Sidewinder

O Willie, come sell your fiddle,
O sell your fiddle sae fine;
O Willie, come sell your fiddle,
And buy a pint o’ wine!
If I should sell my fiddle,
The warl’ would think I was mad;
For mony a rantin’ day
My fiddle and I hae had.

The rattlin’ roarin’ rogue of Robbie Burn’s ballad, for all his love of a gargle, is too canny to sell his fiddle as he knows his fiddle is worth more to him in its possession than it’s simple worth in exchange. Willie’s fiddle is more than a simple commodity, it is an asset. By asset we mean it is the source of a future income stream. By contrast, a commodity is something whose only realisable value is that of a one-time only exchange at the current price for it.

In financial terms, an asset has a duality with respect to return. Either one can hope for a return on the money invested in purchasing the asset by a rise in its price over time. The realisation of this return can usually only be achieved by selling it at the new higher price, this return being known as capital gains. The other source of return on a financial asset is the payment stream associated with owning it - it’s yield. This can be dividends for equities, quarterly or yearly coupons for bonds and so on.

By contrast, investment into commodities has only one possible source of return. Whether gold, oil or pork bellies, the ownership of a stock of commodities, in itself, yields no return. The only possible source of return is movement in the price of the commodity in the spot market. But not all investment in commodities is speculative (i.e. looking for return) some of it is hedging against the risks of volatility in equity and currency markets - the precarity of the stores of value. But the complex tango of hedgers and speculators through the financial markets is not our primary interest here.

The commodification of labour is a theme that has been common ground for the socialist movement for the last two centuries. The question we open here is whether we are seeing a movement from the simple commoditisation of labour to an assetisation of labour, and if so, what does that mean for the movement for the self-emancipation of labour from its compulsion and exploitation?

What would the assetisation of labour mean? By extension from the material and financial spheres we can say that it is the transformation from labour as a commodity - a possession whose only access to return is its one time exchange for the revenue necessary for its own reproduction in order to repeat the cycle anew; to that of an asset itself holding the potential for a return based on a future income stream. The struggling student who may sell his or her labour cheaply in the here and now in order to fund the studies that will (possibly) guarantee them a ‘professional’ career with much greater earning power in the future.

The evolution of financial capitalism into the form of  biofinance, where the majority of equity capital is held by institutional investors, dominated by (life) insurers and pension funds, has long been noted. The insurance of labour against injury, infirmity, old age and death, originally an organic initiative for self-protection through friendly societies, craft unions and mutual associations, has been now fully financialised through de-mutualisation and the colonisation of the field by market-capitalised financial intermediaries. But the underlying process of transforming labour from a mute object of trade on the spot market of commoditised labour, is progressing through the transformation of the entire life span of living labour into a securitiseable income stream - an asset.

We see the assetisation of labour in student loans which load young workers with tens of thousands of pounds of debt to be repaid by a future lifetime of labour. [..etc..]

But aside from the financial side of young workers being transformed into walking futures contracts, there is the effect on the subjectification of labour itself.

Negative solidarity

There has been talk recently of the phenomenon of “negative solidarity” in relation to the contemporary subjectification/socialisation of labour. If you are not, in your own internal self-image, the super-exploited bar or cafe worker you are currently employed as, but the future businesswoman, doctor or advertising executive you will be in the future when you finish your studies and get out of this shitty student life, then there is no surprise that you have no solidarity to your co-workers in the here and now. Your solidarity is to your future imagined self - the one your bank manager has made reality by giving you a mortgage on it. Negative solidarity is the decompositional subjectification of assetised labour.

So, is the assetisation of labour simply a con? Are the loans well-spent propaganda to create the illusion of a prosperous future that the institutions know will never come about for the majority, in order to drive down the cost of their labour in the here and now? Is this just another vector of so-called ‘false consciousness’?

Certainly there may be an aspect of that. However the fact that labour as cheap or cheaper is already available through migrant or precarised workers, without going through the rigmarole of creating the myth of the assetised future super-earner, means this can’t be the whole of the story.

By returning to model of the financial asset we can clarify this question. The two forms of return are one aspect of the financial asset that is always accompanied by a third component - the component of risk. Risk represents the possibility of loss of either or both sources of revenue, the possible loss of some or all of the exchange price of the asset (loss of principal) or loss of future periodic dividends or other earnings.

In the case of living labour, risks include disease or injury which may temporarily or permanently afflict the possibility for immediate earnings and/or long term future earnings. Similarly, previous investment in training and study may be at risk to being invalidated by becoming obsoleted by the march of technology and change in the social division of labour.

Before we can investigate the significance of the assetisation of labour in relation to risk, we need to go back to the growth of the subordination of labour to capital in its nascent centuries, to the difference between capitalised chattel slavery and wage slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

From slavery to commodification of labour

The story of the transatlantic slave trade and its employment by early capitalist agricultural production in the Americas seems to be the non plus ultra of the commodification of labour - the buying and selling of human beings for slave labour. However this is the commodification of human beings, not the commodification of labour and, leaving morality aside, it is important to understand the distinction.

The relation between the slave owner of the cotton plantations of the USA and the cotton mill owners of Lancashire, to their respective labourers must be understood. The slave owner of living labour assumes, inevitably, all the risk costs of injury, sickness or premature death of his slave. Also the investment in training and the concurrent risk of those skills being obsoleted, are the owner’s also. By contrast the mill owner buys labour by the day or week. If the ‘free’ labourer is ill or injured, that risk is not passed on to the mill owner who can replace that individual with another more or less equally productive unit of labour. Labour is commoditised in relation to the mill owner in that he can externalise the risk to the continued reproduction of labour power to society.

Over time, both through struggle from below and the imposition of a biopolitical logic of aggregate, societal level, efficiency from above, the externalised risks of labour are eventually socialised into the specific function of the state - through the regulation of the Factory Acts, the eventual provision of state-funded education and health services.

It is the unmarketised spheres of these state labour ‘risk management’ services, that neoliberalism is now attempting to privatise and marketise. For this purpose the assetisation of labour is the means by which the risk management of labour may be transferred off the account of the welfare state and onto the shoulders, not of some new chattel-owning slave master, but the dispossessed owner of ‘free labour’ him or herself. ‘Every man his own master’, that great liberal aspiration, now reveals its true sinister content - every man or woman his or her own slave-master.

The assetisation of labour then, is the fulcrum of transition from welfare state capitalism to the fully privatised and financialised provision of education, health, training and retirement. This, not only in an ideological sense, but also in the institutionalisation of a financial framework that provides credit and financial services, not to capitalists, but to workers.
[…]

A brief history of time

The three aspects of the asset - the two returns and the risk - correspond to the three modes of time, the periodic, the secular and the exceptional. The ancient Greeks had two conceptions of time, that of Chronos and Kairos. Chronos was the normal passage of time, cyclical like the year, in which the passage of time can be measured - chronometrically - by the repetition of returning to the point of departure. Chronos’ consort Ananke (in Latin, Necessitas) was the goddess of force, constraint and necessity, and the mother of the Fates who measured out the lifes of all living things. By contrast, Kairos is the time of opportunity, the fortuitous moment in which victory can be snatched and perhaps even the fates themselves cheated. Kairos represents an interruption of the time of Chronos, an exception which ruptures the linear progression of fated, cyclical time.

As the ages progressed, the worship of Ananke and the Fates fell into oblivion with the rise of the Orphic cult and its worship of Eros, the god of love and also the escape from death and the Fates. But throughout much of human history societies where change was slow relative to human lifespans such that the dominance of cyclical but unchanging time seemed natural, these two notions of time remained unchallenged. It is with the social and technological upheavals following the Black Death in Europe, and subsequent renaissance and reformation, that we encounter a new dominant conception of time - the time of progress. Progress itself is elevated to the status of explicit godhead by the Enlightenment and is emblazoned on the great seal of the USA as the Novus Ordo Seclorum  the New Order of the Ages, where the time of Progress rules over the Empire of Reason.

This new, third notion of time, called secular in the language of economics, is so ingrained within us as children of capitalism, that its very novelty is practically imperceptible. Yet the idea of a linear time in which change occurs, free from fate, is the new modernist conception of time - the time of, not only progress, but above all accumulation, or “growth” as bourgeois economists more shyly euphemise it, these days.

Returning to the asset we can see that the periodic returns from earnings or dividends, correspond to periodic or cyclical time (Chronos), the return from increase of the principal (capital gains) corresponds to secular time (Progress) and, finally, the risk of interruption to either, the risk of the unforeseen, of breakdown, is that of exceptional or crisis time (Kairos).

Tri-partite production

If we move to the sphere of production, we can see an analogous tri-partite division of products.

The first, cyclical product corresponds to circulating value, those elements of labour, raw materials, products and so on, that are sufficient to keep the various cycles of reproduction going.

The second product is, to a degree, an extension of the first - the surplus over and above the requirements for simple reproduction, that lead to accumulation and the extension of the production relation.

The third product, the by-product, perhaps better thought of as the entropic product, are those effects, both material, immaterial and social, that are neither continually re-subsumed in the cyclical process of simple reproduction not capable of being aggregated to the accumulated surplus product.

The default position is, of course, to simply ignore these entropic products, yet if they are being continually produced and not re-absorbed, then they inevitably accumulate until ignoring them becomes increasingly problematic.

The accumulation of the entropic product is itself a factor that sooner or later pushes the process into crisis - interrupting the bourgeois utopia of limitless progress freed from crisis.

The obvious example of such entropic products are the climate changing gases being released by current production. But despite their materiality, we are still examining how the production of crises is immanent to the cycle of production on a metaphysical level - that is, one where abstract categories themselves appear to be the source of change and movements. In order to bring our analyses down from the metaphysical clouds to the world of human society, we need to re-factor in terms of human agency.
[…]

In the ongoing attempts to analyse the causes of the global financial crisis in the mainstream media, a continual refrain is that the underlying cause is the “imbalance” in world trade. This diagnosis is superficially tempting as it is always self-evidently correct. For the same reason, it is also an utterly cretinous tautology, rather like the sub-Marxian left’s kneejerk response of “overproduction” as the cause of any particular crisis.

In the latter case, Marx himself pointed out that so long as producers can sell their product there is clearly no crisis, hence all crises inevitably manifest as an inability to sell product, thus always appear as “overproduction”. The form of appearance is not to be confused with cause, otherwise the cause of all fatal mountaineering accidents could be diagnosed as hitting the ground very hard.

Similarly with the current popular diagnosis of “imbalances”. It’s like saying the reason I fell off my bicycle is that I lost my balance. If “balance” is in practice defined by ability to progress without interruption, then any crash can be retrospectively attributed to lack of it. Circularity.

The difference is, if I keep my balance, I can continue to cycle without falling off. Capitalism, however, up until now historically, has seemed incapable of continuing without regularly crashing. The exact nature of this difference in relation to the possibility of indefinitely maintaining balance, is vital.

Capital, as value-in-process, seeks to keep continually moving and growing. In so doing, sooner or later it finds closed circuits of movement and growth - in cybernetic terms this is a positive feedback cycle. As anybody who has ever got an electric guitar too close to an amp knows, once positive feedback has begun, it will escalate until something in the system breaks, or the arrangement of the system is changed (moving the guitar away from the amp or turning it down) to stop the feedback. The latter course action requires some agent of control to recognise the condition and have some means of interfering with the circuit assemblage.

Keeping balance on a bike also requires a feedback system. However, this is not a positive feedback system (otherwise you’d have to keep peddling ever faster and make ever more extreme shifts of weight to keep going) it is a self-correcting or “homoeostatic” feedback circuit. Homoeostatic feedback normally works through negative feedback - when one variable exceeds a certain limit, the relevant mechanism is signalled to exert force in the opposite direction to its previous vector.

The balance question then, in relation to capitalism, is can it be prevented from continually falling into positive feedback cycles and be channelled into a kind of self-balancing homoeostatic feedback system that avoids crisis and finally delivers that holy grail of modern social discourse, “sustainable growth”?

We can define “reformism” as any form of politics that basically answers “yes” to the above question. With a few reforms, future crises can be avoided and capitalism can grow uninterruptedly. This position can be either “left” or “right” in the conventional demarcations, depending on the particular proposed reforms are. Despite the apparent political difference between calls for progressive taxation of high earners through to deportation of foreigners and banning homosexuality, if the presumed outcome is a market-based society that evades periodic crises then the perspective is reformist, from the perspective of the balance question.

The conventional revolutionary socialist perspective is that class society means that there are no control mechanisms that can act against the growth phase of the positive feedback cycle, as this benefits the capitalists, who can always try to force the costs of the bust phase onto the working class.

So, the negative response to the balance question by the revolutionary critics of contemporary capitalism is a qualified one. The continual recurrence of the positive feedback cycle followed by bust cannot be prevented under the existing socio-political conditions.

Here the revolutionary commitment is a product of the perceived need for substantial change of the existing social-political structures through the expropriation of the expropriators, through taking the means of production into common ownership. Or alternatively, through the replacement of democracy by the dictatorship of a strong leader and national rebirth through racial purification and war, in a fascist interpretation.

The communist refusal of the balance question is unqualified. Even if you eliminate class (via the common ownership of the means of production) you can never create a control mechanism to prevent positive feedback. For essentially the same reasons that socialists give for the impossibility of common interest control in class society. That is, the growth phase of positive feedback materially benefits the most centrally-involved actors in the circuit, at least in the short term. And in a system prone to the uncertainties caused by positive feedbacks and the inevitable crashes that follow, with no guarantee of equal distribution, rational actors “must” take any short-term gains available to guard against the unpredictabilities of possible future dearth.

The root problem is unequal distribution through exchange. The competitive relations this produces between all social agents leads to the “social contract” of surrendering control of allocation and production to the impersonal emergent forces of the market. It is this surrender that allows the emergent tendency that is capital its freedom to seek growth without limits imposed by human need or reason.

This piece is a sequel to the previous "What is Orthodoxy" post below and should ideally be read after that. Here we are looking at how the objectivist notions of class talked about in the first piece in the series, relates to a particular notion of time - the Epoch.

The reason I concentrate on the theme of the conceptual legacy of Second International or orthodox Marxism is that I think it played a very significant role, even, in places and periods, a dominant one in the development of 20th century socialism. Further, that simplistic notions that "it’s a Marxist issue" that doesn’t effect the evolution of anarchist thought in the same historical period are crap. I just don’t hold that the identity barrier between Marxism and anarchism is an impenetrable firewall. For me it’s a permeable barrier and, given that we face historical struggles and debates over ideas of day together, in the same times and places, it is inevitable that there is a back and forth of ideas between the two families of tendencies. So drawing up a proper balance sheet of the ortho conceptual framework is a necessity for all of us if we are to be more successful in the 21st century than we were in the 20th.

To give an example of the penetration of orthodox thinking and it’s objectivist idea of class into anarchist discourse, we can look at the debate between Pierre Monatte and Errico Malatesta at the 1907 Anarchist Conference in Amsterdam. Here the subject of debate was the relationship the anarchist movement should have towards the rising syndicalist movement, particularly the French CGT which had adopted its famous Amiens Charter the year before. Monatte has advanced a position that the revolutionary syndicalist movement (as distinct from and explicitly opposed to the anarcho-syndicalist movement) represents all the anarchist movements desire for a self-emancipatory worker’s movement and that, therefore, the anarchist movement should dissove itself (liquidate itself) into the CGT and other national revolutionary syndicates (revolutionary unions). Here is a portion of Malatesta’s response, rejecting Monatte’s proposal:

The basic error of Monatte and of all revolutionary syndicalists, in my opinion, derives from an overly simplistic conception of the class struggle. It is a conception whereby the economic interests of all workers – of the working class – are held to be equal, whereby it is enough for workers to set about defending their own particular interests in order for the interests of the whole proletariat against the bosses to be defended.

The reality is very different, in my view. The workers, like the bourgeoisie, like everyone, are subject to the law of universal competition that derives from the system of private property and that will only be extinguished together with that system. There are therefore no classes, in the proper sense of the term, because there are no class interests. There exists competition and struggle within the working “class”, just as there does among the bourgeoisie. The economic interests of one category of worker are implacably in contrast with those of another category.

Here in the first paragraph quoted, it is clear that the "overly simplistic conception" of the class struggle is the anarchist equivalent of the orthodox Marxist objectivist notion of class. Class exists objectively and has common, objective interests. It is in rejection of this notion that Malatesta makes his, at first sight, startling claim that "There are therefore no classes, in the proper sense of the term". This seemingly bizarre statement makes more sense when we understand "proper sense" as meaning formal or essentialist in the positivist fashion. To this degree we can say that Malatesta’s critique of 1907 anticipates notions such as E.P. Thompson’s processual and historicist definitions of class, or the class compositional analysis of the Italian operaisti of the post-war period, by a good half-century.

So, now to make the link from class to time itself. In addition to the notion of the "objective" notion of class (and it’s compensatory product - "false consciousness") I would like to introduce a further characteristic of orthodox thinking - "epochalism". This is a byproduct of the objective class concept. Object-centred models have the disadvantage of the Platonic forms whence they derive, of being timeless. The definition does not really allow for change: if the properties that define an object change over time, then surely that means it has changed into a different object defined by the new set of properties? But in a socialist tradition that sees itself as historical - outlined by the historical problems of the rise of capitalism from feudalism and the historical question of overcoming capitalism - this timelessness does not fit. The solution is a kind of hybrid, a sort of "punctuated equilibrium" theory. That is, that the content of categories like class (and it’s "objective" interests) is defined by particular eras or epochs. When one epoch replaces another, all the categories of analysis must be redone and the new strategy and tactics appropriate to the new era worked out. However, once that is done, then as long as the epoch persists… nothing changes. So the same strategy and tactics remain relevant. In fact, any move by militants to question existing analysis, strategy or tactics on the basis of "maybe things have changed a bit?" is pathologised as "revisionism". After all, if history hasn’t changed, why should our analysis or programme?

Epochalism takes different forms depending on whether you have a substitutionist (partyist) approach to "the consciousness question" or a "class exclusionist" approach. If the former then, once the tendency founder has laid down the analysis and strategy for the era, the "doors of interpretation" (the gates of ijtihad) are closed, all that remains for the tendency leaders is to keep the faith and guard against revisionism by comparing all opposition with your bestiary of past revisionists so you know what names to call the new heretics. All interpretation of existing developments must be carried out through the imitation (taqlid) of the methods of the founder(s). Here epochalism creates extreme sectarianism of the party, whether it be on the Leninist or Bordigist model (c.f. the ICC’s total dependency on the theory of the "epoch of capitalist decline" to justify their pointless existence).

In the case of the "exclusivist" version, the "infallible, invariant programme" is replaced by the organisational form of the "revolutionary" organisation, which must, again, be defended from any suggestions of reform, evolution or adaptation to meet changed circumstances - because, unless someone can demonstrate that we are in a new era, nothing of any strategic or tactical significance has changed.

In either case, the idea of the epoch removes the challenge of history. There is no longer a need for an ongoing exercise of analysis, of changing class composition and hence evolution of strategies and tactics appropriate for the political recomposition of the class as a conscious and antagonist subject, capable of making the revolution.

By contrast, the proposal for a politics free from orthodox aporiai, must start with the idea that history is a process of continual change. Hence we cannot afford to liquidate or mothball the process of analysis and strategising until the next epoch comes along (especially if they’re like buses and you wait for ages and then three come along at once…). The work of analysis and formulation of strategy is a continual, unending task (which is not to be read as an excuse for not starting!).

In summary, I accuse the orthodox assemblage of inter-connected and self-reinforcing concepts of having replaced historical materialism with an idealist epochalism. I believe in the utility in trying to properly understand the errors that stem from the usurpation of historical materialism by this changeling, and understand how it has left its mark in not only tendencies that refer back to Lenin, Trotsky or Bordiga, but also to Luxemburg and Pannekoek and indeed, Monatte and Pouget.

Consider the situation of loaning a spade to a friend or associate. Imagine further that you are away from your home for some time. In that time the loaner of the spade then loans it out to another person. When you return and need the spade back you may not be aware of where it currently is - that is you don’t have total knowledge of the entire chain of transference - but you have the first link in the chain and a reasonable expectation that each link will either lead to another or, if the chain is broken, accept responsibility for replacing the spade. Such are the relations of loaning - they create an accompanying chain of knowledge that, although distributed throughout the nodes of the chain (i.e. no node has complete knowledge of the chain, complete knowledge is stored in no central, canonical node) can be traversed and has basic built-in self-repairing function (i.e. the responsibility of the last link in a broken chain to replace). What’s more there is the possibility of more information to flow along that chain (e.g. what each user actually used the transferred item for or other, possibly unrelated information - e.g. interested in buying a share in a JCB? etc.).

Let’s look at the role of money in a chain of transference. By money here, I’m using that as a proxy for both exchange and private property. If you were to sell your spade to a bloke in the pub, there is no longer the beginning of a chain of transference there. If the buyer of your spade then goes on to sell the spade to someone else or throw it on a fire or whatever, there is no obligation by him to tell you that information if you ask him what happened to your spade, the next time you see him in the pub. This is a consequence of exchange such that once the object becomes the private property of another, the right of the previous possessor to information about it is severed.

It is this effect of rupture of information that leads to the mystification of us the producers from the world we produce around us. We have no information about where the vast majority of the things that surround us came from, who made them and under what conditions. Further, we don’t even know who owns the vast majority of the things and built environment around us, other than it’s not us. The end result is a world that appears to us as alien and external to our will and power.

One of the features that a dis-alienated economy will have to provide is the restoration of that information chain through the passages of circulation, such that the users of goods or services can find their producers and vice versa. Naturally this raises questions of privacy in some cases. But privacy needs to be managed as agreed exceptions to the default of transparency and traceability, not the other way around if we are to understand our production and manage it for our own needs.

Like Judaism, Islam is not only a community of faith but a system of law and jurisprudence. Islamic jurisprudence is based upon the interpretation of the texts of the Qur’an, the Hadith and Sunnah. Various schools or madhabs of past interpretations have built up over time such that coming to a ruling can come through two main routes - the imitation (taqlid) of past scholars and the traditional schools, or original interpretation of the source texts. This is ijtihad, a word derived from the same 3-letter root (j-h-d, jahada - "struggle") as jihad, meaning "struggle with yourself". It contains the idea that original interpretation is a product of struggle, arduous and potentially a mortal danger to body and soul. Whilst in the Shia tradition of ijtihad continues to be a central part of jurisprudence, it is much less in evidence in contemporary Sunni tradition where following the madhabs is the conventional route. The dominant story until recently was that this was because at some time between the 10th to 12th centuries (CE) the dominant Sunni view came to be that contemporary scholars were too remote from the "rightly guided" followers of Mohammed to any longer be capable of righteous new interpretations. This story was called the closing of the gates of ijtihad, and is associated with the ascendance of the "anti-philosophy" Asharite school, principally lead by Al-Ghazali, over the more Aristotlean and Neo-Platonic inspired Mutazilites.

Now it must be said that this account was principally one devised by Western Orientalists, often associated with a search for idealist or culturalist explanations for the perceived decline of Muslim civilisation (specifically the Ottoman empire) relative to the West. Unsurprisingly there are now challenges by muslim historians sceptical of these Orientalist meta-narratives, pointing out that the death of ijtihad in the Sunni tradition has been exaggerated and the "closing of the gates" is a nice story but not really adequate to the complexities of the actual history in which material economic, military, political and inter-imperialist conflicts have a much larger part.

If the story of the closing of the gates of ijtihad is today suspect as an account of the development of Sunni orthodoxy, it does have an irresistible draw as a metaphor for the contemporary stagnation of Marxist orthodoxy. While the gates of orthodox Marxist ijtihad are not officially closed, many people who have tried to progress the struggle for new interpretations of the 21st century capitalist world system find their way blocked by a number of gates sealed with orthodox shibboleths by those who believe Lenin’s "Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism" to be the final word on "the Epoch" (see previous post "Orthodoxy and Time"). Collectively these seals represent a comprehensive block on the directions new interpretations must travel to understand the workings of the financialised system of "Capitalism with Derivatives" that Neoliberalism has (partly inadvertantly) built and has so recently plunged us into the first major global economic crisis of the 21st century. These seals must be broken.

Here we look at 5 sealed gates.

1) Unproductive Labour

2) Fictitious Capital

3) No value created in the sphere of circulation

4) Base / Superstructure

5) Good Investor / Bad Speculator dichotomy

Unproductive Labour

This is a perennial favourite, so many forests have been cut down to print the volume of diatribes between Marxists about the true distinction between what types of labour are productive of value and what are not, to the complete ignorance and indifference of the outside world, that it is tempting to say that this debate is itself the primary examplar of unproductive labour. Candidates for "unproductive labour" range from the usual "luxury" personal services providers from prostitutes, dog-walkers, shopping assistants, to nurses, teachers, doctors, train and bus drivers. The notion that, say, London’s tube, bus, train and taxi drivers are not productive of value rather begs the question of why, if they all went on strike for a week, the losses to capitalist accumulated would be calculated in the billions. The dependence of the pharmaceutical industry, one of global capitalism’s bigger earners, on doctors telling patients what drugs supposedly answer their needs is another case that finds the "unproductive labour" tag inadequate. But above all, the notion of the financial industry, accounting for getting towards a third of UK economic activity before the crash, is unproductive in toto is a hopeless starting point for any attempt to analyse the causes of the current crisis.

Fictitious Capital

If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, flys like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s a … fictitious duck? The notion of fictitious capital is bandied around a good deal these days. The problem is that this necessarily raises the necessity of making a distinction between fictitious and real capitals in a way that is analytical rather than being simply either a lazy moral category masquerading as economic analysis or, perhaps worse, indicative of a pre-Marxist conception of a non-relational, substantial capital. Horses are real, unicorns are fictional, but capital is as capital does. If it’s a volume of money actively engaged in the money capital cycle M-C-M’, it’s capital plain and simple.

No value created in the sphere of circulation

In itself, this is simply a core statement of Marx’s analysis. It becomes a orthodox shibboleth in what areas of capitalist activity are lumped into the category of sphere of circulation. In many ways this is another side of the unproductive labour coin. When entire industries such as finance are dumped into the "sphere of circulation" bin, entire, then this analytical statement becomes a canon of dogma obstructing proper analysis of capitalist activity in these industries.

Base/Superstructure

As many commentators have already pointed out, the orthodox base/superstructure dogma is based on a tendentious reading of a couple of paragraphs in the preface of the "Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy", the notorious "handmill" passage from "Poverty of Philosophy" and the odd letter. Regardless of the weakness of it justification, what must be avoided at all costs is any possibility of being drawn into the utterly irrelevant debate over "the correct reading of Marx", itself an orthodox shibboleth (see "What is Orthodoxy" notes). Where the notion that the relations of society can be divided into two sections, one derivative of the other and thus negligeable, becomes an obstacle to proper analysis is when it focus on "the forces of production" to the exclusion of all else. No better example of this tendency is the case of China where most orthodox commentators appear to accepted that it has somehow crossed a threshold from some form of socialism to a capitalist society on the basis of the presence of capitalist looking industry and market forms, but in a way unable to theorise the real differences still remaining between China, the US and other Western capitalist countries on the unspoken assumption that these differences of political structure are "superstructural", thus somehow secondary. Analysis cannot proceed on this basis.

Good Investor / Bad Speculator dichotomy

In his preface to the first German edition of Marx’s "Philosophy of Poverty" published after Marx’s death, Engels makes clear the effort in their project to disentangle the critique economic categories from moral criticisms, the confusion of which had obstructed previous socialists. It must be made clear that today, under the guise of dismissing vast tracts of the contemporary capitalist economy under the anti-categories of unproductive labour, fictitious capital and so on, the conventional moral landscape of "good capitalist" vs. "bad capitalist" is being reproduced lock, stock and barrel. The tabloids scream about greedy bankers and parasitic speculators ruining capitalism for honest workers and their productive business men employers and decent investors. The orthodox join in the hue and cry with the same aunt sally figures dressed up in Marxist-sounding jargon. To rail against parasitic speculators, is to provide an alibi for the workings of the capitalist system itself of which these periodic crises are an integral part of its functioning.

A spectre is haunting the Left, the spectre of orthodox Marxism. In order to fully exorcise this pernicious spirit it is necessary to first understand it’s true nature.

The orthodox interpretation of Marxism arose after Marx’s death through the work of Engels and the founders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), most significantly, Karl Kautsky. Kautsky eventually became the undisputed "Pope" of the orthodox interpretation of Marxism within the SPD, after the excommunication of the reformist heresy of Eduard Bernstein. Orthodoxy (literally: right thinking) discovers its formulations through the process of opposing the first heresy that threatens its continued existence. By this process, orthodoxy to a degree preserves, like the negative image of a key pressed into wax, the imprint of the heresy or heresies it originally defined itself against, long after those heresies have passed out of existence and been forgotten. Often then, the deconstruction of an orthodoxy most fruitfully begins with the study of the heresy it suppressed. However, for the purposes of brevity, we will skip the examination of Bernstein’s revisionism and move directly to outlining the core framework of orthodoxy itself.

Reduced to its most basic framework, we can characterise orthodoxy as having three core pillars and a fourth, compensatory element. The three core pillars remain relatively constant in all the different branchings off the orthodox tree, but the fourth compensatory element changes and, as such, constitutes the main difference between the different branches. If we use the metaphor of a restaurant table on an uneven dining terrace, the fourth element is the folded beermat that is placed underneath the shortest leg to bridge the gap and damp down the instability of the rocking table. Of course, if a table has only three legs, this problem does not arise, similarly, the three core theoretical pillars of orthodoxy are made unstable by the fourth leg of the table - the contingent reality of the situation of the day, resting on the uneven rocky terrace of history.

The three core pillars are 1) Economism, 2) Scientism and 3) False consciousness.

Economism or economic determinism is a hard version of the base/superstructure interpretation of Marxism, that is, this (in)famous passage from The Poverty of Philosophy -

Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

Is read as meaning "social relations are determined by productive forces"*. This notion that social relations in general and the relations of production in particular, are determined by the forces of production, can lead in the extreme case, to technological determinism. That is, that technological advance revolutionises the forces of production, which in turn revolutionises society. This kind of thinking is more widespread than Marxism or the Left, and has persistent appeal amongst the skilled scientific, technical and engineering strata of capitalist society. Witness the number of plant biologists who still seem to think that one more increase in crop yields will banish world hunger and poverty, or the "net nerd" enthusiasts who believe that the internet is going to magic humanity into a new age of digital freedom. It is also the root of a peculiar blindness which leads the sufferer to miss the fact that technology is neither politically or socially neutral, but determined by the struggles and contradictions of our society.

Scientism is the unshakeable conviction that Marxism is more than a theory, it is a science of society and the "laws of motion" of capitalist society, in an analogous fashion to engineering science being the science of engines and the laws of motion that govern them. The most obvious thing that must be pointed out about this deeply held conviction that Marxism is a science, is that it is deeply unscientific. Popper’s criticism of orthodox Marxism that it’s belief system had more in common with a religion than a science, is not entirely without merit. The other aspect of Marxism as the science of the laws of motion of capitalist society including its inner contradictions, especially the so-called "Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall", combined with economism, leads to historicism. Historicism is the idea that there is a direction to history, that society is progressing towards a particular goal. It was a common idea in the 19th century, linked to ideas of big-P Progress, going back to the Enlightenment. It was also part of the teleological (tr: goal-directed) schema of Hegel, Marx’s philosophical mentor. However, Kropotkin is another example of how hard old revolutionaries find it to resist the temptations of the "scientific inevitability" of the triumph of the revolution, even without a background in German Idealist philosophy. Historicism and a belief in the "objective" economic laws of development, tend to lead to the downplaying of class struggle as an active force in making history. At first sight, this may seem a surprising feature of any kind of Marxism, given that "all history is the history of class struggle" is one of Marx’s more well-known quotes**, but it is a definite tendency of orthodox Marxism.

The third pillar of orthodoxy is the notion of false consciousness. Again for the sake of brevity, we will skirt around a full treatment of Marx’s notion of ideology and class consciousness, save in noting that he made a distinction between class in itself (an sich) and class for itself (für sich), the latter concept being that of a body of people united by a conscious recognition of their common interests as a class and their common interest in overcoming capitalist relations. It was also clear that the class consciousness associated with class for itself was a precursor for revolution. Combined with historicist notions that the "objective laws" of capitalist development are headed inevitably towards revolution and is building it’s own grave diggers in the proletariat, the lack of such a wide-spread, consistent revolutionary class consciousness amongst actual workers of the day creates a problem. This is a classic is/ought question. Why does the consciousness the workers ought to have differ so much from the one they actually do have? False consciousness is the solution to this problem. The workers development of the scientifically-determined "proper" consciousness is being blocked by an obstacle - a false consciousness that is taking up the room that the correct consciousness should be developing within. Of course this solution is itself a riddle - what are the origins of this usurping false consciousness and how is the correct consciousness to be restored to its rightful place?

Thus the three core pillars of orthodoxy, destabilised by an inconvenient reality,  require a fourth element - a fix to the false consciousness riddle.

In the SPD of Kautsky, the solution to the riddle of false consciousness was found in a reading of Marx on ideology and the famous fetishism of commodities, that inferred that the social relations of market exchange in capitalism separated the sphere of production from the sphere of exchange, thus hiding the reality of social production beneath the appearance of private economic intercourse, mystifying the overall social reality from the ordinary worker, re-invented as consumer. In Kautsky’s view, only bourgeois specialists with the education and time to study the new social science of Marxism could bring the proper consciousness back to the workers, from the outside as it were. The mass membership parliamentary party was the proper pedagogic vehicle for "scientific" specialists, such as himself, to school the workers in the correct way of viewing the world and developing their capabilities while waiting patiently for "the objective conditions to be ripe" for the glorious day. In the meantime the worker should dutifully pay party and union subs, study hard, support the party’s social clubs, vote for the party at the elections and, above all, not do anything rash until their leaders told them the time was right and what their new orders were.

Already within German Socialdemocracy there were some dissenting voices who, while rejecting the Bernsteinian revisionist heresies, were growing less convinced that this strategy of "actionless waiting" was the correct response to the requirements of the political struggles of the day. Let’s focus on the two most well-known - Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek (who was the originator of the "actionless waiting" tag for the Kautsky strategy). Both of their challenges were prompted by the upsurge of syndicalist unrest that followed the Ruhr Miners strike and Russian Revolution of 1905, the Charter of Amiens in France and so on. Above all, how to react to the popular syndicalist slogan of the General Strike (or Massenstreik as it was termed in German). The divisions that emerged from the debate that raged over the Massenstreik within the SPD in 1906 were later deepened by the European crisis that culminated in WW1.

The spectre of a spontaneous working class uprising naturally fills the bourgeoisie with existential terror. Good bourgeois that he was, Kautsky had a visceral horror of working class spontaneity. Consequently he was violently opposed to the idea of the General Strike, particularly as the onset of a proletarian uprising and revolution. Luxemburg had a more instinctive impulse to move part-way towards granting the working class some spontaneous agency, albeit one that would still be ultimately reliant on the leadership of the Marxist party in order to finish the job worker’s spontaneous action had started. But, in face of the rising inter-imperialist European crisis, Luxemburg was led to re-examine Marx’s work on accumulation and reproduction of capital and actually revise it in order to come up with a theory of Imperialism. To this degree, Luxemburg not only questioned the parliamentarism and anti-spontaneism of Kautskyite orthodoxy, but actually had the temerity to begin undermining the core orthodox principal of Marxism as an infallible and complete "science". Despite the undoubted nerve it took to take this step (particularly as a woman in a thoroughly unreconstructed male-dominated movement), Luxemburg did not stretch to breaking with the SPD until she was forced out, the attempts to take the initiative in the chaos of defeat, revolution and counter-revolution, were too little and too late. Despite her initial critical noises about the direction Lenin and the Bolsheviks were taking, she did not have enough time to establish a branching of orthodoxy distinct from Leninism or Kautskyism. Her legacy is also compromised by the opinion of many non-orthodox theorists that her unique theoretical contribution to Marxism - the Accumulation of Capital, is based on an underconsumptionist argument that is basically wrong.

Antonie Pannekoek, however, went further than Luxemburg in breaking from Kautskyism. Not only did he support spontaneous workers actions such as wildcat strikes and the general strike, but he grew increasingly critical of the role of the SPD in opposing and putting down worker’s strikes. Eventually this lead him to see the SPD and their tame unions, as being a barrier to class self-activity and hence their development of revolutionary class consciousness. In Pannekoek and his fellow Council Communists, the Kautskyist answer to the riddle of false consciousness is inverted. Here it is the outside bourgeois "revolutionary specialists" who are the source, not of the correct consciousness, but the false consciousness. The solution to the problem of false consciousness then, the fourth element, is the politically independant, rank and file controlled worker’s organisations aiming to build worker’s councils - the bodies that will be the new agency of class power and the transformation of society. Of course this is in radical opposition to both Kautskyite orthodox socialdemocracy and it’s Leninist offshoot both, but it still retains the three basic pillars of orthodoxy - economism, scientism and false consciousness - only the fourth, bridging element has changed. The mass parliamentary party has been replaced by the rank and file workers networks and the workers councils.

The case of Lenin is probably more familiar to readers than the others, and has been dealt with extensively elsewhere. Suffice it to say that Lenin was the last person to break with Kautskyist orthodoxy and was at a loss to explain the "betrayal" of his hero at the outbreak of WW1. Lenin’s full acceptance of the Kautskyist notion that worker’s could not transcend "trade union consciousness" without the intervention of bourgeois intellectuals bringing them the proper consciousness from outside, as stated in "What is to be done?" has been remarked upon many times before. In this context we should see that Lenin’s modification of the fourth element from mass parliamentary party to a covert, compact vanguard party of professional revolutionaries was simply a tactical adaptation to the changed conditions of Russia - i.e. relative backwardness and absolutist repression - as was explicitly stated as such. Hence why Lenin is incapable of explaining Kautsky’s "betrayal" on any factor other than the subjective one - a "failure of leadership". Here, ultimately, lies the progression of Leninism and it’s remaining descendants, principally Trotskyism, from the mass party tactic. Now the fourth, bridging or substitutive element is a voluntarist subjectivism. For the Leninist or Trotskyist, all problems of revolution can be reduced to "the leadership question". In the face of actual situations which force orthodox Marxists to remember that they are supposed to be revolutionaries, the subjective element, completely eradicated from the orthodox universe by its "objective laws", must, like Freud’s return of the repressed, return even stronger and yet not related to any materialist analysis of consciousness itself, as an autonomous agent.

The final actor in our brief survey of post-Kautskyist orthodoxy is Amadeo Bordiga. His case is a little different from Luxemburg, Pannekoek or Lenin, as he was less directly influenced by German Socialdemocracy, Italian socialism having it’s own separate tradition going back to the Italian wing of the First International. Bordiga is often called "more Leninist than Lenin", however, the anti-democratic extremism of Bordigism conceals a subtle but important difference. For Bordiga it is not the party, whether mass or vanguard, that is the bridging element, but the programme itself. The programme is the solution to the problem of false consciousness. The development of the correct revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat is carried out by its most conscious minority who formulate the revolutionary programme. Once formed, the programme then represents the answer to everything, calls for democracy within the party or in the relationship between the party and the rest of the class can only be confusionist, and thus, objectively counter-revolutionary. Bordiga himself was from working class origins but had educated himself and worked his way into a career as an agricultural engineer. To him notions such as the Kautsky/Lenin thesis that the working class were reliant on outside forces to intermediate scientific knowledge were self-evident nonsense. Still and all, he held to the core notions of economism (if anything he was the most deterministic of all), scientism (hence the disdain for democracy) and false consciousness (any deviation from the programme). In many ways, although an outsider compared to the SPD mainstream that formed Luxemburg, Pannekoek and Lenin, Bordiga was the most orthodox of the lot.

In the post-war period, all of the dissidents from the "official" communist movement of the Comintern linked parties, whether from Trotskyist, Council Communist or Bordigist origins remained trapped within the orthodox framework, despite their different bridging solutions and attempts to locate the origins of the failure of the Russian Revolution. Attempts to escape from rigid orthodoxy by going back to early dissidents like Lukács and the re-discovery of the writings of the early Marx on alienation, tended to lose themselves ineffectively in abstruse philosophy or simply end up falling back unto one or other of the micro-tendencies of the orthodox ultra-left. The Situationists, in the heady environment of the wave of struggles of the late 60s, were the first to raise the flag for a post-orthodox Marxism with their manifesto in which they rejected both economism and scientism. However, their escape was incomplete, entranced as they were by the false consciousness problem. Unable to fully recognise the objectivist origins of this concept or overcome it on anything other than with a superficial, idealist critique that was not itself able to overcome the apparent separation of circulation and production, they ended up falling back into the orthodox councillist politics of Socialisme ou Barbarie, albeit that they had formally broken their organisational ties some time before. Similarly a lot of the so-called "New Left" of the late 60s was clouded with variants of Maoism or Guevaraism, which, as an alternative to orthodoxy, was as much an advance as replacing Poker with Snap.

However, in Italy things were stirring. With the rise of the operaisti, Marxists at last encountered a new formulation that went beyond the cage-like framework of orthodoxy. The concept of class composition finally transcended the is/ought problem of false consciousness, economism was overturned with a renewed emphasis on class struggle as the motor of capitalist development, not some transcendent "objective laws of motion", technology was no longer a neutral power, but a weapon deployed in the class war by bosses against workers, but ones which could harm the wielder as well as the target and were not immune from being taken off the bosses and turned back against them. Naturally these developments were met with howls or protest from the orthodox faithful, Stalinist, Trotskyist and ultra-left alike, and indeed they still are. But the requirements of brevity have already been sorely tested, even stretched beyond all recognition, so we must leave it there for now.

* At this stage it should be pointed out that the tradition is when critiquing a certain reading of Marx, to counter perceived misreadings by other, contrasting quotes from Marx. We are not going to do this here, for the sake of brevity let’s just take it as read that the orthodox reading of Marx is not the only one available.
* Like most popular quotes, this isn’t entirely accurate. The actual phrase (at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto) is "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Die Geschichte aller bisherigen Gesellschaft ist die Geschichte von Klassenkämpfen). But, whatever, see previous note.