Beyond Europe

Forgiveness for the out-of-the-orderly post; I’ve been reading Arendt and figured I’d go back to good old Marx and see how he develops colonialism. Of course, this is maybe one of the most troubling—and therefore the least-talked-about—moments in Marx: his stance on Europe’s modern colonizing project from the late 19^th to late 20^th centuries.

On the one hand, it seems almost like a done deal before you start thinking about it: projects ranging from anti-imperialism and radical democratism through to posthegemony studies, etc. all owe at least a procedural debt to Marx, in that their methods develop the concepts we’ve been discussing here [the relative surplus value, the symbolic character of the commodity viz. its paradoxically stubborn materiality] to address fluidities, breakdowns, and multitudes [thanks to H/N for that last one] responsive to global economy. On the other, though, the comparative dearth of explicitly anticolonial writing by Marx himself, coupled with a certain overlap between his stagist-materialist historiography and the more messianic moments in The Philosophy of History, has at times facilitated Marx’ inclusion, however fatuous, among the more disgraced European theorists of what I’ll crudely term the “European / non-European ‘relation’” [ex: Spengler, with all the melancholy organicism]. George Steinmetz has written critically on Marx with respect to the Blowback; I’ll take it off the world-historical circuit, here, by reading Marx’ exegetic chapter on E.G. Wakefield's systematic colonization.

The chapter begins with an assault on method: though one has the sense the Wakefield test wouldn't withstand many sallies--regardless of their specifics--Marx' are particularly damning:

1) Addressing Wakefield's utterly absurd suggestion that the division of economy into wage-labor and capital occurs as a collective, conscious hypostasis of an ideal accumulative impulse [the society wills and effects the antagonization of its productive relations],

2) Marx sarcastically and negatively reiterates not only a well-worn point re: the material root of capitalist production by mocking Wakefield's risible pronouncement that "Mit einem Wort: die Masse der Menschheit enteignet sich selbst" ["At a word: the mass of humanity expropriates itself"], but also highlights the permanence of its intolerance of economies exterior to its own, not once but twice paraphrasing what I presume is Wakefield's pathologization of intransigently precapitalist productive modes as Krebsschaden: as cancer.

3) To his credit, though, Marx tugs at this argument--rather than dismissing it outright, or relegating Wakefield [and modern colonialism with him] to the been-there, seen-that class of analytic apologists, he offers a diagnosis of modern colonialism's dominative mode in the face of entrenched pre- and anti-capitalist strata:

Wie nun den antikapitalistischen Krebsschaden der Kolonien heilen? Wollte man allen Grund und Boden mit einem Schlag aus Volkseigentum in Privateigentum verwandeln, so zerstörte man zwar die Wurzel des Übels, aber auch--die Kolonie. [715]

But how to heal the anticapitalist cancer of the colonies? If one turned all the earth and turf from general possession to private property in one fell swoop, one would indeed destroy the root of the evil, but also: the colony.

The real-political prescription is more insidious, of course; it is with the transformation of general possession into the stake of an arbitrary debt that an economy of recompense, i.e. an economy with 1) the capacity for the generation of surplus, and therefore with 2) the potential to antagonize its elements into labor and capital can emerge. But we must be more specific. It is not just an incorporation of colonial territory into the productive behaviors of the metropole which is taking place here, though this would be bad enough. Beyond this: systematic colonization is set in motion by the fixing of an original price, simultaneously and contradictorily very ideal ["künstlich" / "artificial"] -and- very material [it must be paid], whereby the population of colonial territory, what the Berlin Conference would later codify as "effective occupation," succeeded only upon the recognition of its agents' indebtedness, an acknowledgement which of course points up the "necessity" of the individual colonizer's 1) relation to metropolitan [or colonial-administrative] authority as a pre-propertied perspective, and 2) entrance into productive practices which can generate surplus toward the alleviation of debt.

Even reading just the sardonic barbs of the Wakefield analysis against Marx' normative anticapitalist economics yields a vehement, pre-Berlin Conference anticolonialism. Beyond this, though, we have with the original-debt complex an analysis which, when placed into the context of the man's [and the book's] arguments as a whole, describes a simultaneous incorporation and subordination of colonial territory in terms of antagonistic productive relations, in terms of expedience -- 75 years before Aimé Césaire, who hardly did it first, but arguably did it best, cut through the civilizing and got right to the matter-at-hand:

I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted--harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population--about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials. [...] They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist. [43-44]

Part 1: Chapters 2 & 3

Having proceeded a little way into Capital, I think we can begin to ask, but not yet answer, the question, What problem was Marx attempting to solve by this "critique of political economy"? And, once having set about to solve this problem, why was this approach, this order, this example, seen as the best one? That is, if we see Capital as an inevitable event, or a tautological outgrowth of something called "Marxism", then we miss its engagement in a field of forces and problems. A glance at The Poverty of Philosophy or The German Ideology shows Marx taking on, with extreme rigor, important and/or contemporary figures of political economy and socialism. Capital is not obviously such a work, which gives it a more accessible character-- one does not have to read Ricardo to make sense of it. And this was necessary for it to become the "Bible" of the revolutionary working class, or indeed for it to become a book worth blogging 140 years later. And while I am not the person to elucidate the impressions or inflections made by "classical" political economy and nineteenth century socialism on the form of Capital, the presentation is not at all "argumentative". That is to say, Marx is telling a story of development in the early chapters, rather than refuting (in a polemical way) Ricardo, Smith, etc. These figures mostly receive their fatal blows in the footnotes.

A word about that "story", though. Althusser argues that there can be no "one-to-one correspondence between the terms of the two orders" [the historical order of development, and the "logical order" of presentation] (Section 13, Reading Capital). To summarize Althusser's reading of Rancière's reading of Marx's concept of "inversion", the presentation of this story is precisely the undoing of ideology. Thus stated, it becomes very important to us. Ideology, defined by Marx, is, "They do not know it, but they are doing it." Capital begins by demystifying the most common, everyday, unreflective social actions: treating objects and things to be bought and sold, having money, using money, etc. The famous difficulty of the early chapters can be thought of, in Heideggerian terms, simply as "that which is closest to us being the farthest away."

Thus, at the conclusion of the chapter "The Commodity," Marx asks:

Where did the illusions of the Monetary System come from? The adherents of the Monetary System did not see gold and silver as representing money as a social relation of production, but in the form of natural objects with social properties. And what of modern political economy, which looks down so disdainfully on the Monetary System? Does not its fetishism become quite palpable when it deals with capital? How long is it since the Physiocratic illusion that ground rent grows out of soil, not out of society? (176).

The short second chapter, "The Process of Exchange," contains such a pulling-back-of-the-veil-of-ideology:

The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to another mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol. Nevertheless, this error did contain the suspicion that the money-form of the thing is external to the thing itself, being simply the form of appearance of human relations hidden behind it. In this sense, every commodity is a symbol, since, as value, it is only the material shell of the human labour expended on it. (185, my emphasis)

The chapter "Money, or the Circulation of Commodities," continues the story told in the chapter on commodities about the origin of money. This story, from the first, is one of increasing detachment of value from money. That is, from ancient Rome to medieval times to the modern nation, the coin (and then paper) form of money represents less and less actual gold somewhere. This, of course, we had already learned from Die Hard 3: that the value of all the gold in, say, Fort Knox is not equivalent to the amount of dollars in circulation. Currency is not "backed up" in gold. (This, I believe, is different from the "gold standard," and can be seen in the weight-names of currency: pounds, pesos, etc.) Marx, however, has a surprising revelation awaiting the reader who expects to see in this "detachment" the "alienation" of capitalism or even a lesson about "floating signifiers".

If the paper money exceeds its proper limit, i.e. the amount in gold coins of the same denomination which could have been in circulation, then, quite apart from the danger of becoming universally discredited, it will still represent within the world of commodities only that quantity of gold which is fixed by immanent laws. No greater quantity is capable of being represented. (225)

That is to say, whatever is "in the bank" *is* adequately represented by the amount of money circulating, even if that money claims to represent a greater amount of gold. Marx's example is, if there were twice as much money circulating as gold to back it up, there merely would have been inflation of 100%, and prices would have doubled. In a real crisis, Marx says, "the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction." (236). That is, money, far from being "worthless," as the naive bourgeois imagines in his prosperity, in a crisis when rents/debts still have to be paid, becomes the only commodity, even in its symbolic form, the bank-note. Every other commodity must be then turned into money in order for the system of payments/credit/wages/mortgages to be kept up in a monetary crisis. Put another way, commodities cease functioning as bearers of value with regard to other commodities; they only can express their value through money in such a crisis. The antithesis between commodities and money thus is also expressed in the difference between "hoarding," discussed in this chapter, and capital---the subject of Part 2.