A quote from Beverley Best’s ‘The automatic fetish: the law of value in Marx’s capital’ pp.323-342

Conclusion [p. 323] Link to heading

The Revenues and Their Sources: The Three Faces of Surplus-Value Link to heading

The Economic Trinity as the Religion of Everyday Life – Crisis and Utopia

The Economic Trinity as the Religion of Everyday Life Link to heading

In chapter 11 of Capital I – ‘The Rate and Mass of Surplus-Value’ – Marx makes a certain point, the elaboration of which occupies the entirety of the material assembled as Capital III. There, Marx says that the law of value is objectified in the way that ‘the masses of value and of surplus-value produced by different capitals . . . vary directly [with] the amounts of the variable components of these capitals, i.e. the parts [of capital] which have been turned into living labour-power.’ He continues: ‘This law clearly contradicts all experience based on immediate appearances.’¹ To explain why, and illustrate how, the immediate appearances of a capitalist ‘economy’ contradict the law of value while, at the same time, being determined by it is the singular sustained objective of the analysis in Capital III.² Contradiction, inversion, mystification, autonomization, [p. 324] and fetishization are concepts through which Marx theorizes the modalities of capital’s law of motion, its perceptual physics. As Marx repeats throughout Capital III, this movement becomes a law ‘only in a capitalist mode of production’ (970, my emphasis).

In part I of this book (examining parts I through III of Capital III), we looked at the movement of surplus-value as it assumes the social form of profit in the course of its circulation and distribution. After its production, surplus-value undergoes a redistribution among the competing interests of the capitalist class – a redistribution that is entirely necessary for capital’s viable reproduction from the standpoint of the system, swerving in its course from each immediate, individual standpoint of its agents. This process of redistribution, surplus-value’s transformation of form – a process that I have been calling capital’s perceptual physics – is immanent to a social configuration of generalized exchange, itself both cause and effect of the historical emergence of a system of socialized production among private independent producers. In part II of this book (examining parts IV through VI of Capital III), we looked at the movement that generates profit’s derivative forms – forms that correspond to capital’s competing personifications and redistributional pathways: industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, rent. Part VII of Capital III, ‘The Revenues and Their Sources’, ties all of these threads together. From this most protracted (totalized) stage of the study so far, Marx elaborates the most immediate, surface-oriented appearances of the chaotic whole: surplus-value’s transformation into three forms of ‘revenue’ – profit, ground-rent, and wages.³ Here, the objective is to put Adam Smith’s ‘trinity formula’ – the ‘economic three-in-one’ (953) – back on its feet according to the movement of capital as summarized across Capital’s three volumes.⁴

In the trinity formula, surplus-value’s three outward faces are profit, rent, and wages. These three forms of revenue perform their mystifying enchantment in positing their imaginary sources. As appearances go, the source of profit is capital, the source of ground-rent is land, and the source of wages is labour. In the capitalist phantasmagoria, we could say [p. 325] capital’s economic form is profit, land’s economic form is ground-rent, and labour’s economic form is wages. For Smith, the trinity formula is a story about the sources of wealth in a modern economy. For Marx, the trinity formula is a story about the faces that capital puts forward to the world, and how the exploitation of living labour in the course of private production for exchange – capital’s only genuine source of wealth creation (at least, of wealth in capital’s narrow terms, however vast as magnitude) – is hidden in the process: the ‘trinity form holds in itself all the mysteries of the social production process’ (953). In the case of capital’s worldly face, Marx suggests that interest (a profit derivative) is actually the ‘purer’ representative of capital as a source of wealth given that it is a more deeply mediated social form, a further degree separated from its source in living labour, and therefore more thoroughly mystified – the automatic fetish. Even the mystified form of profit of enterprise carries an imaginary link to productive activity of some kind in its guise as the wages of the capitalist.

Nonetheless, the perceived sources of the revenues – capital, land, labour – strengthen the fetish dynamic by having no apparent connection between each other: the ‘ostensible sources [of the revenues] . . . belong to completely disparate spheres and have not the slightest analogy with one another. Their mutual relationship is like . . . beetroot and music’ (953). Because capital, land, and labour appear as entirely unconnected as sources of revenue (and wealth), their ability to function as such can be construed as the result of their individual qualitative properties, ‘one the basis, the other the result; one the cause, the other the effect – and moreover in such a way that each individual source is related to its product as something extruded from it and produced by it’ (955). Land produces rent like trees produce fruit, labour produces wages like it produces things of utility, and capital, as money or means of production, produces revenue by virtue of its own innate movement as the automatic subject of circulation. Such appearances, however, are misleading, as the entirety of Capital III is dedicated to illustrating. The material forms of the so-called sources of revenue – labour, earth, and the means of production – have nothing to do with their social forms as values:

The earth, for example, is active as an agent of production in the production of a use-value, a material product, say wheat. But it has nothing to do with producing the value of wheat . . . it is foolish to [p. 326] counterpose a use-value, the earth, on the one hand, and value on the other. (955–6)

In this way, to speak of the ‘“price of labour” is just as irrational as a yellow logarithm’ (962).

Capital III is therefore a book about physics, a theory of a particular movement that generates new percepts – a movement arising from collective uncoordinated activity that, over a couple of centuries of objectification through repetition, produces a particular appearance of things that launches a specific (but not inevitable) world history. Capital is a social process instigated in the world, not in the mind, which is why we might call it a perceptual physics rather than a mode of conception, even as it generates appearances that are registered in, and mediated by, the embodied consciousness of its bearers. What Marx calls ‘science’ (and what I have surely oversimplified elsewhere as ‘theory’) is a work of conception – analysis and imagination, speculative thinking or cognitive mapping – that reveals what is hidden, that links essence and appearance, social content and social form: ‘All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence’; as it is, without a conception of their dynamic, ‘their inner connections remain hidden, even though they are comprehensible to the popular mind’ (956, my emphasis). Science is therefore popular work – that which may link up with class struggle in its multitude of lived forms, and with the work of surviving by devising (by doing and living differently) what might come next. Science is part of the work of those who produce the world: the work of the commune; the work of protecting land, environment and creatures: the work of students; the work of the party (in some new and not yet existing iteration). It can be the work of philosophers, but it is not their preserve.

From the standpoint of science – that is, from the standpoint of totality – capital’s appearances are ‘prima facie absurd, illegitimate, nonsense, contradictory’. As Marx points out, the belief that £100 = £110, an equation expressing the ‘occult quality of a value that is unequal to itself ’, is, to this day, the foundation of the entire edifice of capitalist finance, no matter how convoluted its instruments. Vulgar economics, on the other hand, is quite at home inhabiting capital’s ‘estranged forms of appearance’ and turns them into apologetics (956). Capital III is therefore also a book about how capital’s ‘base’ mediation – the [p. 327] capital–labour relation – imperceptible in its legal forms such as market exchange, private property, wage labour, or credit default swaps, becomes sufficiently pervasive as to disappear altogether, like the atmosphere. Capital III is therefore a book about what appears and what disappears:

[The sphere of competition is] where the inner law that prevails through the accidents and governs them is visible only when these accidents are combined in large numbers,⁵ so that it remains invisible and incomprehensible to the individual agents of production themselves. Further, however, the actual production process, as the unity of the immediate production process and the process of circulation, produces new configurations in which the threads of the inner connection get more and more lost, the relations of production becoming independent of one another and the components of value ossifying into independent forms . . . All this conceals the true nature of surplus-value more and more, concealing therefore the real mechanism of capital. (967)

Of course, as we know by now, all revenues (profit, interest, rent, wages) generated by a capitalist economy are ‘nothing but particular components of the surplus-value’ (955). Therefore, despite appearances and apologetics, the entirety of the value magnitude generated by the capital-machine at any given moment, at any stage of development or configuration, is created by labour (labour that must be coincident with the form of waged labour) in the capitalist production process.⁶ No value (in its capitalist form) is created outside of this process. Every [p. 328] portion (c, v, s) of the commodity’s value originates as the value that workers, and only workers, add to the value of the total social product:

The total portion of commodity value, therefore, in which the total labour that the worker adds during a day or a year is realized, the total value of the annual product that this labour creates, breaks down into the value of wages, profit and rent. For this total labour breaks down into necessary labour . . . i.e. wages, and unpaid surplus labour, by which he creates the portion of the product’s value that represents surplus-value and that subsequently divides into profit and rent. Besides this labour, the worker performs no other, and besides the total value of the product, which assumes the forms of wages, profit and rent, he creates no other value. (973, my emphasis)

Unpaid surplus labour therefore forms the entirety of the value magnitude that is divided up into the three revenues that, in turn, posit three corresponding classes in the immediate appearance of things: the capitalist class, the landowning class, and the working class (959–60). We can think of these classes as distributional categories corresponding to profit, rent, and wages respectively, each expressing a certain property relation, or legal comportment to social wealth, depending on whether one owns capital (means of production and/or money that one mobilizes, lends, or speculates with), land (and/or other rent-seeking property, including forms of intellectual property), or labour-power. In the ‘actual world’, the world of capitalist forms, the distributional categories are always already amalgams of other social relations / distributional categories – gender, race, sexuality, citizenship, caste, age, ability, merit – to form complex technologies at work in the sphere of competition for power and resources.⁷ In this sphere, for example, the category/ technology of race is inherently ‘political economic’, in the way that the social relation of modern property is inherently racialized, gendered, imperialized, with or without citizenship, franchise, and so on. Again, a category such as race becomes a technology of ‘group-differentiated [p. 329] vulnerability towards premature death’, a means of managing and facilitating accumulation, and a lever for further stratifying the distributional classes⁸ – fracturing the working class, for example, into the ‘sociological’ strata that express a particular historical conjuncture: aristocratic, professional, middle, precarious, floating, migrant, lumpen, informalized, radically surplus, and so on.⁹

The answer to the question ‘What makes a class?’ therefore depends on whether one is speaking from the point of view of the actual world of capitalist social forms or from the point of view of the internal movement of capital (1025). The analysis anticipated by the final, aborted chapter on ‘Classes’ is, consequently, not a great mystery; if anything, Marx was on the threshold of repeating himself in an already-repetitive set of chapters in part VII. In Capital III, the internal movement of capital is the consistently singular (and exceedingly narrow) object of analysis.¹⁰ In the chaotic complexity of capitalist society, classes are social maps crossed, and crossed again, by the tracks of history and struggle: amalgamations that are the sediment of technologies of group differentiation, legal modes of granting and restricting access to social wealth and the means of subsistence, the social scar tissue of those histories of separation, and the combined, deeply stratifying effects of all these modalities in turning over the ground of social experience, material interest, cooperation, and solidarity. On this register, what we call ‘classes’ are not specific to a capitalist mode of production. They may precede the capitalist formation and always express the historical conjuncture that informs them, capitalist or otherwise – as in, all history is the history of class struggle. However, emerging together with the capitalist mode of production is ‘class’ as objectivity – the capital–labour relation as (social) [p. 330] movement of gravity; as ‘logic’; as structural disposition; or as ‘the general antagonism’. Whatever we call this ‘new’ objectivity, it does not precede the emerging capitalist social formation but rather is posited by it as the presupposition of every moment of that social formation, in each of its various configurations, as the condition of capital’s reproduction going forward. All manifestations of class as lived actuality in existing capitalist society presuppose class in its ‘pure form’, that is, once capital has risen to its feet and stands its ground as automatic subject. Class, as objectivity, divides its bearers into owners and producers tout simple – a process mystified by capital’s three distributional categories – with capital concentrating at one pole and labour at the other (1026):

It is unnecessary after the argument already developed to demonstrate once again how the relationship of capital and wage-labour determines the whole character of the mode of production. The principle agents of this mode of production itself, the capitalist and the wage-labourer, are as such simply embodiments and personifications of capital and wage-labour – specific social characters that the social production process stamps on individuals, products of these specific social relations of production. (1019–20)

Capital and labour, and their personifications in the (collective) capitalist and the (collective) worker, are the ‘two essential agents of production’, both functions of abstraction that move to the core of social reproduction in a capitalist society and form the two constitutive classes in the ‘great simplification and division’ between those who produce surplus-value and those who own it. As such, the social content of class antagonism in the context of the great simplification becomes the ‘depersonalized’ production of surplus-value:

The production of surplus-value [is] the direct object and decisive motive of production. Capital essentially produces capital, and it does this only as long as it produces surplus-value. In dealing with relative surplus-value and then with the transformation of surplus-value into profit, we have seen how a mode of production peculiar to the capitalist period is based on this – a particular form of development of the social productive powers of labour, but as powers of capital that [p. 331] have asserted their autonomy vis-à-vis the worker, thus directly opposing [the worker’s] own development. (1020–1)

The function of abstraction – the process of excreting the forms that carry the exploitation of surplus-value – also introduces logical grounds for solidarity across stratification, across all agents of production whether they are engaged by capital directly or not, and across the multitude of hierarchized differentiated identities. The function of abstraction – the means of exploitation that are* potentially separable from it* – introduces to history a logical framework for unifying struggle across actual-world processes of separation, for planetwide struggle, where the possibility for alliances, and emerging social configurations, is infinitely full because it is radically empty.¹¹ This is the possibility to be exploited by reading the constitution of class, and class struggle, from the movement of the relations of production versus the relations of distribution. It also articulates the dry technicalities of value-accounting with the fleshy, carbon-based politics of alternative world-building. Marx’s relentless emphasis throughout Capital III is that in the formation of capital, the direction of the movement of social determination matters (in all senses), and that the direction of determination in a capitalist mode of production is from production to distribution – to use that old-fashioned language, from base to superstructure:

The so-called relations of distribution, therefore, correspond to and arise from historically particular and specific social forms of the production process and of the relationships which men enter into among themselves in the process of reproducing their human life. The historical character of these relations of distribution is the historical character of the relations of production, and they simply express one side of these. (1023)

The direction is not reversible, even though distribution feeds back onto production by setting contingent negative limits to valorization [p. 332] (explored further below). So, for example, land appears to be the source of rent when it is not; rather, productivity of labour determines how much labour constitutes the social product, how much labour is added to the reservoir of value system-wide, which in turn determines the possible range for a magnitude of rent that does not jeopardize the viability of agricultural enterprise:

Distribution . . . presupposes this substance [the value reservoir] as already present, i.e. the total value of the annual product, which is nothing more than objectified social labour. But it is not in this form that the matter presents itself to the agents of production, the bearers of the various functions of the production process, but rather in a distorted form. (961)

However, despite the distortions that continue today to place the property owner on top of the world, when rent is emptied of its pre-capitalist social content and replaced with the soul of capital, ‘the landowner is reduced from guide and master of the production process and the entire process of social life to a mere leaser of land, usurer in land and simple recipient of rent’ – that is, demoted to an anachronism as ‘a specific historical result of the capitalist mode of production’ itself (1023).

Since, ‘added together, [the revenues] form the total social surplus-value’ (959–60), we can return, as does Marx in part VII, to speaking simply of value/surplus-value and put aside the categories we have developed and deployed throughout this study of Capital III to capture value’s convoluted passages through its social forms as price, profit, interest, and rent.¹² We can [p. 333] now return to the categories of Capital I since, from the totalized point of view of the culmination of Capital III, all of value’s derivative forms are annulled. The material in part VII illustrates that the three-volume study of Capital is, in this sense, the appropriate introduction to Capital I. The concept of value as a concrete whole at which we arrive at the end of Capital III elucidates and finally prepares us to grasp value as a function of social abstraction, as abstract wealth, as the universal inadvertently introduced to history as the outcome of collective doing, as the category with which we set out in Capital I.¹³ In other words, the standpoint of the whole, of capital’s objectified movement, becomes the prerequisite for moving through any one of its narrative entrées.

Thus, part VII reviews the way in which the value magnitude generated by the system as a whole sets the invisible limit for the magnitude of surplus-value that capital is ever able to generate in any given moment. This value horizon is consequently also the invisible determining limit for the magnitude of each of surplus-value’s individual transitory forms, even though the situation appears to be the other way around (as it did for rent above), as if the sum of revenues (profit, wages, and rent) forms the aggregate pool of wealth. As Marx iterates, over and over again (993; throughout chapter 50), commodity value determines the quantitative limit of wages, profit, and rent, not the other way around, as in the distorted but common perception that wages, profit, and rent are independent constituent cost-elements whose combination forms a commodity’s price:

In actual fact commodity value is the quantitative premise, the sum total value of wages, profit and rent, whatever their relative mutual magnitudes may be. In the false conception considered here, however, wages, profit and rent are three independent value magnitudes, whose total produces, limits and determines the magnitude of commodity value. (1002)

The distinction may appear to be slight and academic, but it is the distinction between two completely different worlds: one capitalist, truncated and deformed by the exigencies of value-creation; the other open, limited only by imagination, ingenuity, and planetary deadlines.

[p. 334]

In the mystified appearance of things, a rise or fall in wages, profit, or rent seems to alter a commodity’s value (as expressed in its price) when, in fact, a rise or fall in any one of the revenues simply changes the distributional ratio between them without changing the overall amount of value to be distributed (996; 998).¹⁴ Marx unfurls numerous illustrations of these perceptual physics in chapter 50 and folds the analysis from Capital II into this bigger picture: the total social capital is reproduced through its division, for part of its circuitry, between two classes of capitalist: department I (producing means of production) and department II (producing means of individual consumption) (975). In Capital III, we situate the movement of value between these two departments within the value horizon of the totalized movement:

In so far as the reproduction process proceeds . . . the sum of wages, profit and rent in department I must be equal in value to the constant portion of capital in department II. Otherwise department II cannot replace its constant capital, nor department I convert its revenue from non-consumable into consumable form. (977)

From the point of view of the end of Capital III, the function of the analysis in Capital II is simply to show that the theory of value holds throughout, and that value, as social function of abstraction, is capital’s singular centre of gravity at every moment of its circuitry, for the length of its zombie-span, despite contradicting appearances – that is, despite an increasing fragmentation of the production process; despite the protraction and complexification of logistics; despite the growing prevalence of more immediate and brutal surface-modes of extraction and dispossession; despite the acrobatics of circulation, inter-capitalist competition, distribution, and their financialized opportunities; despite a growing surplus humanity; despite the approaching threshold of planetary extinction; and so on.¹⁵

[p. 335]

The key to the analysis of the moving disaster that is capital – its assembly as well as its potential disassembly, on the level of its internal movement – lies in the dusty-dry technicalities of the value components of the commodity, c-v-s, reproduced at every level of abstraction: that of individual commodity, the product of any particular capital investment, annual national product, and total (global) social product (978). Marx identifies five fundamental perceptual dynamics that generate the inverted appearances that comprise capital’s dogma, and which it is the work of science to put back on their feet: (1) the relationship and distinction between constant and variable capital (Capital I); (2) the process by which labour both adds new value and preserves old value in a new form (Capital I); (3) the interconnections of the reproduction process from the standpoint of the total social capital (Capital II and III); (4) revenues as, in essence, forms of value already realized (Capital III); and (5) the transformation of surplus-value into separate, mutually independent social forms expressing the various elements of the production process – industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, rent, wages (Capital III) (982–4). Marx describes the percepts that arise from these dynamics – percepts that animate the discourses of both vulgar bourgeois economics and classical political economy,¹⁶ as well as the ‘common [p. 336] sense’ that entraps the minds of its agents ‘on the immediately visible surface of capitalist production’ (1007) – as illusions (985), false ideas (987), distortions (1007),¹⁷ tautologies (1003), inversions (1010), and upside-down appearances (1011) – and as the ‘specific shape in which the value components confront one another . . . presupposed because it is constantly reproduced, and . . . constantly reproduced because it is constantly presupposed’ (1012).

In light of these descriptions, perhaps we could even say that Capital III is a book about ideology, or at least one aspect of what that overburdened concept has come to name. Marx never uses the term ‘ideology’ for this subject–object dynamic, but he does use, like a refrain, many of its kin – ‘mystification’, ‘naturalization’, ‘objectification’, ‘personification’, ‘autonomization’, ‘ossification’, ‘reification’ – and, sometimes, several of these concepts jumbled together in one description:

[Capital] is the means of production monopolized by a particular section of society, the products and conditions of activity of labour-power, which are rendered autonomous vis-à-vis this living labour-power and are personified in capital through this antithesis. It is not only the workers’ products which are transformed into independent powers, the products as masters and buyers of their producers, but the social powers and interconnecting form of this labour also confront them as properties of their product. Here we therefore have one factor [p. 337] of a historically produced social production process in a definite social form, and at first sight a very mysterious form. (953–4)

Or consider, for example, this well-cited statement:

This economic trinity as the connection between the components of value . . . and its sources, completes the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification of social relations, and the immediate coalescence of the material relations of production with their historical and social specificity: the bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things. (969)

Social powers, capacities of cooperative production, that are the source of capitalist wealth (and, of course, the potential source of wealth alternatively constituted, in other-than-capitalist terms) appear as the properties of the product of labour, also the means of production, instead of as the capacities of the producers themselves. In other words, the capacity for wealth to expand is attributed to capital, and the fetish character of the product of labour / means of production – the capital fetish – is the effect of the misattribution of social power, of the mystification of the latter’s source. Capital III is, therefore, also a book about the autonomization of capital’s fetish expressions, the reification of the means of labour (those means being dead labour) as they confront living labour as capital:

The formal autonomy these conditions [i.e., means] of labour acquire vis-à-vis labour, the particular form of autonomy they possess, is then a property inseparable from them as things, as material conditions of production, an immanently ingrown character that necessarily falls to them as elements of production. (964)

Capital’s autonomy is the ossification of form against substance, of appearance against essence, a process carried by the devolution of surplus-value into profit, and profit into its various forms of revenue, in the sphere of value’s circulation – the sphere of competition – where surplus-value not only ‘retains no memory of its origin’, nor ‘simply [p. 338] obliterates this origin’, but is placed ‘in a form that is diametrically opposed to this origin’:

The division of profit into profit of enterprise and interest (not to speak of the intervention of commercial profit and money-dealing profit, which are founded in the circulation sphere and seem to derive entirely from this, and not from the production process itself at all) completes the autonomization of the form of surplus-value, the ossification of its form as against its substance, its essence. One portion of profit, in contrast to the other, separates itself completely from the capital-relation as such and presents itself as deriving not from the function of exploiting wage labour; it seems to derive from capital as its own independent source . . . the inner connection [is] definitively torn asunder and its source completely buried, precisely through the assertion of their autonomy [the autonomy of profit’s forms]. (968)

In production, where capital functions as the immediate facilitator of the process, or, as Marx calls it, the ‘pumper-out of surplus labour’, the connection between surplus labour and profit is less mediated than in the sphere of circulation – in a way, closer to the surface appearance of things (966). Consequently, the distortion of the inner connection, the capital fetish, requires less theoretical reconstruction – it more readily relents to cognitive mapping, you could say – in that it suggests at least some kind of relationship between profit and the activity that is carried out in the enterprise. For Marx, it is always the development of relative surplus-value expressed in the growing productivity of social labour that propels the mediations of production into the arena of circulation (competition) in more convoluted and protracted ways, their mutating forms expressing the ever-deepening contradiction of a growth imperative in the context of withering conditions for growth. The mediating formations assume, in one way or another, an array of expressions, all instruments for skimming value from a shrinking value-reservoir: the pathological mutations of the credit system and circulating financial instruments, the funhouse of monetary policy, the equally illusory and Godzilla-like power of the rentier or asset-holding segment of the capitalist class, the distorted social weight of real estate and property development – in other words, all the symptomatic formations [p. 339] of today’s speculative ecology.¹⁸ Marx’s point in part VII is to remind readers that all these formations are historically developing mediations of the production and distribution of surplus-value, and that all serve to obfuscate the original situation – the place, time, and means – of ‘pumping-out’ surplus labour.

Crisis and Utopia Link to heading

The development of relative surplus-value expressed in the growing productivity of social labour (as we explored in chapter 3 of this book) also propels a falling rate of profit across the system that erects barriers to ongoing accumulation that, in turn, compels adjustments to the system without actually changing the nature of the system (i.e., without its revolution) – the mutations just mentioned are examples. When these adjustments no longer provide ample ‘room to move’ for the contradiction between the productive forces (socialized labour) and capitalist production relations, crisis follows.¹⁹ Therefore, crisis, endemic to the movement of capital, precedes a more violent adjustment to the system (1024), whether that is a deep devaluation that resets the value metabolism at a level that resuscitates valorization, or whether that is the obsolescence of the system and its succession by a different one. The latter is a possibility that is as endemic to capital as crisis, structurally and historically (the same thing), even if, as yet, unrealized.

Therefore, throughout Capital III, crisis is consistently represented as a double movement, towards recuperation on the one hand, and post-capitalism on the other, with surplus-value as the lever in both cases (1017). In all modes of social reproduction, whatever form they assume, a portion of the social product (that is to say, a portion of social labour) must be reserved for the satisfaction of social needs. In a capitalist mode of production, social needs are limited as much as possible, expanding only as serves the needs of accumulation. However, as Marx says,

[p. 340]

after the abolition of the capitalist mode of production [the production of a social surplus is more important than ever]. In this situation, of course, the part regularly consumed by the direct producers would not remain confined to its present minimum level. (986–7)

In other words, in the theoretical (or, speculative) mode of association that succeeds capital (the real but as-yet-unrealized commune), surplus-value in its capitalist form now becomes the portion of the social product reserved for the satisfaction of social needs: first, for insurance, in the widest sense, against all contingency, accident, redundancy of a once-necessary social labour, and so on; second, not only for the satisfaction of existing needs but also for the expansion of the repertoire of social needs – of what they consist, and how they are materially articulated and aesthetically embodied.²⁰ At every turn, Capital III is a book about social surplus as a portal to another ‘higher form’ of society, one that represents the transition, famously, from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (958–9):

It is one of the civilizing aspects of capital that it extorts this surplus labour in a manner and in conditions that are more advantageous to social relations and to the creation of elements for a new and higher formation than was the case under the earlier forms of slavery, serfdom, etc. Thus on the one hand it leads towards a stage at which compulsion and the monopolization of social development (with its material and intellectual advantages) by one sector of society at the expense of another disappears; on the other hand it creates the material means and the nucleus for relations that permit this surplus labour to be combined, in a higher form of society, with a greater reduction of the overall time devoted to material labour . . . The real wealth of society and the possibility of a constant expansion of its reproduction process does not depend on the length of surplus labour but rather on its productivity and on the more or less plentiful conditions of production in which it is performed. (958, my emphasis)

[p. 341]

If, then, as I have been arguing throughout this book, Capital is not a study of capitalist society, it is a book about how to think the material conditions of what might come after. The preceding passage asks readers to think of the extortion of surplus labour as one of the ‘civilizing aspects of capital’ (even if we would choose another word for ‘civilizing’) that may be turned to our advantage in the creation of a ‘new and higher’ social formation. This would mean exploiting the power of social labour as the ‘raw social material’ that capital introduces to history – and which it mistakes for its own power – for the purpose of hoisting that raw material into a new form. The utopian/dialectical movement of capital is to drive straight through its own forms and (potentially) out the other end.²¹ The necessary struggle against capital, as much as it seeks to block and resist, for Marx, also takes advantage of capital’s need to turn into something else.²² As modes of production, slavery and serfdom do not introduce similar portals to potentially rational forms or self-subverting drives towards ‘higher’ social modalities. Unlike capital, neither slavery nor serfdom, as modes of production, can be construed as real but unrealized levers of their own obsolescence – not even potentially (or, dialectically): they are modes of domination to the core. Marx’s point is that capital is different from these modes of production in precisely this particular, historical aspect. Capital concentrates and centralizes (monopolizes) wealth in order to command social labour. But the force released by combined labour is potentially too vast and compelling for the legal form of property (capitalist value) to contain.

The exploitable outcome of capital’s monopolization of social development, a history of unmitigated brutality, is the force of combined labour, along with the possibility for cooperative labour’s self-determination. This is equally to transport, on a global scale, the advantageous potential of interdependency, the fruition of a now-necessary sharing and collective building of ingenuity – a planetary general intellect – to the project of minimizing the burden of social reproduction through both its technological rationalization and its communization – which is, in the end, to say the same thing. Throughout [p. 342] Capital III, but concentrated in part VII, are a series of speculative projections where Marx points to capitalist dynamics that serve dual purpose as extant but unrealized conditions for the emergence of a society organized around the logic of association, the generalized partaking of real wealth, and a theoretical – because historically possible – infinite expansion of the modalities of social reproduction. Once unbound from the need to claw back a portion of one’s (that is, the bulk of humanity’s) own objectified surplus labour as the means of survival, each projection becomes a fleeting image of the obsolescence of the value form as the theoretical beginning of history.