ‘leave [procreation] to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation’ (Cammack 2020: 85-9, citing Capital, p. 718). It is scarcely surprising. Benanev’s estimate of a ‘global surplus population’ of 1.3 billion is consistent with many others, and when taken in conjunction with capital’s greatly increased access to workers around the world as a result of revolutions in logistics and mobility more broadly, you can see why the logic of capital is consistent with a wholehearted focus on turning all available proletarians into workers, whether by indifference or hostility towards procreation, or by eager pursuit of the ‘free-floating surplus population of migrants’ (284). The World Bank’s latest World Development Report, Migrants, Refugees and Societies (World Bank 2023) lays out this logic at length. The Bank, with its acute and generally under-appreciated grasp of the long-term needs of global capital, is focused obsessively on the education, skills, productivity and mobility of future workers, but exhibits no concerns whatsoever over their absolute numbers: the focal point of its Human Capital Project and Human Capital Index is explicitly ‘the productivity as a future worker of a child born in 2018’ (Cammack 2022: 146). This reflects the view that there are bound to be sufficient numbers of people, and that the priority is to turn them into available and productive workers for capital.
This entirely vindicates Mau’s argument, and abundantly confirms its significance. But he does not take it as far as he could, because of a degree of imprecision in his approach to the issues of the relative surplus population on the one hand, and the tendency for capital to expel workers in the course of its development on the other. The tendency to expel workers is an inherent characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, best understood as related to those already really subsumed to capital. Such workers form only a small proportion, however, of the relative surplus population at any point in time, short of some long distant and perhaps unimaginable moment when all workers are really subsumed to capital. So I think he is wrong to follow Heinrich, and imagine that the ‘employment’ effect might outweigh the ‘redundancy’ effect. In the limit case of a pure capitalist mode of production this is a logical impossibility, as workers expelled in the course of its development would be the only ones available for employment. But more to the point, in circumstances in which the latent reserve army of labour significantly outnumbers those really subsumed to capital, as it does now and will do for the foreseeable future, not least because it is global in scale, there is effectively an unlimited supply on which capital can draw. Furthermore, Marx explicitly abstracted away from the recurring rise and fall of employment arising from the industrial cycle (Capital, p. 794) in developing his ‘general law of capital accumulation’; and in the same discussion he identified, as a principle contribution to the ‘floating’ relative surplus population, those workers expelled in favour of new recruits as their productivity begins to fall: ‘Capital demands more youthful workers, fewer adults’. Noting that it was ‘precisely among the workers in large-scale industry that we meet with the shortest life-expectancy’, he commented that
‘Under these circumstances, the absolute increase of this section of the proletariat must take a form which swells their numbers, despite the rapid wastage of their individual elements. Hence the rapid replacement of one generation of workers by another (this law does not hold for the other classes of the population). This social requirement is met by early marriages, which are a necessary consequence of the conditions in which workers in large-scale industry live, and by the premium that the exploitation of workers’ children sets on their production’ (ibid: 795).
Self-evidently, this is a conjunctural analysis, at a quite different level of abstraction from the proposition that the capitalist mode of production, through the logic of its operation, expels workers in the course of its development. If we were to make the same conjunctural analysis today, the crucial elements to consider would be the ‘compelled but voluntary’ shift to late marriage and smaller families among the proletariat, the greater capacity on the part of capital to access labour on a global scale, and as a consequence, the even greater indifference of capital to the issue of procreation, and the greater intensity of interest in the skilling and mobility and of people.
The ups and downs of growth or industrial cycles are important, because they exacerbate the instability of capitalist development and of employment, and Mau addresses this best when he examines the role of crises. But the innate tendency of capital to expel workers in the course of its development is fundamental, and should be restored to its proper place in the analysis of the circumstances affecting social reproduction.
If these points are valid, three conclusions follow. First, the significance and value of Mau’s framework for the analysis of the relationship are confirmed, but it can still be further refined and developed. Second, the issue of ‘population and capital’, the subject of a pioneering investigation by Martha Gimenez ([1977] 2019: Ch. 6) is of paramount importance. And third, theorists of social reproduction should consider critically the adequacy of the notion of the reproduction of the labour force from day to day and from generation to generation as a basis for determining its implications for gender roles and the oppression of women. The reproduction and mobility of the global labour force may be a better point of reference today.
References and further reading
Benanev, Aaron. 2015. ‘A Global History of Unemployment: Surplus Populations in the World Economy, 1949-2010’, PhD diss., UCLA.
Benanev, Aaron, and John Clegg. 2018. ‘Crisis and Immiseration: Critical Theory Today’, in Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane, eds, The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Sage, London.
Cammack, Paul. 2020. 'Marx on social reproduction', Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Cammack, Paul. 2022. The Politics of Global Competitiveness, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Capital & Class. 2023. ‘A symposium remembering Simon Clarke’, 47, 2, 156-223.
Clarke, Simon. 1994. Marx’s Theory of Crisis, Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Endnotes. 2013. ‘The Holding Pattern’, Issue 3, 12-54.
Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, New York: Autonomedia.
Fracchia, Joseph. 2005. 'Beyond the human-nature debate: Human corporeal organisation as the first fact of historical materialism', Historical Materialism, 13, 1, 33-61.
Gimenez, Martha. 2019. Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction, Brill, Leiden and Boston.
Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Verso, London.
Malm, Andreas. 2018. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, Verso, London.
World Bank. 2023. Migrants, Refugees and Societies, World Bank, Washington DC.