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Anti-Capitalism
A Marxist Introduction
Edited by
Alfredo Saad-Filho
2003
Pluto P Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
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Contents
Acknowledgements 00
Introduction 00
Alfredo Saad-Filho
Part I: Capital, Exploitation and Conflict
1. Value, Capital and Exploitation 00

Alfredo Saad-Filho
2. Does All Labour Create Value? 00
Simon Mohun
3. Money as Money and Money as Capital in a Capitalist
Economy 00
Costas Lapavitsas
4. Capitalist Competition and the Distribution of Profits 00
Diego Guerrero
5. Contesting Labour Markets 00
Ben Fine
6. Technological Change as Class Struggle 00
Les Levidow
7. Capitalism, Nature and the Class Struggle 00
Paul Burkett
Part II: Global Capitalism
8. The History of Capitalism 00

Michael Perelman
9. Globalisation and the State: Where is the Power of
Capital? 00
Ellen Meiksins Wood
10. Financial and Industrial Capital: a New Class Coalition 00
Suzanne de Brunhoff
11. War, Peace and Capitalism: Is Capitalism the Harbinger
of Peace or the Greatest Threat to World Peace? 00
Christopher Cramer
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vi Anti-Capitalism
12. Understanding Capitalism in the Third World 00

Elizabeth Dore
13. Developing Country Debt and Globalisation 00
John Weeks
14. Globalisation and the Subsumption of the Soviet Mode
of Production under Capital 00
Simon Clarke
Part III: Crisis and the Supersession of Capitalism
15. Capital Accumulation and Crisis 00

Paul Zarembka
16. Marxian Crisis Theory and the Postwar US Economy 00
Fred Moseley
17. Where is Class Struggle? 00
John Holloway
18. Transcending Capitalism: The Adequacy of Marxís Recipe 00
Michael Lebowitz
19. Towards a Society of Free and Associated Individuals:
Communism 00
Paresh Chattopadhyay
Contributors 00
Index 00
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Introduction1
Alfredo Saad-Filho
The need of a constantly expanding market … chases the bourgeoisie

over the whole surface of the globe … All old-established national
industries … are dislodged by new industries … that no longer work up
indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest
zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but
in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the
productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their sat-
isfaction the products of distant lands and climes … The bourgeoisie,
by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the
immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all … nations
into civilisation … It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt
the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it
calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
In one word, it creates a world after its own image.2
CAPITALISM AND ANTI-CAPITALISM

The Communist Manifesto rings even truer today than it did in 1848.
Key features of nineteenth-century capitalism are clearly recognis-
able, and even more strongly developed, in the early twenty-first
century. They include the internationalisation of trade, production
and finance, the growth of transnational corporations (TNCs), the
communications revolution, the diffusion of Western culture and
consumption patterns across the world, and so on.
Other traits of our age can also be found in the Manifesto. In the
early twenty-first century, powerful nations still rule the world by
political, economic and military means, and their gospel is zealously
preached by today’s missionaries of neoliberalism. They follow in
the footsteps of their ancestors, who drew strength from the holy
trinity of Victorian imperialism: God, British capital and the Royal
Navy. Today’s evangelists pay lip-service to human rights and the
elimination of poverty, but their faith lies elsewhere, in the sacred
tablets of copyright law and in the charter of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). They travel to all corners of the globe and, in
spite of untold hardship in anonymous five-star hotels, tirelessly
1
2 Anti-Capitalism
preach submission to Wall Street and the US government. They will

never take no for an answer. Native obduracy is initially explained
away by ignorance or corruption, and then ridiculed. However, even
saintly patience has its limits. Eventually, economic, diplomatic and
other forms of pressure may become necessary. In extreme circum-
stances, the White House may be forced to bomb the enemy into
submission, thus rendering another country safe for McDonalds.
It seems that, in spite of our fast cars, mobile phones and the
internet, the world has not, after all, changed beyond recognition
over the past 150 years. However, even if Marx can offer important
insights for understanding modern capitalism, what about his claim
that communism is the future of humanity? Surely the collapse of
the Soviet bloc, China’s economic reforms, and the implosion of left
organisations across the world prove that Marx was wrong?
Contributors to this book beg to differ. Anti-Capitalism: A Marxist
Introduction explains the structural features and the main shortcom-
ings of modern capitalism, in order to substantiate our case against
capitalism as a system. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 show that Marx’s value
theory provides important insights for understanding the modern
world, including the exploitation of the workers, the sources of
corporate power and the sickening extremes of overconsumption
and widespread poverty. Chapters 5, 10 and 17 claim that classes
exist, and that class struggle is, literally, alive and kicking around us.
Chapters 4 and 6 show that technical change is not primarily driven
by the urge to produce cheaper, better or more useful goods, but by
the imperatives of profit-making and social control. Chapter 8
reviews the driving forces of capitalism across history, and Chapter
7 shows that capitalism is inimical to the Earth’s ecological balance.
Whereas environmental sustainability demands a very long-term cal-
culation of costs and benefits, capitalism is based on short-term
rationality and profit maximisation. This social system must to be
confronted, in order to preserve the possibility of human life on this planet.
Chapters 9 to 16 challenge other idols of contemporary thought,
including the claims that capitalism promotes democracy, world
peace and equality within and between nations, that every debt
must be paid, that globalisation is unavoidable and unambiguously
good, that national states are powerless, and that economic crises
can be eliminated. Finally, Chapters 18 and 19 argue that capitalism
is both unsustainable and undesirable. In our view, communism is
justified not only on material but, especially, on human grounds.
Much of what we argue is obvious. Yet often the obvious must be
Introduction 3
demonstrated over and over again, until it becomes self-evident to

the majority.
This book also challenges the knee-jerk reaction against critiques
of contemporary capitalism, the trite motto that ‘there is no alter-
native’ (TINA). Leading proponents of TINA include rapacious
free-marketeers, prematurely aged philosophers of the ‘Third Way’,
delusional economists, opportunistic politicians, corrupt bureau-
crats, bankrupt journalists and other desperados. They claim that
human beings are genetically programmed to be greedy, that
capitalism is the law of nature, that transnational capital is usually
right, and that non-intrusive regulation is possible when it goes
wrong. They argue that capitalist societies, even though historically
recent, will last forever, and that the triumph of the market should
be embraced because it is both unavoidable and advantageous to all.
They reassure us that massive improvements in living standards are
just around the corner, and that only a little bit more belt-tightening
will suffice.
Deceptions such as these have helped to legitimise the growing
marketisation of most spheres of life in the last 20 years. In rich
countries, this has taken place primarily through the assault on the
social safety nets built after the Second World War. Low paid and
insecure jobs have been imposed on millions of workers, the
provision of public services has been curtailed, and the distribution
of income and wealth has shifted against the poor. In poor countries,
national development strategies have collapsed nearly everywhere.
Under Washington’s guidance, a bleak ‘era of adjustment’ has taken
hold across the so-called developing world. In these countries, low
expectations and policy conformity are enforced by usurious foreign
debts and neoliberal policy despotism monitored by the IMF, the
World Bank and the US Treasury Department. Recent experience
abundantly shows that neoliberalism tramples upon the achieve-
ments, lives and hopes of the poor everywhere, and that it often
leads to disastrous outcomes (see below).3
In spite of the much repeated claim that history is dead or, more
precisely, that significant social and political changes are no longer
possible, the neoliberal-globalist project has been facing difficult
challenges. It has suffered legitimacy problems in the United States
because of falling wages in spite of rising national income, in
Western Europe because of simmering social conflicts triggered by
high unemployment and stagnant living standards, and in Japan
because of the protracted economic crisis. It has had to contend with
4 Anti-Capitalism
the social and economic collapse of the former Soviet bloc, and with
repeated financial and balance-of-payments crises in South East Asia
and Latin America. It has also had to explain away the economic
and political meltdown in sub-Saharan Africa, and to face frequent
wars and unprecedented levels of terrorist activity across the world.
Last but not least, neoliberal globalism has been confronted by
profound disillusion everywhere, and by vibrant protests and mass
resistance, especially in Argentina, Ecuador, Indonesia, Mexico, the
Occupied Territories and South Korea.
In this context, the recent ‘anti-globalisation’ or ‘anti-capitalist’
protest movements are important for two reasons. First, they are
global in scope, combining campaigns that were previously waged
separately. In doing so, they have raised questions about the systemic
features of capitalism for the first time in a generation. Second, they
have shed a powerful light upon the dismal track record of contem-
porary capitalism. Although initially marginalised, these movements
shot to prominence in the wake of the Zapatista rebellion, the Jubilee
2000 campaign and the confrontations that brought to a halt the
Seattle WTO meeting. The new movements have joined vigorous
mass demonstrations in several continents, and they have shown
their opposition to the monopolistic practices of the TNCs,
including pharmaceutical giants and corporations attempting to
force-feed the world with genetically modified crops. They have
challenged patent laws and clashed against other forms of ‘corporate
greed’, leading to boycotts against Shell, Nike and other companies.
These movements have also targeted repressive regimes, such as
Myanmar’s military dictatorship, and shown international solidarity,
for example, with the Zapatistas and the Brazilian landless peasants.
In spite of their rapid growth, these movements remain
fragmented. Different organisations pursue widely distinct objectives
in diverse ways, and occasionally come into conflict with one
another. The lack of a common agenda can hamper their ability to
challenge established institutions and practices. Several pressure
groups, including the environmental, peace, women’s, gay, lesbian,
anti-racist and animal liberation movements, international solidarity
organisations, trade unions, leftist parties and other groups, defend
their autonomy vigorously, sometimes allowing sectional interests to
cloud their mutual complementarity. In spite of these limitations,
political maturity, organisational flexibility and heavy use of the
internet have allowed the new movements to expand. Moreover,
they have often been able to transcend the rules, habits and con-
Introduction 5
ventions that constrain the NGOs, trade unions, political parties and
other institutions of the left. Their recent successes show that there
is widespread discontent and fertile ground for the discussion of
alternatives, at different levels, around the world.
Continuing confrontation against the neoliberal-globalist project
and its destructive implications is inevitable. Perhaps more signifi-
cantly, it is likely that the anti-capitalist feeling previously
channelled through trade unions and political parties of the left has
found new outlets. If true, this shift will have important implica-
tions for the political landscape.
11 SEPTEMBER AND BEYOND

The growing opposition to the neoliberal–globalist project was tem-
porarily checked by the tragic events of 11 September 2001. In
response to those terrorist atrocities, the US government has
unleashed a loosely targeted state terrorist campaign against millions
of people, both at home and abroad. The most important thrust of
this strategy has been the so-called ‘infinite war’ against elusive (but
always carefully selected) adversaries. Rather than helping to resolve
existing grievances, US state terrorism has provided further excuses
for private terrorists around the world to target the United States and
its citizens. In our view, all forms of terrorism – whether private,
state-sponsored or state-led – are reactionary, repulsive, destructive,
criminal and utterly unacceptable.
The so-called ‘war on terror’ has been rationalised by the naked
conflation between the neoliberal-globalist agenda and US imperi-
alism. The global elite (the Washington-based ‘international
community’) has brazenly subordinated international law to US
foreign policy interests. It has granted itself a licence to apply
unlimited force against unfriendly regimes (‘rogue states’) or social
movements (‘terrorist organisations’), either for so-called humani-
tarian reasons or in order to defeat whatever it decides to call
‘terrorism’.4
The overwhelming military superiority of the United States allows
its government to pound foreign adversaries anywhere, secure in the
knowledge that its own casualties will be small and that the damage
to the other side will eventually crack the opposition. The war
unleashed by the United States and its vassal states against Iraq, in
1990–91, and further military action in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo,
Palestine, Panama, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere have
brought important gains to the global elite, not least unprecedented
6 Anti-Capitalism
security guarantees for its business interests. However, the cost of

these operations is incalculable. Conveniently, the victims are
almost invariably dark-skinned and poor. They speak incompre-
hensible languages and worship lesser gods. They live in intractable
trouble spots, which they are rarely allowed to leave because (in
contrast with their money and goods) they are not welcome abroad.
Their fate is of little concern, as long as they ultimately comply with
Western geopolitical designs.
The tragedy of 11 September has revealed the unexpected limits of
neoliberal globalism. The depth of dissatisfaction with Washington’s
political and economic rule has been exposed, and the claim that
trade and financial liberalisation can resolve the world’s most
pressing problems has suffered a severe blow. The argument that
states are powerless against the forces of globalisation has been
undermined by the expansionary economic policies adopted in the
wake of the attacks, and by the co-ordinated wave of repression
unleashed across the world. Repression included not only the restric-
tion of civil liberties, but also refined controls against capital flows
and the limitation of property rights, for example, against pharma-
ceutical patents in the United States at the height of the anthrax
threat. Finally, important anti-war movements emerged in several
countries, especially the United Kingdom and – courageously – the
United States.
In the wake of the tragedy of 11 September, the global elite seized
the opportunity to open its batteries against all forms of dissent.
Amid a rising tide of xenophobia and racism, rabid journalists cried
out that anti-corporate protests were also anti-American, and
scorned principled objections against the ‘war on terror’. Colourful
politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, eager to please their masters,
even claimed that the new protest movements share the same
objectives as Osama bin Laden.5
Difficulties such as these bring to the fore the need for clarity of
objectives and careful selection of targets when campaigning against
important features or consequences of modern capitalism. Unless
our objectives are clear and the instruments appropriate, we will be
unable to achieve our goals, at great cost to ourselves and the world.
Four issues play critical roles in the analysis of contemporary
capitalism and, consequently, in the search for alternatives: neolib-
eralism, globalisation, corporate power and democracy. It is to these
that we now turn.
Introduction 7
FOUR PRESSING ISSUES

Neoliberalism
In the last 20 years, for the first time in history, there has been a
concerted attempt to implement a single worldwide economic
policy, under the guise of neoliberalism. The IMF, the World Bank,
the US Treasury Department and, more recently, the European
Central Bank (ECB), have strongly campaigned for neoliberalism,
and they have sternly advised countries everywhere to abide by their
commands. In this endeavour, they have been supported by the
mainstream media, prestigious intellectuals, bankers, industrialists,
landowners, speculators and opportunists vying for profits in every
corner of the globe.
The spread of neoliberalism is due to several factors. These include
the rise of conservative political forces in the United States, the
United Kingdom and other countries, and the growing influence of
mainstream theory within economics, both in its traditional form
and through new institutionalism.6 The forward march of neoliber-
alism was facilitated by the perceived failure of Keynesianism in the
rich countries and developmentalism in poor ones, and by the
collapse of the Soviet bloc. Finally, the US government has leaned
heavily on the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations and the
World Trade Organisation (WTO) to promote neoliberal policies
everywhere. Pressure by these organisations has validated the
increasing use of aid, debt relief and foreign investment as tools with
which to extract policy reforms from foreign governments.
Neoliberal policies are based on three premises. First, the
dichotomy between markets and the state. Neoliberalism presumes
that the state and the market are distinct and mutually exclusive
institutions, and that one expands only at the expense of the other.
Second, it claims that markets are efficient, whereas states are
wasteful and economically inefficient. Third, it argues that state
intervention creates systemic economic problems, especially
resource misallocation, rent-seeking behaviour and technological
backwardness.
These premises imply that certain economic policies are ‘naturally’
desirable. These include, first, rolling back the state in order to
institute ‘free markets’, for example, through privatisation and dereg-
ulation of economic activity. Second, tight fiscal and monetary
policies, including tax reforms and expenditure cuts, in order to
control inflation and limit the scope for state intervention. Third,
8 Anti-Capitalism
import liberalisation and devaluation of the exchange rate, to

promote specialisation according to comparative advantage,
stimulate exports and increase competition in the domestic market.
Fourth, liberalisation of capital flows, to attract foreign capital and
increase domestic capacity to consume and invest. Fifth, liberalisa-
tion of the domestic financial system, to increase savings and the
rate of return on investment. Sixth, labour market flexibility, to
increase the level of employment. Seventh, overhauling the legal
system, in order to create or protect property rights. Eighth, political
democracy, not in order to safeguard freedom and human rights but,
primarily, to dilute state power and reduce the ability of the majority
to influence economic policy.
It has been obvious for many years that these policies are
successful only exceptionally. Economic performance during the last
20 years, in rich and poor countries alike, has been disappointing,
with growth rates usually lagging behind those in the preceding
(Keynesian) period. Poverty levels have not declined significantly, if
at all; inequality within and between countries has increased sub-
stantially; large capital flows have been associated with currency
crises, and the fêted economic transition in the former Soviet bloc
has been an abysmal failure (at least for the majority). Neoliberals
invariably claim that these disasters show the need for further
reform. However, it is equally logical, and more reasonable, to
conclude that the neoliberal reforms share much of the blame for
the dismal economic performance in rich as well as poor countries.
The above conclusion is reinforced by five theoretical arguments.7
First, neoliberal reforms introduce policies that destroy large
numbers of jobs and entire industries, tautologically deemed to be
‘inefficient’, whilst relying on the battered patient to generate
healthy alternatives through the presumed efficacy of market forces.
This strategy rarely works. The depressive impact of the elimination
of traditional industries is generally not compensated by the rapid
development of new ones, leading to structural unemployment,
growing poverty and marginalisation, and to a tighter balance-of-
payments constraint in the afflicted countries.
Second, neoliberal faith in the market contradicts even elementary
principles of neoclassical economic theory. For example, in their
‘second best analysis’, developed half a century ago, Lipsey and
Lancaster demonstrate that, if an economy departs from the
perfectly competitive ideal on several counts (as all economies
invariably do), the removal of one ‘imperfection’ may not make it
Introduction 9
more efficient. Therefore, even mainstream economic theory can

explain why neoliberal reforms can be worse than useless.
Third, the presumption that the market is virtuous while the state
is wasteful, corrupt and inefficient is simply wrong. This false
dichotomy is often employed in order to justify state intervention on
behalf of capital (for example, privatisation and the curtailment of
trade union rights facilitate capitalist abuse, consumer ‘fleecing’ and
the increased exploitation of the workforce). In fact, states and
markets are both imperfect and inseparable. They include many
different types of institutions, whose borders cannot always be
clearly distinguished. For example, the inland revenue service,
financial services regulatory agencies, accounting and consultancy
firms and state-owned and private banks are inextricably linked to
one another, but the precise nature of their relationship is necessar-
ily circumstantial.
Fourth, economic policies normally do not involve unambiguous
choices between state and markets but, rather, choices between
different forms of interaction between institutions in the two
spheres. Privatisation, for example, may not imply a retreat of the
state or even increased efficiency. The outcome depends on the firm,
its output, management and strategy, the form of privatisation, the
regulatory framework, the strength and form of competition, and
other factors.
Fifth, developed markets arise only through state intervention. The
state establishes the institutional and regulatory framework for
market transactions, including property rights and law enforcement.
It regulates the provision of infrastructure, ensures that a healthy,
trained and pliant workforce is available, and controls social conflict.
The state establishes and regulates professional qualifications and
the accounting conventions, and develops a system of tax collection,
transfers and expenditures that influences the development of
markets, firm performance, and employment patterns. Since
capitalist economies rely heavily and necessarily on state institu-
tions, attempts to measure the degree of state intervention are simply
misguided. What really matters is the gains and losses for each type
of state policy, and the implementation of purposeful and co-
ordinated policies.
This approach to markets and states does not deny the Marxian
claim that the state is ‘a committee for managing the common affairs
of the whole bourgeoisie’8 or that it is ‘an essentially capitalist
machine … the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all
10 Anti-Capitalism
capitalists’.9 The reasons are easy to understand. First, the state is

constitutionally committed to capitalism by custom and law, and state
institutions are geared towards, and have been historically shaped
by the development of markets, wage employment and profit-
making activities. Second, the staffing and policy priorities of the
state institutions are heavily influenced by the interest groups rep-
resented in and through them, where capital tends to be hegemonic.
Third, the reproduction of the state relies heavily on the fortunes of
capital, because state revenue depends upon the profitability of
enterprise and the level of employment. Fourth, the economic and
political power of the capitalists, and their influence upon culture,
language and habits, is overwhelming, especially in democratic
societies. Although the commodification of votes, state control of
the media and the imposition of openly ideological selection criteria
for state officials are usually associated with the strong-arm tactics of
African chiefs and Latin American landlords, they are nowhere more
prominent than in the United States.
In conclusion, economic policy and its effects are both context-
dependent and structured by the needs of capital. On the one hand,
pressure for or against specific policies can be effective, and the
ensuing policy choices can improve significantly the living
conditions of the majority. On the other hand, these potential
successes are limited. When faced with ‘unacceptable’ policies, the
capitalists will refuse to invest, employ, produce and pay taxes; they
will trigger balance-of-payments crises, cripple the government,
paralyse the state and hold the workers to ransom. And they will not
hesitate to resort to violence to defend their power and privileges.
History abundantly shows that most state institutions, including the
police and the armed forces, will rally around the moneyed interests
and seek to protect them against challenges from below.
Globalisation
‘Hyper-globalism’ is the international face of neoliberalism. During
the 1990s, analysts and pundits stridently claimed that develop-
ments in technology, communications, culture, ideology, finance,
production, migration and the environment have modified the
world beyond recognition. Drawing on these superficial insights, the
‘hyper-globalists’ argue that globalisation entails the supremacy of
international over domestic institutions, the decline of state power,
and the relentless domination of social life by global markets.10
Introduction 11
Neoliberals have been at the forefront of the hyper-globalist

assault. Most neoliberals proclaim both the virtues and the
inevitability of the coming world market for everything (except
labour, to be kept caged behind borders). They argue that markets
ought to reign unimpeded by national legislation and meddling
international organisations and, implausibly, claim that policy sub-
ordination to global imperatives is essential for national welfare.
Hyper-globalist views have been discredited by a range of critical
studies. These studies show, first, that global integration builds upon,
rather than denies, the existence of nation states, which remain the
seat of legitimacy and political and economic power. Rather than
withering away because of the penetration of TNCs, vast interna-
tional capital flows and the weight of international treaties, the
critics have argued that powerful states promote international inte-
gration in pursuit of their own agendas, especially improved
competitive positions for home capital in key business areas. Second,
global neoliberalism has been associated with undesirable outcomes,
including increasing poverty and inequality, the debasement of
democracy and the erosion of the welfare state, to the benefit of
powerful corporations and financial interests. Third, the critical
literature claims that globalisation is neither new nor overwhelm-
ing. It was preceded by similar episodes, especially before the First
World War; it is not truly ‘global’, being largely restricted to trade
and investment flows between developed countries and, even in this
restricted sphere, capital is not ‘free’ to move at will; finally, in spite
of appearances to the contrary, the net macroeconomic effect of
trade and financial liberalisation is often very small. Fourth, the
critics argue that the hyper-globalists conflate ‘global’ markets with
the theoretical construct of perfect competition, characterised by
perfect information and costless capital mobility. This confusion
provides ideological cover for pro-business policies and for aggressive
state intervention to foster private capital accumulation.
These critiques of hyper-globalism have led to three policy con-
clusions, which may or may not be mutually compatible. Some have
argued for ‘localisation’, or the decentralisation of the world
economy with increasing reliance on local production and exchange.
Others have emphasised the need to democratise policy-making,
including an increased role for sector-specific trade and industrial
policy and national controls on capital flows. Yet others have pursued
‘internationalisation’, or the reform and revitalisation of interna-
12 Anti-Capitalism
tional institutions (the UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO, EU, ECB, and so
on), in order to promote the positive aspects of globalisation.11
Unfortunately, there are severe problems with each of these alter-
natives. ‘Localisation’ promotes small capital vis-à-vis large capital,
represented by TNCs. This can be analytically misguided, because it
ignores the close relationship that exists between large and small
firms. For example, small firms often cluster around and supply parts
and other inputs to large firms, provide cleaning and maintenance
services, and so on. Their relationship can be so close as to render
‘separation’ between these firms impossible. Moreover, small firms
tend to be financially fragile, lack the resources for technical
innovation and the adoption of new technologies developed
elsewhere, cannot supply large markets, and often treat their
workforces more harshly than large firms. Finally, curbing the TNCs
will inevitably reduce the availability of important commodities
across the globe, including foodstuffs, electronic appliances and
industrial machinery.
Attempts to ‘recover’ industrial policy for progressive ends can be
successful; however, misguided policies can be useless and even
counterproductive. Finally, ‘internationalisation’ is utopian. Most
international institutions are firmly under the grip of the neoliberal-
globalist elites, and it is unrealistic to expect that control can be
wrested from them. In most cases, these institutions ought to be
abolished, to be replaced, when necessary, by alternatives designed
from scratch.
The insufficiencies of these critiques of hyper-globalism are often
due to the misguided opposition between the global, national and
local spheres. This separation mirrors that between markets and
states, discussed above. In general, those spheres should not be
contrasted as if they were mutually exclusive, because they
constitute one another and can be understood only through their
mutual relationship.
Specifically, the presumption that the local and national
economies are the building blocs of the global economy is
misguided. The so-called ‘global’ economy is nothing but the
commuters daily going to the Manhattan financial district and the
City of London, manual workers clocking into position in the Ruhr,
English-speaking call-centre workers cycling to their jobs in Mumbai,
stevedores working in Maputo, and hundreds of millions of workers
producing for people living in distant lands, and consuming not
only locally produced goods but also commodities produced
Introduction 13
elsewhere. In this sense, there is little difference between domestic

and cross-border economic transactions, and economic growth nec-
essarily encompasses the simultaneous development of the local,
national and global economies. In fact, there are reasons to believe,
first, that important aspects of production and finance have always
been ‘international’. Second, that long-distance trade has been more
important for social and economic development than exchanges
between neighbours. Third, that capitalism originally developed
neither in a single country nor in discrete regions, but locally,
regionally and internationally at the same time.
Terms like ‘globalisation’ or the ‘internationalisation of production
and finance’, on their own, are simply devoid of meaning. Capital is
neither national nor international; it is a relationship between people
that appears as things or money. Consequently, there is nothing
intrinsically national or international about capitalist institutions,
production or practices. Detailed studies have shown, for example,
that ‘globalisation’ is not a homogeneous, unidirectional and
inevitable process taking place between neatly separated national
economies. Globalisation does not tend to ‘eliminate’ the nation
state, and recent developments in production, finance, culture, the
environment, and so on are profoundly different from one another
and must be analysed separately. What is often called ‘globalisation’
is, in fact, a set of more or less interlocking processes, some articu-
lated systemically and others largely contingent, moving in different
speeds and directions across different areas of the world economy.
Some of these processes tend to erode national states and local
identities, while other reinforce them.
Both wholesale support for ‘globalisation’ and wholesale
opposition to it are profoundly misguided (for example, it makes no
sense for a global protest movement to be called ‘anti-globalisation’).
What matters, at the local, national and global levels, is what is
produced and how, by whom, and for whose benefit. In the early
twenty-first century, as in the mid-nineteenth century, the distances
between people matter less than the relationships between them.
Similarly, geography remains less important than the social
structures of control and exploitation that bind people together
within cities, between regions, and across the world.
Corporate power
The new ‘anti-capitalist’ movements are famously critical of the large
corporations, especially TNCs. This section argues that the market
14 Anti-Capitalism
power and political influence of TNCs raise important ethical and

economic questions. However, TNCs are not new, and their recent
expansion is not the harbinger of fundamental changes in the
economic and political landscape. Therefore it would be misguided
to try to turn them into the main focus of resistance.
Several commentators sympathetic to the new movements claim
that one of the most important problems of contemporary
capitalism is the excessive tilting of power towards the large corpo-
rations. The causes and implications of this process are usually left
unexamined, although they are presumably related to neoliberalism
and globalisation. It is also left unclear what should be done about
it, other than imposing unspecified curbs against corporate power.
This is clearly insufficient. Arguments along those lines are often
fruitless because they are not based on a consistent theory of the
state and its relationship to the corporations, and on a theory of
monopoly power and capitalist behaviour, without which corporate
practices cannot be understood. For example, although it is right to
claim that the state is controlled by capitalist interests and forces
(see above), it is wrong to ascribe boundless power to specific groups
or interests, such as the TNCs, financiers, landlords or foreign capi-
talists. No social group can exist in isolation, and none exercises
unlimited power.
Let us analyse in more detail the claim that ‘large firms’ control
production, exchange, distribution and the political process. This
view is incorrect for four reasons. First, it artificially disassembles
capital into ‘large’ and ‘small’ units (see above). Second, it suggests
that small firms, such as tiny grocery stores, family-owned
newsagents and small farms conform more closely to local interests,
as if they were independent of the large firms which they represent
and that provide them with inputs and markets, and as if small firms
were renowned for their promotion of employee interests. Third, it
erroneously implies that the evils of capitalism are due to the large
firms only, and that these wrongs can be put right by anti-monopoly
legislation and domestic market protection against foreign firms.
Fourth, this view misrepresents ‘competitive capitalism’, as if it had
actually existed at some idyllic point in the past. In this idealised
image of Victorian capitalism, unsightly features such as poverty,
imperialism, slavery, genocide and the forces that transformed ‘com-
petitive’ into ‘monopoly’ capitalism are arbitrarily expunged.
Sleights of hand such as these, and the lack of a theory of
capital, the state, competition and monopoly power, explain the
Introduction 15
coexistence of critiques of corporate practices with pathetic

apologias for capitalism. For example, in the words of a well-known
critic of ‘globalisation’:
My argument is not intended to be anti-capitalist. Capitalism is

clearly the best system for generating wealth, and free trade and
open capital markets have brought unprecedented economic
growth for most if not all of the world. Nor is … [it] anti-business
… [U]nder certain market conditions, business is more able and
willing than government to take on many of the world’s problems
… I mean to question the moral justification for a brand of
capitalism … in which we cannot trust governments to look after
our interests in which unelected powers – big corporations – are
taking over governments’ roles.12
This approach is profoundly misguided. The outrageous behaviour

of large corporations, from the East India Company to Microsoft,
and from ITT to Monsanto, is not primarily due to their size, greed,
or the support of states that they have hijacked at some mysterious
point in time. Corporate practices and monopoly power are due to
the forces of competition. By the same token, our collective addiction
to McChickens and corporate logos is not simply due to the crude
manipulation of our desires by brutish TNCs. Corporate behaviour,
and its welfare implications, is ultimately rooted in the dominance
of a system of production geared towards private profit rather than
collective need.
Democracy
Several critics have recently highlighted the increasing emasculation
of democracy, the erosion of citizenship and the declining account-
ability of the state even in ‘advanced’ democratic societies. These
processes are often blamed on the capture of the state by corporate
and other interest groups. However, this view is misleading, and the
explanation is inadequate.
This section briefly reviews the relationship between the state,
capital, the political regime and economic policy. Along with most
of the literature, it claims that political freedom is immensely
valuable, and that the spread of democracy across the world has been
possible only through the diffusion of capitalism. However, this
section also shows that capitalism necessarily limits democracy, and
16 Anti-Capitalism
that the expansion of democracy into critically important areas of

life requires the abolition of capitalism.13
A remarkable distinction between precapitalist and capitalist
societies is the separation, in the latter, between the ‘economic’ and
‘political’ spheres. This separation means that, under capitalism,
‘economic’ processes – including the production, exchange and dis-
tribution of goods and services, the compulsion to work and the
exploitation of the workers – are generally carried out ‘impersonally’,
through market mechanisms. It is completely different in pre-
capitalist societies. In these societies, economic processes are directly
subordinated to political authority, including both personal
command and state power, and they generally follow rules based on
hierarchy, tradition and religious duty.
The separation between the economic and political spheres has
three important implications. First, it leads to the constitution of a
separate ‘political’ sphere. For the first time in history, the owners
of the means of production are relieved from public duty, which
becomes the preserve of state officials. The separation of the political
sphere establishes the potential and limits of state intervention in
the economy, including the scope of economic policy and the pos-
sibility of ‘autonomous’ political change, with no direct implication
for the ‘economic’ order. The substance and degree of democracy is
a case in point (see below).
Second, separation entrenches capitalist power within the
‘economic’ sphere. Manifestations of economic power include the
ownership and control of means of production (the factories,
buildings, land, machines, tools and other equipment and materials
necessary for the production of goods and services), the right to
control the production process and discipline the workforce, and the
ability to exploit the workers.
Third, the separation between the economic and political spheres
is relative rather than absolute. On the one hand, the ‘political’
power of the state and the ‘economic’ power of the capitalists may
lead to conflict, for example, over the conditions of work, the
minimum wage, pension provisions and environmental regulations.
On the other hand, we have already seen that modern states are
essentially capitalist. Experience shows that the state will intervene
directly both in ‘political’ conflicts (for example, the scope of
democratic rights) and in purely ‘economic’ disputes (for example,
pay and conditions in large industries), if state officials believe that
their own rule or the reproduction of capital are being unduly
Introduction 17
challenged. When intervening, the state relies on the power of the

law, the police and, in extremis, the armed forces.
The existence of a separate political sphere, explained above,
implies that capitalism is compatible with political (formal or
procedural) democracy. Political democracy includes the rule of law,
party-political pluralism, free and regular elections, freedom of the
press, respect for human rights, and other institutions and practices
that are essential for the consolidation of human freedom.
However, capitalism necessarily limits the scope for freedom
because it is inimical to economic (substantive) democracy. These
limits are imposed by the capitalist monopoly over the economic
sphere, explained above. For example, the franchise and political
debate are not generally allowed to ‘interfere’ with the ownership
and management of the production units and, often, even with the
composition of output and the patterns and conditions of
employment, in spite of their enormous importance for social
welfare. In other words, even though political campaigns can
achieve important transformations in the property rights and work
practices, the scope for democratic intervention in the economic
sphere is always limited.
The limits of capitalist democracy come into view, for example,
when attempts to expand political control over the social affairs are
constrained by the lack of economic democracy – typically, when
governments or mass movements attempt to modify property rights
by constitutional means. The resulting clashes were among the main
causes of the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the overthrow of
Chilean president Salvador Allende and, less conspicuously but
equally significantly, the failure of attempted land reforms across
Latin America. Mass movements attempting to shift property rights
by legal means but against the interests of the state have also been
crushed repeatedly, in many countries. In these clashes, the success
of the conservative forces often depends upon the arbitrary
limitation of political democracy. This implies that political
democracy is rarely able to challenge successfully the economic
power of the capitalist class (embodied in their ‘core’ property
rights). This is not a matter of choice: the advance of political
democracy is permanently limited by the lack of economic democracy.
Tensions between economic and political democracy generally
surface through the ebb and flow of political democracy and civil
rights. These tensions are nowhere more visible than in the
‘developing’ countries. In recent years, multi-party democracy and
18 Anti-Capitalism
universal suffrage have been extended across the world, the

repressive powers of the state have been curtailed by the United
Nations and the International Court of Justice, and by the precedents
established by the Pinochet affair and the prosecution of officials of
the former Rwandan government.
In spite of these important advances, the forward march of
political democracy has been severely hampered by the exclusion of
economic matters from legitimate debate. The imposition of neolib-
eralism across the world is the most important cause of these
limitations. Because of neoliberalism, worldwide policy-making
capacity has been increasingly concentrated in Washington and in
Wall Street, leaving only matters of relatively minor importance
open for debate, both in ‘developing’ and developed countries.
Specifically, in the ‘newly democratic’ states of Latin America, sub-
Saharan Africa and South East Asia the transitions towards political
democracy were generally conditional upon compromises that ruled
out substantive shifts in social and economic power. Even more
perversely, in these countries the imposition of neoliberal policies often
depended upon the democratic transition. After several decades
attempting to subvert democratic governments and shore up dicta-
torships across the globe, the US government and most local elites
have realised that democratic states can follow diktats from
Washington and impose policies inimical to economic democracy
more easily and reliably than most dictatorships. This is due to the
greater political legitimacy of formally democratic governments.
This argument can be put in another way. Repression is often
necessary in order to extract the resources required to service the
foreign debt, shift development towards narrow comparative
advantage and support parasitical industrial and financial systems.
However, dictatorships can rarely impose the level of repression
necessary to implement neoliberal policies. This is something that
only democratic states can do successfully, because their greater
legitimacy allows them to ignore popular pressure for longer (however, the
recent upheavals in Argentina show that this strategy is also limited).
In this sense, the neoliberal-globalist project involves a funda-
mental inconsistency: it requires inclusive political systems to enforce
excluding economic policies. These policies demand states hostile to
the majority, even though democratic states are supposedly
responsive to democratic pressure. As a result, we see across the
world the diffusion of formally democratic but highly repressive states.
We also see the perpetuation of social exclusion and injustice, in
Introduction 19
spite of political pluralism and the consolidation of democratic insti-

tutions in many countries.
‘Democratic neoliberalism’ has consolidated economic apartheid
both within and between countries. Economic apartheid includes
the increasing concentration of income and wealth, the segregation
of the upper classes in residential, work and leisure enclosures, their
unwillingness and inability to interact with the poor in most spheres
of social and civic life, the diffusion of organised and heavily armed
criminal gangs, and unbridled corruption in state institutions.
Economic apartheid and the evacuation of economic democracy
can be at least partly reversed through successful mass struggles.
These struggles can limit the power of industrial and financial
interests, and open the possibility of policy alternatives leading to
improvements in the living conditions of the majority. However,
democracy can be extended into critically important spheres of life
only if the capitalist monopoly over the economic sphere is
abolished. In this sense, the success of the struggle depends on the
extent to which the democratic movement becomes anti-capitalist.
THE WAY AHEAD

The previous section has shown that we should not expect signifi-
cant transformations of contemporary capitalism through appeals
for the restoration of state power, the reform of international insti-
tutions, campaigns for corporate responsibility or the expansion of
formal democracy. Reforms are certainly possible in these and in
other areas, and they can increase greatly the power and influence
of the majority. However, these reforms are always limited and, even
if successful, they will be permanently at risk because they fail to
address the root cause of the problems of contemporary capitalism.
Strategic success depends on five conditions. First, holism.
Successful challenges against different forms of discrimination,
‘shallow’ democracy, the inequities of debt, the destructive effects
of trade and capital flows, environmental degradation, corporate
irresponsibility, and so on, require the consolidation of sectoral
struggles into a single mass movement against the global rule of
capital – the root cause of these wrongs.
Second, whilst the movement ought to remain international, it
should focus its energies in the national terrain. This is only partly
because the potential efficacy of the struggle is maximised at this
level (it is much harder to mobilise successfully in the international
sphere). It is also because national states play an essential role in the
20 Anti-Capitalism
choice and implementation of economic policy, the operation of

markets and the limitation of corporate power. Moreover, ‘global
capitalism’ is organised primarily nationally, and its actors (TNCs,
international organisations, global markets, and so on) depend
heavily upon state promotion and regulation.
It was shown above that there is no such thing as global capitalism
independently of national states and local workers and capitalists.
By the same token, the most effective means of influencing ‘global’
developments is by exercising pressure upon national states. In fact,
it is because the national states are the critical and, at the same time,
the weakest links in the ‘global economy’ that capital endlessly
repeats the myth that globalisation renders the state powerless and
irrelevant.14
Third, the movement should develop further the ability to mobilise
large numbers of people by non-traditional means, and pursue innovative
forms of struggle.
Fourth, the growth of the movement depends heavily upon its
ability to incorporate the immediate concerns of the majority. These
includes issues related to unemployment and overwork, low pay,
lack of employment security and rights in the workplace, the degra-
dation of heavily populated environments, the provision of public
health, sanitation and clean and efficient transport and energy, and
so on. Success also requires closer attention to the workplace, which
is the basis of capitalist domination and economic power. Unity
between economic and political struggles, and challenges against
both capital and the state, especially through mass confrontation
against state economic policy and its consequences, are important
conditions for growth and victory.15
Fifth, given the limits of political democracy and state power, the
achievement of equality and the elimination of poverty and
exploitation within and between countries demands transcendence,
or the abolition of capitalism. These conclusions are explained and
substantiated by every essay in this book.
LEAVING CAPITALISM BEHIND

Social reformers, utopian socialists, anarchists, social democrats,
Marxists and many others have questioned the legitimacy and desir-
ability of capitalism for at least two centuries. However, it is beyond
dispute that Marxism provides the basis for the most comprehensive
critique of this social and economic system, including the develop-
ment of the radical alternative to capitalism: communism. The
Introduction 21
Marxist analysis of transcendence can be divided into two areas, the

critique of capitalism and the importance of communism.
Several problems of contemporary capitalism have been discussed
above and, in each case, the root cause of these problems and the
limits to their potential solution under capitalism were highlighted.
Some of these problems can be remedied within the current system,
for example, the erosion of political democracy, lack of corporate
responsibility, and absolute poverty. In contrast, other problems
cannot be resolved, because they are features of capitalism; among
them, unemployment, exploitation of the workforce, economic
inequality, the encroachment of work upon free time, systematic
environmental degradation, the lack of economic democracy, and
production for profit rather than need. Problems such as these can,
at best, be concealed by propaganda and mitigated by economic
prosperity.
Marxists claim that the limitations of capitalism can be eliminated
only through the institution of another form of social organisation,
communism. The misrepresentation of communism in the past two
centuries cannot be put right in this book. However, three
comments are in order. First, communism should not be confused
with the political systems associated with the USSR or China.16
Second, communism is neither inexorable nor unavoidable.
Capitalism will change and, ultimately, be displaced, only if over-
whelming pressure is applied by the majority. Failing that, capitalism
may persist indefinitely, in spite of its rising human and environ-
mental costs. Third, communism is neither an earthly version of
paradise, nor the ‘end of history’. Quite the contrary: communism
marks the end of the prehistory of human society. Communism will
eliminate the socially created constraints of poverty, drudgery,
exploitation, environmental degradation, and other limitations
currently caused by the manic search for profit. Removal of these
constraints will allow history to begin, because human beings will,
finally, free themselves from the dictatorship of moneyed interests,
destitution due to large-scale property, and inequality engendered
by wealth and privileged upbringing. Economic equality is essential for
political equality, thus allowing everyone to become a valued member
of a truly open society.
The struggle against capitalism is part and parcel of the struggle
for democracy in society and in the workplace, against profit and
privilege, and for equality of opportunity for everyone. These are
22 Anti-Capitalism
the struggles that define the new movements, but taken to their
logical conclusion.
REFERENCES
Arestis, P. and Sawyer, M. (1998) ‘New Labour, New Monetarism’, Soundings,
Summer; reprinted in European Labour Forum 20, Winter, 1998–99.
Barker, C. (2001) ‘Socialists’, in E. Bircham and J. Charlton (eds.) Anti-
Capitalism: a Guide to the Movement. London: Bookmarks.
Callinicos, A. (2001) ‘Where Now?’, in E. Bircham and J. Charlton (eds) Antic-
ipation: A Guide to the Movement. London: Bookmarks.
Chattopadhyay, P. (1994) The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet
Experience: Essay in the Critique of Political Economy. Westport, Conn.:
Praeger.
Engels, F. (1998) Anti-Duhring, CD-Rom. London: Electric Books.
Fine, B. (2001) Globalisation and Development: The Imperative of Political
Economy, unpublished manuscript.
Fine, B., Lapavitsas, C. and Pincus, J. (eds.) (2001) Development Policy in the
Twenty-first Century: Beyond the Post-Washington Consensus. London:
Routledge.
Fine, B. and Stoneman, C. (1996) ‘Introduction: State and Development’,
Journal of Southern African Studies 22 (1), pp. 5–26.
German, L. (2001) ‘War’, in E. Bircham and J. Charlton (eds.) AntiCapitalism:
A Guide to the Movement. London: Bookmarks.
Hertz, N. (2001) The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of
Democracy. London: William Heinemann.
Karliner, J. (2001) ‘Where Do We Go From Here? Pondering the Future of
Our Movement’, CorpWatch, 11 October 2001 (www.corpwatch.org).
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1998) The Communist Manifesto, Cd-Rom. London:
The Electric Book Company.
Radice, H. (2000) ‘Responses to Globalisation: a Critique of Progressive
Nationalism’, New Political Economy 5 (1), pp. 5–19.
WDM (2000) States of Unrest: Resistance to IMF Policies in Poor Countries.
London: World Development Movement (www.wdm.org).
Wood, E.M. (1981) ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in
Capitalism’, New Left Review 127, pp. 66–95.
Wood, E.M. (1988) ‘Capitalism and Human Emancipation’, New Left Review
167, January-February, pp. 3–20
Wood, E.M. (2002) ‘Global Capital, National States’, in M. Rupert and H.
Smith (eds.) Now More Than Ever: Historical Materialism and Globalisation.
London: Routledge, forthcoming.
NOTES
1. I am grateful to Ben Fine and Mike Lebowitz for their helpful comments
and suggestions.
2. Marx and Engels (1998, pp. 13–14), emphasis added.
3. Resistance against IMF policies in poor countries is documented in WDM
(2000).
4. See German (2001, pp. 126–127).
Introduction 23
5. ‘G7 activists no better than Bin Laden’ (London Evening Standard,

November 5, 2001). Similar claims were reportedly made by US Repre-
sentative Don Young, US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and
Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, among others (Karliner 2001).
6. See Fine, Lapavitsas and Pincus (2001).
7. See Arestis and Sawyer (1998) and Fine and Stoneman (1996), on which
this section draws, and the references therein.
8. Marx and Engels (1998, p. 12).
9. Engels (1998, p. 352).
10. This section draws on the critical surveys by Radice (2000) and,
especially, Fine (2001).
11. For a similar analysis, see Callinicos (2001).
12. Hertz (2001, p. 10).
13. For a detailed analysis, see Wood (1981).
14. See Wood (2002).
15. Barker (2001, p. 333) rightly argues that ‘Putting a brick through the
window of Starbucks is a moral gesture, but an ineffective one.
Organising Starbucks workers is harder, but more effective – and hurts
the Starbucks bosses more … We need to focus on people’s lives as
producers and not simply as consumers – for there is a power in
producers’ hands that consumer boycotts can never match. In any case,
many consumers can’t afford to “choose”‘. Isaac Deutscher made a
similar point to student activists in the mid-1960s: ‘You are efferves-
cently active on the margin of social life, and the workers are passive
right at the core of it. That is the tragedy of our society. If you do not deal
with this contrast, you will be defeated’ (cited in Wood 1988, p. 4).
16. See Chattopadhyay (1994).
1 Value, Capital and

Exploitation1
Alfredo Saad-Filho
This chapter explains the essential elements of Marx’s theory of value

and exploitation.2 This theory provides the foundation for his
critique of capitalism, and it substantiates Marx’s claim that
capitalism is a historically limited system. Important elements of
Marx’s theory include his explanation of why wage workers are
exploited, the sources of social conflict, the inevitability of, and
systematic form taken by technical change through the growing use
of machinery, the determinants of wages, prices and distribution, the
role of the financial system and the recurrence of economic crises.
COMMODITIES
If you lift your eyes from this page for a moment, you can see com-
modities everywhere. This book is a commodity and, in all likelihood,
so are your other books, clothes and shoes, your TV, CD player,
computer and other means of information and entertainment, and
your home, bicycle, car and other means of transportation. Your
beauty products are also commodities, and so are your holidays and
food, including ready-made foods and the means to prepare food at
home. Commodities are not only for individual consumption. At
your place of work or study, most things are also commodities. You
live in a world of commodities.
Commodities are goods and services produced for sale, rather than
for consumption by their own producers. Commodities have two
common features. On the one hand, they are use values: they have
some characteristic that people find useful. The nature of their
demand, whether it derives from physiological need, social
convention, fancy or vice is irrelevant for our purposes. What
matters is that commodities must be useful for others, making them
potentially saleable.
On the other hand, commodities have exchange value: they can,
in principle, be exchanged for other commodities (through money,
see below) in specific ratios. For example, one small TV set is
equivalent to one bicycle, three pairs of shoes, ten music CDs, one
27
28 Anti-Capitalism
hundred cappuccinos, and so on. Exchange value shows that, in

spite of their distinct use values, commodities are equivalent (at least
in one respect) to one another. In this sense, in spite of their differ-
ences all commodities are the same.
In commodity economies (where most goods and services are
commodities) money fulfils two roles. First, it simplifies the vast
number of bilateral exchange ratios between these commodities. In
practice, only the exchange value of commodities in terms of money
(their price) is quoted, and this is sufficient to establish the equiva-
lence ratios between all commodities. Second, commodity exchanges
are usually indirect, taking place through money. For example, you
do not produce all the goods and services that you want to consume.
Rather, you specialise in the production of one commodity – say,
restaurant meals, if you are a cook – and exchange it for those com-
modities that you want to consume. These exchanges are not direct
(barter), as they would be if cooks offered their dishes to passers-by
in exchange for cinema tickets, shoes, songs and automobiles.
Instead, you sell your talents to a restaurateur in return for money
and, armed with notes and coins (or a chequebook or bank card),
you can purchase what you wish to consume (see Chapter 3).
LABOUR
The double nature of commodities, as use values with exchange
value, has implications for labour. On the one hand, commodity-
producing labour is concrete labour, producing specific use values
such as clothes, food, books, and so on. On the other hand, as was
shown above, when goods are produced for exchange (and have
exchange value) they have a relationship of equivalence to one
another. In this case, labour is also abstract (general) labour. Just like
the commodities themselves, commodity-producing labour is both
general and specific at the same time.
Concrete labour, producing these use values, exists in every type
of society, because people always and everywhere need to appropri-
ate use values for their own reproduction – that is, to reproduce their
own capacities as human beings. In contrast, abstract labour is his-
torically specific; it exists only where commodities are being
produced and exchanged.
Abstract labour has two distinct aspects – qualitative and quanti-
tative – that should be analysed separately.
First, abstract labour derives from the relationship of equivalence
between commodities. Even though it is historically contingent,
Value, Capital and Exploitation 29
abstract labour has real existence; it is not merely a construct of the

mind. A visit to the local supermarket, for example, shows that your
own labour is actually equivalent to the labours that have produced
thousands of different goods, some of them nearby, and others
halfway across the globe. Labours are equivalent (as abstract labour)
because commodities are produced for exchange. Their equivalence
appears through the convertibility between money and commodi-
ties. When you buy a chocolate bar, for example, you are realising
the equivalence between your own labour – as a cook, for example
– and the labour of the producers of chocolate. The ability of
money to purchase any commodity shows that money represents
abstract labour.
Second, the stability of the exchange values shows that there is a
quantitative relationship between the abstract labours necessary to
produce each type of commodity. However, this relationship is not
direct, as we will see below.
In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
first published in 1776, Adam Smith claims that in ‘early and rude’
societies goods exchanged directly in proportion to the labour time
necessary to produce them. For example, if ‘it usually costs twice the
labour to kill a beaver which it does to kill a deer, one beaver should
naturally exchange for or be worth two deer’ (Smith 1991, p. 41).
However, Smith believes that this simple pricing rule breaks down
when instruments and machines are used in production. The reason
is that, in addition to the workers, the owners of the ‘stock’ also have
a legitimate claim to the value of the product.
Marx disagrees with Smith, for two reasons. First, ‘simple’ or
‘direct’ exchange (in proportion to socially necessary labour) is not
typical of any human society; this is simply a construct of Smith’s
mind. Second, and more importantly for our purposes, although
commodity exchanges reveal the quantitative relations of equiva-
lence between different types of labour, this relationship is indirect.
In other words, whereas Smith abandons his own ‘labour theory of
value’ at the first hurdle, Marx develops his own value analysis
rigorously and systematically into a cogent explanation of
commodity prices under capitalism (see below and, for details, Saad-
Filho 2002).
CAPITALISM
Commodities have been produced for thousands of years. However,
in non-capitalist societies commodity production is generally
30 Anti-Capitalism
marginal, and most goods and services are produced for direct con-
sumption by the household or for non-market exchange. It is
different in capitalist societies. The first defining feature of capitalism
is the generalised production of commodities. Under capitalism, most
goods and services are produced for sale, most workers are employed
in the production of commodities, and commodities are systemati-
cally traded in developed markets, where firms and households
regularly purchase commodities as production inputs and final
goods and services, respectively.
The second defining feature of capitalism is the production of com-
modities for profit. In capitalist society, commodity owners typically
do not merely seek to make a living – they want to make profit.
Therefore, the production decisions and the level and structure of
employment, and the living standards of the society, are grounded
in the profitability of enterprise.
The third defining feature of capitalism is wage labour. Like
commodity production and money, wage labour first appeared
thousands of years ago. However, before capitalism wage labour was
always limited, and other forms of labour were predominant. For
example, co-operation within small social groups, slavery in the
great empires of antiquity, serfdom under feudalism, and indepen-
dent production for subsistence or exchange, in all types of society.
Wage labour has become the typical mode of labour only recently;
three or four hundred years ago in England, and even more recently
elsewhere. In some parts of the developing world, wage labour,
complex markets and commodity production for profit still play
only a minor role in social and economic reproduction.
WAGE LABOUR
Most people do not freely choose to become wage workers. Social
and historical studies show that paid employment is generally
sought only by those who cannot satisfy their needs in any other
way. Historically, wage labour expands, and capitalist development
takes off, only as the peasants, artisans and the self-employed lose
control of the means of production (land, tools, machines and other
resources), or as non-capitalist forms of production become unable
to provide for subsistence (see Chapter 8).
The much-repeated claim that the wage contract is the outcome
of a free bargain between equals is, therefore, both partial and
misleading. Even though the workers are free to apply for one job
rather than another, or to leave, they are almost always in a weak
bargaining position when facing their prospective employers.

Although they are not the property of individual employers, the
wage workers need money in order to attend to the pressing needs
of their household, including subsistence needs, mortgage and other
debt payments and uncertainty about the future. These are some of
the sticks with which capitalist society forces the workers to sign up
‘freely’ to the labour contract, ‘spontaneously’ turn up for work as
and when required, and ‘voluntarily’ satisfy the expectations of their
line managers (see Chapter 5).
The wage relation implies that the workers’ capacity to work, their
labour power, has become a commodity. The use value of the
commodity labour power is its capacity to produce other use values
(clothes, food, CD players, and so on). Its exchange value is repre-
sented by the wage rate. In this sense, labour power is a commodity
like any other, and the wage workers are commodity sellers.
It is essential to distinguish between labour and labour power.
Labour power is the potential to produce things, while labour is its use
– in other words, labour is the act of transforming given natural and
social conditions into a premeditated output (see Chapter 2). When
a capitalist hires workers, she purchases the workers’ labour power for
a certain length of time. Once this transaction has been completed
the workers’ time belongs to the capitalist, who wishes to extract
from them as much labour as possible within the terms of the
contract. The workers, in turn, tend to resist abuse by the capitalist,
and they may limit the intensity of labour unilaterally or reject
arbitrary changes in the production norms. In sum, the purchase of
labour power does not guarantee that a given quantity of labour is
forthcoming, or that a certain quantity of value will be produced.
The outcome depends upon persuasion and conflict in the
shopfloor, farm or office.
MARKETS
The three features of capitalism (explained above) are not merely coin-
cidental. There is a relationship of mutual determination between
them. On the one hand, in advanced capitalist societies a large variety
of commodities are produced for profit by millions of wage workers
in thousands of firms. Many of these commodities are later purchased
by those workers, who no longer can or wish to provide for
themselves. Therefore, the spread of the wage relation fosters, simul-
taneously, the supply of as well as the demand for commodities.
32 Anti-Capitalism
On the other hand, the diffusion of wage labour and commodity

exchanges stimulates the development of markets. For mainstream
economic theory, markets are merely a locus of exchange, and they
are essentially identical with one another: price changes affect both
supply and demand, sexy adverts can help to sell anything, and the
rest is up to the sales team. This is both partial and misleading.
Markets are part of the institutions and channels of circulation that
structure the systems of provision in the economy. Systems of
provision are the chains of activity connecting production, exchange
and consumption, ranging from the supply of basic inputs (crude
oil, copper, cotton, cocoa, and so on) through to the manufacturing
stage and, finally, the distribution of the finished commodities
(aviation fuel, CD players, tee shirts, chocolate, and other products).
At certain stages in these chains, some commodities are marketed
on a regular basis. The necessity of market exchange, and the form
it takes, depend upon the features of each system of provision.3
Four conclusions follow. First, markets are not ideal structures of
exchange, that can be judged to be more or less ‘perfect’ according
to their degree of correspondence with a general model of perfect
competition (as is presumed by mainstream economic theory).
Although markets are essential for commodity production and the
realisation of profits, they exist only concretely, and the markets for
fuel, clothes, food, computers, labour power, money, credit, foreign
currencies and other commodities can be profoundly different from
one another.
Second, markets are structured not only ‘internally’, by the
systems of provision, but also ‘externally’, by the social and
economic constraints affecting production and exchange, such as
law and the justice system, the transportation, storage and trading
facilities, the international trade relations, the monetary, financial
and tax systems, and so on.
Third, capitalist producers gauge demand only indirectly, through
the purchasing power of their customers and the profitability of
enterprise. This is why markets often fail to satisfy important needs
(for example, effective prevention and treatment for the diseases of
the poor, such as malaria) and, conversely, why luxury, wasteful or
harmful goods are produced in large quantities (cosmetic surgery,
advertising, cigarettes, and so on).
Fourth, markets are often the venue of vicious and wasteful
struggles for profit. Reality does not correspond to mainstream
theory, where market competition almost always is efficient and
leads to optimum outcomes. In the real world, expensive advertising

campaigns, employing large numbers of talented people, are
regularly concocted to lure potential customers into purchasing
whatever product the capitalists want to sell. Brand names are arti-
ficially differentiated, and virtually identical products compete
wastefully for attention on the basis of packaging design, jingles and
gifts. At the same time, but far from view, managers, brokers and
investors produce, collect, disseminate and traffic information, not
always truthfully, seeking to maximise private gain even at the
expense of social losses. Laws and ethical standards are regularly
stretched, bent and broken in order to facilitate business transac-
tions, increase market share, extract labour from the workers and
draw money from the consumers. Frequent examples of corporate
crimes, from the traumatic South Sea bubble of 1720 to the gigantic
Enron scandal of 2002, provide a glimpse of the true nature of the
‘free market’.4
VALUE AND SURPLUS VALUE

The capitalists combine the means of production, generally
purchased from other capitalists, with the labour of wage workers
hired on the market in order to produce commodities for sale at a
profit. The circuit of industrial capital captures the essential aspects
of factory production, farm labour, office work and other forms of
capitalist production. It can be represented as follows:
MP
M – C <LP ...P... C' – M'
The circuit starts when the capitalist advances money (M) to

purchase two types of commodities (C), means of production (MP)
and labour power (LP). During production (… P …) the workers
transform the means of production into new commodities (C'), that
are sold for more money (M').
Marx calls the difference between M' and M surplus value. Surplus
value is the source of industrial and commercial profit and other
forms of profit, for example, interest and rent. We are now going to
identify the source of surplus value.
Surplus value cannot arise purely out of exchange. Although some
can profit from the sale of commodities above their value (unequal
exchange), for example, unscrupulous traders and speculators, this
is not possible for every seller for two reasons. First, the sellers are
also buyers. If every seller surcharged his customers by 10 per cent,
34 Anti-Capitalism
say, his gains would be lost to his own suppliers, and no one would
profit from this exercise. Therefore, although some can become rich
by robbing or outwitting others, this is not possible for society as a
whole, and unequal exchanges cannot provide a general explana-
tion of profit (‘cheating’ only transfers value; it does not create new
value). Second, competition tends to increase supply in any sector
offering exceptional profits, eventually eliminating the advantages
of individual luck or cunning (see Chapter 4). Therefore, surplus
value (or profit in general) must be explained for society as a whole,
or systemically, rather than relying on individual merit or expertise.
A convincing explanation of surplus value and profits must depart
from the completely general assumption of equal exchange.
Inspection of the circuit of capital shows that surplus value is the
difference between the value of the output, C', and the value of the
inputs, MP and LP. Since this difference cannot be due to unequal
exchange, the value increment must derive from the process of
production. More specifically, for Marx, it arises from the consump-
tion of a commodity whose use value is to create new value.
Let us start from the means of production (physical inputs). In a
chocolate factory, for example, cocoa, milk, sugar, electricity,
machines and the other inputs are physically transformed into
chocolate bars. However, on their own, these inputs do not create
new value. The presumption that the transformation of things into
other things produces value, regardless of context or human inter-
vention, confuses the two aspects of the commodity, use value and
exchange value. It ultimately implies that an apple tree, when it
produces apples from soil, sunlight and water, creates not only the
use value but also the value of the apples, and that ageing sponta-
neously adds value (rather than merely use value) to wine. The
naturalisation of value relations begs the question of why com-
modities have value, whereas many products of nature, goods and
services have no economic value: sunlight, air, access to public
beaches and parks, favours exchanged between friends and so on.
Value is not a product of nature or a substance physically
embodied in the commodities. Value is a social relation between
commodity producers that appears as exchange value, a relationship
between things (specifically, value appears through commodity prices,
that is, through the relationship between goods and money). Goods
and services possess value only under certain social and historical
circumstances. The value relation develops fully only in capitalism,
in tandem with the production of commodities, the use of money,
the diffusion of wage labour, and the generalisation of market-

related property rights. At this stage, value incorporates the most
important economic relationships. Among other things, value relations
regulate economic activity, constrain the structure of output and
employment, and set limits to social welfare.
If value is a social relation typical of commodity societies, its
source – and the origin of surplus value – must be the performance
of commodity-producing labour (the productive consumption of the
commodity labour power) rather than the metamorphosis of things.
When a capitalist hires workers to produce chocolate, for example,
their labour transforms the inputs into the output. Because the
inputs are physically blended into the output, their value is trans-
ferred, and forms part of the output value. In addition to the transfer
of the value of the inputs, labour simultaneously adds new value to
the product. In other words, whereas the means of production
contribute value because of the labour time necessary elsewhere to
produce them as commodities, newly performed labour contributes
new value to the output (see ‘Labour’ above).
The value of the output is equal to the value of the inputs (MP)
plus the value added by the workers during production. Since the
value of the means of production is merely transferred, production
is profitable only if the value added exceeds the wage costs. In other
words, surplus value is the difference between the value added by the
workers and the value of labour power. Alternatively, the wage workers
work for longer than the time it takes to produce the goods that they
command or control. In the rest of the time, the workers are exploited
– they produce value for the capitalists. For example, if the goods
necessary to reproduce the workforce can be produced in four hours,
but the working day is eight hours, the workers work ‘for themselves’
half the time, and in the other half they work ‘for the capitalists’:
the rate of exploitation (the ratio between what Marx calls ‘surplus’
and ‘necessary’ labour time) is 100 per cent.
Just as the workers have little choice on the matter of being
exploited, the capitalists cannot avoid exploiting the workers.
Exploitation through the extraction of surplus value is a systemic
feature of capitalism: this system of production operates like a pump
for the extraction of surplus value. The capitalists must exploit their
workers if they are to remain in business; the workers must concur in
order to satisfy their immediate needs; and exploitation is the fuel
that moves capitalist production and exchange. Without surplus
36 Anti-Capitalism
value there would be no wage employment, no capitalist production,

and the system would grind to a halt.
It is important to note that, although the wage workers are
exploited, they need not be poor in absolute terms (relative poverty,
due to the unequal distribution of income and wealth, is a
completely different matter). The development of technology
increases the productivity of labour, and it potentially allows even
the poorest members of society to enjoy relatively comfortable
lifestyles, however high the rate of exploitation may be. Specifically,
if the productivity of labour rises faster than the wage rate (see ‘Profit
and Exploitation’ below), relatively well-paid workers in highly
productive economies may be more heavily exploited than badly
paid workers in less productive economies.
COMPETITION
Competition plays an essential role in capitalist societies. Two types
of competition should be distinguished, between capitals in the
same sector (producing identical goods) and between capitals in
different sectors (producing distinct goods). Firms in the same sector
struggle for profits primarily through the introduction of cost-
cutting technical innovations. If an innovating firm can produce at
a lower cost than its competitors, and they sell at the same price, the
more productive firm reaps a higher profit rate and it can increase its
market share, invest more and, potentially, destroy the competition.
Competition between firms producing similar goods with distinct
technologies leads to the differentiation of the profit rates (see
Chapter 4). This type of competition explains the tendency towards
continuous technical progress in capitalism, which is absent in pre-
capitalist societies, and it raises the possibility of monopoly and
crises of disproportion and overproduction (see Chapter 15).
Competition between firms in distinct sectors is completely
different: it produces a tendency towards the equalisation of profit
rates across the (international) economy. This type of competition
explains the equilibrium structures and processes associated with
competitive markets, for example, supply adjustments within each
sector and capital migration. For example, faced with exceptionally
high profits in the Swiss pharmaceutical sector and low profits in
the US steel industry, capitals may decide to invest and thereby
increase supply in the former (which eventually lowers pharmaceu-
ticals prices and profit rates), decrease supply in the latter (which
eventually raises steel prices and profit rates), migrate from the latter
to the former, or pursue a combination of these strategies. What

these alternatives have in common is this: they create a tendency
towards the equalisation of profit rates across the economy. Inter-
sectoral competition, and the tendency towards the equalisation of
profit rates, is enormously facilitated by the development of the
financial markets.
Capitalist competition has three important implications
(explained in more detail in the references listed in note 2). First, it
would be misguided to seek an arithmetic solution to the conflicting
forces of competition. There is no reason why profit rates should
either converge towards an average (which may itself be rising,
falling or static), or diverge permanently, potentially leading to the
development of super-monopolies. The two types of competition
explained above influence the behaviour of firms in different ways,
and the outcome of their interaction (and other influences on firms’
behaviour) depends upon a wide range of variables that can be
understood only concretely (see Chapter 16). Second, price changes
due to inter-sectoral competition influence the operation of the law
of value. Rather than commodity exchanges being regulated simply
by the abstract labour time necessary to produce commodities, as in
Smith’s rude society, in advanced capitalism prices depend upon the
equalisation of profit rates between sectors of the economy (this is
known as the ‘transformation of values into prices of production’;
see Chapter 4). Third, the interplay of the forces of competition
within and between sectors generates a tendency towards the
reduction of the quantity of labour required in production across the
economy (this is known as the ‘tendency for the rate of profit to fall’,
which Marx analysed simultaneously with the ‘counter-tendencies’
to this law; see Chapter 15).
PROFIT AND EXPLOITATION

The profits of firms can increase in many different ways. For
example, the capitalists can compel their workers to work longer
hours or work harder (greater intensity of labour), employ better
skilled workers, or change the technology of production.
All else being constant, longer working days produce more profit
because more output is possible at little extra cost (the land,
buildings, machines and management structures being the same).
This is why capitalists always claim that the reduction of the working
week would hurt profits and, therefore, output and employment.
However, in reality other things are not constant, and historical
38 Anti-Capitalism
experience shows that such reductions can be neutral or even lead

to higher productivity because of their effects on worker efficiency
and morale. Outcomes vary depending on the circumstances, and
they may be strongly negative for some capitalists and, simultane-
ously, highly profitable for others.
Greater labour intensity condenses more labour into the same
working time. Increasing worker effort, speed and concentration
raises the level of output and reduces unit costs; therefore, prof-
itability rises. The employment of better trained and educated
workers leads to similar outcomes. Such workers can produce more
commodities, and create more value, per hour of labour.
Marx calls the additional surplus value extracted through longer
hours, more intense labour or the employment of better trained
workers absolute surplus value. This type of surplus value involves the
expenditure of more labour, whether in the same working day or in
a longer day, with given wages. Absolute surplus value was especially
important in early capitalism, when the working day was often
stretched as long as 12, 14 or even 16 hours. More recently, absolute
surplus value has often been extracted through the lengthening of
the working week and the penetration of work into leisure time, at
least for certain sectors of the workforce (work often extends into
the weekend and holidays, and the general availability of mobile
phones and portable computers allows the employees to be perma-
nently on duty). Moreover, the workers are frequently compelled to
increase productivity through more intense labour (for example,
faster production lines or reduced breaks) or coerced into acquiring
new skills in their ‘free’ time (for example, by attending conferences
and courses). In spite of its importance, absolute surplus value is
limited. It is impossible to increase the working day or the intensity
of labour indefinitely, and the workers gradually learn to resist these
forms of exploitation.
The introduction of new technology and new machines can also
increase the profit rate of the innovating firms. They allow more
inputs to be worked up into outputs in a given labour time or, in
other words, they reduce the quantity of labour necessary to produce
each unit of the product. When productivity rises faster than wages
across the economy, the share of surplus value in the total value
added increases and the workers’ share declines. Marx calls this
relative surplus value. Relative surplus value is more flexible than
absolute surplus value, and it has become the most important form
of exploitation under modern capitalism, because productivity
growth can outstrip wage increases for long periods (the implications
of absolute and relative surplus value are discussed in Chapter 5, and
the use of new technology in order to control the workforce is
analysed in Chapter 6; see also Saad-Filho 2002, ch. 5).
OVERVIEW AND CONCLUSION

Mainstream economic theory defines capital as an ensemble of
things, including means of production, money and financial assets.
More recently, human knowledge and community relations have
been named human or social capital. This is incorrect. These objects,
assets and human attributes have existed for a long time, whereas
capital is relatively recent. It is misleading to extend the concept of
capital where it does not belong, as if it were valid universally or
throughout history. For example, a horse, a hammer or a million
dollars may or may not be capital; that depends on the context in
which they are used. If they are engaged in production for profit
through the direct or indirect employment of wage labour, they are
capital; otherwise, they are simply animals, tools or banknotes.
Like value, capital is a social relation that appears as things. However,
whereas value is a general relationship between the producers and
sellers of commodities, capital is a class relation of exploitation. This
social relationship includes two classes (defined by their ownership,
control and use of the means of production): the capitalists, who
own the means of production, labour power and the product of
labour, and the wage workers, who sell their labour power and
operate the means of production without owning them. The rela-
tionship between these two classes is the basis for the social division
of labour and the production and distribution of commodities.
Competition and exploitation through the extraction of surplus
value render capitalism uniquely able to develop technology and the
forces of production. This is the main reason why Marx admires the
progressive features of capitalism. However, capitalism is also the
most destructive mode of production in history. The profit motive is
blind, and it can be overwhelming. It has led to astonishing discov-
eries and unsurpassed improvements in living standards, especially
(but not exclusively) in the developed countries. In spite of this,
capitalism has also led to widespread destruction and degradation
of the environment and of human lives. Profit-seeking has led to
slavery, mass murder and even genocide (for example, against the
native populations of the Belgian Congo and the United States, in
South Africa under apartheid and in colonial and inter-imperialist
40 Anti-Capitalism
wars, most clearly in the First World War), brutal exploitation of the
workers (in nineteenth century Britain, twentieth century Brazil and
twenty-first century China), and the uncontrolled destruction of the
environment (in the United States, Europe, India, Indonesia and
elsewhere), with long-term global implications (see Chapter 7).
Capitalism both generates and condones the mass unemployment
of workers, machinery and land in spite of unsatisfied wants, and
tolerates poverty even though the means to abolish it are readily
available. Capitalism extends the human life span, but it often
empties life of meaning. It supports unparalleled achievements in
human education and culture while, simultaneously, fostering
idiocy, greed, mendacity, sexual and racial discrimination and other
forms of human degradation. Paradoxically, the accumulation of
material wealth often impoverishes human existence.
These contradictory effects of capitalism are inseparable. It is
impossible to pick and choose the appealing features of the ‘market
economies’ and discard those that we find distasteful. Private
ownership of the means of production and market competition nec-
essarily give rise to the wage relation and to exploitation through the
extraction of surplus value, and they facilitate crises, war, and other
negative features of capitalism. This places a strict limit on the pos-
sibility of social, political and economic reforms, and on the capacity
of the market to assume a ‘human face’.5
Limitations such as these led Marx to conclude that capitalism can
be overthrown, and another social system created, communism. For
him, communism opens the possibility of realisation of the potential
of the vast majority through the elimination of the irrationalities
and human costs of capitalism, including systemic inequality,
material deprivation, destructive competition, greed and economic
exploitation (this system, and the transition towards it, are discussed
in Chapters 18 and 19).
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Fine, B. (1989) Marx’s Capital (3rd edn.). Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Fine, B. (2002) The World of Consumption, (2nd edn.). London: Routledge.
Foley, D. (1986) Understanding Capital, Marx’s Economic Theory. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, D. (1999) The Limits to Capital. London: Verso.
Marx, K. (1976, 1978b, 1981) Capital (3 vols.). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1978a, 1969, 1972) Theories of Surplus Value (3 vols.). London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K. (1981) Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1987) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Collected

Works, vol. 29). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Perelman, M. (2000) Transcending the Economy: On the Potential of Passionate
Labor and the Wastes of the Market. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Saad-Filho, A. (2002) The Value of Marx: Political Economy for Contemporary
Capitalism. London: Routledge.
Smith, A. (1991) Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
London: Everyman.
Weeks, J. (1981) Capital and Exploitation. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Wood, E.M. (1988) ‘Capitalism and Human Emancipation’, New Left Review
167, pp. 3–20.
Wood, E.M. (1999) The Origin of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
NOTES
1. I am grateful to Andrew Brown, Paul Burkett, Ben Fine, Costas Lapavitsas,
Simon Mohun and Alejandro Ramos for their valuable comments on
previous drafts of this chapter.
2. For overviews of Marxian value theory at different levels of difficulty, see
Fine (1989), Foley (1986), Harvey (1999), Saad-Filho (2002) and Weeks
(1981).
3. Systems of provision are discussed in detail by Fine (2002).
4. For an outstanding study of the wastes of the market, see Perelman (2000).
5. See Wood (1999).
2 Does All Labour Create Value?
Simon Mohun
HISTORICAL AND INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS

The industrialisation of Britain from the middle of the eighteenth
century transformed both rural and urban environments. Manufac-
turing in the cottages of the countryside (the ‘putting-out system’)
was gradually centralised in larger units (the ‘factory’ system)
typically located in the rapidly growing towns. This enabled sub-
stantial economies of scale through the use of newly harnessed
sources of power, the further development of the division of labour,
and the much closer control that could be exercised over the
production process. At the same time, agricultural enclosures of
common land dispossessed the rural poor of their traditional grazing
and foraging rights (see Chapter 8). The combination of the decline
of cottage industry with the enclosures of common land deprived
large numbers of rural families of their livelihood. The complex and
precarious ways in which a rural family survived, through a combi-
nation of agricultural wage labour, cottage industry, family labour
on a smallholding and access to common land, was increasingly
attenuated, and more and more families were compelled to seek sub-
sistence entirely through the market. Typically, the only commodity
they had to sell was their own capacity to work. Only the sale of this
capacity (their labour power) for a wage could provide them with
the money required for the purchase of the commodities necessary
for subsistence (see Chapter 1). In this manner, a landless working
class was created and industrialisation proceeded, increasingly an
urban phenomenon.
In the late eighteenth century, contemporaries were aware of the
beginnings of these processes, in terms of both their novelty and
their scale, and attempted to theorise the phenomena they were
witnessing. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations (1776) focused on the benefits from specialisation
as the division of labour was extended. He saw these benefits as
limited only by the extent of the market. Indeed, he linked the
extension of the division of labour with the extension of the market
in a mutually reinforcing process: specialisation increases produc-
42
Does All Labour Create Value? 43
tivity and incomes; this stimulates both investment and demand

(and after a lag, population growth), which widens the market; and
this in turn enables further specialisation. The role of government
was limited to encouraging these processes by guaranteeing internal
and external security (for both people and property), and maintain-
ing a legal system and a stable currency.
However, an important question that worried Smith was whether
all employment contributed to this virtuous growth cycle. This
concern did not originate with Smith. In the 1690s Gregory King
attempted a statistical description of English society for the year
1688, in which more than half of the population was categorised as
‘Decreasing the Wealth of the Kingdom’, meaning dependent to
some degree on transfer payments.1 And within the developing
discipline of political economy, the sources of wealth tended to be
located in the activity of some particular sector (for the mercan-
tilists, the acquisition of bullion through foreign trade; for the
physiocrats, an agricultural surplus), thereby defining economic
activity in other sectors as unproductive. So this was an important
issue for Smith to confront.
Smith took a broader view than earlier writers, and designated as
productive the labour that contributed to a positive feedback
between extension of the division of labour and growth of the
market. Employment of such labour was effectively an investment,
contributing more to output than it cost in wages. Otherwise, labour
was unproductive, contributing nothing to the growth of output by
its activity, and consuming a portion of total output by virtue of the
wages it cost. An example of productive labour might be a worker in
one of the new cotton mills. She is paid a wage and is part of a
division of labour that produces an output that is sold, from the
proceeds of which the capitalist recovers his outlay of wages and
gains a profit that provides the funds for further investment. An
example of unproductive labour might be a worker in domestic
service. She is paid a wage (partly in cash, partly in kind) in return
for an output (domestic service) that is not sold on the market but
is directly consumed by her employer. Payments to such a worker
are a net cost to the economy.2
But Smith’s attempt to draw a clear line of demarcation between
productive and unproductive labour in the terms just outlined is
seriously confused by a different distinction he draws, in which
productive labour produces a physical product, and unproductive
labour produces a service. It is easy to see how this second definition
44 Anti-Capitalism
arises, because Smith wanted to contrast the growing and productive

manufacturing sector, which typically produces a physical output,
with the small armies of retainers unproductively employed in
service by the landed gentry, which he saw as consuming rather than
producing output.3 In an economy in which marketed services are
negligible, the two lines of demarcation are very similar. But as soon
as services are marketed to a significant extent, the two definitions
are incompatible. And there is a further confusion, to do with the
contrast between producing and consuming output. For an activity
might be profitable for an individual employer, and yet add nothing
to social output, so that what is productive from a private perspec-
tive might be unproductive from the perspective of society. If for
example the profits on some (unproductive) activity were in fact a
market transfer out of the profits of some (productive) activity, the
unproductive activity would appear productive when considered in
isolation, and yet contribute nothing to aggregate profits and hence
be unproductive when the economy as a whole is considered. In the
early stages of the industrial revolution, it was perhaps inevitable
that these inconsistencies were not so obvious. But by the middle of
the nineteenth century, Smith’s definitions were an increasingly
unreliable guide. Their interest is that they provided the starting
point for Marx’s analysis of productive and unproductive labour.
PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR

Marx absorbed Smith’s vision of a dynamically growing economy
and developed further Smith’s first distinction between productive
and unproductive labour, but within a rather different framework.
First of all, and obviously, in any society, labour that produces
anything useful is productive. The difficulty is that what is regarded
as useful is historically specific, and is conditioned and structured
by the framework set by the dominance of some particular relations
of production. It is therefore first necessary to consider those class
relations directly. What differentiates class societies is the form in
which the dominant class is able to extract surplus labour from the
subordinate class. In capitalist society, surplus labour takes the form
of a sum of money, called surplus value or profit. Accordingly for
Marx, any labour in capitalist society is productive if and only if it
produces surplus value.
Several points should be noted about this definition. First, the
nature of the output (for example, whether a physical good or an
intangible service) is irrelevant. Only the social relations under
which it is produced count. Hence a necessary condition for labour

to be productive is that it is wage labour. Secondly, since wage labour
must produce surplus value, or profit, to be productive, and profit
only derives from the sale of output, a further necessary condition
for labour to be productive is that the output it produces is marketed.
Thirdly, the activity in which productive labour is engaged is a trans-
formative activity of production. The activity cannot be one which
distributes or redistributes an output which has already been
produced elsewhere, and nor can it be one whose function is to
collect together inputs so that they are then ready for production.
These types of activity earn profit that is a redistribution (through
the market via the price mechanism) of profits earned through the
consumption of inputs in a production process, and so do not
contribute in the aggregate to total profits produced. Hence a further
necessary condition for labour to be productive is that additional
surplus value is produced. In sum, in capitalist society, productive
labour first, is wage labour, second, is employed in a capitalist
production process, and third, produces surplus value from a social
point of view. All other wage labour is unproductive.
The implications of each of these necessary conditions are
important. The first condition requires labour to be wage labour if it
is to count as productive. Labour that is not wage labour is not
productive. That this says nothing about the necessity for such non-
wage labour can be seen from the fact that in any society an
enormous amount of time is spent in informal and unwaged caring
activities, looking after the young and the old. No society could
reproduce itself without at least the labour time spent in creating
and caring for children, but all workers engaged in such unpaid
caring activities are unproductive. They produce neither value nor
surplus value; for all that their work is essential.
Secondly, not all wage labour is productive. Output has to be sold
in order that surplus value be appropriated; hence output produced
by wage labour that is not marketed cannot produce any surplus
value. In any society, substantial numbers are employed in a wage
labour relation by ‘general government’. General government
produces output for individual and/or collective consumption that
is consumed directly, makes cash transfers, and invests in public
assets. Its activities are financed by levying taxes and selling financial
instruments.4 General government activities include general public
services (executive, legislative and judicial), internal (police) and
external (armed services) security, welfare services (health,
46 Anti-Capitalism
education, social security, housing) and economic services (admin-

istration of subsidies and other interventions in industry). Hence
general government employs a substantial number of people, but
none of them produces either value or surplus value, and hence they
are all unproductive.
Thirdly, whether wage labour produces surplus value can be
determined only from an overall social perspective. For capitalist
employment of wage labour producing a marketed output and
earning profits might nevertheless consume rather than add to total
surplus value. Consider for example workers employed by a
profitable advertising agency. The agency is contracted by a firm to
run a campaign on the firm’s commodity. The only output (if the
campaign is successful) is increased sales of the firm’s commodity,
and, whether successful or not, the agency is paid out of the revenues
accruing from the firm’s sales. The agency therefore produces
nothing, and is paid out of a transfer of resource from the contract-
ing firm. No matter that the advertising agency might persuasively
create demand and thereby extend the market; what it does is to
facilitate the sale of commodities produced elsewhere. Generalising
from this example, all labour that is employed one way or another
purely to sell output is involved in facilitating a transfer of title of
ownership. Since nothing additional is produced by that labour, then
that labour is not productive. The surplus value deriving from such
commercial activities arises not from the exploitation of workers
employed in those activities, but from a transfer through the price
mechanism of profit produced by productive workers elsewhere.
Whereas the capital that employs workers who produce surplus value
is called ‘industrial capital’, the capital that employs workers to buy
and sell the products of industrial capital is called ‘commercial
capital’. Commercial capital appropriates a portion of the surplus
value produced by industrial capital via an unequal exchange. The
more sophisticated is the knowledge required about the market, the
more commercial capital can carve a specialised niche for itself.
Symmetrically, the same point can be made about all of those
activities that facilitate the purchase of inputs. Large numbers of
people are employed in these activities, typically involved in
recording and accounting for financial flows, and transferring title
to sums of money and to increasingly complicated financial instru-
ments representing sums of money. The capital that employs
workers in these sorts of activities is called ‘financial capital’. The
functions of financial capital are in general to organise and operate
in financial markets, to spread risk, to consolidate smaller sums of

money into larger ones, and to provide credit. In this manner, large
sums of capital are made available for the purchase of inputs by
industrial capital (see Chapters 3 and 10). The typical payment is a
rate of interest, which determines a transfer of value between the
two contracting parties. But despite the commodity form of a
financial service, there is no commodity produced, hence no
commodity equivalent to match the payments of interest. Conse-
quently, interest payments must be understood in terms of
exploitation and unequal exchange. Like the net earnings of
commercial capital, interest payments are in general a claim on the
surplus value produced by industrial capital. The only difference is
that the activities of commercial capital realise surplus value that has
already been produced, whereas the activities of financial capital are
paid for out of a pre-commitment by industrial capital of surplus
value yet to be produced. Hence in this latter case, a speculative
element is involved. Figure 2.1 summarises this vision of the
capitalist production process.
As soon as financial capital is used to purchase inputs for
production, that capital, as an amount of value, changes its form
from financial to productive capital. Despite the change in form, the
quantity of value does not change. Once inputs have been
consumed in the production process to produce output, the capital
becomes commercial capital (called ‘commodity capital’ by Marx).
Now its quantitative value has increased, by virtue of the difference
between what labour power cost and what labour can produce.
When the output is sold, the sum of gross value produced takes a
financial form, to be recommitted to the production process in due
course. Again, in this change of form, the quantity of value does not
change. The only quantitative change in value (an expansion) takes
place in production, following the advance of capital to purchase
inputs and prior to the appearance of commodity outputs and their
sale. Selling the output, operating in money markets and purchasing
inputs all transfer the form in which value exists, but they do not
alter its quantity.
Figure 2.1 is a highly stylised and abstract representation. The
activities of both commercial capital and financial capital can in
practice be very complex, but analytically the surplus value that they
earn remains a transfer from the surplus value deriving from
production. The labour power hired by commercial and financial
capital is exploited, like any other labour power, if workers are
48 Anti-Capitalism
Stock of financial Capital

(cash and other financial
assets)
Consumption of
surplus value
Flow of sales Flow of capital outlays

purchasing labour
inputs (labour power
and non-labour inputs
(means of production)
Stock of Commercial Capital
(inventories of finished
commodities awaiting sale)
Flow of output
Stock of Productive Capital
(inventories of raw materials and
part-finished goods;
stocks of undepreciated plant
and equipment)
Figure 2.1 The Circuit of Capital
Source: adapted from Foley (1986), pp. 66–9.
compelled to work for longer than is required to produce their con-

sumption needs. But this unpaid labour time is not monetised; the
surplus value accruing to commercial and financial capital derives
from a transfer through the market of surplus value produced by
industrial capital. This occurs through interest payments and fees
charged by financial capital, and through fees charged by
commercial capital combined with unequal exchange (for processes
of pure sale, such as commodity broking). In sum, transformations
of form, from commodity output into money, from money into
other financial assets and back into money, and from money into
commodity inputs, do not change the quantity of value that exists.
That ‘productive’ in the strict sense means ‘productive of surplus
value’ means that the theoretical term has no trans-historical
meaning. It is only concerned with what is productive, what is to
count as social productivity, under specifically capitalist relations of
production. One might be morally offended that the surgeons,
nurses and technicians engaged in vital organ transplants in a state
hospital are unproductive labour, whereas private sector workers

producing weapons designed to destroy such organs are productive
labour. But that is to be offended at the prevailing relations of
production, in which production is organised by considerations of
private profit rather than considerations of social need. For as long
as production is so organised, the class criterion is paramount: labour
is productive if it produces surplus value.
CONTROVERSIES
Like other Marxian categories, the categories of productive and
unproductive labour have no counterpart in the different theoreti-
cal framework of neoclassical economics. For the latter, anything
whose consumption contributes to someone’s utility can command
a price in the market and return a revenue stream to its owner, and
so corresponds to the production of a good or service.5 Categories
of productive and unproductive labour are therefore meaningless:
in general any good or service supplied is the outcome of a
production process, and its price (whether real, potential or shadow)
is a return to its owner. Echoes of the distinction between productive
and unproductive labour sometimes surface in concerns about the
size of the state sector and its effects on growth. But it is not that the
state sector is ‘unproductive’ in neoclassical economics. It is rather
that since the state sector is financed by compulsory taxation, too
large a state sector requires levels of taxation which will generate dis-
incentive effects at the margin in the private sector on both
labour–leisure tradeoffs and the investment decision. In sum, for the
neoclassical tradition, notions of productive and unproductive
labour simply make no sense.
Matters are different for a labour theory of value. But even within
this tradition, there is considerable controversy about whether the
distinction between productive and unproductive labour is tenable.6
These controversies can be summarised in terms of each of the three
points emphasised above, first, that productive labour has to be wage
labour, second, that it has to produce a marketed output, and third,
that it is engaged in production.
One line of questioning has been to refocus the meaning of
‘productive’ as necessary or essential. To define some activity as
unproductive carries the connotation that it is unnecessary, and this
slights or denigrates the people engaged in such activity. Consider
unpaid housework and childcare. These are activities that are pre-
dominantly undertaken by women, and to call such activities
50 Anti-Capitalism
unproductive has been interpreted as an example of the way in

which a patriarchal theory systematically ignores the activity of
women. A response might be that this confuses the reproduction of
capitalist relations of production with the reproduction of the wider
society. There are all sorts of complex interrelations between the two,
structured by the evident truth that children (and thus future
workers) are not produced under capitalist relations of production.
Therefore the reproduction of those relations requires a permanent
flow of inputs of labour power produced (at least in part) elsewhere,
in the family and the school. But the reproduction of capitalist
relations and the reproduction of wider society are not identical, and
the theoretical categories used to analyse the one are inappropriate
for the other.
Secondly, consider wage labour that does not produce a marketed
output, typically employed by general government. General
government in 2000 accounted for about 13.4 per cent of all
employment in the UK, and for about 12.9 per cent in the USA.7 So
the numbers involved in developed capitalist economies are sub-
stantial. The questioning of the productive–unproductive distinction
here also focuses on a denial of the distinction between ‘necessary’
and ‘productive’. If society cannot function without general
government, then it makes little analytical sense to call general
government employees unproductive, and indeed concedes too
much to pro-market ideology. But the response is the same as that
already given: it is important not to confuse the reproduction of
capitalist relations of production with the reproduction of the wider
society. A more specific but related line of questioning concerns the
activities involved in the maintenance and training of the working
class. If extra skills are acquired by a worker through consuming
some state sector output of education and training, then that worker
will produce more value in a given time period than an untrained
but otherwise identical worker. Similarly, a healthier worker will
have lower maintenance and reproduction costs than a less healthy
one. In this manner, state provision of education, training and
health contribute to the production of surplus value, not directly,
but indirectly through transformations of the quality of the living
labour input into the capitalist production process. Then it is argued
that there is no reason to separate those activities that are directly
productive of surplus value from those that are indirectly productive.
The difficulty with this argument is its very breadth. If all activities
that indirectly contribute to surplus value are considered productive,
the term loses any focus and precision, for it is hard to conceive of
any activity that cannot be so interpreted.
A third line of questioning, perhaps the most influential, has been
to focus on what ‘production’ means.8 In particular, it is argued that
it is not possible to make a hard distinction between production
activities, in which inputs are combined in a production process
organised by industrial capital to produce an output, and circulation
activities, in which outputs are transformed into money that is then
reinvested in inputs by the activities of commercial and financial
capital. There are only two ways in which critics have argued that
such a separation can be conceived. One way is by reverting to
Smith’s second definition, in which labour is productive if it
produces a physical good, for only a resort to ‘physicalism’ can
adequately determine what is produced from what is circulated. The
other way is to define as unproductive what is specific to capitalism,
by reference to an evaluative standpoint based on communism. For
example, if communist distribution is direct rather than through the
market, then the labour involved in marketing activities will not
exist under communism, and is therefore unproductive in capitalist
society. Since communist production is for need rather than for
profit, there will be no advertising, and so advertising labour is
unproductive, and so on. To identify unproductive labour on this
evaluative criterion is to locate sources of waste in contemporary
capitalist society, and to identify resources that a more progressive
society can employ to increase the production of use values for the
benefit of all.
The ‘physicalist’ criterion bears no relation to capitalist social
relations, and is not therefore a helpful one for the analysis of con-
temporary capitalism. The ‘evaluative’ criterion, while perhaps
determining a useful project in the identification of waste, also bears
no relation to the analytical categories of the labour theory of value,
and so again is not helpful in the present context. But it is argued
that, unless they resort to one or other of these criteria, all attempts
to found a distinction between productive and unproductive labour
fail. The distinction is empty, and should be abandoned. The circuit
of capital should be understood as a metaphorical rather than a
literal description of how surplus value is produced and realised. To
separate production from circulation, with productive labour
confined to the former and unproductive labour to the latter, is to
separate in an artificial and mechanistic way what are distinct yet
simultaneous components of the same social process.
52 Anti-Capitalism
The response to this line of questioning has been to deny that the
distinction is analytically empty, and to assert on the contrary that
it is fruitful at both theoretical and empirical levels. The distinction
between industrial capital, on the one hand, and commercial and
financial capital, on the other, enables a grasp of the changing
organisation of capitalism as their autonomy from each other
develops alongside their dependence on each other, a continually
fluctuating balance of power now favouring the one, now the other.
Focusing on the development of unequal exchange and the
dependence of commercial and financial profits on the surplus value
produced by industrial capital is to focus on both the possibilities
and the limits of specialisation by capital in particular historical
periods. A labour theory of value which includes the categories of
productive and unproductive labour yields a richer picture of
capitalist development, and one that is more consonant with what
one would expect to be shown by Marxian theory, than a labour
theory of value that abolishes the distinction.
USES OF THE DISTINCTION

The productive–unproductive labour distinction is important in
analysing the development and relative strengths of fractions of
capital (and indeed alliances cutting across those fractions). It focuses
attention upon the dependence of other fractions upon industrial
capital, and hence enables investigation of why that dependence
might be tighter or looser in particular periods. It also differentiates
the determinants of sectoral profitability and the ways in which
different capitals participate in the competition which tendentially
results in all capitals earning the same rate of profit.
Whereas for industrial capital, profitability is determined by the
productivity of labour, the organisation of the labour process, and
the level of wages, for commercial capital, given some cost structure,
profitability is determined by its ability to charge fees for its services
and to increase unequal exchange. These both depend upon its
position in the market, its degree of specialised commercial
knowledge, and its ability to organise networks of distribution. Com-
petition between commercial capitals will tend to reduce unequal
exchange to the level at which revenues are sufficient for each
commercial capital to earn the average rate of profit. For financial
capital, given some cost structure, profitability is determined by the
difference between borrowing and lending rates and its ability to
charge fees for money market operations. In a world of certainty,
arbitrage between capitals should ensure equality between the

interest rate and the average rate of profit, with the difference
between borrowing and lending rates just sufficient to cover the
costs of making loans. But real uncertainties in the production and
realisation of surplus value by industrial capitals can serve to differ-
entiate the interest rate from the profit rate, which throws the focus
on to the ways in which levels of future profitability of industrial
capitals affect the determination of the current rate of interest.
Secondly, the productive–unproductive labour distinction has
some importance in analysing the changing historical determinants
of general government expenditure. In general terms, Marx saw the
state as representing the interests of capital as a whole. At the same
time the state has in some sense to manage class conflict. On the
one hand, one consequence of working-class struggle is that some
activities are taken out of private production and into state collective
provision financed by taxation. On the other hand, the state
attempts to organise the provision of its activities in ways most
beneficial to capital. The changing balance of class forces at any time
shapes how these factors historically combine. Compare for example
the decade after 1945 in Western Europe with its nationalisations
and other forms of state regulation together with the development
of state education, health and social insurance, with the 1980s and
1990s and their privatisations together with tight restrictions on
expenditure on state education, health and social insurance.
The third way in which the distinction is of some use is in
empirical investigations of capitalist development. Given the nature
of the concepts and the data available, too much precision should
not be expected. In particular, data are generally organised by an
industrial classification, and assumptions must always be made
about how to divide productive from unproductive both across
industrial classifications and within them. Because there are always
borderline cases, and because of data limitations, occasionally
arbitrary and sometimes heroic assumptions must be made. But
while exact precision is impossible, some reasonable estimates of
time trends are possible.
Consider for example the UK in the census years 1861 to 1911 as
shown in Table 2.1.
An example of arbitrariness is the allocation of all services except
domestic service to productive labour, whereas some will certainly be
unproductive. An example of approximation is the determination
of productive labour in each productive sector by the proportion of
54 Anti-Capitalism
Table 2.1 Productive and Unproductive Labour by Industry (thousands),

UK, Census Years
1861 1871 1881 1891 1901 1911
Agriculture and fishing 3017 2663 2369 2181 1924 1820

Mining and quarrying 420 486 563 697 811 978
Manufacturing 3686 4011 4075 4578 4762 4967
Building and contracting 471 563 687 697 867 781
Gas, electricity, water 21 26 33 50 79 91
Transport and communication 506 649 712 921 1153 1198
Health, education and other
professional services 287 333 439 498 572 629
Catering, hotels and other services 386 444 555 680 708 804
Total productive 8794 9174 9433 10300 10875 11268
Productive as % of total 67.2 65.3 62.6 61.8 58.2 55.3
Distributive trades 850 1050 1300 1640 1990 2460
Insurance, banking, finance 20 40 70 110 150 230
Public administration and defence 450 420 460 550 880 840
Private domestic service 1294 1790 1850 1940 1980 2000
Unproductive labour in
productive sectors 1681 1576 1957 2120 2805 3592
Total unproductive 4296 4876 5637 6360 7805 9122
Unproductive as % of total 32.8 34.7 37.4 38.2 41.8 44.7
Ration of Unproductive to
Productive Labour 0.49 0.53 0.60 0.62 0.72 0.81
Source: derived from Feinstein (1976) Tables 60 and 21
wages to salaries in that sector, roughly measuring a ‘blue collar’

(factory operative) ‘white collar’ (office worker) distinction, which
is not exactly what is required. This notwithstanding, the upward
drift in unproductive labour is striking. Comparing 1861 with 1911,
the main movements are the fall in productive labour in agriculture
from 23.0 per cent to 8.9 per cent of total employment; the rise in
distributive trades employment from 6.5 per cent to 12.1 per cent of
total employment, and the rise in unproductive labour in productive
sectors from 12.8 per cent to 17.6 per cent of total employment.
These years of the ‘second industrial revolution’ see a growth in spe-
cialised marketing activities, but with scope for much further
specialisation by productive firms in outsourcing their growing
unproductive activities.
Another question to consider is how unproductive labour has
affected the general rate of profit, although this is not a simple
question (see Chapters 15 and 16). Define the pre-tax rate of profit
(r) as the ratio of aggregate profits to the aggregate net capital stock
(K), and define profits as the difference between adjusted net
national product (adj.NNP) and total private sector wages.9 These
latter are the wages paid to productive labour (WP) and the wages
paid to unproductive labour (WU). Hence:
Adj.NNP − WP − WU
r=
K
Adj.NNP − WP WU
−
WP WP
=
K
WP
The first term in the numerator is the money form of the rate of
surplus value (e), so that:
WU
e−
WP
r=
K
WP
The ratio of unproductive to productive labour in wage terms is

a direct negative influence on the rate of profit, but might
indirectly positively affect the rate of profit if the specialisation of
function enabled by the contracting out of unproductive activities
by productive capital increases the rate of surplus value. Thus the
ratio of productive to unproductive labour in wage terms is an
important one, and its growth in the USA in the last third of the
twentieth century is shown in Figure 2.2. Since the data is in
natural logs, the slope of the line representing the ratio is the rate
of growth of the ratio.
The data divide into three distinct periods. From 1964 to 1978 the
ratio grows in total by 7.9 per cent, periods of positive growth being
interspersed with two periods of negative growth. This fluctuating
but fairly flat overall period is marked by the Vietnam War, the
collapse of Bretton Woods, and the stagflation of the 1970s. From
1978 to 1992, dominated by the expansion of the Reagan–Bush
years, there is a more sustained increase, in which the ratio grows by
56 Anti-Capitalism
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
–0.1
1964
1966
1968
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
Figure 2.2 Wage Ratio of Unproductive to Productive Labour, USA,
1964–2000 (natural logs)
a total of 44.5 per cent. This is followed by another essentially flat

period during the first Clinton presidency (from 1992 to 1997 the
ratio falls and then rises, growing by a total of 0.35 per cent). And the
twentieth century concludes with what looks like another sustained
increase as the ratio grows by 11.9 per cent from 1997 to 2000
(although this may be subject to data revisions). Periods of higher
growth appear to allow significant relative increases in unproductive
labour, whereas periods of lower growth do not (although it remains
to be seen whether the increases of the second half of the 1990s will
be maintained into the twenty-first century). Combined with an
analysis of profitability, and some assessment of the effects of the
relative increase of unproductive labour on that profitability, these
figures provide a basis for an empirical analysis of structural change
in the US economy in the second half of the twentieth century.

Feinstein, C.H. (1976) Statistical Tables of National Income, Expenditure and
Output of the UK 1855–1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foley, D. K. (1986) Understanding Capital. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Laibman, D. (1992) Value, Technical Change and Crisis. Armonk, New York: M.
E. Sharpe.
Laibman, D. (1999) ‘Productive and Unproductive Labour: A Comment’,

Review of Radical Political Economics 31 (2), pp. 61–73.
Laslett, P. (2000) The World We Have Lost Further Explored. London: Routledge.
Mitchell, B. R. (1988) British Historical Statistics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Mohun, S. (1996) ‘Productive and Unproductive Labour in the Labour Theory
of Value’, Review of Radical Political Economics 28 (4), pp. 30–54.
Mohun, S. (2002), ‘Productive and Unproductive Labour: A Reply’, Review
of Radical Political Economics 34 (2), forthcoming.
Office for National Statistics (2001a) ‘Jobs in the Public and Private Sectors’,
Economic Trends, June.
Office for National Statistics (2001b) UK National Accounts (Blue Book) 2001
Edition. London: The Stationery Office.
Shaikh, A. M. and Tonak, E. A. (1994) Measuring the Wealth of Nations.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, A. (1776) Inquiry into the Nature and Courses of the Wealth of Nations.
London: Everyman (1991).
US Bureau of Economic Affairs: National Income and Product Accounts
(www.bea.gov).
US Bureau of Labour Statistics (stats.bls.gov).
NOTES
1. King’s table is reproduced and discussed in Laslett (2000), pp. 30ff. King’s
data are revised by Lindert and Williamson and reproduced in Mitchell
(1988) ch. 2, p. 102.
2. Smith did not consider how expenditure out of the wages of unproductive
workers adds to overall demand and thereby indirectly contributes to the
extension of the market.
3. The number of families in the category ‘high titles and gentlemen’ in
England and Wales was 19,626 in 1688, 18,070 in 1759 and 27,203 in
1801/3. See the sources cited in note 1.
4. Fees might be charged for some portions of general government output,
but they are not economically significant in terms of cost recovery of the
activities concerned. General government in some very poor countries
might also depend upon the receipt of grant aid from overseas.
5. Some qualification is necessary. Sometimes, the market transaction is only
a potential one. Thus homeowners are deemed to pay a rent to
themselves, which is counted as a return for the production of housing
services, for otherwise national income would fall whenever a renter
purchases a house. And sometimes markets cannot exist for technical
reasons. If consumption of a good by one person does not diminish the
amount available to another person, and if nobody can be excluded from
consuming the good, then the good is a pure ‘public good’ and must be
financed out of taxation.
6. See Mohun (1996, 2002) and Laibman (1999), and the references therein.
7. The figures are on a ‘full-time equivalent’ basis, and for the UK include
those employed by National Health Service Trusts. The UK figures are from
the Office for National Statistics (2001a) and (2001b), and the US figures
58 Anti-Capitalism
are from the US Bureau of Economic Affairs National Income and Product
Accounts.
8. See Laibman (1992, ch. 4, and 1999)
9. Net national product should be adjusted downwards for three reasons.
Imputations should be subtracted, because they correspond to a flow of
services which is not marketed; general government wage costs should be
excluded, because general government workers are financed out of
taxation rather than the market; and household worker wage costs should
be subtracted, because no output is sold.
3 Money as Money and Money

as Capital in a Capitalist
Economy
Costas Lapavitsas
Money permeates economic activity in capitalism, from the

mundane to the vital. Money also permeates social life, making or
breaking personal relations, attaching meaning to human action and
providing a measure of human qualities. But despite its prominence
in capitalism, there is no consensus in social theory on what money
is and how it functions. This chapter considers the social relations
that give rise to money and those that rest on it, from the perspec-
tive of Marxist political economy. The first section (Money as
Money) focuses on money as plain money, that is, money as a
phenomenon of simple commodity exchange. By considering
money purely in the context of market trading, it is possible to
specify what money is as well as its functions and forms in relation
to markets. The second section (Money as Capital) turns to money
as capital, that is, money as a phenomenon of capitalist production
and circulation. Money’s specifically capitalist functioning is thus
specified, including its role in relation to credit.
MONEY AS MONEY
Money and markets
Capitalism is a social system that incorporates an extremely wide
network of markets. There are markets in which the traded com-
modities are produced by capitalist enterprises employing wage
labour, such as those for consumer and investment goods. There are
markets in which the traded commodities are not produced by using
capitalist methods, typical examples being the markets for land and
labour (see Chapters 1 and 4). There are also markets in which the
objects of trading are not produced commodities at all, but financial
obligations, claims on others, cover for risk and other promises
among people. Finally, there are even ‘markets’ in which the traded
objects can only be imputed by analogy with commodity markets,
such as the ‘markets’ for bribes, for gangster protection, for hired
59
60 Anti-Capitalism
murderers, for fines, for libel compensation, and so on. All these
disparate markets, however, have one thing in common: money.
The functions of money in these capitalist markets are ubiquitous.
Money is the means of rendering disparate objects and activities
commensurate with each other (the unit of account or measure of
value). It is the mediating instrument in transactions (the means of
exchange). It is, further, the medium that enables settlement of
promises and obligations between market participants at a time
other than that of the actual transaction itself (the means of
payment). It is also the medium that allows one country to settle its
obligations with, or transfer wealth to, another (world money).
Finally, money is the medium for forming hoards, which are
possessed by individuals or enterprises and held with banks or other
financial institutions (means of hoarding). Financial institutions also
hold their own vast hoards of money (reserves).
Money also has broader social functions in a capitalist society,
most clearly seen in relation to power and hierarchy. Money affords
social power, since it can impel others to comply with its owner’s
will, for example, by placating opponents, mobilising supporters, or
hiring professional expertise. Money also affords political power, as
is clearly seen in the influence exercised on political parties by those
that finance them. Money, moreover, determines rank and social
hierarchy, since it opens the doors of ‘good’ society and secures
membership of exclusive clubs and associations. In capitalist society,
which typically shuns hereditary distinctions and privileges, money
is uniquely able to sustain rank and hierarchy across the generations,
since it can place one’s children in the ‘right’ schools and purchase
husbands and wives.1 Finally, money’s power is also global as it
allows countries to acquire military weapons produced by others,
and since countries that can make gifts of money can also persuade
others to do their bidding.
The complex economic and social functions of money are
matched by a bewildering array of its forms. There is gold, which
lies mostly in private and public hoards. There are cheap metallic
coins and banknotes used heavily in the petty transactions of
everyday life. There are many different types of bank deposits that
can be used to effect payments, or transfer wealth, among individual
and large corporations. There are bank and other accounts that can
be charged through the use of credit cards. There are also deposits
held by financial institutions other than banks that can be used for
payment. There are, moreover, several credit instruments that can be
Money as Money and Money as Capital in a Capitalist Economy 61
used in lieu of payment with cash, such as commercial bills. Despite

money’s protean aspect, however, the vast bulk of its forms in a
developed capitalist economy have one thing in common: they are
related to the credit system. The bulk of modern capitalist money is
credit money.
The social relations captured by money in commodity

exchange
These simple observations about capitalist markets and money
appear unobjectionable, what economists call ‘stylised facts’. Con-
sequently, it comes as a surprise to find that mainstream economic
theory leaves little room for money in its analysis of markets. To be
sure, there are standard references to money’s functions in
economics textbooks, but they sit very uneasily with the underlying
analytical approach of mainstream theory. The theoretical model of
‘general equilibrium’, which underpins mainstream economic
thinking, is fundamentally a model of direct commodity exchange
between market participants (Hahn 1982). Mainstream economic
analysis, which prides itself in being the most advanced social
science, at bottom sees capitalism as a social system in which things
exchange directly for other things (barter), rather than for money. In
short, mainstream economic theory analyses capitalist markets
without adequately explaining money’s role.2
Marxist political economy is vastly different on this score: money
is shown to emerge spontaneously and necessarily whenever regular
commodity exchange is undertaken. It is deeply misleading to
assume, as mainstream economics does, that widespread commodity
exchange could take place under barter conditions. There is no
evidence (historical, anthropological or sociological) that a durable
system of entirely money-free commodity transactions has ever
existed. Indeed, research into exchange systems in which
commodity owners regularly and frequently meet each other shows
that money is present and touches all transactions, directly or
indirectly.3 Economic interactions between owners of particular
commodities inevitably lead to the emergence of money as the
universal commodity, the ‘independent form of value’ or ‘universal
equivalent’. Money and markets are inseparable.
In the first volume of Capital, Marx (1867, ch. 1) provided the
building blocs for a theoretical explanation of money’s emergence as
part of his discussion of the ‘form of value’. Money is shown to
emerge spontaneously and inevitably whenever commodity owners
62 Anti-Capitalism
come into frequent contact with each other. A very important point
here is that money does not emerge simply as a generally accepted
means of exchange, the mere lubricant of markets. Rather, money is
the ‘universal equivalent’ or ‘independent form of value’. Its essential
property is that it can be immediately exchanged for all other com-
modities, thus enabling its owner to buy all others. Money emerges
in commodity exchange as the monopolist of buying power, it is a
special commodity that possesses a unique ability. The process
through which this takes place is determined by the social relations
between commodity owners, analysed below.
Markets are places in which independent and separate individu-
als interact with each other. Market participants might be related
through kinship, friendship or social habits, but when they meet
each other as commodity owners, these links recede into the
background. They do not fully vanish, but become dominated by
the characteristics of commercial give and take, by the ‘bottom line’.
The overwhelming concern of commodity owners when they meet
is to obtain the exchange value of their commodities, to secure the
‘quid pro quo’ of value that is the very logic of their market activities.
As far as this purpose is concerned, other market participants are
strangers, alien individuals with whom a social relationship is to be
constructed in the market alone. Thus, whenever two commodity
owners meet (the ‘accidental form of value’), one must make the
opening move in establishing a social relation among them: there
has to be an initial gambit. Typically, this takes the form of making
an offer to sell the commodity possessed. The counter-party is, thus,
given the option of accepting or rejecting the offer. The social
relation that begins to emerge between the two commodity owners
places the former in the position of the ‘relative’ or ‘active’ and the
latter in the position of the ‘equivalent’ or ‘passive’. To put it differ-
ently, when two alien commodity owners meet and begin to interact
with each other, one of them immediately places the other in the
position of being able to buy, even if only one commodity. Their
social relation, defined as it is by the market, unfolds on this basis.4
Emergence of money represents the development of this rudi-
mentary ability to buy, and its monopolisation by a single
commodity. It occurs as transactions take place generally and
frequently among similarly independent and separate market par-
ticipants. As they meet each other and engage in quid pro quo
transactions, their social relations develop further and revolve
around a single pole of buying ability. There are successive steps to
this process. First, one commodity owner makes an offer of sale to

many others (the ‘expanded form of value’), giving to all of them a
little of the ability to buy (making them partial ‘equivalents’).
Second, in reverse, many commodity owners make offers of sale to
a single other (the ‘general form of value’), giving to the latter a
much strengthened ability to buy (making the commodity involved
a ‘universal equivalent’). Third, if a commodity has come to possess
exceptional buying ability (it already is the ‘universal equivalent’ for
a group of commodities), still other commodity owners will offer
their commodities for sale against it because of its power to buy and
not because they want to consume it. Its ability to buy will increase
correspondingly. On this basis, one commodity will eventually
attract toward it offers of sale from all other commodity owners,
becoming an ‘equivalent’ for all others. This is money, the
commodity that can buy all others. It can do so simply because all
other commodities are typically offered for sale against it.
When transactions become monetary, the social relations among
commodity owners acquire a different content. Commodity owners
are still independent and separate from each other, but they also act
in a social way (if unplanned and unconscious), since they make
money emerge by collectively offering their goods for it. Thus,
money has its roots in individual exchange transactions among alien
individuals, but it is also a collective and social phenomenon.
Commodity owners typically offer their goods for money because
they know that money will also be accepted by others. In short,
money is systematically used by market participants because its use
has become a social norm that characterises markets. However, the
general use of money is a very peculiar social norm. It links essen-
tially alien individuals and does not rest on familial, religious,
hierarchical relations on which social norms typically depend.
Money is the glue that holds together the individuals that comprise
the market, it is the ‘nexus rerum’ of a market economy. But it is an
impersonal link, lacking the immediacy and directness of other
norms that hold society together. Participants in capitalist markets
are inherently separate from each other, their connections estab-
lished by a thing that monopolises buying ability, the use of which
has become a social norm.
The source of money’s social power and influence is now clear.
Contrary to what is typically (though often implicitly) assumed by
mainstream economic theory, markets are not characterised by
equality among participants. One commodity stands above all
64 Anti-Capitalism
others, since it possesses the unique characteristic of being able to

buy all others. Far from being democratic and egalitarian, markets
have a privileged king and a vast crowd of subjects. This is the
foundation of the power possessed by money owners compared to
plain commodity owners. Money owners can mobilise resources,
obtain commodities, secure promises and postpone demands on
them in ways not available to plain commodity owners, thus
affording to themselves economic power. In societies in which
commodity exchange is widespread, the economic power afforded
by money naturally leads to social power. In a capitalist society,
which incorporates a vast network of markets, the king of the market
is a prime instrument for imposing one’s will on others, and estab-
lishing social hierarchy and rank. Social power, privilege and
inclusion in various activities are intertwined with possession of
money in a capitalist society. Equally, lack of money translates into
powerlessness, deprivation and exclusion from several social
activities for the majority of the poor in capitalism. In capitalist
society, successful participation in social affairs depends less on a
person’s abilities and skills and more on possession of money, the
monopolist of the ability to buy.
Forms and functions of money

Thus, from Marx’s work it is possible to piece together an explana-
tion of what money is, namely the monopolist of the ability to buy
in markets, ‘the universal equivalent’. Money emerges necessarily
when commodity owners interact with each other and, in turn, its
use becomes a social norm. Does this derivation imply that money
has to be a commodity? Is Marxist analysis of money tantamount to
a theory of metallic money, namely gold, as Schumpeter, the great
Austrian economist, thought (1954, pp. 699–701)? Moreover, since
commodity money plays a marginal role in the contemporary world
economy, is such analysis obsolete? These questions sound plausible
but actually reveal confusion regarding what money is, its corre-
sponding functions and the forms it takes when it performs them.
The first point to stress is that the multiple economic and social
functions of money flow from what the ‘universal equivalent’ is,
namely the monopolist of the ability to buy. For the functions of
measure of value and means of exchange to become real economic
phenomena, the money owner has to accept an offer of sale from
the commodity owner and part with money. A theorist can certainly
create abstract models of value being measured and commodities
exchanging in a variety of ways, but for these functions to become

social reality, there must be regular payment of money in exchange
for commodities. In short, if the ability of money to buy is not
exercised regularly in practice, the functions of measure of value and
means of exchange have no social content at all. The same holds
true for the hoarding and paying functions of money, domestically
and internationally. It is possible for commodity owners to create
obligations among themselves that rest on subsequent use of money
as means of payment because money’s monopolistic ability to buy
makes later payment in practice acceptable. Similarly, commodity
owners hoard money in order to be able to confront unforeseen
events in the markets because money has a unique ability to buy.
The multiple functions of money rest on its monopolisation of the
ability to buy.
Money’s original form has to be that of a commodity. It cannot be
otherwise since money emerges within a set of commodities as the
monopolist of buying ability. But as commodity money performs
the function of means of exchange, symbolic money begins to
emerge. By being used in exchange, commodity money is abraded
and worn, and thus has less weight than it purports to do. Through
use, metallic money spontaneously turns into a symbol of what it is
supposed to be, and opens the way for proper symbols of money
(paper or metallic) (Marx 1859, pp. 108–114). Furthermore, by
performing the function of means of payment, money allows growth
of trade credit (‘buy now – pay later’). Similarly, the hoards created
by money make it possible for their owners to make loans aimed at
earning interest, thus opening the possibility of money-lending
credit. In a capitalist economy, financial institutions emerge that
make systematic the advance of both types of credit. Through their
operations a proliferation of other forms of money takes place, all
of which are essentially credit money.
In all its forms (commodity, symbolic or credit) money remains
the ‘universal equivalent’, the monopolist of the ability to buy. At
the same time, it cannot be assumed that every new form of money
is fully adequate for the particular function that it is called to
perform in exchange. Monetary problems and crises may occur if
the form is inadequate for the function, for example, price inflation
may arise out of fiat and credit money functioning as means of
exchange. In developed capitalism, the functioning of commodity
money has been limited to hoard of last resort. Such hoards are held
by the major financial institutions (central banks) of the capitalist
66 Anti-Capitalism
credit system. The marginal role played by commodity money in

advanced capitalist exchange poses no insuperable problems for
Marxist political economy.5
MONEY AS CAPITAL
Money and the circuit of capital
Money is not a specifically capitalist economic phenomenon. The
presence of money and its extensive social and economic function-
ing are well attested in ancient societies as well as in contemporary
communities that are in no way capitalist. Given the analysis of
money as monopolist of the ability to buy, it follows that money’s
presence and functioning in non-capitalist societies depends on the
extent to which commodity exchange is present in them. Never-
theless, money’s nature, functions and forms emerge most clearly
under capitalist social conditions, for it is only then that commodity
exchange becomes truly general and permeates economic activity.
There are two reasons why commodity exchange and money
occupy such a prominent position in capitalism compared to other
societies. First, capitalist production is undertaken by a class of
autonomous and competing producers (capitalists), who purchase
inputs and sell output in a range of markets. Capitalist production,
moreover, relies on the social class of wage workers. They derive their
income from selling their ability to work in the labour market, and
use the proceeds to obtain means of consumption in commodity
markets. The prominence of markets in the economic functioning of
capitalism ensures the prominence of money’s economic and social
role. Second, as discussed elsewhere in this volume, the existence of
a capitalist class and a working class turns commodity value into a
deeply rooted social norm. The economic interaction of these two
classes gives to value a real social substance, namely abstract labour.
The driving motive and mainstay of capitalism is the continuous
expansion of value as abstract labour, through extraction of surplus
value from workers employed in production. Since it is the inde-
pendent representative of value, money possesses a special role in
capitalism: it captures its very social essence, summarised in the drive
for money profits.
The special place occupied by money in capitalism is shown by
money becoming capital. Money as capital is a broader social and
economic phenomenon than money as money. For Marxist political
economy, capital is the sum total of social relations between capi-
talists and workers, but also the ceaseless movement of value in
pursuit of self-expansion. The latter is best thought of as a circular

flow: capital value starts as money, becomes material inputs to
production through market purchases (means of production and
labour power), turns into finished commodities through production,
and returns to money (augmented by surplus value generated in
production, i.e. profit) through sale of finished commodities (Fine
1975). Money is the natural starting and finishing point for this
circuit. Since it is the circuit’s most fluid element, money is the form
in which capital normally commences its movement as capitalists
make investment purchases. It is also the form to which capital must
return (plus profit), if the capitalist is to retain the ability to invest
where profit can be maximised. Money as capital can be indicated by
M – C – M' (money – commodities – more money), a summation of
the circuit of capital. This is in contrast with money as plain money,
indicated by C – M – C' (commodities – money – other commodi-
ties), a summation of market transactions (or simple exchange). The
motivating purpose of M – C – M' is acquisition of money profit,
while that of C – M – C' is acquisition of different use values. Money
provides the objective of M – C – M', but also a means for achieving
this objective since money as capital hires workers and allows for
generation of surplus value (see Chapter 1). Yet, money as capital
takes advantage of – and does not eliminate – money’s functioning
as plain money. The point is important for reasons of both theory
and policy, as can be seen in the following two ways.
First, the profit-seeking and exploitative character of capitalism
revolves around money but does not result from money’s peculiar
properties. Rather, capitalism originates in the profound social trans-
formation that creates the social classes of capitalists and workers. It
is true that for the emergence of capitalism extensive use must be
made of money’s capacity to be hoarded and to pay in order to create
the original capital available to the capitalist class and to dispossess
the working class from the means of production. But the driving
force behind these changes is social struggle, of which money is a
means and not a cause. Put differently, it is not money that creates
capitalism, but capitalism that transforms money into capital.
Capitalist social relations graft onto money’s functions as means of
purchasing, payment and hoarding the aspect of capital, especially
since surplus value takes the form of money profits. These functions
are incorporated into the circuit of capital and facilitate the ceaseless
expansion of capital. It follows immediately that to tackle the roots
of capitalism and stop money from functioning as capital it is not
68 Anti-Capitalism
enough to confront the monetary mechanisms of capitalism.

Instead, it is vital to challenge the class relations that underpin it
and result in exploitation. To stop money acting as capital it is
necessary to change the class structure of capitalist society rather
than simply disrupt its monetary mechanisms.
Second, in developed capitalism the economic and social space of
simple commodity exchange (C – M – C') expands dramatically.
From the standpoint of the working class, market transactions are
simple circulation: workers enter the labour market, sell their ability
to labour, and use the money to obtain necessary means of con-
sumption. Since the development of capitalism implies the
expansion of the working class (that is, the class that earns income
by entering the labour market), it follows that as capitalism develops,
the functioning of money as plain money is intensified. Money
functions as plain money in transactions relating to the sale of
labour power, and that is how it enters the realm (and conscious-
ness) of the worker. The driving motive for workers in such
transactions is acquisition of the use value of goods, and has nothing
to do with the expansion of value. For workers, money is primarily
the means of purchase and of settling obligations, and in a very
limited sense, the means of hoarding.
Consequently, money as the monopolist of the ability to buy
directly affects the social power of workers in capitalism – and of the
poor generally. Their social power could increase dramatically if the
buying power of money were limited relative to key goods. This is
not conditional on changing the class structure of capitalism, or on
overthrowing it. It simply follows from limiting the monopoly
power of money over important elements of the consumption of
workers and the poor. When access within capitalism to health,
education, and transport is regulated through public provision rather
than through private expenditure of money, the social power of
workers rises sharply. Public provision of such goods and services is
not only more economical but also makes for greater social power
and confidence for those who have limited access to money. Money
as capital has little to do with this result. What is vital is to restrict
the functioning of money as money in the social realm of workers
and the poor.
Money and the credit system

Money’s role in the circuit of capital brings one more fundamental
change to its social and economic functioning: money is systemati-
cally mobilised in credit and finance. Credit practices, that is, both
the advance of goods on trust (for later settlement of the obligation)
and the lending of money, are found in a wide variety of non-
capitalist societies. However, in those societies the practices of credit
are peripheral to the main activities of production, and they are
aimed mostly at facilitating or smoothing consumption. No
mechanisms for the systematic lending of money to undertake
productive investment can be found in non-capitalist societies (Itoh
and Lapavitsas 1999, ch. 3). In contrast, capitalism contains a
financial system, a vast and elaborate social structure that puts credit
and finance at the service of capitalist production.
Money’s role in the circuit of capital is of critical importance for
the capitalist financial system in two related ways. First, by func-
tioning as means of payment, money allows for the systematic
advance of finished commodity output against promises to pay.
Thus, money makes possible the expansion and growth of trade
credit among capitalist enterprises. The typical way of undertaking
market operations in developed capitalism is on trade credit rather
than cash, because such credit economises on money capital and
speeds the turnover of capital. Second, by functioning as means of
hoarding, money allows for systematic concentration of idle money
in the course of the circuit, and creation of loanable money capital.
Hoards are systematically formed by capitalist enterprises as precau-
tionary reserves, fixed capital depreciation, reserves necessary for
maintaining the continuity of production, and so on.6 Hoards are
also formed as workers and capitalists realise their consumption
through money. The financial system gathers money hoards across
society and turns them into loanable money capital. This is a special
form of capital, which does not earn profit through direct
engagement in production and circulation but earns interest by
being lent. Access to loanable money capital allows capitalists to start
new – or to expand existing – circuits of capital, thus increasing the
mass of surplus value generated by their own capital. Interest is a
share of the additional surplus value, which accrues to the owners of
loanable money capital (see Chapters 2 and 4).
The capitalist financial system is a complex social mechanism that
organises trade credit, mobilises loanable money capital and transfers
money across society. Its operations rely on money. The hoarding
function of money allows reserves to be created that can form
loanable money capital, by definition impossible in the absence of
money. The paying function of money, on the other hand, allows for
70 Anti-Capitalism
systematic cancelling out and residual settlement of obligations

among capitalists (clearing), which encourages growth of all credit
practices. The paying function is also vital to lending, as money can
reliably transfer value to claimants at specified points in time,
whether as interest or principal. In turn, the form of money is
profoundly affected by growth and development of the capitalist
financial system. Banks and other financial institutions systemati-
cally generate credit money that overtakes commodity and state fiat
money as ‘universal equivalent’. Capitalist money is overwhelmingly
credit money, mostly functioning as means of hoarding and
payment. The means of exchange function is relegated to the small
change of credit money (mostly banknotes).
The financial system represents a concentration and expansion of
social power on quite a different level from mere money. Access to
credit enables capitals to move into different areas of production and
to beat others in competition. The financial system distributes spare
resources across society, hence control over its mechanisms matters
greatly for the direction of development of a particular society. Nev-
ertheless, the enormous social power that is afforded by the financial
system cannot be analysed in the context of money – it requires
discussion of the social relations of credit and finance which, despite
having a monetary aspect, are very different from the social relations
encapsulated in money (see Chapter 10).7 One point that should be
made in this connection, however, is that the deeper foundation of
the financial system in capitalism can be found in the systematic
generation of surplus value in the circuits of industrial capital.
Surplus value allows for systematic payment of interest and provides
the wherewithal for other returns made by capitals engaged in
finance. Capitalist society is the only historical society that has been
able to evolve a financial system, as opposed to simple credit trans-
actions, because it is the only society that systematically generates
money profits in production. Thus, although the power of finance
is enormous in a capitalist society, ultimately finance is subservient
to industrial capital.
CONCLUSION
Money is an economic category intrinsic to markets and funda-
mental to relations between commodity owners. It arises
spontaneously in commodity exchange, through the social (but
unplanned and unconscious) action of other commodity owners. It
is the monopolist of the ability to buy, or in Marxist terminology,
the ‘universal equivalent’. Money has several complex functions

vital to commodity exchange – measure of value, means of
exchange, means of hoarding, means of payment and world money.
As it performs these functions, money’s own form is altered into
forms that include commodity money, symbolic money and credit
money. Each form of money has to be adequate for the function that
it tends to perform. Money’s unique ability to buy gives it an excep-
tional position in commodity markets. Hence, access to money
becomes a source of economic and social power, and the foundation
for capitalist hierarchies and privileges. It also follows that the social
power of working people and the poor in capitalism would benefit
from limiting money’s ability to buy, especially over the goods that
significantly affect their living conditions.
Money is an economic category that is far older than capitalism.
Nevertheless, its nature and functions emerge most clearly under
capitalist social conditions because it is then that commodity
exchange becomes truly general. Moreover, under capitalist
conditions, money becomes capital. It is both starting (money
investment) and finishing point (sales revenue) of capital’s charac-
teristic circular movement. More importantly, money provides the
motive (money profit) for capital’s operations, and captures its
essential purpose: self-expansion. Since it can be used to hire workers
necessary for generation of surplus value, money is also the means
through which capital can bring about its self-expansion. Conse-
quently, the social power of money in capitalism is enormous. Under
capitalist conditions, furthermore, money becomes one of the foun-
dations of the financial system by allowing trade credit to proliferate
and by making possible the formation of loanable money capital. Its
close association with the financial system induces broad changes
in the form of money, and credit money becomes the characteristic
form of money in capitalism. The power of the financial system over
capitalist society is also enormous, but the social relations of finance
need a broader framework of analysis than those of money.

Fine, B. (1975) Marx’s Capital. London: Macmillan.
Fine, B. and Lapavitsas, C. (2000) ‘Markets and Money in Social Science: What
Role for Economics?’, Economy and Society 29 (3), pp. 357–82.
Hahn, F. (1982) Money and Inflation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Itoh, M. and Lapavitsas, C. (1999) Political Economy of Money and Finance.
Macmillan: London.
72 Anti-Capitalism
Kiyotaki, N. and Wright, R. (1989) ‘On Money as a Medium of Exchange’,

Journal of Political Economy 97, pp. 927–54.
Lapavitsas, C. (2000a) ‘Money and the Analysis of Capitalism: The Signifi-
cance of Commodity Money’, Review of Radical Political Economics 32 (4),
pp. 631–56.
Lapavitsas, C. (2000b) ‘On Marx’s Analysis of Money Hoarding in the
Turnover of Capital’, Review of Political Economy 12 (2), pp. 219–35.
Marx, K. (1859) Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1970.
Marx, K. (1867) Capital, vol. 1. London: Penguin, 1976.
Menger, K. (1892) ‘On the Origin of Money’, Economic Journal 2, pp. 239–55.
Schumpeter, J.A. (1954) History of Economic Analysis. London: Routledge.
Uno, K. (1980) Principles of Political Economy. Brighton: Harvester.
NOTES
1. For a fuller discussion of money’s social role and power see Fine and
Lapavitsas (2000).
2. There have been neoclassical attempts to explain the spontaneous
emergence of means of exchange as the most ‘marketable’ commodity,
going as far back as Menger (1892). The most recent formulations of this
idea, for instance, Kiyotaki and Wright (1989), leave the property of ‘mar-
ketability’ unexplained. In effect, money is the most ‘marketable’
commodity because market participants think that it is. That is a deeply
unsatisfactory and circular argument.
3. See Itoh and Lapavitsas (1999, chs. 2 and 10).
4. Positing Marx’s analysis of money in these terms is one of the most
decisive contributions of the Japanese Uno school (Uno 1980). It is not
implied here that Marx’s analysis of money is the final word on the
subject. The point is, rather, that it offers a path toward solving the ‘riddle
of money’, while also taking into account the social relations encapsu-
lated in money.
5. For further analysis of this issue see Lapavitsas (2000a).
6. Hoarding in the circuit of capital is fully discussed in Lapavitsas (2000b).
7. See Itoh and Lapavitsas (1999, chs. 3 and 4).
4 Capitalist Competition and

the Distribution of Profits
Diego Guerrero
Universal competition among all those who sell commodities and

depend on their sale, as well as the capitalist distribution of the
output, must be understood and analysed together in the framework
of their own mode of production: capitalism. The mode of distribu-
tion of the social product is a consequence of the actual mode of
production. When capitalism prevails, its main feature is the all-
embracing dependence of the social processes (including the labour
process) on the specific way production is undertaken. Capitalist
production is carried out in a private and socially fragmented way,
with no possibility of systematic co-operation beyond each unit of
production (see Chapter 1).
THE ALL-EMBRACING COMPETITIVE STRUGGLE AND THE

PRIMARY DISTRIBUTION OF INCOME
The fragmentation of social production into private, independent
and rival units reaches its maximum when labour power becomes a
commodity. Then the wage workers and the public administration,
as well as the capitalists, behave as merchants. The workers depend
on the sale of their labour power, and the state – whose revenues
derive from a productive sector that produces commodities as the
sole means of making money – follows a similar merchant
behaviour. Hence, wherever rivalry and competition form the
system’s status quo, all agents (workers, capitalists, and the state)
must behave as merchants subject to the rules of the competitive
war. The study of these rules is the core of the theory of competi-
tion, an aspect of value theory bearing upon the distribution of the
means of production, its implications for the primary distribution
of the newly produced value (between variable capital and surplus
value) and, especially, the distribution of surplus value among its co-
sharers (see below).
The class struggle itself, although not reducible to competition,
includes a competitive dimension. However, the reproduction costs
73
74 Anti-Capitalism
of simple labour power are the main determinant of its normal price
(the wage rate). The necessity that this reproduction should be
accomplished without jeopardising the continuity of the process of
capital accumulation ensures that ‘subsistence wages’ (in a social
rather than physical sense) remain the norm in contemporary
capitalist economies (see Chapter 5). This ‘subsistence’ level includes
all categories of wage labour. The fact that the flow of former capi-
talists (and self-employed workers) becoming new wage workers is
greater than the opposite flow is explained by the fact that the
threshold (money) capital required to set up a new capitalist firm is
growing faster than the monetary reproduction costs of the average
socially qualified worker. The net result of this process is the
growing proportion of wage (or proletarian) labour in capitalist
societies (see Table 4.1).
Table 4.1 Proportion of waged (proletarian) labour power, in selected

countries and years.
Country 1930–40 1974 1997
USA 78.2 (1939) 91.5 91.5

Japan 41.0 (1936) 72.6 80.8
Germany 69.7 (1939) 84.5 (West) 90.7
UK 88.1 (1931) 92.3 87.3
France 57.2 (1936) 81.3 87.6
Italy 51.6 (1936) 72.6 74.7
Canada 66.7 (1941) 89.2 n/a
Belgium 65.2 (1930) 84.5 83.6
Sweden 70.1 (1940) 91.0 94.7
Spain 52.0 (1954) 68.4 81.0
Europe – 15 n/a n/a 84.3
Simple Average 65.2 83.7 86.2
The trend towards a growing relative immiseration of the workers

is well documented, and it should not be confused with the simul-
taneous trend toward an increasing real wage. The two trends are
not only mutually compatible but each is inherent in capitalism, as
can easily be seen in developed capitalist societies. As was pointed
out by Marx (1867), the increase in labour productivity reduces the
labour value of each commodity, and each bundle of commodities
(including the ‘subsistence’ bundle of the workers). At the same time,
the increase in average labour intensity generates a trend towards
higher consumption levels, as the only way of replenishing the
Capitalist Competition and the Distribution of Profits 75
increased labour power consumed per hour. In fact, this duality –

rising real wages and declining ‘relative’ wages – is a very important
factor conditioning the behaviour of the working class. The workers
can improve their material standard of life in the long run (even if
going through phases in which their purchasing power stagnates or
even declines) while, at the same time, inequality grows in terms of
the relative position occupied by the working class in contrast to its
antagonistic class: the capitalists.
Edward Wolff (1998) has shown that the net financial wealth of
the average family in the United States is ten times smaller if ‘only’
99 per cent of the population is taken into account (leaving aside
the highest one per cent). It can also be shown that, in several OECD
countries, the rate of surplus value (the rate of exploitation) has been
rising for two centuries. The only categories we need are those of
surplus value, exploitation and others derived from the labour theory
of value (for a review of the literature, see Shaikh and Tonak 1994).
COMPETITION AND PROFIT DISTRIBUTION BETWEEN FIRMS IN

THE PRODUCTIVE SECTOR
Each capitalist firm gathers a mass of workers into a single operating
mechanism called its ‘collective’ labour force. In this system of
production, work is collectivised at the level of the individual firm,
but it cannot be co-ordinated with the remaining social labour in
the framework of the capitalist mode of production. ‘Direct’ labour
performed by the whole ‘collective worker’ (the sum total of the
collective workers in all firms) produces an amount of new value
greater than that needed to reproduce the value of the collective
labour power (the value of their means of subsistence or regular con-
sumption). This is due to the generalised existence of surplus labour,
that is, labour over and above the amount needed to reproduce the
equivalent of the bundle of goods actually consumed by the direct
producers. The monetary expression of the surplus labour appropri-
ated by the owners of the firms is the total surplus value, or profit,
extracted by the capitalist class. The core of the theory of competi-
tion concerns the allocation of this surplus value and, specifically,
the discrepancies between the ‘individual’ amounts of surplus labour
extracted and realised by each of the rival productive units.
The state and other institutions able to modify the basic results of
the free competition model should be temporarily set aside, so that
we can focus on productive capital only. Accordingly, we exclude
taxes and monopolies, and the existence of goods that are not freely
76 Anti-Capitalism
reproducible by manufacturing (land, for instance; see below). We

will firstly study competition among capitalist firms as a process
which is conveniently split into two different analytical moments:
intrasectoral competition and intersectoral competition. Even if both
take place simultaneously in practice, they should be analysed
separately and successively in order to facilitate understanding (see
Chapter 1 and Gouverneur 1983).
Intrasectoral competition
Intrasectoral competition occurs between firms belonging to one
sector, i.e. all those producing the same kind of commodity (homo-
geneous product). Technical diversity within each sector makes the
unit production costs very different in each of the firms. However,
all of them are forced to accept the tendency toward the same output
price, and not demand a higher one, due to their competition for
market shares. These different unit costs, and the simultaneous
tendency toward homogeneous prices, generate a tendency toward
the dispersion of the individual profit rates obtained by each firm.
However, it is crucial not to confuse the cost per unit of input used
up with the cost per unit of output produced. This is a very important
issue, as intrasectoral competition frequently takes place in a
worldwide framework, and the firms producing the same type of
commodity face an increasingly globalised market. The competi-
tiveness of a firm, like that of a sector or country, is ultimately based
on an advantage in unit costs. If the price of a unit of labour power
employed in sector S is lower in country A than in country B (say
one half), but labour productivity is much higher in B (say six times
higher), the result will be that the wage cost per unit of product will
be three times lower in country B (even if the wage rate is higher in
this country). If both producers face approximately the same input
prices, their profit rates will be very different and, paradoxically, they
will be higher in the high-wage country (since high wages usually
reflect productivity differences).
Intersectoral competition
Intersectoral competition operates between firms belonging to
different branches or sectors. As Marx (1894) points out, when taking
into account the fact that commodities circulate not simply as com-
modities, but as the product of capitals (i.e., as capitalist
commodities; see Rubin 1928), competition requires that any
amount of capital invested in one sector should gain a proportion-
ate yield (an equal profit rate). This means a profit that tends towards
proportionality to the sum of its variable and constant capital, in
spite of the composition of capital in each sector (the ratio between
the two components of capital) being very different in each of them.
Both dimensions of competition produce quantitative modifica-
tions in the value of the individual commodities and in the profits
received by individual capitalists. The latter happens even if the total
value and surplus value produced are unaffected by this double redis-
tribution. Marx (1894) insisted that the unit value in each sector can
be modified as a result of ‘free competition among capitals’. Free
competition (as was pointed out by Smith 1776) prevents one sector
from obtaining a higher average profit rate than the economy’s
average, since the search for maximum profit rates by each
individual capital generates a tendency toward the equalisation of
the average rate of profit in every sector. Marx explained that these
‘modified’ or ‘transformed’ prices, arising from this second tendency
in competition – what he called ‘prices of production’ – would not
be strictly proportional to the total amount of labour spent in
production. This is because differences in the organic and value com-
positions of capital between sectors require that, in the context of
intersectoral competition, profit should be proportional to the total
capital invested, rather than proportional to its variable component
only (the fraction of capital exchanged against the only commodity
capable of producing surplus value, labour power).
Before proceeding to the next section, it is necessary to add two
considerations. First, even if Marx considered Smith’s treatment of
the tendency toward the equalisation of the sectoral rates of profit to
be one of his most important contributions, he completely rejected
the ideological (normative) conclusions that the apologists of
capitalism extract from the idea of the ‘invisible hand’. Marx distin-
guishes between two things. On the one hand, it is true that supply
tends to adjust itself (more or less slowly) to the demand existing in
actual capitalist conditions: this is the ‘automatic’ mechanism in
capitalist reproduction, allowing the pursuit of individual interest
on the part of each firm to lead to a certain mode of social repro-
duction. However, there is no guarantee that this effective demand
truly reflects the needs of the members of society, for it is simply a
monetary demand expressing the mode of distribution correspond-
ing to a system of production that reproduces wealth and poverty in
both poles of the same basic (capitalist) relationship. Moreover,
although the prices of production are the centres of gravity regulating
78 Anti-Capitalism
the movement of actual (market) prices in conditions of ‘free com-

petition’, the existence of monopolies or public intervention, acting
through ‘price regulation’, may alter the normal oscillation of these
prices around their regulating centres, determined by the conditions
of ‘free competition’ (this process should not be confused with the
neoclassical theory of perfect competition).
THE DISTRIBUTION OF PROFIT OUTSIDE THE PRODUCTIVE

SECTOR
The presentation of the theory of competition based on the labour
theory of value is not yet complete. We should now deal with the
unproductive sector of the economy, especially the state (which
finances itself through taxes and other revenues originating from
the productive sector) and the circulation activities (as opposed to
the productive sector), including the redistribution of part of the
surplus value (or its money form, profit), and land rent or, more
generally, any kind of payment made for the use of inputs that are
not freely reproducible.
The public sector

The state – leaving aside the public utilities, which should be dealt
with exactly like private firms that, in this regard, belong either to
the productive or the circulation sectors – supplies the so-called
‘public services’ usually without any merchant transaction or price.
This means that the state must take up a fraction of the profits
generated in the productive sector of the economy, in order to pay
for the expenses generated by its ‘administrative’ activities (both
when it performs the most useful activities, like public health or
education, and when it shows more clearly its capitalist class nature,
as in the defence of private property or in helping to fund private
firms). The taxes levied by the state and other public institutions (in
a broad sense, including fees, social security contributions and other
revenues) are a fraction of the total surplus value that cannot be
directed toward the ultimate aim of the capitalist class: accumula-
tion, as additional capital available to expand the scale of operation
of the productive sphere. Hence, it must be considered as a form of
‘social consumption’ of part of the output of the productive sector.
Commodity circulation
The state is not the only sphere where unproductive labour is
performed (i.e., labour creating neither value, nor surplus value, nor
capital; see Chapter 2). The ‘sphere of circulation’ must be clearly

distinguished from the sphere of production, since only the latter
creates the whole mass of value, while the sphere of circulation
displaces and distributes that mass without modifying it. This
difference is crucial, since the analysis of exploitation starting from
the labour theory of value ought to be based on the assumption of
equivalent exchange. What this means is that, in the global process
of capitalist production, M – C ... P ... C' – M', value and surplus value
(hence profit) are created only in ... P ..., the phase of production,
whereas in both circulation processes (the purchase of inputs, M – C,
and the sale of the output, C' – M') all that happens is the transfer of
ownership from the seller to the buyer, without any modification in
the value of the commodity exchanged (see Chapter 1).
Empirical works dealing with this issue can be misleading, in incau-
tiously identifying the concept of ‘circulation’ with what the
available data characterise as the ‘trade’ and ‘finance’ sectors. In my
view, Nagels (1974) has correctly insisted that this should be avoided
and, instead, that researchers should attempt to analyse two problems
that are often ignored: (a) that productive activities are performed in
these sectors (see Guerrero 1999–2000), and (b) that it is necessary to
locate unproductive circulation activities inside all productive sectors,
because capitalist economies produce not only goods but commodities
and, hence, needs to transmit titles of ownership, as well as perform
other activities that are superfluous, from the point of view of the use
value produced and its consumption.
Land and other non-reproducible inputs

Finally, the question of land rent requires a special treatment in the
theory of value, competition and distribution (Bina 1985).
Productive inputs privately appropriated and reproducible only in
a limited way allow their owners to participate in the distribution
of the surplus value created by the workers in the productive sector.
The reason is simple: these owners can claim from the productive
capitalists a share of the total surplus labour, and this share increases
with the demand for these inputs (whose supply is, necessarily,
limited). Marx (1894) wrote that ‘the fact that capitalist ground-rent
appears as the price or value of land, so that land, therefore, is
bought and sold like any other commodity, serves some apologists
as a justification for landed property since the buyer pays an
equivalent for it, the same as other commodities ... The same reason
in that case would also serve to justify slavery, since the returns
80 Anti-Capitalism
from the labour of the slave, whom the slave-holder has bought,
merely represents the interest of the capital invested in this
purchase’ (p. 642).
Marx criticised Ricardo (1821) for analysing differential rent only.
Instead, for Marx, there is also an ‘absolute rent’ alongside the
former. Absolute rent is appropriated by the landowners whenever
the demand for the commodity produced with help from land (or
other non-reproducible inputs) raises its price above zero. Absolute
rent is simply due to the ‘monopoly of the ownership of the land’,
and this ‘limitation’ to the free circulation of capital (and hence to
the general theory of competition) ‘continues to exist even when
rent in the form of differential rent disappears’ (Marx 1894, p. 751).
In contrast, differential rent benefits the owners of land (and other
limited resources) who are in a better position relative to their fellow
landowners, either due to the better quality of their land (rich soils
for agriculture, better weather in land for tourist uses), proximity to
the place of manufacturing or sale of the output, or easier exploita-
tion (in the case of mining or exploiting underground or marine
deposits or urban land) and so on. In this way, the owners of the
best quality non-reproducible resources make possible production at
a lower cost than that included in the normal (production) price,
and appropriate the difference.
What has been said in the previous paragraph applies to the so-
called ‘differential rent I’. Marx also discusses ‘differential rent II’,
which arises as a consequence of an additional investment of capital
on a given plot of land, keeping constant both the productivity dif-
ferential of this allotment with respect to others, and the regulating
price of the commodity which is being produced with the help of
this land.
Consequently, in the case of land and other non-reproducible
resources, it is the conditions of the least efficient units that regulate
the price of the commodities to which these inputs contribute. This
is the opposite of what happens with the regulating capitals in most
industrial sectors. In mature sectors, the regulating capitals are
usually those enjoying the average conditions of production; in
contrast, in sectors endowed with the most advanced technology,
especially those undergoing rapid evolution (or ‘revolution’, such as
the personal computer industry during the 1980s and 1990s), it is
the most efficient productive units that set the normal price
regulating the actual (market) price.

Bina, C. (1985) The Economics of the Oil Crisis. London: Merlin Press.
Gouverneur, J. (1983) Contemporary Capitalism and Marxist Economics. Oxford:
Martin Robertson (updated French edition: Decouvrir l’économie.
Phénomènes visibles et réalités cachées. Paris: Editions Sociales, 1998).
Guerrero, D. (1999–2000) ‘Nonproductive Labor, Growth and the Expansion
of the Tertiary Sector (Thirty Years after the Publication of Marx and
Keynes)’, International Journal of Political Economy 29 (4), pp. 14–55.
Marx, K. (1867, 1894) Capital, vols. 1 and 3. New York: International
Publishers, 1967.
Nagels, J. (1974) Travail collectif et travail productif dans l’évolution de la pensée
marxiste, Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles.
Ricardo, D. (1821) On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, (3rd
edn.), in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. P. Sraffa and
M. Dobb, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rubin, I. I. (1928) Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Detroit: Black and Red,
1972.
Shaikh, A. and Tonak, E. (1994) Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political
Economy of National Accounts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, A. (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976.
Wolff, E. N. (1998) ‘Recent Trends in the Size Distribution of Household
Wealth’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 12 (3), pp. 131–50.
5 Contesting Labour Markets
Ben Fine
THE ENIGMA OF UNEMPLOYMENT

Standing alongside its undoubted achievements, there are some
endemic features of capitalism that have persisted despite general,
if not universal, condemnation and concerted attempts to mitigate
and eliminate them. These include uneven development; poverty
for many, even the majority, alongside huge wealth for a minority
both within and between countries; deepening environmental
damage; oppression by race, gender and ethnicity; and the apparent
inevitability of armed conflicts. If capitalism has triumphed, much
of its victory is hollow. At a deeper analytical level, such stark
empirical realities concerning the contemporary world, as part of its
continuing history, point to the systemic character of capitalism,
and the presence of forces, structures, relations and processes that
are not amenable to control. In a previous age, literally, a deus ex
machina would have been invoked both to explain and to justify
the complexities and contradictions of the real world, with mortals
merely playing out a battle between vice and virtue according to a
game set by divine rule. Now, in the age of reason, we cannot afford
such ideological luxuries. They must be replaced by analysis.
At a less dramatic level, unemployment has shown itself to be
uniquely characteristic of capitalism. Unlike other markets, even
when the labour market is ‘tight’, it still leaves workers without jobs,
leading mainstream economics to appeal to a ‘natural’ rate of unem-
ployment in equilibrium, necessary for the economy to function
smoothly. To some, this does not set the labour market apart from
other markets, for all unemployment is perceived to be ‘voluntary’.
If only workers would offer themselves at a sufficiently low wage,
they could be employed. They must prefer the leisure and other
benefits attached to their chosen state of idleness. There are, of
course, many objections to this view of the world, varying from the
false picture painted of the unemployed themselves, often desperate
for work, through to the various versions of Keynesianism that
emphasise deficient aggregate effective demand as the cause of
(involuntary) unemployment. As is readily recognised by those who
82
Contesting Labour Markets 83
care to see, recessions and unemployment do not reflect conscious

choices, freely undertaken, but unconscious forces beyond our ken.
It is important, however, to recognise that those (Keynesian)
critics who accept that unemployment can be involuntary share
some questionable assumptions with their opponents. First is the
idea that work necessarily incorporates what is termed disutility, and
that it is a matter of the worker gaining maximum reward for
minimum time and effort. Even within capitalist society, this is far
from the full story since the waged worker’s motivation is both
complex and mixed. In addition, non-waged work, in the household
for example or for recreation, is often undertaken for pleasure. In
effect, one undoubted feature of capitalist employment – its often
arduous and unrewarding nature – is taken for granted as an
exclusive characteristic of all work.1 Significantly, in his early work
on alienation, Marx placed considerable emphasis on the uniquely
dissatisfying nature of work under capitalism. He focused on the
worker’s loss of control over the production process, in conception,
organisation and execution. Even if this is not the whole picture, the
worker tends to become a repetitively rotating cog in a machine, as
brilliantly displayed in Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times. And
the worker has no control over the fruits of labour, the products
themselves, as they belong to the capitalist. It is hardly surprising
that other aspects of workers’ alienation should be heavily contested
under capitalism, in disputes over conditions of work and not just
levels of wages. In general, workers seek more satisfaction from their
work, and not just more pay for less time, but achievement of their
goals is limited by the capitalist pursuit of profitability.
THE DISTINCTION OF LABOUR

There is then within mainstream economics a tendency to treat all
work as if it were synonymous with work under capitalism (which is
itself falsely conceived in terms of a simple trade-off between higher
productivity for capitalists and lower disutility for workers). Hence
the same theory is applied seamlessly across other forms of ‘work’,
as in the new household economics and the economics of crime –
focusing on the ‘wages’ of theft as against the disutility (derived from
potential punishments). This is indicative of a more general
drawback of economic theories of the labour market – they are
universal, ahistorical and asocial. This is already apparent in the
categories of analysis used – such as (dis)utility, production function,
and labour itself. Whilst the theory is intended to address a labour
84 Anti-Capitalism
market, it does so by deploying concepts that have no roots in such

specific commercial circumstances. To return to the previous issue,
of the inescapable presence of unemployment, it already presumes
much that is to be examined and explained. For there to be the
unemployed, it is necessary to acknowledge that capitalist
employment is the predominant form taken by work or labour, that
a wage system is involved. In other words, we need to know what is
different about the labour market in historical and social terms as
well as by comparison with other commodities that do not
experience chronic unemployment (a term that is used with extreme
reluctance when describing markets other than labour).
Not surprisingly, there is a host of literature concerned with what
is different about labour markets. It has spawned the disciplines and
practices of industrial relations, human resources, and personnel
management. These tend to focus on what is different about labour
or what is different about the market in which it is bought and sold.
As such, it does not deal directly with why labour takes the wage
form and the significance of this in comparison with other markets.
Economists have been even more negligent of such fundamentals,
simply distinguishing labour by its conditions of supply and
demand, like any other market. Significantly, the Nobel prize winner
Solow (1990) deems it necessary to devote a book to persuading his
fellow economists that the labour market is different from that for
fish. This is a remarkable task to have set himself, not so much in its
substance, but that it should be considered to be necessary. For
economists have been reluctant to accept that labour markets are
distinct from other markets. Essentially Solow’s answer is that
workers, unlike fish, represent themselves in the labour market. They
have thoughts and feelings about fairness and fellow workers, for
example, and can display these in terms of loyalty or resistance to a
particular employer. Whilst humans and fish are different in these
respects, a moment’s reflection reveals that Solow has not otherwise
distinguished between the two as markets. Fish, like all products,
offer ‘resistance’ of one sort or another in being brought to the
market, what mainstream economics would perceive to be the costs
or conditions of supply. Moreover, fish are represented in the market
by human agency, by those who sell the fish. Fishermen, fishmon-
gers and others are also able to display and act upon motives of
fairness and loyalty, in relation to one another as well as to those
who stand on the other side of their market. Indeed, in more
advanced (and often in the most primitive) labour markets, the
worker is also represented by another, a separate agency, for

example, by a trade union (or via family, kin or ethnicity).
More recently, a different approach to the specificity of labour
markets, one that straddles mainstream economics and radical
political economy, is the idea of efficiency wages. In its mainstream
version, employers may choose to pay higher wages than necessary
in order to secure a loyal, skilled and disciplined workforce. Lowering
wages, even where there is unemployment, does not necessarily
increase profitability because turnover, skills and work-intensity all
suffer (the latter because the threat of the sack is lessened at a lower
wage). This situation arises because of informational uncertainties –
individual workers know how loyal, skilled and disciplined they are
but bosses do not and may be willing to pay a premium on wages to
obtain higher levels of these features on average.2
The radical version of efficiency wages differs little in analytical
content from the mainstream version.3 It does, however, add a richer
interpretation in which the market inefficiencies arising out of infor-
mationally uncertain contracting are perceived to derive from the
asymmetry between the two sides facing one another across the
labour market. Conflictual contracting predominates over co-
operative because of the capitalist ownership of the means of
production. It is suggested that only if there were more equal and/or
collective forms of ownership, then it would be possible for con-
tracting to be more efficient and less antagonistic and for
co-operation to prevail over conflict.
Irrespective of the latter’s merits as a recipe for socialism (as a fairer
contractual society), the distinctive nature of labour markets has yet
to be captured by the efficiency-wage approaches. For informational
asymmetries (the buyer not knowing as well as the seller what is
being bought and sold) can be used to interpret any market and
have, as such, been at the leading edge of mainstream microeco-
nomics (often parading as macroeconomics). Indeed, the same
analytical tools have been used in a whole range of applications,
from the new financial economics through to the new development
economics. Significantly, this way of looking at imperfect markets
began with the example of ‘lemons’, slang for second-hand cars. This
indicates that uncertain, conflictual contracting with asymmetric
information and power does not get to grips with the nature of
labour as distinct from other markets. As the old saying goes, ‘Buyer
beware!’. What you get for your money has some uncertainty
attached in whatever market you are buying, and not just in the
86 Anti-Capitalism
labour market (and there is no guarantee of getting more or better by

paying more although this is required by the efficiency-wage
approach).
A more long-standing and common explanation for unemploy-
ment amongst political economists originated with Kalecki (1943)
in what, in part, can be interpreted as the macro-version of the
efficiency wage argument. Anticipating the potential impact of
Keynesian policies in the coming postwar period, he argued that full
employment could not be pursued. If it were, worker discipline
would be totally eroded since threat of the sack would be empty
given the ready availability of other jobs. There are, however, two
problems with this account. First, it presumes that, should they want
to, governments of capitalist economies could achieve full
employment. They will not do so, though, because of the undue
power that would then reside with workers, both individually and
collectively. Belief in the capacity to create full employment is a con-
sequence of the Keynesian theory that is at the heart of Kalecki’s
approach, in which effective demand determines the level of
employment. This point will be taken up below. Second, once again,
the approach does not really get to the heart of labour markets as
distinct from other markets. Essentially, it is a general argument that
supply cannot be allowed to become too powerful through
guaranteed demand. But this applies to all markets, especially in the
case of monopolies (addressed by competition policy) and those
considered to be strategic for economic or other reasons, the military
or the ‘utilities’. As a result, such industries have been regulated or
even nationalised.
What all of these explanations for the labour market have in
common is a wish to explain its distinctiveness by reference to the
nature of labour, its market or some combination of the two. This is
why they are deficient since they range over specific instances of
more general properties that do not sufficiently distinguish labour
(markets) from others – it does not help much to ask whether labour
is more or less fish-like or sold through more or less uncertain
contracts. To be more direct, with an ex post exception that proves
the rule suggested in the next but one sentence, what remains
unexamined are the social relations that allow for the market or
wage form of labour – as opposed to feudal or slave forms of labour
for example. This is precluded by taking labour and or markets
themselves as the starting point. Underlying social relations can then
only enter as an afterthought, as in the attempt of some political
economy to suggest that labour markets are distinguished by their

unique attachment to class, conflict and asymmetry in power.
FROM LABOUR MARKET TO VALUE PRODUCTION AND LABOUR

MARKETS
Such factors should be taken as the starting point for understanding
the labour market. And, for Marxist theory, doing so yields a
remarkably simple yet rich answer as its implications are worked
through to more complex and concrete outcomes. What distin-
guishes the labour market is that labour or, more exactly, labour
power employed by capital is the source of value (and surplus value).
From this, that the labour market is the form adopted by (capitalist)
value relations, a whole series of propositions follow. First, and
foremost, such relations are attached to particular class relations –
those in which capital and labour confront one another. Because of
the ownership of the means of production by capital, labourers can
only gain access to work through the labour market. There are very
few other realistic alternatives. Whilst there might appear to be a
choice as market exchange is in some sense free by comparison with
the coercion of feudalism or slavery, the possibilities are limited
without denying the presence of, and possibilities created for, the
self-employed, for example.
Second, with labour power employed by capital for the purpose
of creating (surplus) value, the process of production, not exchange
(or contracting), becomes paramount. The germane issue is how do
capitalists appropriate surplus value. For Marx, the answer lies in
extending the labour performed beyond that necessary to provide
for the wage (see Chapters 1, 2 and 4). It is not a matter of stealing
some of the worker’s product, or part of the distribution of a net
product after it has been produced. Marx examines exploitation, the
production of surplus value, in terms of a fair exchange in the labour
market. Both parties agree and no force is necessarily used, except
when conflict between capital and labour becomes overt. But it is
the goal of the capitalist to get sufficient work to leave surplus value
over and beyond that required to match the value of the wage. This
is done, according to Marx, either by persuading workers to labour
longer or more intensively (what he terms absolute surplus value) or
by increasing productivity of labour so that a given wage takes up
less value and leaves more surplus value left even with a fixed
working day and real wage (relative surplus value for Marx).
88 Anti-Capitalism
Third, both absolute and relative surplus value go far beyond

simple logical categorisations of how capitalists appropriate more
surplus value. Each has important implications for how the
production process is controlled and evolves, and the conflicts it
generates. And each is of greater or lesser significance in particular
times and places. As capitalism becomes more advanced and the
crudest forms of exploitation (low wages and long work) are
eliminated, so relative surplus value comes to the fore, consolidated
into a particular period or stage of capitalism, monopoly capitalism
for Lenin. Here productivity increase is crucial and is underpinned
by legislation to limit working hours, for example, or for social
provision to allow for a healthy and skilled workforce.
Fourth, for Marx, the major systematic source of productivity
increase is derived through increase in size of capital, through accu-
mulation. In order to produce more commodities with a given
quantity of labour, more raw materials are needed for processing,
and sophisticated and large-scale fixed capital provides for these to
be worked up into commodities.
Fifth, on this basis, Marx explains the presence of unemployment
under capitalism. He perceives it to be both a condition for, and a
consequence of, the accumulation of capital. As capitals grow and
increase productivity, so they eliminate rivals whose workers are
rendered unemployed. By the same token, those unemployed form
what Marx calls a reserve army of labour on which expanding
capitals can draw, as can those less advanced capitalists relying upon
both low productivity and low wages as in sweatshops.
Sixth, it follows that employment and unemployment are heavily
influenced by the scale and nature of capital accumulation, with
workers gaining and losing work according to the accumulation and
restructuring of capital. In this light, understanding the labour
market in terms of equilibrium or natural rates of (un)employment
becomes ludicrous – as if the nature of the ocean could be addressed
in terms of the average sea level rather than its ebb and flow.
Seventh, Marx’s theory of technical change is extremely sophisti-
cated but is probably best known for the simple idea that capitalism
divides production down into detailed tasks, displaces workers by
machinery, and thereby deskills workers and reduces them to
machine minders. But the increasingly complex nature of
machinery, raw materials and production processes does itself also
require that workers be reskilled. Consequently, the division of
labour across skilled and unskilled (and what these are) depends
upon how the accumulation of capital accommodates economies of

scale and scope, quite apart from the scale and scope of capitalist
production itself (for which products increasingly become subject to
commercialisation as more and more activities are brought under
the market umbrella).
Eighth, the restructuring both of capital and of labour markets is
highly contingent on associated socio-economic processes, relations,
and structures of broader scope. These concern urbanisation, indus-
trialisation, demographic transition, social stratification and so on,
with measures to promote the health, education and welfare of the
working class in pursuit of productivity increase and to temper
struggles for alternatives to the worst excesses of capitalism.
Ninth, taken together, these points lead to a simple conclusion.4
There is no such thing as the labour market. For labour markets are
highly differentiated from one another according to how the
various factors involved interact with one another and are institu-
tionalised within and across workplaces. Further, such
differentiation is deepened by the possibilities for, and creation of,
labour markets that are not necessarily or directly tied to capital
and profitability – as in much of the state sector, some personal
services and self-employment. In part, these promote the illusion
that full employment is a possibility given a sufficiently strong pull
on the effective demand lever (through state expenditure and/or
employment). But the outcome cannot be freed from the rhythm
and pace of capital accumulation. In short, on the basis of
underlying value relations of production, outcomes for the labour
markets are complex and need to be traced through a diverse set
of interconnected factors embedded in the discussion of the
preceding paragraphs.
FROM ECONOMIC TO SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

Not surprisingly, these factors are conditioned by, and based upon,
a history of capitalism that is marked by a diverse range of struggles
around the value relations that make up labour markets. Necessarily,
at the forefront of such struggles are trade unions, the form of
economic organisation of the working class in pursuit of its collective
interests, however these might be defined and pursued. At its core,
to the extent that the trade union movement aspires to a fair day’s
wage for a fair day’s work (and for waged work itself or full
employment), it cannot fundamentally challenge the wage relation
and the class relations that underlie it.
90 Anti-Capitalism
The limitations of such a goal can be seen in a number of ways.

First a fair day’s wage has its counterpart in the sanctity of a fair
profit for capital advanced, either as an ethical principle (reward for
saving/investment/ownership) or as a pragmatic one (low prof-
itability will squeeze out investment). Second, more generally, a fair
day’s wage leaves unattended those aspects of wage employment
that were previously raised in terms of alienation – control of
production in concept, organisation and execution and control of
the products themselves. Third, fair wage gains are far from secure
given the vagaries of capitalist competition and the cyclical crises of
accumulation that bring depression and downward pressure on
wages and employment. Fourth, gains for some workers in wages
and employment can be at the expense of others, both individually
and collectively, not least for example in competitive trade wars
through protectionist measures.
Despite these reservations, wage struggle is not to be sniffed at and
treated with suspicion for failing to challenge the system more fun-
damentally. First, trade union successes can result in real gains that
can be generalised. Only in a narrow, static distributional under-
standing of wage struggles is conflict perceived to be zero-sum at
best, with the ultimate sanction, resting with the capitalist, of job
loss and closure should wages rise. Rather, wage gains are consistent
with accumulation through more productive techniques and the
elimination of sweatshops and extreme forms of exploitation –
although restructuring of industry in this way is by no means
guaranteed by wage rises.
Second, even in the economic arena, trade unions are not confined
to wage struggles alone. They concern themselves to a greater or
lesser extent with every condition of work, ranging across the
spectrum covered by Marx’s notion of alienated labour, as well as
hours of work, its intensity, and breaks during work as well as for
sickness and holidays, etc. Thus, workers struggle not only against
capitalist control of the production process but also over the
production conditions themselves, as with bargaining over new
technology and the nature of workplace authority – what workers
and managers may, or may not, do. Again there can be no guarantees
over how far these struggles go and how successful and secure they
are. But it is worth bearing in mind that they can even raise prof-
itability. For workers have direct knowledge of the production
process, and improvements in their conditions of work are not nec-
essarily at the expense of productivity and profitability. Nonetheless,
they can be resisted by capitalists as a matter of principle in view of

their origins. For the principle of capitalist authority over production
and property can take precedence over profitability, with Marx giving
the example of employers resisting legislation to require guards to
protect workers against injury from machinery. Once in place, such
measures become, and appear to have been, uncontroversial.
Third, as is already apparent, in engaging in economic struggles,
trade unions will often be drawn across the nebulous and shifting
boundaries connecting economic with social reproduction. The
wage, after all, is only the most immediate source of revenue for
sustenance of the working-class family, whose capacity to provide
able and skilled labour depends upon the range of ‘services’ that are
now commonly thought of as constituting part and parcel of the
welfare state, albeit unevenly by country and type of provision
(housing, education, health, etc.). Initially, such non-wage struggles
are conducted to limit the length of the working day and the
conditions of employment of women and children.
Fourth, the rise of the welfare state does not derive exclusively
from reform conceded for fear of working-class struggle and the drive
for a more productive workforce. Nonetheless, trade unions have
played a significant role in the formation and the continuing
content of the welfare state, not least through trade unions within
the state sectors themselves. Two different aspects are crucial. On
the one hand, trade unions as economic organisations have the
motive and the potential for participating in or creating political
parties in pursuit of broader interests (although this has the dual
effect of broadening the basis for struggle whilst displacing it from
the point of production and from producers themselves). On the
other hand, trade unions (and their political representatives) can suc-
cessfully seek to ‘decommodify’ provision of welfare services,
‘putting people before profit’ in terms of how provision is made as
well as ensuring that is is, in principle, free on demand. In these
respects, embryonic socialist forms of production can already be seen
to be evolving within capitalism, with the persistence of the wage
form of labour but without the inevitable conditions attached to the
capitalist production of surplus value.
FROM ECONOMISM TO SOCIALISM

No doubt the previous paragraphs present too rosy a picture of trade
unions in practice in the absence of a downside that includes
economism (the failure to move beyond immediate material issues,
92 Anti-Capitalism
especially wages), the pursuit of sectional interests both nationally

and sectorally, and a mixed response to new social movements
concerned with sexism, racism and the environment. Defence
workers, after all, depend upon the production of armaments and
hence upon war, just as energy and car workers in a sense depend upon
pollution. Yet the transition to socialism is to go through two phases
according to Marx as he intriguingly and openly suggests in his Critique
of the Gotha Programme. In the first phase, the bourgeois principle of
reward according to work contributed continues to prevail:
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it

has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, as it
emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, eco-
nomically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the
birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.
Accordingly the individual producer receives back from society –
after the deductions have been made [for common fund for
administration, health education and welfare] – exactly what he
gives to it. (1875, p. 563)5
With some form of wage labour persisting in this first phase, it is

essential that organised labour ensures that new, let alone old, forms
of exploitation do not emerge, or re-emerge, this depending upon
how production is controlled alongside the surplus labour itself.
Only then, through a remarkable synthesis of critical commentary
on capitalism and the prospects it promises, does Marx suggest:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving sub-

ordination of individuals under division of labour, and therefore
also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has
vanished, after labour has become not merely a means to live but
has become itself the primary necessity of life, after the productive
forces have also increased with the all-round development of the
individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more
abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right
be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs. (p. 566)

Akerlof, G. and Yellen, J. (eds.) (1986) Efficiency Wage Models of the Labour
Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1990) ‘Contested Exchange: New Microfoundations

for the Political Economy of Capitalism’, Politics and Society 18 (2),
pp. 165–222.
Fine, B. (1985) ‘On the Political Economy of Socialism: Theoretical Consid-
erations with Reference to Non-European and European Experience’, in D.
Banerjee (ed.) Marxian Theory and the Third World. New Delhi/Beverly
Hills/London: Sage Publications.
Fine, B. (1998) Labour Market Theory: A Constructive Reassessment. London:
Routledge.
Kalecki, M. (1943) ‘Political Aspects of Full Employment’, Political Quarterly
14 (3), reproduced in Kalecki (1972).
Kalecki, M. (1972) The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
Marx, K. (1875) Critique of the Gotha Programme, reproduced in Selected Works
in Two Volumes. New York: International Publishers, 1933.
Solow, R. (1990) The Labour Market as a Social Institution. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Spencer, D. (2002) ‘Shirking the Issue? Efficiency Wages, Work Discipline and
Full Employment’, Review of Political Economy, forthcoming.
NOTES
1. See Spencer (2002) for a critical account.
2. See Akerlof and Yellen (1986), for example.
3. See Bowles and Gintis (1990), for example.
4. For fuller discussion of what has preceded and this conclusion, see Fine
(1998).
5. For extensive discussion, see Fine (1985).
6 Technological Change as
Class Struggle
Les Levidow
What is technology? Apparently it works by helping people to solve

problems. In our everyday lives, we commonly experience
technology as hardware whose effects may be predictable or
otherwise, beneficial or otherwise.
Yet political controversy has increasingly focused upon technology
– e.g. automation, nuclear power, agrochemicals, biotechnology,
electronic surveillance, etc. Protest has challenged not simply their
undesirable side effects, but also their implicit purposes, i.e. how their
designers define the problem to be solved. From where do these
problem definitions come?
This chapter will make the following arguments:
• that technological change is inherently social, driven by class

struggle, broadly understood;
• that prevalent technological designs embody strategies for
exploiting labour, commoditising resources, and extending
market relations;
• that these aims are both promoted and disguised by ‘efficiency’
rhetoric; and
• that alternative designs and social futures are possible, by
defining differently the problem to be solved.
To develop those arguments, the chapter has the following

structure: critical perspectives on technology; case studies of educa-
tional technology and high-tech seeds; and conclusions about
technological change as class struggle. The analysis will draw on two
key Marxist concepts – reification, whereby social relations take the
form of relations between things; and fetishism, whereby a human
quality takes the form of property of a thing.
TECHNOLOGY WORKS: EFFICIENCY FOR WHAT?

A common explanation for new technology is the need to increase
efficiency (see Chapters 1 and 4). This begs fundamental questions:
94
Technological Change as Class Struggle 95
efficiency for what purpose? under whose control? according to what

account of progress? Let us survey some critical perspectives.
When Karl Marx analysed new technology in the Industrial
Revolution, e.g. the steam engine and the self-acting mule, he
argued, ‘It would be possible to write a history of the inventions
made since 1830 for the sole purpose of supplying capital with
weapons against the revolt of the working class’ (Marx 1976, p. 563).
Such devices routinised, displaced and undermined craft labour, as
a step towards extending the factory system. While wage labour
already imposed a formal subordination of labour to capital, new
technologies helped to achieve its real subordination, i.e. capitalist
discipline over the content and pace of work, in order to maximise
exploitation.
Since then, Marx’s argument has been extended to another
century-and-a-half of inventions. More recent technologies have
been designed to reduce managerial dependence upon living labour
– e.g. by replacing, managing or disciplining human labour. Their
design codifies, embodies and appropriates specialist skills – not only
those of shop-floor workers, but also those of professional staff and
middle managers (e.g. Braverman 1976, Noble 1984, Robins and
Webster 1985).
That class rationale can be illustrated by many examples from the
1980s onwards. The ‘Information Technology Revolution’ responded
to the employers’ problem that informal worker collectivities were
exercising informal control over the labour process; they could keep
down the work pace, could use their paid time for unofficial
activities, and could even counterpose their own agendas. In the
same period, the UK government expanded its nuclear power
programme, while also automating the coal mines; such decisions
responded to the problem that miners’ revolts were catalysing class-
wide solidarity. Such problem definitions influenced the R & D
criteria for technological solutions. The state and private investors
favoured new technological designs which served to fragment and
discipline workers, while enhancing managerial authority over
labour (see Chapter 17).
Given those aims, some critics have demanded to ‘share the
benefits’, e.g. by increasing workers’ wages or reducing their hours.
Such proposals assume that the main benefits (indeed, purposes)
are a quantifiable increase in material things which therefore could
be allocated more fairly. Yet the benefits lie mainly in relationships
of power.
96 Anti-Capitalism
Wage-labour discipline is a condition for its products to be

fetishised as properties of things. As Karl Marx argued,
the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own

labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour
themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things ... I call
this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour
as soon as they are produced as commodities … To the producers,
therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear
as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations
between persons in their work, but rather as material relations
between persons and social relations between things. (Marx 1976,
pp. 164–6, emphasis in original)
Through commodity exchange, then, relationships between

labourers appear as relations between things, i.e. between quantities
of their labour. This appearance is no misperception or misrepresen-
tation. Rather, it is the form of social relations which allows products
to be exchanged as quantities of a homogenous quality – exchange
value. Such relations ‘appear as what they are’, in so far as human
labour is subordinated to wage labour for commodity exchange.
This subordination can be enforced by technology, i.e. by dead
labour. In capitalist machinery, ‘the social characteristics of their
labour come to confront the workers, so to speak, in a capitalised
form; thus machinery is an instance of the way in which the visible
products of labour take on the appearance of its masters’. Moreover,
the forces of nature and science ‘become separated from the skill and
knowledge of the individual worker’ (Marx 1976, p. 1055, emphasis
in original).
Such perspectives were later elaborated, especially by the Frankfurt
School of Critical Theory. According to Herbert Marcuse, modern-day
‘efficiency’ derives from the capitalist project of commoditisation.
Heterogeneous qualities are homogenised into universally
comparable ones, thus allowing a quantifiable output to be designed,
measured, managed, increased, etc. Such homogenisation is
promoted as a neutral technical tool, thus denying its own value-laden
character. ‘As universal functionalisation (which finds its economic
expression in exchange value), it becomes the precondition of
calculable efficiency – of universal efficiency’ (Marcuse 1978, p. 205).
Such criteria are embedded in technology: ‘Specific purposes and
interests ... enter the very construction of the technical apparatus’.
Consequently, ‘rational, “value-free” technology is the separation of

man from the means of production and his subordination to
technical efficiency and necessity – all this within the framework of
private enterprise’ (p. 222).
In more recent history, such strategies have been extended for
producing novel commodities, for reproducing labour power
amenable to capitalist work discipline, and for commoditising
natural resources. Technological designs promote a commitment to
ordering the world according to their own models of society and
nature. A technology can ‘work’ only by creating the socio-natural
conditions which its design takes for granted. At the same time, these
inbuilt imperatives appear as properties of technology, rooted in its
thing-like characteristics.
Those technological characteristics are not merely an appearance
or rhetoric. Let us consider the social metaphors in ‘smart bombs’,
‘intelligent machines’, ‘clean technology’, ‘gene banks’, ‘natural
capital’, etc. As particular human purposes are embedded into
technology, those social qualities are fetishised as material or natural
properties, while things acquire human-like qualities. These design
choices confront us as a discovery about the nature of things. As
quoted above, ‘the visible products of labour take on the appearance
of its masters’ (Marx 1976, p. 1055).
In such ways, technological change both promotes and conceals
class interests through future models of society. This role will be
illustrated by two examples: Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs) in higher education; and genetically modified
(GM) crops.
ICTS FOR CAPITALISING EDUCATION

Recent conflicts over educational values have intersected with
designs for Information and Communication Technology (ICT). In
the neoliberal project, marketisation imperatives are attributed to
inherent qualities of ICT. According to the Director-General of the
WTO, Mike Moore, ‘There are technical reasons for the acceleration
of trade in services, especially in the area of information technology’.
Through electronic transmission, local services have been ‘trans-
formed into internationally tradable products’ such as education
services, he argues.
Roles of ICTs
In such accounts, a political agenda is fetishised as an inherent
property of technological progress. Electronic media generate an
98 Anti-Capitalism
inevitable future, to which we must adapt through trade liberalisa-

tion. ICTs play several roles in this neoliberal agenda, especially for
higher education.
First, according to the ‘info-society’ paradigm, the management,
quality and speed of information become essential for economic
competitiveness. ICT is dependent upon highly skilled labour;
together they will be used in order to increase productivity and to
provide new services, we are told. This imperative redefines the skills
which higher education must provide.
Second, ICT facilitates the individualised and flexibilised learning
which is required for modern workers. They must become individu-
ally responsible for managing their own human capital in the
workplace. Through lifelong distance learning, for example, they will
be able to recycle themselves at their own expense during their free
time.
Third, teachers are identified as a problem. They have ‘an insuffi-
cient understanding of the economic environment, business and the
notion of profit’, and their present role hinders ‘internal searches for
efficiency’, according to industry lobbyists (e.g. ERT 1989). As a
solution, ICT diminishes the role of teachers.
Fourth, universities are subjected to productivity criteria, as an
imperative for their survival. They must package knowledge, deliver
flexible education through ICT, provide adequate training for
‘knowledge workers’, and produce more of them at lower unit cost.
While this scenario portrays universities as guiding social change,
there is evidence of a reverse tendency: that they are becoming sub-
ordinate to corporate-style managerialism and income-maximisation.
For neoliberal strategies, the real task is not to enhance skills but
rather to control labour costs in the labour-intensive service sector,
e.g. education (Garnham 2000).
Overall, neoliberal strategies for higher education have the
following features. All constituencies are treated through business
relationships. Educational efficiency, accountability and quality are
redefined in accountancy terms; courses are recast as instructional
commodities. Student–teacher relations are mediated by the con-
sumption and production of things, e.g. software products,
performance criteria, etc.
Prime agents of this agenda are the IMF and the World Bank,
which elaborate the strategies of their paymasters in the dominant
OECD countries. For several years the World Bank has been
promoting a ‘reform agenda’ on higher education. Its key features
are privatisation, deregulation and marketisation. A 1998 World

Bank report identified the traditional university and its faculty
members as inefficiencies to be rationalised. As the solution, ‘Radical
change, or restructuring, of an institution of higher education
means either fewer and/or different faculty, professional staff, and
support workers’.
Online solutions
In its future scenario, then, higher education would become less
dependent upon teachers’ skills. Students would become customers
or clients. As the implicit aim, private investors would have greater
opportunities to profit from state expenditure, while influencing the
form and content of education. Business and university administra-
tors would become the main partnership, redefining student–teacher
relations. Although the World Bank agenda has little support among
educators, some elements are already being implemented, e.g. in the
guise of ICTs.
In North America many universities act not only as business
partners, but also as businesses in themselves. They develop profit-
making activities through university resources, casualised faculty and
cheap student labour. In developing online educational technology,
they aim to commodify and standardise education. Those aims have
been resisted by students and teachers, e.g. by raising the slogan, ‘the
classroom versus the boardroom’.
In the name of increasing efficiency, North American universities
have standardised course materials. Once lectures are submitted to
administrators and posted on web pages, these materials can be mer-
chandised to other universities. Better yet, the course writing can be
outsourced on contract to non-university staff. By transferring
control to administrators, the technology can be designed to
discipline, deskill and displace teachers’ labour. This approach
changes the role of students, who become consumers of instruc-
tional commodities (Noble 1998).
The putative threat of market competition has been invoked as a
serious threat to higher education in Europe. According to the
national body of university executives, Universities UK, the solution
is to abolish borders between the university and business, as well as
those between domestic and international ‘markets’ for educational
goods. They describe the university as already a business, albeit a
deficient one which must be corrected according to corporate
principles. Their chief celebrates changes in undergraduate delivery:
100 Anti-Capitalism
from a ‘just-in-case’ general intellectual training, to a more flexible

‘just-in-time’ ethos, and then to ‘just-for-you’ forms of learning.
In particular, they promote internet-based delivery as a key means
of becoming a ‘borderless business’. According to sponsors of the
electronic university, ‘The project is designed to give UK higher
education the capacity to compete globally with the major virtual
and corporate universities being developed in the United States and
elsewhere’. The preliminary business model ‘recommended that
pedagogic support should be embedded within learning materials,
and that supplementary online support might be negotiated for
individual students at a price’. This proposal generated internal
debate about what types of social interaction must be designed into
the product in order to find customers. By standardising courses and
reducing dependence on professional skills, the electronic university
seeks ways to commodify student–teacher relations.
In sum, the neoliberal project cites putative imperatives of tech-
nological forces, whose design in turn reshapes higher education in
the image of a marketplace. Through ICT, marketisation can take the
apparently neutral form of greater student access, flexible delivery,
efficiency, etc. As education is capitalised, student–teacher relations
are reified as relations between things, e.g. between consumers and
providers of instructional software (Levidow 2001).
Rather than ‘inefficiency’, we can define marketisation as the
problem. It threatens academic freedom, internal democracy and the
university’s scope for critical analysis. ICT could be used instead to
promote critical citizenship, to link student networks, to create
‘virtual communities’ of interest in controversial issues, and to
circulate debate on critical perspectives. Technology could be
designed differently to facilitate alternative futures.
SEEDS FOR CAPITALISING NATURE

Seeds have been a site of struggle over the entire agro-food chain.
Given the inherent reproducibility and variability of seeds, their
natural characteristics have provided an opportunity for farmers to
improve varieties through selective breeding, while developing their
skills in cultivation methods. Capitalist strategies have attacked that
independence by uncoupling seeds from farmers’ control, thus cap-
italising natural resources into commodities. Even by the
mid-nineteenth century, noted Marx (1973, p. 527), ‘Agriculture no
longer finds the natural conditions of its own production within
itself, naturally arisen, spontaneous, and ready to hand, but [rather]

these exist as an independent industry separate from it’.
A major step in capitalising nature was hybrid seeds, which could
not breed true, so that farmers had to buy them anew each season.
Citing the supposed benefits of ‘hybrid vigour’, agricultural research
prioritised such varieties, rather than improve open-pollinated
varieties. For seeds which could still be bred under farmers’ control,
the proprietary gap was filled by a series of laws restricting farmers’
rights to sell or even reproduce their own grain for seed. They have
also been locked into dependency through other purchased inputs,
grain contracts, debt, etc., so such that the farmer has become little
more than a propertied labourer, despite owning the land (Klop-
penburg 1988).
High-response varieties
Such dependency was extended to the South through the Green
Revolution. So-called ‘high-yielding varieties’ (HYVs) were really
‘high-response varieties’. Designed for more intensive cultivation
methods, their higher yields depended upon agrochemicals,
irrigation and other purchased inputs. That entire system was
fetishised as an inherent property of a discovery, the HYV.
The use of HYVs substantially increased grain yields of wheat and
rice in India, yet this increase counted as greater efficiency only by
measuring a single commodity, while ignoring previous beneficial
practices. Higher grain yield meant less straw, used locally as animal
feed. Previously many farmers had done intercropping – e.g.
sorghum and wheat with pulses – which helped to renew soil
fertility, while providing other nutrients. Those benefits were lost in
the switch to HYVs. More generally, land use shifted away from cul-
tivating oilseeds and pulses, which had been a cheap protein source
– ‘the poor person’s meat’. Eventually India had a shortage of
oilseeds and pulses, which had to be obtained through imports.
Moreover, HYVs favoured those farmers who could obtain loans
for the purchased inputs. Financial dependency and market com-
petition drove many into debt, even out of business, leading some
to commit suicide. Landless peasants became wage labourers for the
successful farmers or migrated to cities. Some moved to live or work
near the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal, which supplied agro-
chemicals for the HYVs and was the site of the poison gas disaster
(Shiva 1991).
102 Anti-Capitalism
Those outcomes logically followed from the agribusiness agenda

which guided the HYV research, largely funded by the Rockefeller
Institute. According to its chief, ‘agriculture is a business and, to be
successful, it must be managed in a business-like fashion’. As such
language indicates, the Green Revolution redefined agricultural
efficiency in terms of calculable commodities, while devaluing any
resources or benefits which did not fit such a model.
Agbiotech
That commoditisation agenda has been extended by agricultural
biotechnology, which originated from the 1930s science of molecular
biology. This science reconceptualised ‘life’ in physico-chemical
terms: through a computer metaphor, DNA became coded ‘informa-
tion’ which could be freely transferred across the species barrier. ‘As
technology controlled by capital, it is a specific mode of the appro-
priation of living nature – literally capitalising life’ (Yoxen 1981).
This technological trajectory has intersected with a wider debate
over sustainable agriculture. At issue is how to diagnose and remedy
the systemic hazards of intensive monoculture, e.g. agrochemical
pollution, pest epidemics, pest resistance, etc. Agbiotech attributes
these problems to deficient seeds, which must be corrected by
editing their genetic information, thus making agriculture more
efficient and clean.
Through social metaphors, nature is recast in the image of biotech-
nology, while human qualities are fetishised as properties of ‘smart
seeds’, i.e. genetically modified (GM) crops. In addition to the
computer-code metaphor, biotechnologists speak of a clean surgical
precision, e.g. redesigning seeds to attack pests or to withstand
herbicides, which are often sold by the same company. Some also
speak of ‘value-added genetics’, i.e. searching for genetic changes
which can enhance the market value of agricultural products. By
projecting capitalist criteria onto nature, design choices are fetishised
as the discovery of natural properties (Levidow 1996).
Moreover, farmers’ socio-economic dependency on purchased
inputs is reified as a relation between things – e.g. as a relation
between crops and external threats. Ironically, such dependency is
portrayed as liberation from natural threats to crops. Although
farmers may still have the free choice to buy non-GM seeds, the GM
option can become an imperative, given the promise of greater
efficiency and the consequent threat of market competition. For
example, some crops are redesigned as interchangeable, flexibly
sourced raw materials. Others are designed to favour large planta-

tions over small-scale farmers. In various ways, the consequent
pressures benefit mainly the agro-food industry (Hobbelink 1991).
Biopiracy
GM techniques have also been used as a symbolic instrument to
privatise seeds. According to advocates of greater patent rights, GM
crops are inventions, involving a significant contribution by
scientists. According to opponents, however, such products are dis-
coveries (or simulations) of common resources which have been
already selected and cultivated by farmers over many generations.
To qualify for patent rights, a product or process must have con-
tributed an ‘inventive step’. The USA and the European Union have
interpreted that criterion so as to accept broad patent claims on GM
crops. Patents have encompassed substances derived from plants tra-
ditionally cultivated in developing countries, e.g. pesticidal agents
from the neem tree. Even some non-GM seeds have been subjected
to royalty payments by farmers in Southern countries, thus threat-
ening their livelihoods. The US government has sought to extend its
patent criteria to other countries, by using the TRIPS (Trade-Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) rules under the WTO.
Amid that conflict, the term ‘biopiracy’ has acquired two opposite
meanings. For advocates of greater patent rights, ‘biopiracy’ means
violating those rights, e.g. by using patented materials without a
licence agreement or without paying royalties. For opponents of
such rights, ‘biopiracy’ means the patents themselves – e.g. on the
grounds that plant material should remain freely reproducible as a
common resource, or that Southern farmers should be reimbursed
for their plant-breeding skills.
Those stakes have generated fierce protests against GM crops, as
well as a search for alternatives. In 1999 Indian farmers ‘cremated’
field trials of Monsanto’s GM insecticidal cotton. In previous years,
many of their fellow farmers had been abandoning mixed farming
systems in favour of cotton monoculture based on hybrid seeds, thus
intensifying their dependence upon purchased seeds, which
sometimes led to crop failures. Towards an alternative future, their
organisations encouraged farmers to resow their own seeds, to
preserve diverse cultivars in the agricultural field, and to develop
independent methods of crop protection. Likewise, the Sem Terra
(landless) movement in Brazil has been developing organic cultiva-
104 Anti-Capitalism
tion methods, as an alternative both to chemical-intensive ones and

to GM crops.
CONCLUSION: REDESIGNING TECHNOLOGY

As this chapter has shown, technological design is inherently social.
Like history in general, technological change is driven by class
struggle. Often its design responds to the employers’ problem that
workers resist subordination to capitalist labour discipline, e.g.
through their informal collectivities and skills. The prevalent designs
embody strategies for exploiting labour, commoditising resources,
and extending market relations to more social activities.
These tendencies are both promoted and disguised by ‘efficiency’
rhetoric, which value human activities only as quantifiable things.
As such aims guide R & D, the resultant technology tends to acquire
human qualities, which become fetishised as properties of things.
Technological imperatives and solutions appear to arise from the
natural order. Social relations become reified as relations between
things, e.g. between smart seeds and external natural threats, or
between consumers and providers of instructional software.
Through various forms of resistance, however, people attempt to
dereify those relations: they seek to reappropriate their collective
power and skills, while expressing needs beyond market relations.
By defining differently the problem to be solved, alternative designs
become possible (see, for example, Sclove 1995). Rather than a
discovery of natural properties, technological change can be recast
as diverse human choices for the future of society.

Braverman, H. (1976) Labour and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
ERT (1989) Education and Competence in Europe. Brussels: European Round
Table of Industrialists (www.ert.be).
Garnham, N. (2000) ‘“Information Society” as Theory or Ideology’, Infor-
mation, Communication and Society 3(2), pp. 139–52.
Hobbelink, H. (1991) Biotechnology and the Future of World Agriculture.
London: Zed Books.
Kloppenburg, J. (1988) First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Bio-
technology, 1492–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levidow, L. (1996) ‘Simulating Mother Nature, Industrializing Agriculture’, in
G. Robertson et al. (eds.) FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture. London:
Routledge.
Levidow, L. (2001) ‘Marketizing Higher Education: Neoliberal Strategies and
Counter-Strategies’, Education and Social Justice 3(2), pp. 12–23, available
from www.trentham-books.co.uk, www.commoner.org.uk/03levidow.pdf,

and from K. Robins and F. Webster (eds.) The Virtual University? Informa-
tion, Markets and Managements. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Marcuse, H. (1978) ‘Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max
Weber’, in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Boston: Beacon Press and
London: Free Association Books 1988.
Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1976) Capital, vol. 1, especially ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity
and Its Secret’, pp. 163–77. London: Penguin.
Noble, D. (1984) Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation.
New York: Alfred Knopf.
Noble, D. (1998) ‘Digital Diploma Mills: the Automation of Higher
Education’, Monthly Review 49(9), pp. 38–52; also in Science as Culture 7(3),
pp. 355–68; other material available at thecity.sfsu.edu/~eisman/
digital.diplomas.html and www.communication.ucsd.edu/dl/ddm2.html.
Robins, K. and Webster, F. (1985) ‘New Technology and the Critique of
Political Economy’, in L. Levidow and R.M. Young (eds.) Science, Technology
and the Labour Process: Marxist Studies, vol. 2. London: Free Association
Books.
Sclove, R. (1995) Democracy and Technology. New York: Guilford Publications.
Shiva, V. (1991) The Violence of the Green Revolution. London: Zed Books/Third
World Network.
Yoxen, E. (1981) ‘Life as a Productive Force: Capitalizing the Science and
Technology of Molecular Biology’, in L. Levidow and R.M. Young (eds.)
Science, Technology and the Labour Process: Marxist Studies, vol. 1. London:
CSE Books/Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press; reissued by Free Associ-
ation Books, 1983.
Saad-Filho 02 chap 7 3/9/02 4:07 pm Page 106
7 Capitalism, Nature and the

Class Struggle1
Paul Burkett
There was a time when those voicing concerns about environmen-

tal crises and the quality of our relationship with nature were quickly
dismissed as alarmists, doomsayers, and starry-eyed romantics
standing in the way of human progress. No more. Now the media
are filled with reports on global warming, the breakdown of the
ozone layer, destruction of rainforests, reduced species diversity,
depletion of non-renewable energy sources, and the build-up of car-
cinogens and other toxins in our air, water, and food. Even the word
‘development’ is as likely to carry images of urban sprawl gouging,
poisoning, and eroding the land as of a comfortable and secure
human existence.
The demand for a sustainable and healthy relationship with
nature is central to the growing worldwide rebellion against the
current system of development. Yet, this challenge has been
weakened by an inability to uncover and describe clearly the
systemic roots of environmental crises. The popular movements are
increasingly led by those who blame ecological problems (and much
else besides) on particular institutions in our economic system,
especially transnational corporations and banks along with the IMF,
World Bank, and WTO. But attempts to analyse these institutions
and their activities using the category of ‘globalisation’ seem to beg
the question as to what social relations are being globalised. What
kind of socio-economic system creates such powers as these global
institutions wield?
Similarly, ecological economists have pointed out the failure of
mainstream economics (especially neoclassical growth theory) to
recognise the irreducible role of limited natural resources in human
production. But the social relations that cause the current system
to undervalue these resources are still not critically addressed. In
this regard, production remains just as much a ‘black box’ for
ecological economists as for mainstream economics.2 Interestingly,
the technical perspectives of economists complement the cultural
106
Capitalism, Nature and the Class Struggle 107
views of ‘deep ecologists’ who blame environmental crises on

human-centred thinking and industrialisation as such – not the
specific human-natural relations produced by specific socio-
economic systems.
This failure to specify the social roots of environmental crisis can
only hamper our political and intellectual challenges to the current
form of development. To be successful, we need an accurate
conception of the system we are fighting against – and that system
is capitalism. Previous economic systems had their own environ-
mental problems, but it is capitalism that is at the root of
contemporary environmental crises and which has brought the
human race to the brink of a planetary catastrophe. What are the
fundamental relations that distinguish capitalism from other
economic systems?
WEALTH, CAPITAL, AND CAPITALISM

Any conception of capitalism hinges on prior conceptions of wealth
and capital. Following Marx, I define wealth (use value) as anything
that contributes to human life. Both nature and human labour are
necessary sources of wealth, but the ways in which nature and labour
are combined depend on the social relations in and through which
human beings appropriate nature and transform it into humanly
useful forms. In this sense, wealth is simply human development
itself, a process that always involves a socially structured material
‘metabolism’ between people and nature. While recognising nature’s
contribution to human production, this conception of wealth also
encompasses nature as an eternal condition of human life in all its
material, intellectual, aesthetic, and even spiritual dimensions.
Nowadays, living in a system that identifies ‘wealth’ with monetary
and financial assets, it is easy to lose sight of this original, human-
natural meaning of wealth.
Capital is the advancement of money to obtain more money, or
M ... M'. Capital accumulation refers to the reinvestment of all or part
of the monetary surplus so obtained (M’ minus M) to obtain yet
more money (see Chapter 1). Such monetary accumulation has, of
course, been taking place for quite a long time. From the bible we
learn that merchants accumulated money through trade in goods
(including slaves) and money-lenders became rich long before the
birth of Christ. Commodity trade and money-lending can occur on
the basis of a wide variety of social relations of production. All that
is required is that different production units (households, villages,
108 Anti-Capitalism
slave plantations, or feudal estates) desire to sell at least some surplus

products (even a small amount above those produced for own use)
to obtain other goods and services from other production units.
What distinguishes capitalism, as an economic system in its own
right, is that money-making becomes the driving, overriding goal
of production itself – a goal that competition inexorably presses
upon the human producers. For this to happen, the producers must
be socially separated from necessary conditions of production, above
all the land but also the tools and machines used in production.
Once this separation occurs, the only way that the economically
disenfranchised producers can obtain needed means of consump-
tion is by purchasing them as commodities using the wages
obtained by working for the capitalist who owns the necessary
conditions of production.3 Under capitalism, in other words, labour
and nature – the two basic sources of wealth – are first socially
separated and then united only in production managed in line with
the goal of money-making.
From this perspective, the phenomena commonly grouped under
the category of economic globalisation comprise merely the latest
phase of capitalism and capital accumulation on a global scale. His-
torically, the development of capitalism in Western Europe and
North America was itself contingent on the establishment and
growth of world markets in goods, money, and labour power; the
plunder of natural and human wealth from colonised areas; and the
establishment of an unequal division of labour between the
developed capitalist centres and the colonies.4 The agencies
normally associated with contemporary globalisation are either insti-
tutional vehicles of capital (transnational corporations and banks)
or fulfil necessary legal and financial functions for globalised capital
accumulation (World Bank, IMF, and WTO). To focus our critical
attention on these agencies rather than the social relations they
embody is to evade a crucial question: How do capitalist relations
influence people–nature relations?
CAPITALISM AND NATURE

In its own way, capitalism has been enormously productive of wealth
compared to previous economic systems. By socially separating
labour from natural conditions and developing both under the spur
of competitive money-making, capitalism makes the development
of production much more dynamic and transformative than, say,
feudalism. In the latter system, the landlords basically viewed the
land and everything on it (including the peasants) as given

conditions of production. By contrast, capital treats labour and its
natural conditions as mere vehicles of monetary accumulation, to be
appropriated, divided, recombined, reshaped, and discarded as needs
be in the never-ending pursuit of increased capital values. This
difference accounts for the rapid development of the productive
powers of labour and nature under capitalism compared to feudalism.
Unfortunately, the same factors that make capitalism a dynamic
system of wealth creation render its production profoundly exploita-
tive of and damaging to both labour and nature. The alienation of
labour from natural conditions is manifested, for example, in
capitalism’s reduction of ‘value’ to the amount of social labour time
directly objectified in commodities. For capitalism as a total system,
the only source of surplus value or profit is the surplus labour time of
the direct producers. Capital accumulation is thus much more
directly dependent on the exploitation of workers’ time than was the
case with previous systems in which labour was not as fully separated
from the conditions of production. Along with its adverse effects on
workers, this specifically capitalist reduction of ‘value’ or ‘wealth’ to
commodified labour time abstracts from nature’s eternal contribu-
tion to real wealth – as if people can be separated from nature.
Naturally, capitalists do not directly observe value as commodi-
fied labour time in the abstract. For them, the pursuit of ‘value’
appears as the competitive process of money-making (M ... M') by
any and all available means.5 Considered formally, this process has
several crucial characteristics. First, the goal of capital accumulation,
namely, money, is a qualitatively homogenous entity. Its main
quality is that of being pure quantity. Second, the basic monetary
units of capital accumulation are, for all intents and purposes,
perfectly divisible and mobile. Third, there is no apparent quantita-
tive limit to the capital accumulation process. No matter how much
money one has, there is always a larger amount that one can strive
for. Importantly, none of these three features are shared by human-
natural wealth. Considered as ecological systems, human
communities and their natural environments are qualitatively
variegated, interconnected (that is, imperfectly divisible), location-
ally specific, and quantitatively limited. These characteristics place
definite limits on the appropriation of human-natural wealth – limits
that, if exceeded, result in a qualitative deterioration of this wealth.
Monetary accumulation, by not recognising the basic characteristics
of real wealth, in effect denies all human-natural limits to wealth
110 Anti-Capitalism
production. By placing monetary accumulation in command of

production, capitalism guarantees that these limits will be over-
stretched unless and insofar as society imposes external restraints on
the capitalistic appropriation of labour and nature. This is as true for
the limits to exploitation of nature as it is for the limits to the length
and intensity of wage-labour time that human beings can endure.
CAPITALISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES

The contradiction between capital accumulation and natural wealth
is manifested in two distinct kinds of environmental crisis: crises of
capital accumulation and crises of human development. In the first
type of crisis, the profitability of production is disrupted by the
failure to respect the natural conditions of wealth production. One
form this takes is shortages of the materials and non-renewable
energy sources used to produce commodities. Agricultural
production of raw materials, for example, is bound up with natural
conditions which place certain limits on the amount that can be
produced within any given time period – even with the application
of human labour and technology. The same goes for forest products
and other animate and plant materials gathered from nature. Some
raw materials (minerals, metals, oil) as well as energy sources (coal,
and again oil) are, in practical terms, completely non-renewable, that
is, non-reproducible. When production is driven by competitive
monetary accumulation, with its non-recognition of all quantitative
limits, it is inevitable that the demand for materials and energy will
periodically outstrip supplies. The resulting rise in material and
energy prices, and absolute shortages of these crucial inputs, may
produce disturbances and breakdowns in the profitable production
and sale of commodities. This type of crisis is familiar from recent
recessions in the advanced capitalist countries triggered by increases
in the price of oil. In the mid-nineteenth century, periodic shortages
of cotton had a similarly disruptive effect on capital accumulation.6
Capital accumulation may also be disrupted by the environmen-
tal disasters that it periodically produces. Capital’s reduction of
human-natural wealth to a vehicle of money-making, and its wanton
disregard for the ecological qualities of this wealth, necessarily result
in episodes of mass destruction of human beings and their natural
conditions due to ‘accidental’ explosions, fires, nuclear meltdowns,
chemical releases, etc. Such crises may themselves produce
temporary shortages of exploitable labour power and materials, and
in extreme cases may even put many production facilities out of
commission. Depending on the outcomes of political conflicts (e.g.

class action lawsuits), these disasters can also impose ‘clean-up costs’
on capitalists – further disturbing profitable accumulation.
Nonetheless, capital accumulation can and will continue as long
as capital can access a supply of wage labourers, and as long as these
wage labourers can produce vendible commodities. Apart from these
minimal requirements, capitalism is in no way dependent on
particular natural conditions. It is an extreme form of what Gary
Snyder has termed ‘biosphere culture’, that is, a society that ‘spreads
its economic support system out far enough that it can afford to
wreck one ecosystem, and keep moving on’.7 For capitalism, in
short, there are no permanent environmental crises short of the total
extinction of human life. Indeed, capital often profits from its own
damaging effects on natural wealth – as when it produces and sells
air conditioners and oxygen masks so people can ‘live with’ urban
air pollution, and more generally when it enters the highly
profitable and ever-expanding pollution control and waste
management industries.
Capitalism’s ability to survive and even prosper (in its own
money-making terms) despite its plunder and vitiation of natural
wealth makes it all the more crucial that we avoid identifying ‘envi-
ronmental crises’ with crises for capital accumulation. We must
recognise a second type of environmental crisis produced by
capitalism: a crisis in the quality of human-natural wealth, i.e. in the
conditions of human development. This second kind of crisis itself
involves two historical dynamics operating both within countries
and on a global scale. The first is capitalism’s extreme division
between city and country. Capitalist development concentrates both
population and non-agricultural production in urban areas, whose
material effluvia (human bodily waste and other forms of refuse),
rather than being reproductively returned to the soil, instead pollute
the cities and their hinterlands. Meanwhile, agriculture, when
likewise harnessed to the quantitatively unlimited goal of monetary
accumulation, becomes a ‘factory farm’ system reliant on ever
growing ‘fixes’ of the fossil-fuel-intensive machinery, fertilisers and
pesticides provided by urban factories. The resulting destruction of
natural soil fertility and rural ecosystems is accentuated by the failure
to recycle the animal waste produced by concentrated ‘feedlot’
facilities for raising livestock. In this way, capitalism’s division of
city and country creates an unhealthy and unsustainable circulation
of matter between human civilisation and its natural environment.8
112 Anti-Capitalism
The second dynamic is a product of capitalism’s latest phase of

‘globalisation’, i.e. of the further development of capitalist industry
and the city country division on a global scale. Since the Second
World War, the scientific utilisation of wealth in the service of profit
has created a new, more radical break between production and the
natural conditions of human life. The combination of absolute
growth of production and material/energy throughput on the one
hand, and the development of non-biodegradable and downright
poisonous forms of production on the other, has caused global
capitalism to enter what John Bellamy Foster terms ‘a new stage of
planetary crisis in which economic activities begin to affect in
entirely new ways the basic conditions of life on earth’.9 Among the
symptoms of this planetary crisis dynamic are global warming,
ozone depletion, accelerated extinction of plant and animate species,
and the proliferation of cancerous disease.
These dynamics clearly manifest capital’s lack of concern for the
qualitative variety, interconnection, locational uniqueness, and
quantitative limits of natural wealth. That the planetary crisis stage
corresponds to huge increases in monetary ‘wealth’ as measured by
GDP, profits, and financial asset values strongly suggests that
capitalism has reached its historical limits as a system of production
and human development.
MARKET-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES

Capitalism’s supporters deny the need for a basic change in
economic relations to deal with environmental problems. They
assert that the market system, by pricing natural resources, can limit
the use and destruction of these resources – as long as clear private
property rights are assigned to them. They also argue that, for those
environmental problems involving privately unpriced ‘external
effects’, or ‘common pool resources’ that are by their nature
collective rather than private, the government can set up a system of
artificial prices or rents using taxes and subsidies.10 But this
argument assumes what needs to be shown, namely, that human-
natural wealth can be adequately registered in profit-seeking market
transactions. Market-based environmental policies do nothing to
counteract the anti-ecological characteristics of money and capital.
In fact, by assigning prices to natural resources (including ‘ecosystem
services’) such policies legitimise the reduction of human-natural
wealth to a means of money-making.
Whether set privately or publicly, market prices or rents do not

effectively limit the depletion and destruction of natural resources.
As we know from the fishing and oil industries, a higher price for a
scarce resource is as likely to increase as to reduce its depletion by
profit-seeking enterprises. Taxing the use of a resource will, like
raising its price, tend to accelerate the depletion of substitute
resources. If the tax is not globally enforced, it may accelerate
depletion of the target resource in non-taxed countries and regions.
Besides, taxes offer, at the very best, a highly imperfect micro
instrument for achieving macro goals arrived at prior to market
processes. This has become quite evident in recent negotiations sur-
rounding biospheric problems like global warming and ozone
depletion. Market prices and taxes also reinforce the arbitrary
division of human-natural systems implicit in the money form of
value, and this makes them a limp instrument for alleviating the
ecological impacts of an increasingly intensive and globalised
production system driven by the boundless goal of monetary accu-
mulation. Given that the competitive search for resource rents is an
important contributor to the planetary crisis produced by capitalism,
it is difficult to see market prices and taxes as part of a viable solution
unless we define sustainability in terms of continued growth of GDP.
THE CLASS STRUGGLE OVER NATURE

Capitalism’s profit-driven development of production has created a
global system of intensive human appropriation and processing of
nature. This system calls out for a collective and democratic form of
regulation, not only to protect the natural wealth that remains but
also to restructure production in more healthy and sustainable
directions. But the basic social relations of capitalism, specifically
the separation of workers from conditions of production and the
management of production by anarchically competing capitalists,
stand in the way of such ecological regulation.
Nonetheless, we should not totally reject all legacies of capitalism
in a vain search for a ‘more natural’ or ‘less industrial’ way of life.
An important by-product of capitalist development has been a
tremendous increase in human knowledge about natural wealth. But
this knowledge has mainly been put to use on the micro level by
competing enterprises producing for a profit, the result being
growing environmental problems on the macro level. This paradox
of macro irrationality alongside ever greater rationality in the micro-
engineering of production accurately reflects the alienation of
114 Anti-Capitalism
working people from the natural and social conditions of

production. If this social separation can be overcome, the scientific
knowledge developed under capitalism can be augmented and put to
better use on macro and micro levels.11
A related paradox is that, by socially separating workers from
natural conditions of production, capitalism makes ‘the environ-
ment’ a legitimate issue in its own right to a much greater degree
than under previous systems like feudalism, in which the workers
were not formally separated from the land. True, capitalism’s
‘separation’ of environmental issues from workplace issues is itself a
form of alienation, as is shown by the ‘jobs versus environment trade-
off’. But, from a class perspective, there is still a positive potential
here: as capital tries to reduce labour and nature to means of money-
making, it is in constant tension with the struggles of workers to
improve their material and social conditions. In these struggles,
workers and their communities are forced to confront and overcome
capitalism’s separation of workplace and environmental concerns.12
These struggles are of two broad types. First, workers may look
beyond the sphere of capitalist production for less money-driven
forms of human existence and fulfilment, in the process creating new
cultural, political, and economic relations that challenge capital’s
dominance over nature and society. Second, they may resist capital’s
dominance in the sphere of wage labour itself, not only by
demanding wage increases, safer and less burdensome work
procedures, and reduced work times, but also by struggling for more
co-operative and democratic forms of ownership and management
of industry. Although they overlap, combine, and even clash in
complex ways, the ultimate success of either mode of struggle in
displacing the power of capital arguably depends on the other. And
both modes of struggle require worker co-operation, democracy and
solidarity as opposed to capital’s reliance on exploitation, hierarchy,
and atomistic competition. The former set of values is much more
likely to produce sustainable and humanly sensible environmental
policies. In short, workers’ struggles (inside and outside the
workplace) contain a powerful pro-ecological potential insofar as they
contest all forms of money-driven exploitation of labour and nature.
To engage in the class struggle on the side of working people is to
reject the search for technical and market-based fixes for environ-
mental problems. The kinds of changes needed are those that help
clean up the environment and move production in ecological
directions through increased worker and community control over
production. The power of money, capital and competition must yield

to a conscious and collective socialisation of labour and nature.
Subsidies for solar power to replace non-renewable energy sources?
Definitely, but in ways that enhance worker-community control and
reduce the role of profit-driven decisions and unplanned regulation
by market forces. Reductions in work time? Yes, but as a means to
increase the quantity and quality of citizen participation in
economic and political decision-making, including the management
of the community’s natural and social conditions. Monetary
accounting should be replaced by ecological accounting, i.e. by
direct measures of the material and energy throughput from
production and the ecological impacts thereof – with due regard for
the inherent uncertainties involved. But, insofar as it guides
production decisions, this accounting must adequately register the
multiple dimensions of human-natural wealth, including concerns
for other species. The only way this will happen is if workers and
communities have a clear grasp of, and real participation in, the
accounting process – so that conflicts can be worked out in the open,
not smothered under the false balance sheets of monetary ‘wealth’.
Given the current dominance of money in capitalist society, getting
ourselves to think in terms of such a collective non-monetary
accounting promises to be the most difficult struggle of all.

Altvater, A. (1993) The Future of the Market. London: Verso.
Bellamy Foster, J. (1999) The Vulnerable Planet. New York: Monthly Review
Press.
Bellamy Foster, J. (2000) Marx’s Ecology. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Brewer, A. (1990) Marxist Theories of Imperialism (2nd edn.) London:
Routledge.
Burkett, P. (1999) Marx and Nature. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Capital and Class 72, Autumn 2000 (special issue on environmental policy).
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, any issue.
Chattopadhyay, P. (1994) The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet
Experience. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
Daly, H.E. (1991) Steady-State Economics. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
England, R. (2000) ‘Natural Capital and the Theory of Economic Growth’,
Ecological Economics 34(3), September, pp. 425–31.
Heal, G. (2000) Nature and the Marketplace. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
Jackson, W. (1994) Becoming Native to This Place. Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky.
Hughes, J. (2000) Ecology and Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lebowitz, M. (1992) Beyond Capital. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
116 Anti-Capitalism
Marx, K. (1967) Capital, vol. 1. New York: International Publishers.

Perelman, M. (1987) Marx’s Crises Theory. New York: Praeger.
Rosdolsky, R. (1977) The Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’. London: Pluto Press.
Snyder, G. (1977) The Old Ways. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
NOTES
1. The author thanks Don Richards and Alfredo Saad-Filho for useful
comments on a prior draft.
2. See Daly (1991) and England (2000).
3. There is no presumption here that ‘the capitalist’ must be a private
individual or corporation. It could be the state that owns and controls
necessary conditions of production, which are then distributed among
competing state enterprises. See Chattopadhyay (1994).
4. Brewer (1990), and references therein.
5. Marx (1967, part 1) showed how value in the sense of commodified
labour time necessarily takes on the form of money; see also Rosdolsky
(1977, ch. 5).
6. Such disruptions may involve increases in the value of materials (as
scarcity exhibits itself in an increased labour time required to produce
materials of given quality), rising rents to landowners, or both. See
Altvater (1993, ch. 5), Burkett (1999, pp. 108–9) and Perelman (1987).
7. Snyder (1977, p. 21).
8. Bellamy Foster (2000, ch. 5), Burkett (1999, pp. 119–28) and Jackson
(1994).
9. Bellamy Foster (1999, p. 108).
10. Heal (2000).
11. Under capitalism’s money-driven production, certain kinds of
knowledge about nature’s ways, and about the requirements of
ecological balance in human production, have been socially margin-
alised and in some cases forgotten despite the general growth of natural
scientific knowledge (Jackson 1994, Snyder 1977). An important task of
any anti-capitalist ecological movement, and of post-capitalist society,
is to recover and enhance these ecological insights.
12. Lebowitz (1992).
8 The History of Capitalism
Michael Perelman
BACKGROUND
The history of capitalism is a contentious matter. Just as nobody has
been able to pinpoint satisfactorily the moment at which life begins,
some people are even able to find what they consider to be elements
of capitalism in ancient society. For example, archaeologists have
found records of business transactions in ancient Mesopotamian
society.
In fact, some economists go so far as to report evidence of the
existence of capitalism in the animal kingdom. Because they
consider capitalism to be an innate extension of human nature,
these economists have reported aspects of this same ‘human’ nature
in rats (Battalio, Kagel and McDonald 1985). Adam Smith took a
different position, suggesting that this ‘instinct’ for exchange was a
defining quality of Homo sapiens. He asserted, ‘Nobody ever saw a
dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another
with another dog’ (Smith 1776, I.ii.2, p. 26).
In reality, the defining characteristic of a capitalist society is the
dominant form of social relations. The fundamental capitalist social
relation is the relation between wage labour and capital. Within this
arrangement, capital, represented by an individual employer or a
firm, hires people with the intention of profiting from their work
(see Chapter 1).
Notice the reference to the dominant form of social relations. The
existence of an instance of a particular type of behaviour, an insti-
tution, or even some capitalist-like transactions does not constitute
evidence a capitalist society. I can personally attest to this statement
because I work in an institution fully steeped in feudal traditions;
namely, a university, complete with an archaic administrative
structure and apprenticeship rituals. On graduation day, the
costumes that the faculty wears provide striking evidence of the
feudal nature of this institution.
Nonetheless, nobody would think to define the contemporary
United States of America as a feudal society on the basis of the feudal
nature of higher education. For all of its display of feudal tradition,
119
120 Anti-Capitalism
US universities have become an extension of the corporate sector to

a large extent (see Perelman 2002).
Just as a pre-capitalist society may contain elements that we
consider to be characteristic of a capitalist society, a capitalist society
typically contains remnants of pre-capitalist societies, as well as the
seeds of a future communist society. In fact, no society has ever been
thoroughly capitalistic, in the sense that all other forms of social
relations have been expunged.
People unfamiliar with the arcane world of academia might have
trouble in regarding higher education as feudal. Let me refer you to
a more obvious example. In the United States of America until the
middle of the nineteenth century, slaves and independent farmers
performed the majority of work. Neither of these groups was
involved in a typical capitalist social relation of working for a wage.
The pre-capitalist nature of independent farming, and even more so
of slavery, is probably easier to accept (see Chapter 12).
Let me return to the question of dominance. I would also argue
that capitalist social relations were dominant in the mid-nineteenth
century, despite the undeniable importance of slaves and indepen-
dent farmers. Notwithstanding their numbers and their contribution
to overall production, the independent farmers, as well as the slaves
and the plantation owners, were becoming increasingly marginalised.
At that time, the social relations symbolised by the emerging
Republican Party were increasingly defining the direction that the
United States would follow. In effect, the social relations associated
with independent farming and slavery were a part of the economy
that was losing its vigour, while the more urban, industrial sectors
were gaining the strength and confidence that allowed them to take
the lead. So, dominance is not merely a matter of the quantity of
people within a particular social relation.
When exactly did the industrial sector become more vigorous than
the agrarian sector? Such a question is every bit as unanswerable as
the earlier question about the dating of the origin of capitalism.
Moreover, the nineteenth-century industrial sector could not have
existed without its agrarian counterpart. The farms fed the workers
in the factories and represented the major outlet for their goods.
Disputes about the origins of capitalism are even more con-
tentious than those regarding the timing of the emergence of the
capitalist. Again, social relations provide the key. Adam Smith, as
well as a French economist, Turgot, proposed that capitalist began as
a voluntary outgrowth of a natural tendency of people to engage in
The History of Capitalism 121
mutually beneficial trades. The theoretical approach of both Smith

and Turgot floundered on one particular point: the emergence of the
wage-labour relationship. Are we really to believe that some people
voluntarily adopted the role of poor people who had nothing to
trade except their own capacity to labour?
PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION
Nobody put the contrary theory more forcefully than Karl Marx,
who attributed the rise of capitalism to violent acts that expropri-
ated the land and other property of the great mass of the population.
The concept of primitive accumulation began in confusion and later
settled into an unfortunate obscurity (see Perelman 2000). The
seemingly Marxian expression, ‘primitive accumulation’, originally
began with Adam Smith’s assertion that ‘the accumulation of stock
must, in the nature of things, be previous to the division of labour’
(1976, II.3, p. 277). Marx emphasised primitive accumulation, the
expropriation of land and other means of production, rather than
the accumulation of stock through saving and investment.
For Marx (1977, p. 926), ‘capital comes dripping from head to toe,
from every pore, with blood and dirt’. Workers were ‘tortured by
grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary
for the system of wage-labour’ (p. 899). Where Smith scrupulously
avoided any analysis of social relations, Marx produced an elaborate
study of the connection between the development of capitalistic
social relations and the so-called primitive accumulation.
Nonetheless, Marx played down primitive accumulation because
it detracted from his more fundamental analysis of capitalism. With
primitive accumulation, capitalists steal property from people. Their
behaviour merits disapproval because they act in a way that seems
to be unfair.
Marx wanted to show how the normal, legal functioning of the
market, aside from any individual unfair behaviour, expropriates
value from the working class. Marx did not attribute this capture of
surplus value to ‘bad’ behaviour on the part of individuals, but to
the impersonal functioning of a class system.
According to the typical reading of primitive accumulation, this
original expropriation occurred in the distant pre-capitalist past.
After the completion of this initial burst of primitive accumulation,
a small group of people could function as capitalists.
By downplaying primitive accumulation, Marx pointed his readers
to the importance of the way that the normal buying and selling of
122 Anti-Capitalism
labour power robbed the working class. Unfortunately, that

approach also obscured the way that primitive accumulation
continued to occur alongside the capitalist system.
Most obviously, the colonial powers stole massive amounts of
property throughout the colonial period. In fact, Marxist economists
have long debated without resolution the extent to which this
second wave of primitive accumulation rather than the ongoing
accumulation of capital through the exploitation of wage labour was
responsible for the massive development during the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries in the core capitalist economies.
Primitive accumulation was, in fact, much more a sophisticated
process than a once-and-for-all event. Early capitalists realised that
if people in the countryside were able to provide for their own needs,
they would never work for wages. However, the more they were able
to provide for themselves, the less money they would need in order
to survive. So the early capitalists went to considerable lengths to
create a situation in which people had enough means of production
to allow wages to go as low as possible without giving them an
option to survive without engaging in wage labour.
So, in effect, capitalists benefited from the lack of dependence on
the market. Later, when they became more concerned about finding
new outlets for their products, they benefited from a greater
dependence on the market.
Today, when capital comes up against new limits to its ability to
accumulate, once again it seeks to take over public resources through
privatisation and other means. Schools, health care, water supply,
even prisons are coming under the control of corporations. In
addition, as families become more pressed to survive with one
income, more and more women enter the labour force. In the
process, many functions that the household would traditionally
provide, such as food preparation and childcare, are being increas-
ingly purchased as commodified services.
Smith, of course, had something other in mind than Marx’s vision
of violent primitive accumulation. He was attempting to speculate
on the origins of capital. By showing how one individual could
accumulate capital without impoverishing another, Smith could
account for the voluntary origins of capitalism, which he so desper-
ately wished to find. Sadly, he failed miserably in this endeavour.
Nonetheless, in his futile effort, Smith described the first act of
capital accumulation as ‘original accumulation’. By the time the
term was translated from English into German and back into English
again, original accumulation has become primitive accumulation, a

more ominous sounding expression, suggesting the brutality
associated with the expropriation.
Without a doubt, primitive accumulation was an essential
component of the rise of capitalism throughout Western Europe,
especially England. Gold flowed from the mines of Latin America,
black slaves from Africa, and wealth of all kinds from Asia, which, on
the eve of capitalism had an economy more technologically
advanced than that of Europe. On top of the plunder from other
nations, the English gentry confiscated the land from most of its
own people, consigning them to work for wages in the factories and
on the farms.
Notice that although the social relations between labour and
capital define capitalism, primitive accumulation operates on the
level of property relations. In that sense, primitive accumulation
might seem to be unrelated to capitalism, even though it is a
necessary precondition.
THE CONTINUING VIOLENCE OF CAPITALISM

Just as the act of procreation differs from the process of raising a
child, the way primitive accumulation fostered the creation of
capitalism seems to differ considerably from the way a functioning
capitalist economy accumulates wealth. The analogy is admittedly
imperfect because primitive accumulation continues to make a con-
tribution to the accumulation of capitalist wealth, while the act of
procreation occurs at a specific moment in time.
Nonetheless, the analogy is appropriate in the sense that the way
a functioning capitalist economy typically accumulates wealth on
the basis of the social relations between capital and labour differs
significantly from the often openly violent process of primitive accu-
mulation. Within the system of primitive accumulation, an
exchange of equivalents is unnecessary. The more powerful party
merely takes what it wants.
Within the mindset of ordinary people, primitive accumulation
represents a violation of human rights and property rights. The
response is often a sort of moral outrage. In contrast, under
capitalism the law of value prevents arbitrary actions by individu-
als. Consequently, capitalist accumulation through the exploitation
of labour gives the appearance of fairness. Workers ask for jobs.
Employers ask for work. They exchange wages for this work.
Everyone supposedly gets something from the exchange.
124 Anti-Capitalism
Appearances can be deceptive. Workers use a considerable part of

their wages to buy necessities. Were they slaves rather than wage
labourers, their owners would have to supply them with food,
clothing, and shelter if they were to continue to be able to do
productive work.
Few people would claim that slavery was fair because of an
exchange of equivalents. Most people would say that the exchange
between master and slave does not represent an equivalence.
Marx attempted to show with objective analysis that the exchange
between labour and capital creates a similar type of exploitation, but
he was intent on transcending the moral question of fairness. Like
slaves, workers did what they did because of the objective condition
in which they found themselves. Stripped of their capacity to
provide for themselves, they had little choice but to work for others.
The violence of the capitalist system may be hidden, but it is violent
nonetheless. This particular arrangement is not necessarily any more
or any less fair than primitive accumulation. Its main fault is that it
prevents both people and society from achieving their potentials.
For Marx, what was important was the ability to analyse the
process in order to create something superior. He believed that
capitalism would fail not because it was unfair, but because its short-
comings would become so obvious that people would throw it aside
for a more rational organisation of society. Moral outrage about
fairness was beside the point.
For that reason, Marx placed the material on primitive accumula-
tion at the end of his book (Marx 1977, part 8). It appeared to be less
of a conclusion than an appendix, outside of the main thrust of the
book, except for one brief section that gave a beautiful analysis of
the relationship between primitive accumulation and ongoing
capitalist accumulation.
There, Marx described the work of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an
Englishman who spent some time in jail for attempting to abduct
and marry a young schoolgirl (Marx 1977, ch. 33). While languish-
ing in prison, Wakefield learned about Australia because many of his
fellow inmates were to be transported there. Wakefield found that
many of the prisoners who were expected to do labour once they got
to Australia instead went inland and began to work land on their
own. He realised that an abundance of free resources was incom-
patible with getting workers to labour for others.
From prison, Wakefield wrote a book purporting to be letters from
an Australian (Wakefield 1829). He convincingly argued that the
creation of a viable capitalist economy in Australia would require

putting much of the land off-limits, until the population reached
the point that free land would no longer be available. The book was
so successful that Wakefield became a major figure in the organisa-
tion of British colonisation. Under his leadership, New Zealand
followed his recommendations, preventing a rapid mass migration
of people into the inland regions of the country.
For Marx, Wakefield’s story was a parable of the capitalist
economy. What we now call free markets based on wage labour are
only possible when the preconditions make labour unfree. Nonethe-
less, aside from the Wakefield section, most of Marx’s materials on
primitive accumulation seem somewhat unconnected with his more
theoretical analysis of the nature of a capitalist economy.
This separation of the historical creation of capitalism and the
ongoing functioning of capitalism had some negative consequences.
It suggested that the beginning of capitalism was an event (like pro-
creation), after which primitive accumulation ceased. This ‘Big
Bang’ never happened. Instead, primitive accumulation initiated a
long process.
Recall that that which defines capitalism is a particular type of
social relation. This social relation goes beyond merely placing the
worker in the employ of another; it requires that this arrangement
be seen as in some sense ‘normal’.
The artificial separation of the stages of capitalist development is
unfortunate in another respect. While primitive accumulation was
a necessary step in the initial creation of capitalism, it actually
continues to this day. For example, at the time of this writing,
petroleum and mining companies are displacing indigenous people
in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even in the United States. Empha-
sising the social relations of advanced capitalist production to the
exclusion of the ongoing process of primitive accumulation obscures
the fact that the struggles of the Ogoni people in Nigeria or the Uwa
in Colombia are part of the same struggle as that of exploited
workers in Detroit or Manchester.
THE CONTINUING ROLE OF PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION

The artificial separation of capitalism into stages makes another fun-
damental element murkier than it need be: even today, access to
resources depends, more often than not, on primitive accumulation.
In this sense, capitalism has not changed a great deal over the centuries.
While capitalist production may seem to reside within the
confines of the world of advanced technology, run by advanced
126 Anti-Capitalism
electronic controls, this system ultimately depends on access to

cheap raw materials – especially petroleum. For example, even the
supposedly weightless economy still depends on colossal server
farms. One, being constructed near Seattle, covers about 13 acres
(McKay 2000).
These server farms have power concentrations of 100 watts per
square foot. Ten square feet consume enough power to supply a
typical home. These data centres are expected to cover an estimated
50 million square feet by 2005, but even so their demand will
amount to slightly more than 1 per cent of the US electricity demand
by that time (Bryce 2000).
The material demands of the New Economy go well beyond fossil
fuels. The United States used about 1 billion tonnes of materials in
1990, such as iron, copper, sulphur, and phosphorus, and hydro-
carbon fossil fuels, as well as other materials that are mined and used
in the production of goods, but excluding some (crushed) stone that
is used to build roads and other structures (Wernick et al. 1996).
Access to these resources depends, more often than not, on primitive
accumulation. In this sense, capitalism has not changed a great deal
over the centuries.

Battalio, R.C., Kagel, J.H and McDonald, D.N. (1985) ‘Animal’s Choices over
Uncertain Outcomes’, American Economic Review 75(4), pp. 597–613.
Bryce, R. (2000) ‘Power Struggle’ Interactive Week, 18 December
(www4.zdnet.com:80/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2665339,00.html).
Marx, K. (1977) Capital, vol. 1. New York: Vintage.
McKay, J. (2000) ‘Server Farms Strain Local Grids: Jurisdictions Are Facing
Huge Power Demands From These Digital Warehouses’ Government
Technology News, 29 September (www.govtech.net/news/features/
feature_sept_29.phtml).
Perelman, M. (2000) The Invention of Capitalism: The Secret History of Primitive
Accumulation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Perelman, M. (2002) Steal This Idea: The Corporate Capture of Creativity. New
York: Palgrave.
Smith, A. (1776) The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1976.
Wakefield, E.G. (1829) ‘Letter from Sydney: The Principle Town of Australa-
sia’, in The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ed. M.F. Lloyd
Pritchard. Glasgow and London: Collins, 1968.
Wernick, I.K., Herman, R., Govind, S. and Ausubel, J.H. (1996) ‘Materializa-
tion and Dematerialization: Measures and Trends’, Daedalus 125(3),
pp. 171–98 (phe.rockefeller.edu/Daedalus/Demat).
9 Globalisation and the State:

Where is the Power of Capital?
Ellen Meiksins Wood
Anti-capitalist movements, from the earliest days of socialism to

anti-globalisation protests today, have always encountered one fun-
damental problem: power in capitalist societies is so diffuse that it
is difficult to identify a target for opposition. Of course, workers in
any individual enterprise can fight against their employer for better
terms and conditions of work. Sometimes many enterprises in a
single industry can be challenged by their common trade union. But
it is much harder to locate a point in capitalist society where power
is concentrated in such a way that resistance and opposition can be
effectively directed against class domination by capitalists in general,
or against the logic of the capitalist system, which puts ‘profits
before people’.
THE ELUSIVE POWER OF CAPITAL

In pre-capitalist class societies, it is not usually so difficult to identify
the locus of power. Find the source of military and political coercion
and you will generally find economic power too. Capitalism is dis-
tinctive among class societies in this respect. Capitalists – unlike, say,
feudal lords – generally need no direct control of coercive military or
political force to exploit their workers who, because they are prop-
ertyless and have no direct access to the means of production, must
sell their labour power in exchange for a wage in order to work and
to live (see Chapter 1).
To be sure, capitalists ultimately depend on coercion by the state
to underpin their economic powers and their hold on property, to
maintain social order and conditions favourable to accumulation.
But there is a more or less clear division of labour between the
exploitative powers of the capitalist and the coercive powers of the
state. In capitalist societies, it is even possible to have universal
suffrage without fundamentally endangering capitalist economic
power, because that power does not require a monopoly on
political rights.
127
128 Anti-Capitalism
There is even a sense in which only capitalism has a distinct

‘economic’ sphere at all. This is so both because economic power is
separate from political or military force and because it is only in
capitalism that ‘the market’ has a force of its own, which imposes
on everyone, capitalists as well as workers, certain impersonal
systemic requirements of competition and profit maximisation.
Because all economic actors depend on the market for everything
they need, they must meet its requirements in order to survive, irre-
spective of their own personal needs and wants.
This brings us to the second reason for the diffusion of power in
capitalism. Coercion in capitalist societies is exercised not only
personally and directly by means of superior force but also indirectly
and impersonally by the compulsions of the market. The dominant
class, with the help of the state, can and does certainly manipulate
those compulsions to its own advantage, but it is impossible to trace
them to a single source of power.
While capital does require support by state coercion, the power of
the state itself is circumscribed by the powers of capital. A very wide
range of social functions – not only the organisation of production,
but the distribution of resources, the disposition of labour and the
organisation of time itself – is largely outside political or communal
control, belonging to the economic sphere, either under the direct
control of capital or subject to the impersonal ‘laws’ of the market.
In fact, one of the most important characteristics of capitalism is
that the economic hegemony of capital can extend far beyond the
limits of direct political domination. This is true not only of class
relations between capital and labour but also of relations between
imperial and subordinate states. We have already noted capital’s
ability to dominate labour by purely ‘economic’ means and without
direct political rule or judicial privilege. This contrasts sharply with
pre-capitalist classes which depended on ‘extra-economic’ powers
of coercion. Such classes relied on their superior coercive force, on
their political and military power and privilege, to extract surplus
labour, typically from peasants who, unlike capitalist wage
labourers, remained in possession of the means of production, either
as owners or as tenants. There is an analogous difference between
pre-capitalist and capitalist imperialisms. Old colonial empires
dominated territory and subject peoples by means of ‘extra-
economic’ coercion, by military conquest and often direct political
rule. Capitalist imperialism can exercise its rule by economic means,
Globalisation and the State: Where is the Power of Capital? 129
by manipulating the ‘laws’ of the market, including the weapon of

debt (see Chapters 8 and 13).
The state remains vital to this kind of domination, in ways that
will be discussed in what follows. But the separation between
economic and political domination clearly presents problems for
oppositional struggles. All of this has inevitably affected the nature
of opposition and class struggle. It is, for instance, no accident that
modern revolutions have occurred not in advanced capitalist
societies but in societies where the state has presented a visible target,
with a prominent role in direct exploitation. But as capitalism
develops into its mature industrial form, there tends to be a growing
concentration of class struggle in the workplace and a growing
separation between ‘industrial’ and ‘political’ struggles.
This distinctive relation between economic and political spheres
has always posed a problem for anti-capitalist movements. But as
long as there was some more or less clear connection between
national economies and national states, there remained a clear pos-
sibility of challenging the power of capital not only in the workplace
but at a point of concentration in the state. At the very least, pressure
could be put on the state by organised oppositional forces, most par-
ticularly the labour movement, to undertake policies that would to
some extent ameliorate the worst effects of capitalism. The division
of labour between political and economic spheres could even work
to the advantage of subordinate classes, and the balance of class
forces within the state itself might shift significantly in favour of the
working class, so that, even while the state remained within the con-
straints of the capitalist system, it could act more positively in the
interests of workers. There was even a hope that seizure of state
power would make possible a more complete social transformation,
the replacement of capitalism by socialism.
But today, it seems that even the most limited of these possibili-
ties hardly exist. At first glance, the separation of economic from
political power seems an even greater, and perhaps insurmountable,
problem in today’s ‘globalised’ economy than ever before. Transna-
tional capital seems to have escaped the boundaries of the nation
state, the power of capital seems to have become even more diffuse,
and the problem of locating and challenging the centre of capitalist
power has apparently become harder than ever. It seems to be
everywhere and nowhere.
Many of today’s anti-capitalist protestors have therefore sought
their principal targets in transnational organisations. Some of the
130 Anti-Capitalism
most well-known critics of globalisation, at least in the dominant

capitalist economies, characterise it mainly as a development driven
and dominated by transnational corporations, whose infamous
brand names – Nike, McDonald’s, Microsoft, and so on – are the
symbols of today’s global capitalism. At the same time, these critics
seem to assume that the services traditionally performed by the
nation state for national capital must now be performed for transna-
tional corporations by some kind of global state. In the absence of
such a state, the political work of global capital is apparently being
done by transnational institutions such as the WTO, the IMF, or G8
summits. Anti-capitalist movements acting on these assumptions
have targeted transnational corporations by such means as consumer
boycotts, sabotage and demonstrations. But above all, they have
directed their oppositional energies against supranational organisa-
tions which appear to be the institutions that come closest to
representing the political arm of global capital, in the way that the
nation state has traditionally represented national capital.
These ‘anti-capitalist’ movements have been effective in bringing
to light the devastating effects of ‘globalisation’. They have raised
the consciousness of many people throughout the world, and they
have offered the promise of new oppositional forces. But it may be
that in some respects they are based on faulty premises.
GLOBALISATION: MORE GLOBAL OR MORE CAPITALIST?

The conviction that global corporations are the ultimate source of
globalisation’s evils, and that the power of global capital is politi-
cally represented above all in supranational institutions like the
WTO, may be based, first, on the assumption that global capitalism
behaves the way it does because it is global, rather than (or more
than) because it is capitalist. The principal task for oppositional
forces, then, is to target the instruments of capital’s global reach
rather than to challenge the capitalist system itself.
In fact, many participants in movements of this kind are not so
much anti-capitalist as anti-‘globalisation’, or perhaps anti-
neoliberal, or even just opposed to particularly malignant
corporations. They assume that the detrimental effects of the
capitalist system can be eliminated by taming global corporations or
by making them more ‘ethical’, ‘responsible’, and socially conscious.
But even those who are more inclined to oppose the capitalist
system itself may assume that the more global the capitalist
economy becomes, the more global the political organisation of
capital will be. So, if globalisation has made the national state
increasingly irrelevant, anti-capitalist struggles must move immedi-
ately beyond the nation state, to the global institutions where the
power of global capital truly lies.
We need to examine these assumptions critically, not because
anti-capitalist movements are wrong in their conviction that
transnational corporations are doing great damage and need to be
challenged, or that the WTO and the IMF are doing the work of
global capital – which is certainly true. Nor are these movements
wrong in their internationalism or their insistence on solidarity
among oppositional forces throughout the world. We need to
scrutinise the relation between global capital and national states
because even the effectiveness of international solidarity depends on
an accurate assessment of the forces available to capital and those
accessible to opposition.
Let us start from the premise that global capitalism is what it is
not only because it is global but, above all, because it is capitalist.
The evils we associate with globalisation – the social injustices, the
growing gap between rich and poor, ‘democratic deficits’, ecological
degradation, and so on – are there not simply because the economy
is ‘global’, or because global corporations are uniquely vicious, or
even because they are exceptionally powerful. These problems exist
because capitalism, whether national or global, is driven by certain
systemic imperatives, the imperatives of competition, profit max-
imisation and accumulation, which inevitably require putting
‘exchange value’ above ‘use value’ and profit above people. Even the
most ‘benign’ or ‘responsible’ corporation cannot escape these com-
pulsions but must follow the ‘laws’ of the market in order to survive
– which inevitably means putting profit above all other considera-
tions, with all its wasteful and destructive consequences. These
compulsions also require capital’s constant self-expansion (see
Chapters 1 and 4). Globalisation itself, however much it has inten-
sified these imperatives, is their result rather than their cause.
These systemic imperatives can certainly operate through the
medium of specific transnational corporations, but, as one com-
mentator has put it, ‘corporations, as powerful as they are, are only
vehicles for capitalists ... It’s often assumed that corporations are a
power in themselves, rather than a particular way in which capital-
ists organise their wealth’.1 Any particular organisation of capitalist
wealth, such as Monsanto, can be challenged, even wrecked, but the
capitalists involved can simply restructure their wealth, restore their
132 Anti-Capitalism
profits in another form, and resume their destructive activities – all

of which Monsanto did, very soon after what was one of the most
effective anti-globalisation campaigns.
This is not to say that such campaigns are fruitless. They should
certainly be supported. The point is simply to recognise that
targeting even the most destructive corporations still is very far from
challenging the sources of capitalist power or capitalism’s systemic
compulsions, the imperatives that compel capitalists (whether they
are evil or relatively benign and responsible) to accumulate relent-
lessly and constantly maximise their profits. Targeting, or even
wrecking, specific corporations or supranational institutions like the
WTO certainly has the advantage of complicating the daily life of
capital, but it brings us not much closer to the core of capitalism.
A DECLINING NATION STATE?

If we start from the premise that the problem is not this or that cor-
poration, nor this or that international agency, but the capitalist
system itself, we are, of course, left with the problem of tracing
capitalist imperatives to a source that is accessible to challenge. How
do you fight a whole system? No one can deny that this remains an
intractable problem. But at the very least, we can raise questions
about whether the global scope of capital has put it so far beyond
the reach of the national state that the nation state is no longer a
major source of capitalist power, a major target of resistance nor a
potential instrument of opposition.
We can consider, first, the main functions traditionally performed
by the nation state for domestic capital and ask whether these
functions have been transferred to transnational organisations.
In every class society, where one class appropriates the surplus
labour of another, there are two related but distinct ‘moments’ of
class exploitation: the appropriation of surplus labour and the
coercive power that enforces it. In pre-capitalist societies, these
tended to be more or less united. The separation of ‘economic’ and
‘political’ spheres in capitalism has meant that these two moments
have been effectively divided between private enterprises and the
public power of the state. To be sure, any capitalist enterprise has at
its disposal an array of disciplinary mechanisms, as well as internal
organisational hierarchies, to keep workers in line and at work; and
the most effective sanction available to capital is its ability to deny
the worker access to the means of labour, that is, its ability to deny
the worker a job and a wage, to dismiss workers or to close enter-
prises altogether. But the ultimate sanction that sustains the system
as a whole belongs to the state, which commands the legal authority,
the police and the military power to exert direct coercive force. While
capitalists have used their property to exploit propertyless workers in
the ‘economic’ sphere, the state has maintained social order.
From the beginning, intervention by the state has been needed to
create and maintain not only the system of property but also the
system of propertylessness. State power has, of course, been needed
to support the process of expropriation and to protect the exclu-
siveness of capitalist property. But the state has also been needed to
ensure that, once expropriated, those without property in the means
of production are available, when required, as labour for capital.
Here, a delicate balance has had to be struck. On the one hand, the
state must help to keep alive a propertyless population which has
no other means of survival when work is unavailable, maintaining
a ‘reserve army’ of workers through the inevitable cyclical declines
in the demand for labour. On the other hand, the state must ensure
that escape routes are closed and that means of survival other than
wage labour for capital are not so readily available as to liberate the
propertyless from the need to sell their labour power when they are
needed by capital.
This balancing act has been a major function of the state since the
earliest days of capitalism. The state has also performed another
major and related function: controlling the mobility of labour, while
preserving capital’s freedom of movement. Although the movement
of labour across national boundaries has been severely restricted,
controlling labour’s mobility need not mean keeping workers
immobile. It may mean getting them to move where capital most
needs them. Sometimes, especially in the early days of industrial
development, the state has helped to uproot labour, to separate it
from local attachments. But even when the state has made labour
freely available by movements within and across borders if required,
such movements have always been rigorously controlled. It has been
one of the state’s most essential functions to keep a firm grip on the
mobility of labour, so that the movements of labour enhance, rather
than endanger, capitalist profit.
Capitalism is, by its nature, an anarchic system, in which the
‘laws’ of the market constantly threaten to disrupt the social order.
Yet capitalism needs stability and predictability in its social arrange-
ments probably more than any other social form. The nation state
has from the beginning provided that stability and that predictabil-
134 Anti-Capitalism
ity by supplying an elaborate legal and institutional framework,

backed up by coercive force, to sustain the property relations of
capitalism, its complex contractual apparatus and its intricate
financial transactions.
The question then is whether ‘global’ capitalism has found other
and better means than the nation state to perform all, or indeed any,
of these basic functions. Even a moment’s reflection should make it
clear that no other institution, no transnational agency, has even
begun to replace the nation state as a coercive guarantor of social
order, property relations, stability or contractual predictability, or
any of the other basic conditions required by capital in its everyday
life. The state still provides the indispensable conditions of accu-
mulation for global capital, no less than for very local enterprises;
and it is, in the final analysis, the state that has created the
conditions enabling global capital to survive and to navigate the
world. It would not be too much to say that the state is the only non-
economic institution truly indispensable to capital. While we can
imagine capital continuing its daily operations with barely a hiccup
if the WTO were destroyed, it is inconceivable that those operations
would long survive the destruction of the local state.
For all the attacks on the welfare state launched by successive
neoliberal governments throughout our era of ‘globalisation’, it
cannot even be argued that global capital has been able to dispense
with the social functions performed by nation states since the early
days of capitalism. Even while labour movements and forces of the
left have been in retreat, with so-called social democratic govern-
ments joining in the neoliberal assault, at least a minimal ‘safety net’
of social provision has proved to be an essential condition of
economic success and social stability in advanced capitalist
countries. At the same time, developing countries that may have
been able to rely more on traditional supports, such as extended
families and village communities, have been under pressure to shift
at least some of these functions to the state, as the process of ‘devel-
opment’ and the commodification of life have destroyed or
weakened old social networks.
Oppositional movements must struggle constantly to maintain
anything close to decent social provision. But it is hard to see how
any capitalist economy can long survive, let alone prosper, without
a state that to some extent, however inadequately, balances the
economic and social disruptions caused by the capitalist market and
class exploitation. Globalisation, which has further undermined tra-
ditional communities and social networks, has, if anything, made

this state function more, rather than less, necessary to the preserva-
tion of the capitalist system. This does not mean that capital will
ever willingly encourage social provision. It simply means that
capitalism’s hostility to social programmes, as necessarily a drag on
capital accumulation, is one of its many insoluble contradictions.
GLOBAL CAPITAL, GLOBAL STATE?

Are there, nonetheless, certain new or growing functions that are
specifically global in their scope, which must be administered by
transnational agencies instead of by nation states? No one can doubt
that movements of capital across national boundaries are frequent
and breathtakingly rapid in today’s global economy, or that new
supranational institutions have emerged to facilitate those
movements. But whether that means that markets are substantially
more globally integrated than ever before, or, even if they are, that
the role of the nation state has diminished accordingly, is another
question.
The first and most elementary point is that so-called ‘transna-
tional’ corporations generally have a base, together with dominant
shareholders and boards, in single nation states and depend on them
in many fundamental ways. Beyond that simple point, some com-
mentators have argued that, according to various measures of
integration, globalisation is far from advanced, and in important
respects less so than in previous eras – for instance, in the magnitude
of international trade as a share of gross domestic product, or global
exports as a proportion of the global product.
But let us accept that the speed and extent of capital movements,
especially those that depend on new information and communica-
tion technologies, have created something new. There remains one
overriding indication that the global market is still far from
integrated: the fact that wages, prices and conditions of labour are
still so widely diverse throughout the world. In a truly integrated
market, market imperatives would impose themselves universally,
to compel all competitors to approximate some common social
average of labour productivity and costs, in order to survive in
conditions of price competition.
This apparent failure of global integration is not, however, a
failure of globalisation so much as a symptom of it. In fact, globali-
sation has been as much about preventing as promoting integrated
markets. The global movements of capital require not only free trans-
136 Anti-Capitalism
border access to labour, resources and markets but also a kind of

economic and social fragmentation that enhances profitability. And
here again, it is the nation state that must perform the delicate
balancing act between opening borders to global capital and
deterring a kind and degree of integration that might go too far in
levelling social conditions among workers throughout the world.
It cannot even be said that global capital would gain most from
levelling the costs of labour downward by subjecting workers in
advanced capitalist countries to the competition of low-cost labour
regimes. This is certainly true, up to a point. But, apart from the
dangers of social upheaval at home, there is the inevitable contra-
diction between capital’s constant need to drive down the costs of
labour and its constant need to expand consumption, which requires
that people have money to spend. This, too, is one of the insoluble
contradictions of capitalism. But, on balance, global capital benefits
from uneven development; and the fragmentation of the world into
separate economies, each with its own social regime and labour
conditions, presided over by more or less sovereign nation states, is
no less essential to ‘globalisation’ than is the free movement of
capital. Not the least important function of the nation state in glob-
alisation is to enforce the principle of nationality that makes it
possible to manage the movements of labour by means of strict
border controls and stringent immigration policies, in the interests
of capital.
But the first and most basic condition of globalisation is imposing
market imperatives throughout the globe. This does not mean that
imperial powers will encourage the development of capitalist
economies like their own everywhere. It simply means that subor-
dinate economies must be made vulnerable to the dictates of the
capitalist market, by means of certain social transformations – such
as, for example, the transformation of peasants into market-
dependent farmers, as subsistence agriculture is replaced by
specialisation in single cash crops (while, of course, the metropoli-
tan powers protect their own domestic agriculture by huge subsidies
and import controls). Bringing about such social transformations has
been a major function of capitalist imperialism since its inception,
and the indispensable instrument has been the nation state.
Older forms of imperialism, as we have seen, depended directly
on conquest and colonial rule. Capitalism has extended the reach of
imperial domination far beyond the capacities of direct political rule
or colonialism, simply by imposing and manipulating the operations
of a capitalist market. Just as capitalist classes need no direct political

command over propertyless workers, capitalist empires can rely on
economic pressures to exploit subordinate societies. But just as
workers had to be made dependent on capital and kept that way, so
subordinate economies must be made and kept vulnerable to
economic manipulation by capital and the capitalist market – and
this can be a very violent process.
The most recent methods of imposing market imperatives are
familiar in countries that have undergone ‘structural adjustment’.
But, in various forms, the process goes back to the earliest days of
capitalist imperialism. England, even in the late sixteenth century,
was already experimenting with this imperialist strategy, notably in
Ireland. And from the beginning, capitalist imperialism has been
affected by one of the main contradictions of capitalism: the need to
impose its economic ‘laws’ as universally as possible, and, at the
same time, the need to limit the damaging consequences that this
universalisation has for capital itself. Capitalism is driven by com-
petition, yet capital must always seek to thwart competition. It must
constantly expand its markets and constantly seek profit in new
places, yet it typically subverts the expansion of markets by blocking
the development of potential competitors (as it did in Ireland,
already in the seventeenth century).
The nation state has been an indispensable instrument in the
process of spreading capitalist imperatives, not only in the sense that
the military power of European nation states has carried the
dominating force of capital to every corner of the world, but also in
the sense that nation states have been the conduits of capitalism at
the receiving end too. Indeed, for all the globalising tendencies of
capitalism, the world has become more, not less, a world of nation
states, not only as a result of national liberation struggles but also
under pressure from the imperial powers. These powers have found
the nation state to be the most reliable guarantor of the conditions
necessary for accumulation, and the only means by which capital
can freely expand beyond the boundaries of direct political
domination. As market imperatives have become a means of manip-
ulating local elites, local states have proved to be far more useful
transmission belts for capitalist imperatives than were the old
colonial agents and settlers who originally carried the capitalist
market throughout the world.
But this mode of imperialism also reveals a curious contradiction
at the heart of capitalism, especially in today’s ‘globalised’ form.
138 Anti-Capitalism
Capitalism has a unique drive for self-expansion. Capital cannot

survive without constant accumulation, and its requirements relent-
lessly drive it to expand its geographic scope too. From its earliest
days, capital, while always needing the support of nation states, has
been driven beyond national borders. The separation of the
‘economic’ and the ‘political’ has made it possible for the economic
reach of capital to extend much further than its political grasp – in
a way that was never possible for earlier forms of economic exploita-
tion which depended directly on military power and political rule.
Globalisation is taking this separation, this division of labour,
between the economic and the political to its utmost limit. But it is
not making the nation state less relevant to capital. Despite the
emergence of various transnational institutions – which are, after all,
little more than instruments of certain nation states, and one in
particular – there is little evidence that global capital is losing its
dependence on national states. It seems very unlikely that there will
ever be a capitalist state that corresponds to the global economy.
Globalisation, then, does not mean the decline of the nation state.
If anything, the new form of imperialism we call globalisation is
more than ever an imperialism that depends on a system of multiple
states. Precisely because the imperialism of globalisation depends on
extending purely economic hegemony and market imperatives far
beyond the reach of any single state, it is especially dependent on a
plurality of subordinate states to enforce those imperatives and to
create the climate of legal and political order, the stability and pre-
dictability, that capital needs in its daily transactions.
GLOBALISATION AND WAR

The US attack on Afghanistan is a dramatic illustration of the
relation between globalisation, imperialism and the nation state. The
most obvious point is that the state is revealing its ultimate power,
the power to make war. It is at the same time revealing other powers
which we have been told no longer exist. Having insisted that the
movements of capital have escaped state control, for instance,
imperial states are now freely proposing to freeze the assets of
terrorist groups. But the war reveals other more essential connec-
tions between globalisation and the state.
The history of the whole region is, to begin with, testimony to the
imperialist practice of creating and manipulating states to serve the
purposes of capital. Osama bin Laden himself is in many ways a
product of that practice. He was formed in Saudi Arabia, and the
Saudi Arabian state is his principal target. That state developed into
its present form after the carve-up of the Middle East, engineered
especially by Britain and France as the Ottoman empire disinte-
grated. Since then, Western states, and increasingly the United States
of America, have propped up this repressive regime, and others,
mainly to ensure the oil supply that capital so desperately needs. The
United States also, of course, supported religious extremists, such as
those who created the Taliban, and bin Laden himself, in their
efforts to ensure a friendly, anti-Soviet regime in Afghanistan. This
imperial practice of state formation has certainly not been displaced
by globalisation. Some commentators have suggested, for instance,
that the United States is now exploiting the opportunity to reshape
Afghanistan, with an eye to the huge oil and gas reserves of Central
Asia (though it must be said that the US has shown little interest in
the process of ‘nation building’ there, as it leaves its ‘allies’ and the
UN to clean up its mess).
But there is more to the war than such specific imperial objectives.
This war, like others in recent years, has a more general objective.
The military power of the USA, by far the most powerful coercive
force the world has ever known and the closest thing to a global
state, is certainly the ultimate enforcer of globalisation. Yet try to
imagine high-tech bombs, however ‘smart’, acting as the day-to-day
regulator of a complex legal and contractual order, enabling the
property transactions and financial dealings that are capitalism’s
daily bread, to say nothing of the everyday relations between capital
and labour. For that, local states are indispensable.
But the trouble with a system of multiple states is that it creates
great potential for disorder, resistance and opposition. Those states
are subject to their own internal pressures and oppositional forces,
and no single military power, not even the United States, with or
without its allies, can ensure the compliance of so many states. Not
even the most advanced military force can keep this global system
in line all at once, by means of constant direct coercion.
Controlling a whole global economy, all the time and everywhere,
and the many states that are needed to keep it working, is a very
different matter from the old imperialist task of capturing territory
or dominating particular states, with finite boundaries. So one way
of keeping states in line is regularly to display the military power of
the United States and demonstrate that, if it cannot be everywhere
all the time, it can go anywhere at any time and do great damage.
140 Anti-Capitalism
The need to shape the world’s political environment – both in sub-

ordinate states and in other advanced capitalist states which are
implicated in military alliances2 – may help to explain why the
United States has so often embarked on military actions with no
clear goal or exit strategy, and in situations not susceptible to
military solutions. It may also help to explain the US practice of
waging war without risking the lives of its own forces, even when
massive air attacks cannot achieve the professed objectives.
The attack on Afghanistan will certainly not end terrorism. It is
far more likely to increase terrorist violence. For that matter, even
installing a friendly and stable regime in Afghanistan (assuming that
the United States cares) is very far from guaranteed. But military
action without apparent purpose may be an end in itself.
Warmongers in Washington have been talking openly about the
‘demonstration effect’ of the war against Afghanistan, making it clear
that, if they have little interest in what happens to Afghanistan, they
have great hopes for the war’s psychological effects on more
important states, such as Iraq. It is especially revealing that hawks
in the White House reportedly have a plan called ‘Operation Infinite
War’, which calls for war without constraints of time or geography,
and that US Vice President Cheney has warned that the ‘war against
terrorism’ may last beyond our lifetimes.3 Open-ended war against
an invisible enemy is just what this new form of empire needs. The
borderless empire of globalisation needs infinite war, war without
boundaries, war that is endless in both purpose and time.
And yet, this kind of military strategy also exposes the growing
contradiction between the global economy and the local political
forces on which it depends. It reveals how dependent global capital
is on local states and how unstable that structure of multiple states
can be. At the very least, it confirms that the state is more than ever
the point of concentration of capitalist power, and that therefore the
state must more than ever be a target of oppositional struggles. Anti-
capitalist demonstrations at meetings of the WTO or the IMF have
been enormously important in many ways, but they are no
substitute for the kind of political organisation that can truly
challenge state power, and the balance of class forces the state
represents, from both outside and inside the state.

Gowan, P. (1999) The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World
Dominance. London: Verso.
Greenfield, G. (2001) ‘Devastating, with a Difference: From Anti-Corporate

Populism to Anti-Capitalist Alternatives’, Against the Current 93, pp. 12–14.
NOTES
1. Greenfield (2001, pp. 13–14).
2. For a discussion of US efforts to manipulate its allies in this way, see
Gowan (1999).
3. On 30 September, the Observer in London carried a special report by Ed
Vulliamy, ‘Inside the Pentagon’. Here are some of the highlights: ‘As war
begins in Afghanistan, so does the assault on the White House – to win the
ear and signed orders of the military’s Commander in Chief, President
George W. Bush, for what Pentagon hawks call “Operation Infinite War”
… The Observer has learnt that two detailed proposals for warfare without
limit were presented to the President this week by his Defence Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, both of which were temporarily put aside but remain
on hold. … They were drawn up by his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz … [T]he
plans argue for open-ended war without constraint either of time or
geography … [T]he Pentagon militants prefer to speak of “revolving
alliances”, which look like a Venn diagram, with an overlapping centre
and only certain countries coming within the US orbit for different sectors
and periods of an unending war. The only countries in the middle of the
diagrammatic rose, where all the circles overlap, are the US, Britain and
Turkey … Officials say that in a war without precedent, the rules have to
be made up as it develops, and that the so-called “Powell Doctrine”
arguing that there should be no military intervention without “clear and
achievable” political goals is “irrelevant”.’
10 Financial and Industrial

Capital: A New Class
Coalition
Suzanne de Brunhoff
We need to understand better how today’s capitalism works, and

how harmful it is to ordinary people across the world. This task
requires a careful scrutiny of the social forces that might be able to
oppose capitalism and bring about an alternative system.
International finance and money seem to be in a dominant
position since the 1980s. All over the world, neoliberal policies have
generated huge flows of short-term investment, currency specula-
tion, financial instability and crises. The ‘creation of shareholder
value’ has put economies under great strain. However between 1995
and 2000, there was growth and technical progress (and near full
employment) in the United States, which looked like the model of
a ‘new economy’ (see Chapter 16). We have to examine the rela-
tionship between capitalist production and finance, and the class
divisions that are at stake today.
THE ‘TRIUMPH OF FINANCIAL CAPITAL’?

Many opponents of capitalist globalisation denounce the vices of
financial hegemony. Contrary to the accumulation of productive,
‘real’ capital, financial activity transforms private wealth into highly
profitable investments, but it needs liquidity and mobility. This
entails the ‘short-termism’ of speculators and the parasitism of
rentiers, which are counterposed to the productive contribution of
economic agents, entrepreneurs and workers. The ‘activities of a
casino’ are harmful to industrial development and growth.
A key feature of this financial hegemony is the overpowering
demand of shareholders for high returns and high short-term
company profits. Bank loans and bonds are now more dependent
on international short-term profits. They provide credit to enter-
prises or countries that are able to pay high private returns. When
these returns are declining, big international banks cut credit lines,
and money flows back to safe havens. Then weak currencies are
142
Financial and Industrial Capital: A New Class Coalition 143
devalued, which entails financial crises and economic recession in

the ‘emerging’ countries.
Neoliberal policies are accused of paving the way to this financial
hegemony. When did they start? At first they were political answers
to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s, combining inflation and
stagnation, and the depreciation of the dollar. The Bretton Woods
system collapsed, and financial liberalisation started with the free
floating of the main currencies (the dollar, the D-mark and the yen)
and the end of exchange controls. Private financial markets now
settled the rates of exchange.
The main political turn came in 1979–80, with Reaganomics in
the United States and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom, and dis-
inflation policies in Western Europe. The value of money was
restored. These policies worked in favour of money capital and
financial asset owners. However, we need to understand the rela-
tionship between industrial capital and real growth, and whether
economic stagnation was the price to pay for ‘the triumph of
financial capital’ (Sweezy 1994, p. 2) since the 1980s.
A NEW COALITION BETWEEN FINANCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL

CAPITALISTS
The visible domination of financial markets does not imply that
industrial capital has lost its fundamental importance. Rather, we
could say that a new capitalist coalition has emerged, in order to
restore profitability after the crisis of the1970s. When shareholders
required very high returns on their financial assets, bosses responded
by reorganising production processes: downsizing, subcontracting,
relocation of plants and so on. Since the 1980s, company restruc-
turing has maximised profits while treating employment and wages as
adjustment variables.
Everywhere labour was broken by the new profitability regime. In
response to the profit crisis of the 1970s, the ‘new economy’ was
driven by an international capitalist coalition of financial and
industrial capitalists, with the help of neoliberal policies. Techno-
logical progress blossomed. This complex process restored high
profits and supported the emergence of a financial boom. Until
2000, it seemed that the growth of the ‘new economy’ in developed
capitalist countries would last for ever.
The distribution of profits between industrial and financial capi-
talists is often problematic, and conflicts of interest often arise. Each
of these spheres of capital has its own form of expansion, instability
144 Anti-Capitalism
and crisis. However, the accumulation of capital needs both of them.

According to Marx (1867, p. 626), the ‘credit system’, including bank
loans and financial markets, is ‘a terrible weapon in the battle of
competition, and is finally transformed into an enormous social
mechanism for the centralisation of capital’. It operates by ‘the
violent method of annexation’ of dispersed enterprises by prepon-
derant centres of annexation, or by ‘the smoother process of
organising joint stock companies’ (p. 627).
Great waves of mergers and acquisitions took place in the 1990s.
They promoted qualitative changes in industrial production through
the restructuring of plant and labour by subcontracting, outsourc-
ing and relocation, within both developed and developing countries.
During the same period, a huge centralisation of money was
undertaken by mutual and pension funds. These quantitative and
qualitative changes in the accumulation of industrial capital involve
the active participation of finance.
This does not mean that finance capital is purely functional, or
that financial markets act ‘rationally’. Orthodox arguments in favour
of free financial markets are well known. They claim that these
markets are ‘efficient’ when asset prices incorporate immediately all
available information, and that they rationally allocate savings to
economic investment. Growth needs these markets. Without foreign
investment, less developed countries could not grow, and industrial
countries could not promote technical progress. Therefore, financial
instability, currency crises and windfall speculative profits are part of
the price to pay for global development and world wealth. However,
there are large differences of opinion among orthodox analysts about
the evaluation of financial assets.
There is a disparity between the market price of shares and the
‘real’ capital evaluation of companies, which is shown by different
indices. One of them is the ratio of stockmarket evaluation of
companies to the replacement cost of ‘tangible assets’, including
plant, machines, and so on (Tobin’s Q). In the 1990s, this ratio
became very high, as share prices climbed. Does this mean that share
prices were overvalued, when they were compared with the prices
of the means of production? If this is the case, invoking ‘irrational
exuberance’ does not explain how financial capital works.
There are different explanations of the ‘irrationality’ of the
financial markets, according to different theories of economic value.
The first belongs to the prevailing neoclassical theory of market equi-
librium. This theory is unable to explain how financial markets
work, because it does not understand the meaning of the demand

for money and finance. ‘Rational individuals are interested in the
commodities they can produce and exchange. Their motives are
measured in “real” terms (expressed in quantities of goods) not in
“nominal” terms (values expressed in money)’ (Arrow 1981, p. 139).
The consequence is that money and the prices of financial assets
cannot be determined within this theory’s equilibrium analysis. Far
from being ‘irrational’, they are simply not included in the economic
rationale defined by this theory.
This failure has not prevented the construction of several mathe-
matical models and measures of rational capital-asset pricing. All of
them consider financial assets to be specific commodities bought
and sold in a free market where rational individuals trade. The math-
ematical evaluation of the risks of losses and the chances of gains
has become more and more developed. However, these theories
remain within the financial sphere; therefore, they cannot explain
how the prices of financial assets are related to economic ‘funda-
mentals’, if at all.
J.M. Keynes (1936) presented a different analysis of the irrational
behaviour of financial markets. He introduced the theory of the
demand for money and liquidity, and of different groups of
economic agents. The irrationality of financial markets results from
mass psychology and ‘herd behaviour’. When ‘news’ circulates, asset
prices can suddenly rise or fall, without any changes in the
underlying economic conditions, such as the prices of commodities
or the activities of enterprises. Financial asset prices have no real
anchor. According to Keynes, the least useful economic group
comprises rich owners of money capital, the parasitic ‘rentiers’. They
want high returns from their financial investments, otherwise they
will keep their money idle and provoke the scarcity of finance for
economic needs. Such behaviour has no justification, since the
savings of the rich are not the result of austerity or consumption
restrictions. Therefore, financial activity should be taken out of the
hands of the rich owners of money capital and regulated by the state.
Keynes proposed the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’. The active economic
agents, entrepreneurs and workers, should not be dependent upon
the interests of idle rentiers.
This kind of analysis is often used today by people who ask for the
cancellation of the debts of less developed countries, and by those
proposing a new regulation of finance (see Chapter 13). They are
right to protest against the waste of labour power and real resources
146 Anti-Capitalism
resulting from free financial markets. They are also right to protest
against the growing inequality of income and wealth everywhere.
The private regulation of exchange rates, public services and social
welfare operates in favour of financial fortunes and is a source of
windfall profits, instability and crisis. A new public regulation of
markets and financial institutions is necessary.
However, this new regulation should involve major changes in
the whole body of capitalist accumulation of wealth. Therefore, it is
necessary to understand more fully the complex relationship
between financial and industrial capital, and the respective roles of
financiers and entrepreneurs in capital accumulation. Then we will
come back to the general notion of capital, whether ‘real’ or
financial.
According to the classical economists, all commodities, including
capital goods, are created by labour in the industrial sphere. Only
here is there value and profit creation. So what about finance, which
is not created by labour? Marx showed how money and money
capital are derived from the creation of value and the circulation of
commodities (see Chapters 1 and 3). Money capital is necessary for
paying wages and buying industrial equipment. It is also involved
in the circulation of productive capital. Marx went further when he
analysed the accumulation of capital. The exploitation of labour is
the basis of capitalist profit. However, a capitalist ‘credit system’ is
required for financing new industrial investments, and it also cen-
tralises the money of all social classes. Owners of small savings are
passively involved in this process, while the ownership of financial
assets is highly concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy people,
including some industrial managers.
This economic role of finance does not mean that financial capital
is a mere adjunct of capitalist accumulation. Even if financial returns
depend on profits made in production, they have their own
dynamic. Marx, after some classical economists, wrote that the
evaluation of financial assets is peculiar, because they are not directly
produced by labour. When we learn that, in 2001, ten billion dollars
were lost because the international stock markets have plunged, we
know that this does not imply that factories and workers disappeared
as the overvaluation of financial shares and wealth started to
decrease. There is a depreciation only of ‘paper wealth’.
But this ‘paper wealth’ is also a form of capital property. Financial
losses do not mean that rich owners are deprived of their property
rights. It is striking to see that, whatever the fluctuation of share
prices, large fortunes remain concentrated in a few hands. This brings

us back to the previous question: is there control of capital accumu-
lation by the owners of large financial assets? Since the 1980s, the
huge growth of joint-stock companies and investment in corporate
shares has been accompanied by strong pressure by financial markets
and institutions for high corporate profits and high financial rates
of return from company activities. These financial standards are now
the most important measure of the interests of capital. The mobility
and liquidity of financial investment makes it easy to choose
industrial sectors where the highest returns can be expected.
The domination of financial standards must be validated by the process
of capital accumulation. Marxian analysis shows that the pressure from
the owners of finance on the management of production must be
relayed by industrial directors concerned with high profits from
production. These directors not only have high salaries, but also
obtain important share portfolios by means of stock options or in
other ways. And they agree to change the organisation of industrial
production in order to maximise both profits and financial rewards.
This is the objective basis for a coalition of financiers and top industrial
directors. New production and organisational standards are imposed
upon small enterprises, making them more dependent on the markets
for commodities and services. Outsourcing part of their productive
operations, subcontracting services linked to productive activity,
relocating plants to another part of the country or to other countries,
all these measures are taken according to the common interests of the
capitalist coalition. Even if financial and industrial capitals do have
distinct features, both are involved in capital accumulation.
However, this process seems to generate a capitalism without cap-
italists, or a market economy driven by competition and centralisation
of capitals. It looks like a natural mechanism in which the behaviour
of all economic individuals is predetermined. Class divisions become
invisible. So it is necessary to analyse how the class coalition of
financiers and industrial capitalists opposes workers’ interests.
THE CLASS COALITION OF CAPITALISTS AGAINST WORKERS

Class positions are rooted in the process of capital accumulation.
According to Marx, capital is constituted not only by ‘real’ means of
production and money, or by financial assets belonging to private
owners. Since value is created by labour, capital includes a social
relation of production between capitalists and workers. This
determines the basic distribution of global income between profits
148 Anti-Capitalism
and wages. Capital accumulation constantly reproduces the social

positions of capitalists and workers (see Chapter 4).
The main features of this relation have changed in the history of
capitalism. The balance of power between capital and labour is not
static. Since the 1980s, it has shifted in favour of capital. Inequalities
of income and wealth have increased considerably everywhere. But
herein lies a paradox. The working class has suffered from the new
practices of the capitalist coalition, but these were not opposed by
important national or international workers’ movements in the
democratic capitalist countries. The working class as such seemed to
disappear, broken by competition and individual interests.
Intense competition between the workers was used to cut ‘corpo-
ratist’ wages and employment demands. Part-time and temporary
contracts were developed. Job insecurity increased for all, even when
there was near ‘full employment’ in the United States and the United
Kingdom. The mobility of workers increased. These changes exerted
labour market pressure upon jobs and wages, at the expense of
collective bargaining and unions. They entailed the restoration of
high profits for capital.
Politics and ideology must be introduced into the analysis of class
relations. Economic position and conflicts of interest are the
economic basis of class divisions, but they are not sufficient to
explain class struggles and compromises. Since the 1980s, neoliberal
policies were not only orientated by laissez-faire, but also actively
promoted new practices and social relations (see Chapters 16 and 17).
Since the 1980s, monetary policy has become the focus of
economic policy. Price inflation, or the relative depreciation of
money, was no longer tolerated. Whatever the origin of price
increases, wages had to be stabilised and some public expenditures
had to be cut. This monetary discipline was a decisive contribution
of neoliberal policies to the huge development of the financial
markets. While wages were stabilised, financial property was
encouraged by disinflation policies.
More specific measures were at work (Economist 2001, pp. 3–38).
In Europe and elsewhere, the privatisation of public or state enter-
prises promoted equities markets and property in private assets.
There were also new legal dispositions and corporate strategies to
finance pensions systems. There was ‘a shift from state and pay-as-
you-go systems towards greater emphasis on privately funded
pensions’ (p. 4). Mutual funds boomed. But this kind of property in
financial assets by workers is indirect. Small savings are centralised
by financial institutions, which drive them into markets. And even

if some workers have share accounts in the enterprises where they
work, they do not obtain new rights. They do not become ‘associates’
of the capitalists. New kinds of rewards have been developed within
companies. The variable part of wages has increased. Share options,
which are shares having specific rules of attribution, have become a
very important part of top managers’ salaries. Some US union leaders
have asked for a distribution of share options to workers. They have
never got it. Statistics show that a very low percentage of people in
active employment get share options. And general statistics of wealth
distribution show the very high concentration of financial property
in few hands. There is no ‘worker capitalism’.
Capitalist profitability needs not only the exploitation of labour,
but also workers’ loyalty to their contracts (see Chapter 5). Market
discipline and new methods of production and control are insuffi-
cient. The culture of individual opportunity has been promoted by
neoliberal policies and by the ideology of the ‘new economy’.
Popular access to credit for consumption goods and housing has
been developed, which sustains global demand. But, since the 1980s,
the access of workers to property in shares, however limited and
passive it may be, was also encouraged and it has contributed to the
new culture of opportunity. Collective wages were stagnant, but
some workers could obtain individual compensation.
During the 1990s, the new culture was supported by US economic
growth, technical progress, and booming stock markets. Capitalism’s
triumph looked definitive. There were crises only in some underde-
veloped or emerging countries. Winners could afford to have
compassion toward the losers, without changing their respective
positions. Poverty and inequality was dissociated from class structure.
Have these neoliberal policies and the ideology of individual
opportunity changed since the US crisis that started in 2000? Stock
markets were hurt, profits decreased, and there have been massive
layoffs in the US manufacturing sector. Unemployment has
increased. The ‘privileged’ workers who own shares in pension funds
have also been hurt by the depreciation of their meagre financial
assets. The working poor have become poorer, even when they still
have jobs. Their working class identity has become more apparent,
but it is still too early to grasp the consequences.
Some economists think that Keynesian policies are now coming
back. The monetary policy of the US central bank has been very
loose since the beginning of 2001: its short-term interest rates have
150 Anti-Capitalism
been reduced from 6.5 per cent to 1.75 per cent. But this is obviously
insufficient to sustain consumer demand and enterprise invest-
ments. This has led to a new fiscal policy of income tax cuts, and
other measures to support demand. Does this means that ‘Keynes is
coming back’?
Not necessarily. As was said above, a Keynesian policy involves a
social compromise between capitalist entrepreneurs and workers.
Financial markets and ‘rentiers’ who own money capital should be
disciplined by public rules. This was not the case for the US
‘Keynesian measures’ implemented in 2001. Pragmatic neoliberals use
these policies to confront emergencies. Ronald Reagan, in 1980, adopted
income tax cuts and public deficits, while breaking the workers’
movement and the unions. George W. Bush, in 2001, while taking
about ‘compassion’ with the unemployed workers, has the same
strategic orientation, which does not affect the power of large
companies and financial capitalists.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW ANTI-CAPITALIST MOVEMENT

The management of world business by international institutions like
the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO has lost its legitimacy. In
1997–98, the IMF was unable to manage the Asian crisis. The inter-
ventions of the World Bank in the poor Southern countries have not
reduced poverty. Periodic meetings of these international institu-
tions and of the leaders of the most powerful countries (the G7) are
challenged by demonstrations. The leaders of the world capitalist
empire seem to be unable to provide the necessary reforms.
Since 1998, international movements against neoliberal capitalist
globalisation have grown. They have exposed the iniquity of free
capital movements and free trade, the privatisation of public
services, the huge debts of underdeveloped countries, and the waste
of natural resources. The big profits of multinational corporations
are made at the expense of human beings. These critics have gained
political influence since obtaining support from public opinion in
the developed capitalist countries.
The new movements have developed outside the existing workers’
unions and left-wing political parties. Rather than having a common
political programme, they all seek human rights, including the
economic and social rights crushed by the neoliberal search for profit
maximisation and satisfaction of shareholders. Some of the
protesters ask for business and trading ethical norms to be imposed,
and for loosening the oppression of poor people and low-wage
workers. Others require institutional reforms, such as control of

financial flows, and real changes in the ‘standards and practices’ of
the international institutions.
Are the critics of neoliberal capitalism and their demands for
reforms a basis for a new anti-capitalist movement? Protests against
the new curse of capitalism since the 1980s are an important con-
tribution to the struggles against oppression and exploitation. Some
of the proposed reforms could lead to a shift in the balance of power
from capital to labour. In Italy and Germany, some workers’ unions
understand this and have joined the new movements. However, the
rebirth of the working class is essential not only in a defensive cor-
poratist way but also through political claims. Without the specific
participation of the working class, no anti-capitalist movement can
gain a victory over the coalition of financiers and industrial capital-
ists supported by politics and ideology.

Arrow, K. J. (1981) ‘Real and Nominal Magnitudes in Economics’, in D. Bell
and I. Kristol (eds.) The Crisis in Economic Theory. New York: Basic Books.
Bellofiore, R. (1998) (ed.) Marxian Economics: A Reappraisal (Essays on Volume
3 of Capital). London: Macmillan.
Economist (2001) ‘A Survey of Global Equity Markets’, May 5.
Keynes, J. M. (1936) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964.
Marx, K. (1867) Capital, vol. 1. New York: International Publishers, 1967.
Sweezy, P. M. (1994) ‘The Triumph of Financial Capital’, Monthly Review 46(2)
pp. 1–11.
11 War, Peace and Capitalism:

Is Capitalism the Harbinger
of Peace or the Greatest
Threat to World Peace?
Christopher Cramer
One of the political arguments for capitalism has always been that
it could tie people up with the relatively benign business of money-
making, thus diverting them from the more nefarious activities of
seeking power and making war, to which they might otherwise be
prone (Hirschman 1977). It is still often presumed that capitalism is
pacific, because it knits people together within and among countries
in the bustle of production and exchange, consuming their attention
and raising the costs of war. A very different idea of the properties of
capitalism is captured by Wood: ‘I am convinced…that capitalism
cannot deliver world peace. It seems to me axiomatic that the expan-
sionary, competitive and exploitative logic of capitalist accumulation
in the context of the nation-state system must, in the longer or
shorter term, be destabilising, and that capitalism – and at the
moment its most aggressive and adventurist organising force, the
government of the United States – is and will for the foreseeable
future remain the greatest threat to world peace’ (1995, p. 265 – see
Chapter 9). This chapter discusses whether there is a clear Marxist
position on war or on the links between war and capitalism. It then
shows the consequences of not adopting a historical political
economy perspective. It argues for the relevance of a historically
minded analysis of contemporary war in which the role of capitalism
– advanced and nascent – is central but complex.
IS THERE SUCH A THING AS A MARXIST THEORY OF WAR?

Marxist theory is concerned with social conflict, with crisis, and with
the commonplace brutality of social relations in many circum-
stances. The Marxist analysis of capitalism highlights the founding
violence of this form of social organisation through primitive accu-
mulation. After the establishment of capitalist relations of
152
War, Peace and Capitalism 153
production there remain inherent tendencies towards occasional

crisis. And a Marxist analysis also stresses the significance of class
conflict, where exploitative relations are bound to generate
antagonism of various forms. Further, classical Marxist ideas of how
capitalism could be supplanted by a different and even more pro-
gressive mode of production sometimes revel in imagery of violent
conflict. For all this, however, there is not much – certainly in Marx’s
own writings – that directly explains war or the relationship between
war and capitalism. This is so despite the fact that Marxist theory
was elaborated at a time characterised by major civil wars (including
the American Civil War) and international wars, and despite the fact
that both Marx and Engels were attentive readers of Clausewitz.
However, there are components of original Marxist thinking that
suggest some perspectives on war and capitalism that might be
absorbed into a historical political economy of contemporary
conflicts. To begin with, Marx saw war as archaic. Marx, recall,
waxed rhapsodic about the historically transformative powers of
capitalism. Capitalism was revolutionary in its progressive conse-
quences for human society. One of the senses in which capitalism
was superior to any previous set of social relations was precisely that
it was not a system of perpetual warfare in the literal sense. For
medieval European society more or less had been that – a society in
which war was the dominant institution and peace merely an
occasional interlude. This was an Enlightenment insight: for
arguably peace was only invented during the Enlightenment as a
serious prospect, and there were considerable hopes that, having
overthrown the institutions of the ancien régime, societies would be
able to live without war.
If war as a central institution of society was made archaic by
capitalism and bourgeois society, nonetheless war could play a role
in the success of capitalism. In several places Marx writes that social
relations as they take shape in war and military organisations can
accelerate the development of the productive forces. ‘In general, the
army is important for economic development. For instance, it was in
the army that the ancients first fully developed a wage system …
This division of labour within one branch was also first carried out
in the armies. The whole history of the forms of bourgeois society is
very strikingly epitomised here’ (quoted in McLellan 1977, p. 342).
Providing for armed forces has often generated innovations that
have then spread through societies. Famously, the concept of sizes
and ready-to-wear clothing developed during the American Civil
154 Anti-Capitalism
War from the need for uniforms. Indeed, capitalism, war and
modern nation states fed off one another in an extraordinarily
expansionary combination from the seventeenth century onwards
(Tilly 1990). Capitalism has a distinctive technological dynamism.
Military demand, the compulsion of war, and ideological urgency in
the perceived threat of war have harnessed this dynamism with
dramatic effect. Since the early days of capitalism arms manufactur-
ers (in the seventeenth century especially British, Dutch and French)
competed for export markets in Europe, America, and elsewhere,
including Africa where the arms trade was integral to the slave trade
and where this trade revolutionised warfare. More recently, of
course, the appliance of capitalism’s technological concentration to
military ends has fuelled a phenomenal arms race and, especially
since the end of the Cold War, a proliferation of industrial
production of arms internationally.1 A nice example of the power of
the interests of arms-oriented capital overriding liberal idealism was
the announcement, in December 2001, that the British government
was planning to approve an export licence for a military air traffic
control system (costing well over the average for civilian systems) to
Tanzania, one of the poorest countries in the world.2 This is but one
example of the persistent links between states and military
productive interests, a set of linkages that used to be taken as so
powerful that it dominated capitalist economies and became known
as the ‘military industrial complex’, or MIC. The MIC idea has rather
faded from view, as indeed has the argument that military expendi-
ture and war-related production might be positively necessary to the
survival of the capitalist economy.
One way in which some Marxists have viewed capitalism as
especially amenable, at least, to war is through the development of
underconsumption theory. From this perspective, common particu-
larly in the 1970s, capitalism is prone to crisis when its reliance on
the exploitation of labour contradicts the need for sufficient demand
for commodities produced in capitalist relations of production.
Military production – and the expansion of an MIC, driven by state
procurement – has sometimes been seen as an inbuilt mechanism
within capitalism of defence against underconsumptionist crises. To
the extent that military preparedness requires realisation in war to
justify continued investment, then this argument would support a
pro-war tendency within capitalism. At the very least, one could
argue that the strength of capital tied up in military production and
provisioning contributes greatly to the shaping of foreign policy and
the way wars are fought. For example, US military technology has
evolved a particularly strong commitment to air power; and US
military commitments in, for example, Afghanistan in 2001, have
seemed to some critics to rely inordinately on air power. However,
there has been strong criticism of the underconsumptionist position,
chiefly on the grounds that in jumping straight from a very abstract
theory to instant explanation of empirical facts it provides no
mediating links, that its underlying theory of capitalist crisis is over-
wrought, and that it is completely arbitrary to assign exclusively to
the military the potential for moderating tendencies to crisis in
capitalist economies (see Chapters 9 and 15).3
Nonetheless, there is a final sense in which capitalism might well
inherently support the likelihood of violent conflict. For capitalism
is by its very nature conflictual: the logic of desperate competition
that compels capitalists – especially perhaps when framed within
nation states and the organisation of national interest – could be
expected to generate regional and international violence, including
violence in the form of war. This tendency might be mitigated,
however, by the fact that capitalism is transnational and develops
complex interconnectedness between people. The key, however, is to
see the independence of the nation state as the principal unit of
political organisation and international legitimacy, shaping capitalist
competition into a potentially lethal form. There might not be
anything inherently warlike about capitalism, but when it is
harnessed to national power and competition it easily becomes so.
Here the role of the French government, in particular, in backing
and arming the Habyarimana regime in Rwanda that unleashed
genocidal violence in 1994 against (mainly) Rwandan Tutsis is an
obvious example. So too is the rather more complex US involvement
in the Middle East as part and parcel of the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict and also the wider social and political conflicts that bred al-
Qa’ida terrorism from the late 1990s onwards. Here it is not simply
‘the national state’ but the configuration of political influence on
the US state that has held together much of the Middle East in a vice
of artificial stability through support to regimes in Egypt and Israel,
among others.
For surely it is the combined causal powers of capitalism and
national interest (along with a range of other material and ideolog-
ical factors) that are realised in arms races and military engagements
among capitalist nations. Similarly, it is the combined causal powers
of the transition to capitalism (the prolonged, traumatic ‘moment’
156 Anti-Capitalism
of change), the non-linear history of state formation, the diverse

roles of non-national collective identities, and the interests of inter-
national capital that are realised in the ‘civil wars’ of the world in
recent years. Thus, while there has often been a tendency to insist on
the total subordination of war and militarism to capitalist
production logic, this is never analytically very successful. Marx and
Engels themselves ultimately portrayed war as ‘a relatively indepen-
dent variable in the ever-changing human scene’ (Gallie 1978, p. 79).
Further, although the causal powers of capitalism are central to
any understanding of modern conflict, these cannot be ‘read off’
effortlessly from some rigid logical schema. Rather, all the ambigui-
ties of capitalism are revealed in the relationship between capitalism
and violent conflict. Capitalism can mitigate the proclivity to war
just as it can in different circumstances provoke war. Capital tends to
require peace but often thrives on conflict. The expanding domain of
capital may knit together different peoples in a common association
around the possibilities and political challenges of bourgeois society;
but at the same time the international reach of capital may raise the
stakes of local conflicts. Obvious examples of this last tendency
include the markets for high-value primary commodities that play a
central role in sustaining and scaling up conflicts around the world:
markets for diamonds; the vast set of linked economic activities
relying on oil; or the mobile phone, games console and space
technology industries and their hunger for coltan, the heat-resistant
metal whose deposits are concentrated in the Kivu districts of eastern
Congo (Kinshasa) and whose extraction is fought over by contending
Congolese, Rwandan, Ugandan and other regional groups.
There is an accommodation between capitalism and other factors,
such as the nation state, and a social propensity to violence, that is
independent from specific historical epochs. Capitalism itself
remains of central significance, however, as of course does the scope
within capitalist society for political struggle to have real conse-
quences. From this perspective, we should be wary of analyses that
repeat in reverse the errors of some strains of radical analysis. For
example, Shaw (2000) suggests that the institutions of war fed on
capitalism and, once sufficiently engorged, squashed and subordi-
nated the capitalist mode of production. This to some extent is what
E.P. Thompson argued when he claimed there was in modern
industrial society a ‘logic of exterminism’. For all those enamoured
by the attractions of Western liberal values and the defence of ‘civil-
isation’, it is certainly salutary to recall the thread of extreme and
mass viciousness in modern Western society. Modern exterminisms

were prefigured in Montaigne and Swift (for example, in Gulliver’s
Travels, in the Houyhnhnms’ debate on whether to exterminate the
entire population of crude, human-like Yahoos). European genocidal
tendencies, far from being the exclusive preserve of Nazi Germany,
arguably have been more general and are rooted in imperial ideology
and crude social Darwinism. These tendencies were realised not just
in the Holocaust but before then in colonialism and were captured
perfectly in a single phrase spoken in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by
Kurtz: ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ (Lindquist 1997). However, the
human imagination of violence has been a rich one for centuries
and for centuries it has been realised horrifically. There is little real
evidence of a peculiarly modern social death wish. Arguably, what
we see in genocide, in the nuclear arms race, in ethnic cleansing and
so on is less a logic of exterminism and more some of the particularly
morbid forms in which dynamic capitalism in advanced countries
and insecure capitalism in developing countries manifests its
linkages with competitive collective identities and a historically
entrenched human violence.
A related discussion is that among sociologists concerning
whether ‘war and violence are parts of modernity and not only of
its genesis’ (Joas, quoted in Roxborough 1999, p. 494). Roxborough’s
answer is that war could well persist as part of modernity for three
reasons: conflicting values (since peaceable consumerism and com-
mercialism might not be the sum total of value sets possible within
modernity); aggregation problems (the ways in which individually
rational decisions and preferences become aggregated through insti-
tutions might then favour a clash between particular interest groups
outweighing majority wants, or, simply, there may be miscalcula-
tion leading to blundering into war); and limitations on rationality
(cognitive frameworks or ideologies may lead people to misunder-
stand their predicament and go to war as a result). Shaw goes further:
rather than stating that war remains an ongoing possibility given
the shortcomings of modern rationalism he argues that the
genocidal tendency in recent wars (e.g. in Rwanda and the former
Yugoslavia) shows precisely that ‘in modernity, war is the problem’
(emphasis in original).4 The focus of these contributions seems to
me misplaced. In Shaw all historical ambiguity is lost under the
weight of the contemporary ‘mode of warfare’ and the logic of exter-
minism. Capitalism is entirely subsidiary, simply a contingent and
enabling factor. Meanwhile, Roxborough sustains a sense of
158 Anti-Capitalism
ambiguity in modernity but excludes the material and the dynamics

and tensions of capitalism as central to that historical ambiguity vis-
à-vis war. Neither approach adequately captures the relational
content of social, economic and political conflict that is implied
more effectively in Marxist traditions of political economy.
In short, if we combine the interest in the origins of capitalism
and the underlying relations sustaining it with a recognition of the
ongoing propensity to contradiction, crisis and competition, with
an awareness of the historical independence of violent conflict from
specific material epochs, and an awareness of how those specifics
nonetheless shape and carry the baton of war, then we have a
powerful basis for understanding contemporary conflicts.
WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES OF NOT TAKING A MARXIST

PERSPECTIVE ON WAR AND VIOLENT CONFLICT?
The flip side of the ‘logic of exterminism’ school of thought is liberal
optimism. Most contemporary analyses of war fall in the liberal
camp. Contrary to Marx’s ‘tragic view of history’, the liberal inter-
pretation of war and peace is based on the assumption that all good
things go together. Economic progress and political progress are
mutually supportive and enjoy an entirely uncomplicated relation-
ship. ‘The liberal dream which stemmed from the Enlightenment
project was that the modernisation of society would lead to the dis-
appearance of war’, as Roxborough puts it (1999, p. 491). Naturally,
therefore, the persistence of war must mean that there has simply
not been enough modernisation.
Again reflecting a lack of capacity for ambiguity or complexity, the
‘liberal interpretation of war’ inherited from the nineteenth century
considers war to be always and exclusively negative in its conse-
quences. Although there were important empirical challenges to this
stance early in the twentieth century, the frame of mind survived
and reappeared in various forms, including exercises working out the
total economic costs of war in developing countries. If there is a
liberal interpretation of war, there is also a liberal interpretation of
peace and the transition to peace. According to this position,
Western democracy is self-evidently a ‘good thing’, as are NGOs,
adjustment to a more market-based economy, and so on; and the
relationships among these factors is also unproblematic. Hence the
model for peace is to nurture governments that commit to structural
adjustment policies and strongly to encourage a swift introduction
of procedural democracy in the form of ‘free and fair’ elections.5
So, war is a terrible thing that arises from lack of modernity and
makes things worse, always. This often translates into the causal
connection presumed by many between poverty and war. Poverty
causes war and war causes poverty. Another dimension of the liberal
perspective on violent conflict is the mentality of collapse. For most
such analyses argue or presume that wars in developing countries
are a function of collapse and reversal – of the state, of modernisa-
tion, of development. Wars, particularly the post–Cold War conflicts,
are commonly seen from this view as apolitical, untouched by
ideology but rather driven by base greed and/or a social retreat into
conflicts of ethnic animosity inherited through some process of
(assumed) social Darwinism. There is little scope from this perspec-
tive for inquiring whether conflicts might be part of a tumultuous
and long process of state formation and the establishment of
capitalism, not just a threat to that process; little scope for seeing
that although all war is sickening some wars might nonetheless have
progressive consequences.
A particular and more formal variation of the liberal perspective
on war is built on the axioms and institutional influence of neo-
classical economics. According to this approach, civil war is the
outcome of rational choices of individuals seeking to maximise their
utility and faced with a trade-off between co-operation and conflict.
Conflict will be chosen under certain circumstances that determine
whether or not conflict is more profitable at the margin than co-
operation. The most common factor tipping the scales of choice
towards conflict is poverty. For, it is claimed, the poor have a ‘com-
parative advantage in violence’: this is because they have next to no
other opportunities, therefore the opportunity cost of engaging in
violence is close to nil. Models along these lines are, however, purely
abstract and speculative until there is some effort to make them
empirically operational. Some effort has been made to do this, for
example, by claiming that ‘greed’ rather than ‘grievance’ explains
the incidence of civil wars.
The trouble is that empirical applications of these models are
unsuccessful. The empirical tests do not perform very well. They are
constructed from data whose reliability and comparability is highly
questionable. And they are poorly designed: both because the samples
are sometimes biased and because the variables used as proxies
(because they can in principle be quantified) for more direct concepts
identified in the abstract models do not correspond neatly to their
theoretical counterparts. A high share of primary commodity exports
160 Anti-Capitalism
in total GDP, a preponderance of young males in the population

structure, and low average years of schooling are taken in one model
(Collier 2000) to signal the influence of ‘greed’ before being tested for
correlation with the incidence of civil war. Yet it is equally plausible
that strong informational content for these three variables may
indicate, instead, widespread social frustration and ‘grievance’. Alter-
natively, such a conjuncture (lots of young, uneducated and therefore
[sic] unemployed males surrounded by primary commodities) might
be the starting point to explore the complex interaction between, or
joint determination of, greed and grievance.
Varieties of liberal analysis are all unsatisfactory and restrictive.
They treat the material dimensions of war as fetishes: giving magical
causal powers to degrees of resource concentration or fixing the
determinants of conflict in optimal combinations of poverty,
demography and other variables. Efforts to incorporate the social
have no historical or relational content. Furthermore, any pretence
to capture human agency through the incantation of rational choice
is belied by a staggering determinism: the choice is always made,
written in the econometric stars. However elusive the understand-
ing of war might ultimately be, it has to address the material, it must
be historical and relational (what is conflict if not relational?) and it
has to allow for human actions and policy decisions. Surely, also, a
useful analysis of conflict must contain some focus on historical
change or transition. Only an analysis rooted in a Marxist tradition
can hope to meet these demands.
A BRIEF ILLUSTRATION: WAR IN ANGOLA

The briefest illustration of the war in Angola – a country at war more
or less constantly over the past 40 years – helps to tie together the
themes of this chapter. Despite first impressions, Angola does not
neatly fit the template analyses currently on offer. Resources play a
role in the war, but the conflict is not simply produced by oil and
diamond abundance, though it is indeed reproduced through this
abundance. The instrumental use of violence by greedy elites is a
characteristic of the war but can only be appreciated against a more
subtle history of power struggles and grievances. Various forms of
sub-national collective identity have helped shape the divisions in
the war; however, to claim to ‘explain’ this war by reading from a
score of ethnic fragmentation would be laughable. Angola’s is a ‘civil
war’ that has been fuelled by external interests throughout. And so
it is an international war (now as it was during the Cold War), but
it has never been a ‘proxy war’ pure and simple. Furthermore,

Angola’s current spate of warfare bears some of the features of what
are often called ‘new wars’; yet it cannot be understood as anything
other than a war with old and enduring roots.
It is only possible to begin to make sense of war in Angola through
a historical analysis of capital and of clashing class interests and
wrenching experiences of class formation, from the moment the
Portuguese arrived in the late sixteenth century to the present day.
Such an account would bind together: the consequences of initial
encounters with merchant capital fuelling the slave trade and with
industrial capital generating technical innovations in and exports of
guns from Europe; the organisation of the colonial economy,
including the ways in which differences in the spread of capitalism
overlapped with the beginnings of distinct zones of Angolan nation-
alism (shaped by domains of different mission groups and their
schools); the way that the ferocity of the Cold War scaled up rival
conflict among anti-colonial groups; the logic of oil and diamond
markets; and the way in which foreign companies currently seem to
be acting as vehicles of, and influences on, the foreign policies of
major powers.6 Obviously, wars like Angola’s owe a great deal to con-
tingency, to national interest, to local specificity; but equally
obviously they are driven by the compulsive logic of capital.
Social transformation and state formation in Angola have been
extraordinarily disruptive and drawn out and remain incomplete.
Given its own history, and against the background of European
history, this is hardly surprising. It might also be noted that ‘peace’
in Angola – where vast numbers of people have been forced away
from rural subsistence livelihoods by the privations of war – will not
bring an end to this process and its brutality. For all the well-meaning
policy advice that will be meted out during a peace process and its
aftermath, about ‘reconstruction’ and so on, it may be expected that
the accumulation of land and other assets, primitive accumulation
to be sure, will dominate the real politics of Angola and will – if other
‘post-conflict’ experiences (in Nicaragua, Mozambique, El Salvador)
are any guide – continue to be characterised by violence.
CONCLUSION
The analysis of war shows capitalism at its most ambiguous. It might
even be that there is this paradox: that capitalism is actually in some
ways more pacific than most other known forms of social organisa-
tion, but at the same time many of its qualities lend themselves
162 Anti-Capitalism
better than other modes of production to increasing the intensity of

conflict. This chapter has shown how war or social violence and the
transition to capitalism are commonly bound together. It has also
shown how in the contemporary world economy there is a distinc-
tive binding of this traumatic transitional ‘moment’ and the interests
of advanced capitalist nations, consumers and enterprises. This kind
of analysis should make one wary of the pretty prognostications of
liberal theory and policy advice. And it should alert one to the pos-
sibilities for horrendous conflicts to be associated with progressive
outcomes: if this is the case there is a need to look for where those
outcomes might emerge from in war and how to promote their man-
ifestation. The analysis has also shown that war is likely to remain a
feature of our world.

Collier, P. (2000) ‘Doing Well out of War: An Economic Perspective’, in M.
Berdal and D. Malone (eds) Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil
Wars. Boulder and London: IDRC/Lynne Rienner.
Gallie, W.B. (1978) Philosophers of Peace and War: Kant, Clansewitz, Marx,
Engels and Tolstoy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hirschman, A.O. (1977) The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for
Capitalism before its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kaldor, M. (1999) New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lindquist, S. (1997) ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’. London: Granta Publications.
McLellan, D. (1977) Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Pythian, M. (2000) The Politics of British Arms Sales Since 1964. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Roxborough, I. (1999) ‘The Persistence of War as a Sociological Problem’,
International Sociology 14(4), pp. 491–500.
Shaw, M. (2000) ‘The Contemporary Mode of Warfare? Mary Kaldor’s Theory
of New Wars’, Review of International Political Economy 7(1), pp. 171–80.
Smith, R. (1977) ‘Military Expenditure and Capitalism’, Cambridge Journal of
Economics 1(1), pp. 61–76.
Tilly, C. (1990) Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1992. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Wood, E.M. (1995) ‘Capitalism and Human Emancipation: Race, Gender and
Democracy’, in Democracy Against Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
NOTES
1. Engels captured the anxious peace of the arms race well: ‘Peace continues
only because the technique of armaments is constantly developing, con-
sequently no one is ever prepared; all parties tremble at the thought of
world war – which is in fact the only possibility – with its absolutely incal-
culable results’ (Gallie 1978, p. 92).
2. On the politics of the British arms trade, see Pythian (2000).
3. On the economic consequences of military expenditure see Smith (1977).
4. Shaw’s argument is developed around the concept of ‘new wars’, coined
by Kaldor (1999).
5. Even this involves turning a blind eye towards manipulation by interna-
tional managers or at the very least towards some of the shortcomings of
election conduct in Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mozambique, etc.
6. Through the Cold War period, US oil companies tempered American
hostility to the MPLA government with whom they did a roaring trade;
more recently, French government officials have been allegedly embroiled
in corruption scandals including Elf Aquitaine’s interests in Angola.
12 Understanding Capitalism
in the Third World
Elizabeth Dore
How Marxists understood capitalist development – or its absence –

in Latin America, Africa and Asia changed dramatically over the
course of the twentieth century. Broadly speaking, in the first half of
the century Marxists believed that the countries of Latin America,
Africa and Asia were underdeveloped because they were not capitalist.
In the second half of the twentieth century most socialist scholars
turned this interpretation on its head and argued that tricontinen-
tal countries were underdeveloped because they were capitalist. This
radical revision was part the result of changing socio-economic
conditions, and part the product of changing revolutionary strategies
in the Third World. This chapter examines ruptures as well as con-
tinuities in Marxist approaches to underdevelopment and shows that
how we understand capitalist development matters.
FEUDALISM AND THE OLD LEFT

Before the 1960s, the Old Left espoused the view that underdevel-
opment was the result of the absence of capitalism. From the 1920s
to the 1940s, the official position of the Comintern (also called the
Third International – the association of Communist Parties founded
by the Bolsheviks to promote worldwide socialist revolution) was
that all colonial and post-colonial countries were feudal. Feudal, in
this sense, meant societies ruled by landlord and merchant classes
whose power and wealth derived from exploiting the peasantry by
overtly violent, non-market means (see Chapters 1 and 9). In this
line of argument, feudal ruling classes in alliance with imperialists –
the capitalist classes in industrialised countries – blocked the kind
of economic competition that gives rise to technological advances
and modern market societies. Therefore, according to the Old Left,
because the colonies and post-colonies were not-yet-capitalist, or
pre-capitalist, they lacked the preconditions for socialism. Conse-
quently, the Comintern’s mandate for communists and their allies
in underdeveloped countries was to pursue a ‘two-stage’ revolution-
164
Understanding Capitalism in the Third World 165
ary strategy. To hasten their country’s transition to capitalism, they

should first promote anti-feudal and anti-imperialist struggles. Then,
after the capitalist transition, ‘the national bourgeois revolution’,
socialists should redirect their efforts to anti-capitalist revolution. In
this scenario, before their countries were capitalist, peasants, workers
and other subordinate classes would form tactical alliances with
those sectors of the local capitalist class – the national bourgeoisie –
that had conflicts with, ergo were oppressed by, the imperialists and
their feudal allies. In stage two, after the feudal classes were
overthrown and the imperialists weakened, revolutionary peasants
and workers would shed their erstwhile bourgeois allies and struggle
for socialism. While this summary of the Comintern’s ‘line’ on Third
World revolution is schematic, to my mind the policy prescriptions
tended to be schematic too. However, most major communist
leaders, including Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, advocated some
version of this explicitly linear scenario of two-stage revolution.
Adherence to the Comintern’s prescriptions led communist
parties and radical activists in Latin America, Africa and Asia into
some strange pacts. Especially at the time of the Second World War,
when pursuing both the two-stage revolutionary strategy and the
Comintern’s United Front Against Fascism, communists ended up
supporting an assortment of unsavoury dictators and repressive
regimes. For instance, communists in Nicaragua backed Anastasio
Somoza, and the Cuban Communist Party supported Fulgencio
Batista long after he turned from reformism to reaction.
THIRD WORLD CAPITALISM AND THE NEW LEFT

In the 1960s, radicals turned this scenario for Third World revolution
upside down. In Latin America, the revolution from below began
when Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara led an armed uprising against
the dictatorship of Batista, Washington’s lackey in Cuba. Before and
after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Castro and
Guevara cast aside reformist politics associated with Latin America’s
communist old guard: they advocated socialist revolution
throughout the Third World. Although the Cuban leaders’ political
analysis was rooted in the country’s special history of rapid capitalist
development, led by US-owned sugar companies, Castro and Guevara
applied this thinking to all countries of the Third World. To this end,
the Cuban government forged a new International, the ‘Tricontin-
tental Congress’ bringing together revolutionaries from the
post-colonial world. Notwithstanding Cuba’s reliance on Soviet
166 Anti-Capitalism
economic and political support, the Castro government played a

leading role in challenging the politics of the Old Left, which
remained the official ‘Moscow line’ for revolution in the Third World.
A combination of events set in motion political upheavals in the
1960s: anti-colonial struggles in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, the
civil rights movement in the United States, and Washington’s war in
Vietnam. In this era, the influence of the Cuban Revolution should
not be underestimated. Castro and Guevara inspired revolutionaries
around the world to found parties that regarded the Cuban
Revolution as their model. In 1968, student revolts sparked
rebellions in other sectors of society against the Vietnam War and
against white supremacy in the United States, against capitalism in
Western Europe, and against Soviet-style socialism in Central and
Eastern Europe. Large demonstrations in the United States, Paris,
London, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw
and Tokyo – some verging on uprisings – manifested widespread
rejection of the status quo and disaffection with the politics of the
Old Left.
These upheavals gave birth to a New Left. Following in the
footsteps of Castro and Guevara, the New Left repudiated Old Left
politics, especially its vision of the Third World. Radicals in
developed and developing countries virtually swept away the
doctrine that neocolonial countries were feudal and lacking the pre-
conditions for socialist revolution. They turned this thesis upside
down and argued that the countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia
had long been capitalist, and that capitalism – not its absence –
caused underdevelopment. In this revision of Third World history,
capitalism developed in distorted forms in post-colonial countries
and conditions there were particularly ripe for socialist revolution.
The shift in Third World revolutionary politics was a tsunami of
major proportions. In the broadly Marxist debate of the 1960s and
1970s about the causes of underdevelopment, three schools of
thought stand out. Dependency theory quickly became the
orthodoxy in the field (Frank 1969), followed by World Systems
theory (Wallerstein 1979), a variation on the dependency theme. In
this theoretical current, capitalism is – first and foremost – a system
of international exchange in which ‘metropolitan’ or imperialist
countries appropriate ‘surplus’ from colonial or /neocolonial
countries. The major conclusions of this theory are (a) that European
trade took capitalism to the far reaches of the colonial world, where
it took root as long ago as the sixteenth century; and (b) that
capitalism – understood as surplus appropriation among countries

through international trade – caused underdevelopment in colonial
countries and development in imperialist countries. Dependency
remained the prevailing wisdom in Third World Studies for several
decades. It left behind as one of its most enduring – and to my mind
troublesome – legacies the almost unquestioned view that colonial
and post-colonial countries have been capitalist for a very long time
– at least since contact with Europeans.
A different approach to understanding capitalism in the Third
World was grounded in more traditional Marxist methods. Unlike
dependency theorists with their almost exclusive focus on exchange
between countries, Marxist scholars viewed class relations – a rela-
tionship rooted in processes of production – to be the motor force of
capitalist transitions. To understand development and underdevel-
opment, Marxists analysed the social forces that promoted and
prevented transformations to free wage labour, particularly in agri-
culture (Brenner 1977). This approach focused on how large
landowning classes appropriated surplus products and surplus labour
from the people who directly worked the land. Overall, Marxists
sought to understand how and when peasants became proletarians,
and how these processes affected technical change and economic
growth (Weeks and Dore 1979).
The Marxist literature on development and underdevelopment
veered away from dependency theory in a number of crucial ways.
Marxists tended to hold a more contradictory view of the history of
capitalism – its uses and abuses – in the Third World. In the Marxist
framework, capitalism rests on exploitation in production: on the
propertied classes’ appropriation of the labour (or labour power) of
people who own no property and who, therefore, have to sell their
labour power to survive. Because capitalism engenders competition
among capitalists over profits, inter-capitalist rivalry tends both to
increase the exploitation of workers and to drive forward technical
change. In short, capitalism promotes growth and development – of
a particular sort. Consequently, competition among capitalists creates
conditions for – or the possibility of – improving workers’ standard
of living (see Chapter 4). Whether or not this occurs depends on
workers’ struggles against capitalists, not on some technical fix
inherent in capitalist production. In sum, whereas dependency
theorists see capitalism as an unmitigated evil, most Marxists see
capitalism as an evil that rests on class exploitation and political
subjection, but mitigated in so far as capitalism contains within it a
168 Anti-Capitalism
drive to raise labour productivity. In capitalist societies increasing

labour productivity tends to be harnessed to intensifying exploita-
tion; however, technical change, resulting in higher productivity,
potentially liberates humankind from some of the drudgery of work.
But emancipation from toil – even in this narrow materialist sense –
is more of a possibility in post-capitalist societies than within the
belly of the capitalist beast. From this perspective, Marxists regard
some aspects of capitalist development in the Third World as
exploitative and progressive: using ‘progressive’ not in the sense of
good, fair or just, but in the sense of creating conditions for
economic advancement that might promote human liberation,
instead of exploitation, in a socialist order.
A related difference between dependency theory and Marxist
theory is that in the former, Third World countries have been
capitalist for something of the order of five hundred years, while in
the latter capitalism has had a more recent history in the post-colonial
world. Marxist scholars frequently emphasised the heterogeneous
and zigzagged nature of capitalist transformations in Latin America,
Africa and Asia (Cooper et al. 1993). Nevertheless, in my view, swayed
by the current in Third World history, some Marxist writers tended
to overemphasise the capitalist nature of agrarian change and to
minimise the staying power of non-capitalist relations. Rather like
explorers on the lookout for the earliest sightings of free wage labour,
they might have been predisposed to making a discovery. As a con-
sequence, I think there was a tendency even within the Marxist
tradition to present a great variety of different kinds of social
upheaval as the capitalist transition, or, more commonly and
cautiously, as major turning points on the capitalist road.
The last body of broadly defined Marxist writings on the rise of
capitalism in the Third World was a kind of ‘third way’. A school of
thought known as ‘articulation of modes of production’ sought to
meld together elements from dependency theory and traditional
Marxism (Foster-Carter 1978). Writers of this persuasion emphasised
the ways that capitalism coexisted with non-capitalist social forms.
Overall, they argued that non-capitalist class relations persisted only
(or mainly) because capitalists appropriated surplus labour and/or
products from peasants. Ergo, non-capitalist class relations survived
into modern times only when and if they played a functional role in
capitalist development.
The broadly defined Marxist debate of the late twentieth century
about the causes of development and underdevelopment was
exciting. To understand Third World capitalism and anti-capitalism

in our time we would do well to read – or reread – the literature at
the heart of those international controversies. In these debates,
scholar/activists tried to understand the world in order to change
it. With the benefit of hindsight, but at the risk of flattening out a
rich and fertile field, I propose that notwithstanding key differences
in the three schools of thought, taken together they tended to
portray the Third World as capitalist, or as far advanced on the
capitalist road, a road with few detours or byways. Once the political
tide had turned from the Old Left to the New, the view that colonial
and neocolonial countries were not capitalist (that they were
‘feudal’), or that they retained significant non-capitalist elements,
fell into disrepute.
THEORY AND PRACTICE: THE SANDINISTAS’ HISTORY

Leaders of anti-imperialist movements in Latin America, the
Caribbean, Africa and Asia were at the forefront of the new-wave
history of the Third World. In each epoch the call for change adapts
itself to the radical rhetoric of the time. It is not surprising that in the
1950s and 1960s, anti-colonial leaders used the language of anti-
capitalism and professed a commitment to socialism. Independence
struggles were pitted against the world’s capitalist powers; for this
reason, the language of socialism seemed to lend itself more readily
to the discourse of anti-colonialism than the language of feudalism
and capitalism. Yet, with few exceptions, after independence new
governments in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean fostered capitalist
development.
Following the Cuban Revolution, Latin American radicals also
adopted the language of socialism – even in countries seemingly ill
suited to anti-capitalist or post-capitalist movements. With
communism the enemy of the US government, it is unsurprising
that throughout Latin America anti-imperialism was framed in the
ideology of the enemy’s enemy: Marxism. The Frente Sandinista de
Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in Nicaragua grasped the transformative
power of the new Third World history. Many leaders of the FSLN
wrote history; they reinterpreted the past with the explicit objective
of inspiring their compatriots to revolutionary action. From its
formation in 1961, the FSLN disseminated its vision of Nicaraguan
history through pamphlets, songs and speeches. After a popular
armed insurrection defeated the Somoza dictatorship and brought
the FSLN to power in 1979, the Frente Sandinista created a historical
170 Anti-Capitalism
institute whose mission was to remake ‘official history’ in the image

of the Sandinista vision of the past.
The FSLN’s re-vision of the past portrayed Nicaragua as a country
of rebellious rural proletarians that was ripe for socialism. The
Frente’s founder, Carlos Fonseca, initiated the new history, retelling
the national story as a sequence of popular uprisings against US
imperialism. Fonseca’s history recovered Augusto Sandino, the leader
of a guerrilla peasant army that fought the US occupation of
Nicaragua from 1927 to 1933. Where Somocista history had
banished Sandino the ‘rural bandit’, Sandinista history resurrected
Sandino the ‘saviour of the nation’. In Fonseca’s interpretation of
the past, Nicaragua was a nation of revolutionary worker peasants
who repeatedly, and against all odds, resisted US intervention. In
this version of the past, Sandino was both father of the nation and
the embodiment of the Nicaraguan national character. Nicaraguans
could fulfil their national destiny by following in the footsteps of
Sandino and of his direct successors, the Frente Sandinista de
Liberación Nacional.
Jaime Wheelock, leader of the Proletarian Wing of the Frente
Sandinista, developed the Sandinista school of history into the
leading current in Central American revolutionary thought.
Wheelock, an accomplished historian, said he wrote his most
important book, Imperialismo y dictadura: Crisis de un formación social,
to persuade party militants that their struggle was not simply anti-
dictatorial and anti-imperialist, but anti-capitalist (1979, p. 12). In
Wheelock’s interpretation of the past, Nicaragua possessed all of the
preconditions for socialist transformation. Its capitalist transition
occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, and by 1960 national
capitalism had developed to a mature stage. Wheelock argued that
Nicaragua was a country of rural proletarians who, because of their
class position and political consciousness, would join an anti-
capitalist revolution.
Subsequently, a number of historians argued against the
Sandinista view of the past, saying it reflected their political ideology
and presented an inaccurate interpretation of history. In the counter-
interpretation, Nicaragua was a pre-modern society of landlords and
peasants as recently as the 1940s and 1950s. And, although
capitalism developed rapidly in the 1960s, class consciousness
changed slowly and the world-view of rural people tended to be
more backward looking than forward looking. Rural workers
violently evicted from land in the previous decades retained a deep
longing for landholding. Consequently, rather than developing a

working class or socialist consciousness, poor Nicaraguans aspired
to return to what they viewed – somewhat romantically – as their
traditional peasant way of life. In the counter-history, Nicaragua had
a small, highly unorganised working class, a weak and fragmented
communist movement, and scant tradition of socialist thought in
the twentieth century. In short Nicaragua was not, as Wheelock
argued, ripe for socialist revolution (Dore, forthcoming).
Whatever the merits and demerits of Sandinista history, unlike
their rivals from right to left across the political spectrum, only the
FSLN was successful in leading a powerful movement against the dic-
tatorship. The Sandinistas’ success rested on their ability to galvanise
the imagination of the masses of Nicaraguans. This they achieved, in
part, by rewriting history. Paradoxically, the anti-capitalist discourse
that played a role in inspiring Nicaraguans to take up arms against
the dictatorship, when put into practice in the countryside provoked
large numbers of peasants to take up arms again: this time against
the Sandinistas and their revolution.
Not surprisingly, after Wheelock became the Sandinista Minister
of Agriculture, his vision of history strongly influenced state policy
in the agrarian sector. Despite peasant demands for land, the FSLN
refused to distribute land to the tiller. Wheelock declared that
because for several generations the majority of the agrarian poor
were rural proletarians, and because capitalist class relations had pre-
dominated in the countryside for over a century, distributing land to
the peasantry would be a retrogressive step.
The Sandinista Agrarian Reform created large state farms and the
government promised to deliver on the classic demands of rural
workers: improved wages and working conditions. In line with
socialist ideals, the Ministry of Agriculture set about encouraging
workers’ participation – if not control – over what the FSLN hoped
would become huge, high-tech farming complexes. In the event,
large numbers of rural Nicaraguans opposed the Sandinistas’ state-
centred agrarian policy and continued to press for land distribution
to peasant households. When the Sandinista government ignored
peasant demands, many rural people joined the Contras, the armed
opposition founded and funded by the US government to overthrow
the Sandinistas (Dore and Weeks 1992).
By the middle 1980s it became evident that the Sandinistas’ vision
of Nicaraguan society and history clashed with the world-view of
most people in the countryside. In 1986 the Sandinistas tacitly
172 Anti-Capitalism
acknowledged that they had made a great mistake; they reversed the
state-centred agrarian reform and began to distribute land to peasant
households. But by then the revolutionary fervour of the insurrec-
tion and Somoza’s defeat was spent, and the difficulties of survival in
the face of US opposition gave the Sandinistas little scope for
assuaging peasant unrest. In the end, the Sandinistas lost the
elections of 1990. Defeat came as a shock; although with the benefit
of hindsight it seems clear that the FSLN’s demise should have been
a death foretold. Their vision of Nicaragua’s past was more myth than
history. While myth served the Sandinistas well in armed opposition,
in power the FSLN’s use of the past to guide policy-making antago-
nised the majority of rural Nicaraguans. More importantly, in the
elections of 1990, like the elections of 2001, the US government
poured in money and advisers to defeat the Sandinistas.
THEORY AND HISTORY MATTER

Debates about the extent and timing of capitalist development are
not ‘just academic’. The link between Sandinista history and policy
is but one example of how understanding the past – trying to ‘get
history right’ – helps us to comprehend the politics of the real world.
Although it is impossible to ‘get history right’, as Marxists we believe
that there is a past that happened, and understanding the complex-
ities of past societies helps us to interpret the present and to think
about the future. In the case of post-colonial countries, their recent
histories of capitalist development often are reflected in contempo-
rary class relations and class consciousness, which in turn have a
bearing on strategies for radical social change.
The Marxist approach to history stands postmodern history
writing on its head. Postmodern historians argue that subjectivity
and relativity so condition all events – both how they took place and
how they are understood – that there is no such thing as ‘a past that
happened’. History is only interpretation: ergo any one interpreta-
tion of the past is as good (or bad) as any other (Munslow 1997, pp.
1–35). Marxists, on the contrary, see writing history as a process that
involves a productive tension between trying to understand a past
that happened, and interpreting the past in order to grasp important
dynamics of historical change. For as Marx famously said, revolu-
tionaries try to understand the world in order to change it.
Marxists do not believe that historical conditions determine the
possibilities and impossibilities for revolutionary change. If we have
learned anything from the history of the twentieth century, it is that
the relationship between history and social change is more indeter-

minate than determinate. Most Marxists, however, subscribe to the
idea that particular historical/material contexts, including but
certainly not restricted to class and property relations, condition the
possibilities and impossibilities for social change. The Sandinistas
knew this; one of their great strengths was that they believed that
history mattered, that the past would validate their revolutionary
strategy. Like many radical thinkers of the late twentieth century,
the Sandinistas argued that their country had been fully capitalist
for a long time. With this framework, the Sandinistas, like other rev-
olutionary leaders in post-colonial countries, may have exaggerated
the role of the proletariat in Third World countries in leading
struggles for socialist change.
Thinking about the great shifts in understanding the history of
capitalism raises questions about the politics of the Old and New
Left. Whereas the Old Left vision of Third World countries as
uniformly ‘feudal’ was problematic in that it obscured social changes
tending in the direction of capitalism, New Left interpretations of
post-colonial countries as fully capitalist seem equally problematic;
they camouflaged the activities of non-capitalist classes, and tended
to underestimate the weight of non-capitalist relations, which in
certain times and places remained considerable in countries of the
Third World.
From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, when
capitalism is aggressively turning the entire world into its own
image, studying times and places where capitalism had not trans-
formed, or fully transformed, landscape and society can provide
important lessons. Historical perspectives might allow us to distin-
guish what is old and what is new about globalisation – capitalism
in its current stage. Revitalising controversies about capitalism’s rise
– and fall – in Africa, Asia and Latin America could make an
important contribution to the contemporary anti-capitalist debates.
With politicians, pundits and academics across the globe pro-
claiming that capitalism is triumphant – that we are at ‘The End of
History’ and ‘There Is No Alternative’ to capitalism (TINA), it is not
surprising that many people now find it difficult to imagine that
capitalism can come to an end. In our era, with critics of capitalism
frequently silenced in universities, the very institutions supposedly
devoted to protecting freedom of thought, we are taught to forget –
not to remember – that capitalism is but one historically unique way
of organising society. The apparently common-sense belief that
174 Anti-Capitalism
capitalism prevailed everywhere on earth in modern times has con-

tributed to ‘naturalising’ capitalism: to legitimating the notion that
capitalism is the natural way for human society to be organised. In
these times, it is difficult to imagine that capitalism can be
overthrown. By studying the history of capitalism, especially in
countries of the Third World, we can remember that capitalism had
a beginning, and if capitalism had a beginning it will probably also
have an ending. Another world is possible.

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Pre-Industrial Europe’, Past and Present, February, pp. 30–75.
Brenner, R. (1977) ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-
Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, July–August, pp. 25–92.
Cooper, F., Isaacman, A., Mallon, F., Roseberry, W. and Stern, S. (1993) Con-
fronting Historical Paradigms: Peasant, Labour and the Capitalist World System
in Africa and Latin America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Dore, E. (forthcoming) ‘Debt Peonage in Granada, Nicaragua, 1870–1930: A
Non-Capitalist Transition’, Hispanic American Historical Review.
Dore, E. and Weeks, J. (1992) The Red and the Black: The Sandinistas and the
Nicaraguan Revolution. London: Institute of Latin American Studies
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Expansion’, Science and Society, Winter, pp. 414–36.
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13 Developing Country Debt

and Globalisation
John Weeks
This chapter considers the relationship between developing country

external debt and the integration of world markets in the 1980s and
1990s (‘globalisation’). Governments, companies, other institutions,
and individuals contract debt, and it is a major confusion to refer to
the debt of ‘countries’. Perhaps the defining characteristic of an
external debt is that the contracting party is not, in general, the
party upon whom the burden for repayment falls. In general, gov-
ernments and the wealthy in developing countries contract the debt,
while it is the mass of the non-wealthy population that bears the
burden of its repayment. This is especially the case during periods of
financial crisis.
DOMESTIC AND EXTERNAL DEBT

External debt has a long history, but was incidental to the world
economy prior to the capitalist epoch. One of the first major external
borrowings involving developing countries was by Latin American
governments in the mid-nineteenth century. For the most part, the
purpose of these loans was to finance infrastructure development,
such as railroads and ports, in order to facilitate trade with the
emerging capitalist powers. Among others, the Peruvian government
defaulted on outstanding loans. The defaults did not result in a
suspension of lending, for again in the early twentieth century Latin
American governments sought loans, which private banks in the
capitalist countries were eager to extend. During the Great
Depression of the 1930s and during the Second World War there
were further defaults, most notably by Mexico. These defaults did
not result in suspension of lending for two major reasons. First,
developed country banks served as intermediaries for loans of the
1920s, rather than as direct lenders. That is, they sold the Latin
American debt on the bond market, thus incurring no risk of default
themselves. Second, after the Second World War moderate to rapid
175
176 Anti-Capitalism
growth in several Latin American countries ensured the creditwor-

thiness of the borrowing governments.
This chapter deals with developing country debt after the Second
World War, and one can distinguish three periods. From 1945 until
the oil crisis of 1973–74, lending to developing countries was almost
exclusively to governments, from the international financial insti-
tutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
During the rest of the 1970s, the governments of underdeveloped
countries in which capitalism was more highly developed, and those
with considerable mineral wealth, borrowed directly from the
commercial banks of the advanced capitalist countries, which gave
rise to the so-called debt crisis of the early 1980s. The remainder of
the 1980s was characterised by the intense efforts of the commercial
banks, aided by the governments of their home countries and the
international financial institutions, to recover as much of the out-
standing debt as possible. During the 1980s a new phenomenon
emerged, which reached major proportions in the 1990s, namely
private companies and banks in developing countries borrowing
directly from commercial banks in the advanced capitalist countries.
This chapter focuses on this third period, which was the result of
deregulation of currency markets in developing countries.
To understand why there were these three periods requires con-
sideration of the dynamics of capital and the nature of
underdevelopment. Capital is a social relation in which money is
advanced with the purpose of generating more money. That is,
capital is not money, commodities or means of production, but takes
the form of all of these in its cycle of reproduction (see Chapter 1).
Capitalist trade among countries involves either the purchase of
raw materials and intermediate products from underdeveloped
countries (conversion of money capital into commodity capital), the
purchase of final products from those countries for resale in the
capitalist countries at a profit derived from control of supply (market
power), or the sale in underdeveloped countries of commodities
produced in advanced capitalist countries (conversion of commodity
capital into money capital). The sale of commodities can also lead to
the export of commodity capital. When companies based in
advanced capitalist countries establish production facilities in under-
developed countries, productive capital is exported. If financial
capitalists make loans to governments or companies in underdevel-
oped countries, this involves the export of money capital. In effect,
this introduces an additional step into the circuit.
Developing Country Debt and Globalisation 177
Therefore, loans to governments, companies, and individuals in

other countries involve the export of money capital. This export of
money capital differs from loans within a country in important
ways. Most generally, it involves two currencies, the currency of the
lender and the currency of the borrower. The revenue of the
borrower, which will be used to repay the loan, will come partly or
wholly in the currency of the country in which the borrower is
located. In the case of a government borrower, the revenue will
derive from taxes, and for a private borrower from domestic and
foreign sales. In order to repay, the domestic currency must be
converted to the currency of the lender.
The ‘external’ character of the debt (involving at least two
currencies) means that while a domestic borrower faces the problem
of generating enough revenue to repay the debt, the external
borrower must do this, and must also be able to convert his/her
national currency into the currency of the borrower. The differences
between domestic and external debt are summarised in Table 13.1.
These differences arise from the apparently simple issue of
conversion of the borrower’s currency into the lender’s. Following
Marx’s analysis, one sees that the problems of repayment of external
debt represent an extreme example of the problems arising from
money’s use as means of carrying out exchange (means of exchange)
and as means of cancellation of a debt (means of payment).
A debt is contracted at a given amount by a promise to pay at some
future date. When the principal of the debt falls due; the value of
the contracted amount may have changed. This can occur within an
economy due to falling or rising prices, but the intervention of a
currency exchange dramatically increases the probability that the
value of the debt at the point of repayment will be different from
the value when it was contracted. Formally, the difference often
results from change in the exchange rate, which can be provoked by
a range of causes: changes in export and import prices, capital flight
from the debtor country, or the infamous ‘loss of market confidence’.
The difficulties in repayment are increased if governments
guarantee the external debt of the private sector. Prior to the 1980s,
governments of developing countries typically restricted the con-
vertibility of their currencies; for example, they required all foreign
exchange earned by the private sector to be deposited into the
central bank, and conversion to foreign currencies required
government approval. In such circumstances, private sector external
debt was small or non-existent, as governments gave explicit
Table 13.1 Differences between Domestic and External Debt
Type of Loan Possible problems Consequence
Loans within a country Borrower fails to generate Bankruptcy, repossession

sufficient revenue to of assets by lender, loss of
Saad-Filho 02 chap 7
service the loan due to: borrower’s ‘creditworthiness’

– borrower-specific problems
– contraction of the market for the product
– general contraction of the economy
Loans between countries All the above, plus: In addition to non-payment

– devaluation of the of government debt, if the
borrower’s currency government guarantees the
3/9/02 4:08 pm
– inability to convert local private sector’s debt:
178
currency into lender’s currency General financial crisis,
contraction of the
economy, possible fall of the government
Page 178
guarantees to the lender to pay the debt should the private sector
fail to do so. Once governments deregulated currency trading,
guarantees of private sector external debt were no longer necessary,
since companies and banks had free access to foreign exchange. In
principle, free convertibility eliminates the difference between
domestic and external debt, and the consequence of any non-
payment by the private sector should be bankruptcy according to
the rules of markets.
However, in practice, private sector failure to service external debt,
even with free convertibility, led to ex post facto government
guarantee of that debt. Perhaps the most infamous case of this
occurred in Chile in the 1980s. Following sound market logic, the
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet announced in 1982 that his
government would not assume responsibility for foreign debts
contracted by the private sector. However, within days pressure from
banks in the United States, conveyed via the US government, forced
the dictator to reverse his stand, provoking the particular form of
Chile’s debt crisis, namely an inability of the government to service
the debt without a dramatic contraction of the Chilean economy.
This contraction was required in order to generate trade surpluses
for debt service.
In summary, governments acquire external debt for the purpose
of public sector investment or to cover deficits in the balance of
payments (usually trade deficits). Prior to the 1970s, governments
contracted these debts with the international financial institutions.
In the 1970s, external debt remained largely that of governments,
contracted with private commercial banks. With the deregulation of
currency markets in the 1980s and 1990s, the door opened for
private sector external debt and associated financial crises.
PATTERN OF DEVELOPING COUNTRY DEBT

In the 1990s progressives vigorously took up the call to cancel
developing country debt. Almost without exception, the call was for
the cancellation of ‘official’ debt; that is, debt owed to the govern-
ments of advanced capitalist countries and the international
financial institutions. Those holding this position frequently based
their advocacy on the following arguments: (a) that underdeveloped
countries, especially the poorest, suffered from high indebtedness;
and (b) that cancellation of debt would have a substantial impact on
the growth potential of the indebted countries. While an argument
can be made for the cancellation of the official debts of the poorest
180 Anti-Capitalism
countries, both of these arguments were wrong. Most heavily

indebted countries in terms of absolute debt were the middle-income
countries, in Latin America and Asia, not the poorest countries. And
for the poorest countries, debt cancellation would have a minor
impact on growth. From the perspective of the capitalist world
market, the importance of external debt lay in its close relationship
to financial crisis, rather than to the debt burden itself.
2500
private debt
2000
all ext debt
US$ billions
1500
1000
500
0
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
Figure 13.1 External Debt of Developing Countries, 1970–99 (constant
US$ of 1995, billions)
Figure 13.1 shows the total debt and private sector debt of
developing countries, and Figure 13.2 disaggregates the total debt by
region. In both charts debt was divided by the US GDP deflator to
adjust for inflation. These two charts demonstrate the points made
above. Since 1970, total debt of underdeveloped countries has grown
at a relatively constant rate, except for the 1980s, when it was
virtually constant. In contrast, private sector debt was quite small
until the end of the 1980s, after which it grew at an extraordinary
rate of over 20 per cent per year (see Table 13.2). The only decade of
rapid growth of public debt was the 1970s, when governments
borrowed to cover balance-of-payments deficits that resulted form
the petroleum price increase of 1973–74 and 1979. During the 1990s,
when private sector debt boomed, growth of public debt was well
below the rate of increase of both national income and exports; i.e.
in most countries the relative burden of public debt declined. Figure
13.2 shows that for three regions, the Middle East and North Africa
(ME&NA), South Asia (SoAsia), and Africa south of the Sahara (SSA),
the increase of total debt was quite slow after 1980. For Latin
America, debt increased in the 1980s as a result of borrowing to cover
balance-of-payments deficits, then, after holding constant for a
decade, grew rapidly in the 1990s. For East Asia and the Pacific
(which includes the South East Asian countries), there was a long
increase to the end of the 1980s, after which growth was more rapid
than before. China, with 20 per cent of the world’s population,
shows a similar pattern, beginning from near zero in the early 1980s
and rising to over US$100 billion in 1995 prices.
900 LA&C
800 ME&NA
SoAsia
700
E Asia&Pac
600 SSA
US$ billions
China
500
400
300
200
100
0
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
Figure 13.2 Total External Debt by Developing Region and China,

1970–99 (constant US$ of 1995, billions)
Table 13.2 Annual Rates of Growth of Public and Private Sector Debt of
Developing Countries
Public Private
1970–80 16.1 7.1

1980–89 5.7 –7.1
1989–99 2.1 21.6
All years 7.3 5.2
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2000, CD Rom. These

numbers exclude the so-called transitional economies of Central and Eastern
Europe and Russia.
182 Anti-Capitalism
250
200 LA&C
ME&NA
SoAsia
150 E Asia&Pac
US$ billions
SSA
China
100
50
0
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
Figure 13.3 Developing Country Debt of the Private Sector, 1970–99
(constant US$ of 1995, billions)
The reason for the different growth trends is revealed in Figure

13.3, which shows private sector debt by region. For the three
regions with slow growth of total debt, private sector debt is tiny.
But for Latin America and East Asia, private sector debt exploded
in the 1990s. This phenomenal increase, 24 per cent per year for
Latin America and 21 per cent for East Asia, was the direct result of
the deregulation of currency markets, which allowed private
companies to borrow directly from international commercial banks.
Companies were motivated to do this because borrowing costs in
the advanced capitalist countries were generally lower than in the
local capital markets.
Thus, with regard to external debt, one can identify three broad
categories of countries. First, there are the low-income countries in
which the development of capitalist production is incipient at best.
These countries, most of them lying south of the Sahara, along with
a few in Asia and the poorest of the Latin American countries, carry
an official debt burden. With a few exceptions, this debt burden is
relatively low. That many of these countries cannot service their
debts reflects a general problem of national development, of which
debt is a symptom rather than a cause. For another, smaller group of
countries, debt burdens are low because the governments in question
have not liberalised currency and capital markets, or only partially.
In this group are most of the countries of the Middle East, China,
and India. Third, there are the liberalised middle-income countries
of Latin America, East Asia and South East Asia. These countries,
along with several of the countries in transition from central
planning (not covered in this chapter), have, as a result of their gov-
ernments’ policies, accumulated large private sector debts.
A major difference between the Latin American countries and
those of East and South East Asia is that because the latter grew so
much more rapidly during 1980–97, their debt service burden
declined, while that of Latin America grew in the 1990s (see Figure
13.4). However, if prior to deregulation of markets a falling debt
service burden implied less vulnerability to a debt-provoked crisis,
that was no longer the case in the ‘globalised’ 1990s. Despite a falling
debt burden for most of the East and South East Asian countries, the
financial crisis of 1997 struck the region with virulence. This was
essentially a crisis of deregulation; since national policies of deregu-
lation are the basis of ‘globalisation’, this crisis could correctly be
called a crisis provoked by ‘globalisation’.
LA&C
50 ME&NA
45 SoAsia
40 E Asia&Pac
35 SSA
30 China
per cent
25
20
15
10
5
0
1970
1972
1974
1976
1978
1980
1982
1984
1986
1988
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
Figure 13.4 Developing Country Debt Service as a Percentage Share of

Exports, 1970–99
Based on our analytical discussion and review of the pattern of

developing country debt, we can provide a schematic summary of
the relationship between external debt and financial crisis. Deregu-
lation of markets creates the possibility of a financial crisis. In the
absence of deregulation, countries would not be crisis-free, but their
crises would be of a different nature. The deregulation of markets
184 Anti-Capitalism
results in the accumulation of private sector external debt, so that

the form of the crisis will be excessive debt accumulation. The
proximate cause of the crisis, or ‘trigger’, might be a range of
otherwise mundane events, such as a decline in the country’s terms
of trade, transitory political instability, or the perception by inter-
national currency dealers that the country would be vulnerable to a
speculative attack. Once the crisis hits, the neoliberal policy
orthodoxy will ensure that it passes form the financial sector to the
entire economy, through imposition of high interest rates and
reductions in public sector expenditure. If the government has the
political independence to reject the neoliberal orthodoxy and re-
regulate, the crisis may be painful, but not disastrous, as in Malaysia
between 1997 and 1999. If the government zealously embraces the
neoliberal policy package of austerity, the result will be disastrous
(Indonesia after 1997) or even catastrophic (Argentina in 2001–02).
THE BURDEN OF REPAYMENT

In the ‘globalised’ 1990s financial crises leading to general economic
crises resulted from debt accumulation of the private sector, such
that banks and companies faced bankruptcy on a massive scale.
However, these are rarely, if ever, the victims that must bear the
burden of the disaster. That role is invariably reserved for the urban
and rural working class, the poor peasants, and, to a lesser degree
the middle class.
Indonesia between 1997 and 2001 provided an extreme, though
representative, example of the relative and absolute impact of
economic crisis. The speculative run on the rupiah in mid-1997
resulted in a massive and uncontrolled devaluation. Because
Indonesian banks and companies had accumulated large external
debts, every decline of the rupiah increased the domestic currency
cost of debt service. By the time the rupiah had risen from 2,500 to
over 10,000 to the dollar, the entire medium- and large-scale man-
ufacturing sector, and the entire banking system, was bankrupt. The
government’s agreement to a series of IMF programmes aggravated
bankruptcy. A major element in this process was the use of the
domestic interest rate to attract capital from abroad and stabilise the
currency. The practical effect of raising interest rates (to over 70 per
cent) was to add a rising domestic debt cost to the external debt
burden of the private sector.
With the private sector on the verge of total collapse, the
government nationalised the entire banking sector and close to half
of large-scale manufacturing. Far from using these nationalisations

as a vehicle to maintain employment levels and reassert control over
the financial system, the government set about a massive bailout.
The collapse of the financial system implied that banks would not
honour deposits, the vast majority of which were held by wealthy
Indonesians. Further, loans to the manufacturing sector represented
a substantial portion of the non-deposit assets of the banks. The
collapse of large-scale manufacturing rendered these assets worthless.
Under a so-called recapitalisation programme, the government
issued public sector bonds to the nationalised banks with the
purpose of entirely replacing the value of deposits and non-
performing loans. The government estimated in 1999 that the bond
issue would reach US$75 billion, making it, in proportion to
Indonesia’s national income, the largest financial bailout ever
recorded. The annual interest on these bonds would by 2001
consume almost 40 per cent of the government budget and be over
ten times the expenditure on health and education. To this flagrant
transfer of resources to the rich was added the privatisation of the
banks and manufacturing firms at ‘fire sale’ prices, in some case to
the pre-crisis owners. Once the banks were privatised, the interest
on the bonds would accrue to their private owners. Thus, through
the tax and expenditure system, there would be built into the
Indonesian economy a long-run transfer of income from the poor,
the working class and the middle classes to the rich. The Indonesian
crisis carried a profound message: it is the institutions and dynamics
of capitalist society that generate crises, and the masses of the
population that bear its cost.
DEBT AND CAPITALIST INSTABILITY

Debt in and of itself is not a problem for governments. Just as private
corporations borrow to finance investments, so a government may
borrow to foster modernisation and development. It becomes a
problem in the context of the circuit of capital and the institutional
arrangements that regulate capital. The international debt crisis of
the 1980s resulted from the accumulation of public debt,
compounded by the shifting of the burden of private sector debt
repayment to governments.
In the 1990s the deregulation of money capital flows by govern-
ments throughout the world resulted in a rapid accumulation of debt
held by private companies and banks in underdeveloped countries.
This debt accumulation created the possibility of crises considerably
186 Anti-Capitalism
more severe than those of the 1980s, realised in South East and East
Asia in 1997–98, and Argentina in 2001–02. The greater severity
resulted from the adoption by governments of unrestricted con-
vertibility of domestic currencies into foreign currencies. In an
important sense, the growing private sector debt was but the tip of
the iceberg of potential instability. If currencies can be converted
without restriction, then the entire money supply of a country
becomes ‘external debt’, in that it can be converted at will and sent
abroad as capital flight.
Unrestricted convertibility creates an international financial
market continuously on the verge of a speculative dementia, holding
out the promise to capital of unlimited profit without engaging in
the time-consuming process of production. Marx wrote of the
capitalist the pipe dream of profits without the annoyance of mar-
shalling, supervising and disciplining workers, and without the need
to satisfy the demands of consumers. The realisation of that dream
is the systemic instability of capitalism.
FURTHER READING
Bitterman, H. J. (1973) The Refunding of International Debt. Durham: Duke
University Press.
De Pinies, J. (1989) ‘Debt Sustainability and Overadjustment’, World Devel-
opment 17(1).
Maddison, A. (2001) The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. Paris:
OECD.
UNDP (1999) Debt and Sustainable Human Development, Technical Advisory
Paper, No. 4. Management Development and Governance Division, Bureau
for Development Policy.
Weeks, J. (ed.) (1989) Debt Disaster: Banks, Governments and Multilaterals
Face the Crisis. New York: New York University Press.
14 Globalisation and the

Subsumption of the Soviet
Mode of Production under
Capital
Simon Clarke
Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the Comunist

Party of the Soviet Union in 1985 with the mission to reform an
economic system which had progressively lost its dynamism during
the ‘years of stagnation’. Gorbachev’s programme of ‘perestroika’
aimed to introduce market elements into the Soviet administrative-
command system in order to subject Soviet enterprises to the
discipline of world-market prices. The transition to a market
economy was completed under Yeltsin, who freed most wages and
prices from government control at the end of 1991.
The neoliberal Russian and Western economists who were the
ideologues of Yeltsin’s programme of radical reform expected that
the abandonment of administrative methods and the transition to
a market economy would lead to the rapid transformation of the
Soviet Union into a capitalist economy as investors took advantage
of the highly skilled labour force and advanced science and
technology that had built up the Soviet military machine. In fact the
outcome was a disaster: the longest and deepest recession in recorded
human history, including a decline in industrial production twice
as deep as that provoked by Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union,
and living standards which fell back to the level of the 1960s, when
Khrushchev was dismissed for his economic failures.
The most common explanations for this disaster refer to the
adoption of inappropriate policies by the Russian government.
While the government’s domestic critics argue that the collapse has
been the result of the adoption of neoliberal reforms, neoliberals
argue to the contrary, that the collapse has occurred because reforms
have not been sufficiently radical. However, what has happened in
Russia has not been the result of policy choices. The ability of policy-
makers to mould the economy is constrained by the instruments at
187
188 Anti-Capitalism
their disposal and the structural characteristics of the economy

which they seek to manipulate. What has happened in Russia has
its roots in the Soviet period, a result of the unfolding of the con-
tradictions of the Soviet economic system in the context of its
integration into the global capitalist economy.
THEORISING TRANSITION: SMITH AND MARX

Many commentators have compared the Soviet system to that of
feudalism in being based on the appropriation of a surplus by the
exercise of political power. For Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek the
central feature of feudalism was the distortion of the natural order
of the market economy by the superimposition of political rule, and
the transition from feudalism to capitalism depended on sweeping
away the political institutions of the old regime in order to establish
the freedom and security of property – what Smith referred to as
‘order and good government’ – which would allow the market
economy to flourish (Clarke 1988, ch. 1). This was the ideology that
informed the liberal project of the transition to a capitalist market
economy in the former state socialist economies. According to this
model the transition is not theorised as an evolutionary develop-
ment of the existing system under the impact of its integration into
the structures of the world market. For this model the existing
system has no dynamic of its own. It is defined purely negatively as
a barrier to change which must be destroyed, so that a new system
can be created out of the fragments set free by its destruction. It is
not to Adam Smith or Friedrich Hayek that we should look to
understand the development of capitalism, but to Smith’s most
cogent critic, Karl Marx.
For Marx the development of capitalism was not the realisation
of individual reason but an expression of the contradictions of the
feudal mode of production, as the development of the forces of
production broke the fetters of feudal production relations with the
development of commodity production; this was massively acceler-
ated by the dispossession of the mass of the rural population, who
became the wage labourers for capital and the consumers of the
products of capitalist production.1 The dispossession of the rural
population provided an ample reserve of cheap wage labour which
could be profitably employed by the capitals accumulated through
trade and plunder. At this first stage of capitalist development,
however, capitalists did not change the methods of production
which they had inherited, so the subsumption of labour under
Globalisation 189
capital was purely formal. Merchant capitalists made huge profits by

exploiting their commercial monopolies. Capitalist producers cut
their costs not by transforming methods of production but by
forcing down wages and extending the working day.
Capital only penetrated the sphere of production when competi-
tion between capitalists induced and compelled them to
revolutionise the methods of production in order to earn an
additional profit, or resist the competition of those who had already
done so. It was only with the ‘real subsumption’ of labour under
capital that the characteristic dynamic of the capitalist mode of
production got under way. Nevertheless, in the peripheral regions
of the emerging global capitalist economy the subsumption of
production under capital remained purely formal, based on the
intensified exploitation of pre-capitalist social forms, with the
‘second serfdom’ in Eastern Europe and the reinforcement of slavery
and quasi-feudal forms of exploitation in the colonial world.
The process described by Marx as that of ‘primitive accumula-
tion’ (see Chapter 8) was largely achieved in Russia in the Soviet
period, when the peasants were dispossessed and transformed into
wage labourers, not for capital but for the state. The Soviet state
launched a programme of industrialisation, based on the intro-
duction of the most advanced capitalist technology, but the social
form of the production and appropriation of a surplus in the
Soviet system was quite different from that characteristic of the
capitalist mode of production, and the dynamics of the system
were correspondingly different.
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THE SOVIET MODE OF PRODUCTION

The Soviet system was not based on the maximisation of profit by
the production of commodities, but nor was it based on the free asso-
ciation of producers and planned provision for social need. It was
an essentially non-monetary system of surplus appropriation subor-
dinated to the material needs of the state and, above all, of its
military apparatus. The development of the system was not subor-
dinated to the expansion of the gross or net product in the abstract,
an abstraction which can only be expressed in a monetary form, but
to expanding the production of specific materials and equipment –
tanks, guns, aircraft, explosives, missiles – and to supporting the
huge military machine.
The system of ‘central planning’ was developed in Stalin’s indus-
trialisation drive of the 1930s in a framework of generalised shortage.
190 Anti-Capitalism
The system was driven by the demands of the state for a growing
physical surplus, with scant regard for the material constraints on
production of skills, resources and capacities. The strategic demands
of the five-year plan would be determined by the priorities of the
regime, and ultimately by the demands of the military apparatus,
which would then be converted into requirements for all the various
branches of production. These requirements came to be determined
in a process of negotiation between the central planning authorities,
ministries and industrial enterprises.
Soviet social relations of production were supposed to overcome
the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production in
being based on the centralised control of the planned distribution
and redistribution of productive resources. However, the Soviet
system was marked by its own contradiction inherent in the subor-
dination of the system of production to the Soviet system of surplus
appropriation. As in the case of feudalism, this contradiction was
expressed in the development of market relations within the Soviet
system which provided the basis for the emergence of new, proto-
capitalist, forms of surplus appropriation.
The fundamental contradiction of the Soviet system lay in the
separation between the production and appropriation of the surplus.
The centralised control and allocation of the surplus product in the
hands of an unproductive ruling stratum meant that the producers
had an interest not in maximising but in minimising the surplus
that they produced. Since neither the worker, nor the enterprise, nor
even the ministry, had any rights to the surplus produced, they
could only reliably expand the resources at their disposal by inflating
their production costs, and could only protect themselves from the
exactions of the ruling stratum by concealing their productive
potential. Resistance to the demands of the military-state-Party
apparatus for an expanding surplus product ran through the system
from top to bottom and was impervious to all attempts at bureau-
cratic reform. The resulting rigidities of the system determined its
extensive form of development, the expansion of the surplus
depending on the mobilisation of additional resources. When the
reserves, particularly of labour, had been exhausted, the rate of
growth of production and of surplus appropriation slowed down
(Clarke et al. 1993, ch. 1).
MARKET ELEMENTS IN THE SOVIET SYSTEM

Market relations played an increasing role in the Soviet system. As in
the case of feudalism, the contradictions inherent in the Soviet
Globalisation 191
system meant that money, the market and quasi-market relations

developed spontaneously out of attempts to overcome the contra-
dictions of the system and were tolerated, however reluctantly, by
the authorities.
First, although social reproduction was as far as possible subordi-
nated to the imperatives of production, with a wide range of goods
and services being provided through the workplace, labour power was
partially commodified and workers were paid a money wage. Money
in the hands of workers lubricated the black market for consumer
goods and for the private production of agricultural produce for the
market, which was tolerated and even encouraged; rural producers
were allowed to sell their own products on the kolkhoz markets, which
provided a basis for more extensive market transactions.
Second, Trotsky’s early attempts at the ‘militarisation of labour’
were unsuccessful and, although wages were regulated centrally,
workers were always in practice free to change jobs in search of
higher wages. Labour shortages put increasing pressure on the cen-
tralised regulation of wages as employers sought to attract the
scarcest categories of labour, so that wage setting had to take account
of labour market conditions.
Third, while the centre could allocate rights to supplies, it could
not ensure that those supplies were delivered to the right place, at
the right time, and were of the desired quality, so that enterprises
used informal personal connections with their suppliers, often
backed up by local Party apparatchiki, to secure their supplies, and
came increasingly to draw on the services of unofficial intermedi-
aries, the so-called tolchaki (pushers), who were the pioneers of
market relations within the Soviet economy. The central directives
which nominally regulated inter-enterprise transactions within the
Soviet system were therefore only realised in practice through
exchanges within networks of personal, political and commercial
connections which provided the basis for the emergence of financial
and commercial intermediaries under perestroika.
Fourth, the need to acquire advanced means of production from
the West meant that the Soviet Union had to export its natural
resources in order to finance its essential imports of machinery. The
1930s industrialisation drive was made possible by the massive
export of grain forcibly expropriated from the peasantry, which led
to the devastating famines of the 1930s. By the Brezhnev period the
Soviet Union had become dependent on its exports of oil and gas to
finance its imports of machinery and even of food, and the repro-
192 Anti-Capitalism
duction of the Soviet system depended increasingly on transactions

on the world market. In 1985 fuel accounted for more than half the
Soviet Union’s exports, with another quarter being accounted for by
raw and semi-processed raw materials, while machinery accounted
for a third of imports and food for a fifth. The share of world trade
in the net material product of the Soviet Union increased from 3.7
per cent in 1970 to a high of 11 per cent in 1985, while oil and gas
production doubled between 1970 and 1980. At the same time, the
Soviet Union saw a sharp improvement in its terms of trade,
primarily due to rising fuel prices, the net barter terms of trade
improving by an average of 5 per cent per annum over the period
1976–80, and 3 per cent per annum between 1980 and 1985
(IMF/World Bank/OECD 1991, vol. 1, pp. 86, 105), helping to offset
the decline in productivity growth and allowing the Soviet Union
to increase its import volume by a third, while export volume
increased by only 10 per cent. The improved terms of trade also
made a substantial contribution to the buoyancy of government
revenues through the price equalisation system, according to which
the state appropriated the difference between domestic and world
market prices. This opening of the Soviet economy to the world
market, and the corresponding political processes of détente, were
by no means a sign of fundamental change in the Soviet system, but
were rather the means by which change was constantly postponed.
However, such favourable circumstances could not last: production
of gas and oil peaked in 1980, so that the Soviet Union was increas-
ingly dependent on improvement in the terms of trade to sustain its
economy. When the terms of trade turned sharply against the Soviet
Union from 1985, reforms could be postponed no longer.
THE TRANSITION TO A MARKET ECONOMY

The ‘transition to a market economy’ was not an alien project
imposed on the Soviet system by liberal economists, but in the first
instance was an expression of the fundamental contradiction of the
Soviet system. The first stage of market reforms sought to improve
the balance of external trade by ending the state monopoly of
foreign trade and licensing enterprises and organisations to engage
in export operations and to retain a portion of the hard currency
earned. The idea was that this would give industrial enterprises an
incentive to compete in world markets and to use the foreign
exchange earned to acquire modern equipment. In practice it
provided a windfall for exporting enterprises, at the expense of the
Globalisation 193
state, and opportunities for those with the right connections to make
huge profits by acting as intermediaries.
Once the precedent had been set, other enterprises sought the
right to sell above-plan output on export or domestic markets, and
to retain a growing proportion of the proceeds. Allowing enterprises
to sell on the market provided an alternative source of supply to the
centralised allocations which the state could not guarantee, and if
the state could not guarantee supplies, why should enterprises
continue to deliver their state orders when they could sell more
profitably at market prices? Thus the development of market
relations undermined the control of the centre, created a space for
the development of capitalist commercial and financial enterprise
and precipitated the collapse of the administrative-command
system. Rather than resolving the contradictions inherent in the
Soviet system, as Gorbachev had hoped, the transition to a market
economy brought those contradictions to a head. The surplus which
had been appropriated by the state was now retained by enterprises
or appropriated by the new financial and commercial intermediaries
which arose to handle the emerging market relations.
Yeltsin’s programme of radical reform was no more than a belated
recognition of the fact that the state had lost control of the
management of the economy. The decision to free wages and prices
from state control was a recognition that the state had already lost
control of wages and prices, since by the end of 1991 nothing was
available to buy at state prices. Corporatisation and privatisation of
state enterprises was an equally inevitable consequence of the devel-
opment of a market economy, merely a juridical recognition of what
had already become a fact: that these enterprises had already
detached themselves from the administrative-command system of
management which no longer had any levers of control over them.
Privatisation did not give enterprises any more rights than they
already had, while it allowed the state to abdicate all the responsi-
bilities to them which it no longer had the means to fulfil. Thus, the
rhetoric of neoliberalism and radical reform was little more than an
ideological cover for what was essentially a bowing to the inevitable.
RUSSIA’S CAPITALIST TRANSITION: NEW FORMS OF SURPLUS

APPROPRIATION
The surplus appropriated by the Soviet ruling stratum took the form
of the material goods which sustained Soviet military might and the
lifestyle of its ruling stratum, but these goods were produced at
194 Anti-Capitalism
enormous cost. According to the calculations of Western economists,

at world-market prices a large proportion of the Soviet economy was
‘value-subtracting’, primarily because of the very high energy and
raw material intensity of production. In value terms, the bulk of the
surplus was accounted for by the rents appropriated through the
export of fuels and raw materials. The result of the subordination of
the Russian economy to global capitalism was, therefore, inevitable:
massive profits would accrue to those who controlled the export of
fuels and raw materials, while the bulk of domestic industry and agri-
culture would not even be able to cover their input, let alone their
wage costs. The only policy issues were those of the extent to which
the state would be able and willing to divert the profits of the
exporters to subsidise loss-making domestic producers and support
domestic investment in new technologies.
The development of a market economy in Russia and the
emergence of private commercial and financial capitalist enterprises
represented a change in the form of surplus appropriation, the
surplus being appropriated in monetary rather than in material
form. The new capitals were formed out of the commercial and
financial intermediaries which had been rooted in the Soviet system
and been given free rein by perestroika. They appropriated their
profits by establishing the monopoly control of supplies which had
formerly been the prerogative of the state. They acquired this control
on the basis of rights assigned to them by state bodies, including
property rights acquired on the basis of the privatisation of state
enterprises, and the privatisation of the banking system, and they
maintained their control, where necessary, by the corruption of state
officials and enterprise directors, backed up by the threat and use of
force. However, the change in the form of surplus appropriation was
not matched by any change in the social relations of production
(Clarke 1996).
The surplus was not appropriated on the basis of the transforma-
tion of the social organisation of production or the investment of
capital in production. Investment declined steadily, to less than a
quarter of its 1990 value in 1998. The average age of industrial plant
and equipment in the Soviet period was about nine years, but by
1999 it had increased to over 18 years, with less than four per cent
being less than five years old and about two-thirds having been
installed before the beginning of perestroika (all data in this section
is from Goskomstat 2000 and Goskomstat 2001). Far from being
Globalisation 195
regenerated by the transition to a market economy, the productive

economy was still capitalising on the deteriorating legacy of the past.
The surplus was appropriated by the notorious oligarchs, who
have privatised the former state monopolies of banking and foreign
trade, siphoning off enormous profits, estimated at US$20–25 billion
per year, which are transferred abroad to offshore accounts. The bulk
of the profits of the oligarchs derive from the sale of Russian fuel and
raw and processed raw materials, which make up 80 per cent of
Russian exports, on world markets, but they make almost no
investment even in the oil and gas and metallurgical companies
which supply them, so that the production of fuels is declining,
existing reserves are rapidly being depleted and the exploitation of
new reserves is postponed because of the lack of investment. Oil
extraction fell by 42 per cent between 1990 and 1999. In 1999 the
rate of fixed investment as a proportion of output in the oil industry
was less than a fifth of the 1985 level. Even gas production fell by 15
per cent between 1990 and 1999, but labour productivity fell by
more than half, while investment as a proportion of output had
fallen by 40 per cent since 1985. The privatisation of export revenues
led to a massive fall in federal government revenues and growing
reliance on debt finance. Although the oligarchs were induced to
pay substantial amounts to the federal government in tax and
royalty payments, they recovered some of this through the banking
system, through speculation and investment in government debt,
debt service now amounting to 3.6 per cent of GDP.
While the oligarchs have privatised much of the surplus that was
formerly appropriated by the state, the possibilities of profiting
directly from industrial investment are minimal. The windfall profits
which enterprises could make in the late 1980s, when they could
buy at state prices and sell at market prices, were annihilated by the
liberalisation of prices at the end of 1991. With the collapse of the
Soviet system, enterprises inherited their premises, capital stock and
stocks of parts and raw materials, which enabled many to remain in
profit by trading on their inherited assets; but by 1996 the majority
of enterprises were loss-making, the figure only falling to 41 per cent
in the recovery of 1999. The bulk of the remaining enterprise profits
are annihilated by taxation, leaving little or nothing to pay out as
dividends to shareholders. While the taxation of enterprise profits
amounted to 4.9 per cent of GDP in 1999, dividends amounted to
only 0.5 per cent of GDP, up from 0.3 per cent in 1998. The tradi-
tional state enterprises, the majority of which have been privatised,
196 Anti-Capitalism
have struggled to survive by any means that they can with the
limited resources at their disposal: seeking out new markets,
deferring payments to the government, their suppliers and their
employees, looking for subsidies from local and federal government,
and looking for profitable connections with criminal organisations
or foreign companies; but industrial production halved between
1990 and 1999, with the production of light industry falling by 85
per cent as imports flooded the domestic market.
Meanwhile, new capitalist enterprises are concentrated in trade,
catering and services, with much less penetration of construction,
transport and communications and minimal penetration of industry
and agriculture. New capitalist enterprises are mostly small unin-
corporated private companies, paying low wages and making small
profits. In October 1999, average wages in the private companies
which dominate trade and catering were only two-thirds of the
wages paid in the remaining state enterprises, half the wages paid by
incorporated companies and a fifth of the wages paid by foreign
companies. Low wages, however, were not associated with high
profits: almost half the companies in trade and catering were loss-
making in 1998.
RUSSIA IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY: COMPARATIVE

PERSPECTIVES
I have focused on the internal dynamics of the transition to a market
economy, but it should be apparent that the transition has been
driven by internal forces unleashed by the integration of the Soviet
system into global capitalism as a classic neo-colony, producing
cheap fuels and raw materials for global capitalism and importing
foodstuffs and manufactured goods while domestic production
languished, unable to compete with its archaic production
technology and inappropriate social organisation of production in
the face of unfavourable market conditions. As in the classic case of
neocolonialism, the surplus is appropriated by multinational cor-
porations and their comprador capitalist partners. Foreign direct
investment between 1994 and 1999 amounted to only US$3 billion
per annum. In 1999, 23 per cent of foreign investment went into oil
and metallurgy, 20 per cent into trade and catering, commerce and
finance, and 15 per cent into the food processing industry, with only
a trivial amount in the remaining industrial branches.
Meanwhile, the subsumption of labour under capital within
Russia remains overwhelmingly purely formal. The vast majority of
Globalisation 197
Russian enterprises struggle to survive in the face of intense domestic

and foreign competition, with minimal investment and earning little
or no profits, using inherited plant and equipment and retaining the
traditional Soviet social organisation of production, while the bulk
of any surplus they produce is appropriated by monopolistic and at
best semi-criminal commercial and financial intermediaries. Enter-
prises cut costs not by revolutionising production methods, but by
reducing real wages and intensifying labour; and they stay in
business by defaulting on their payments to suppliers, the
government and to their own employees.
The fate of Russia has not been determined exclusively by its own
historical legacy. While the other Soviet republics, as well as Romania
and Bulgaria, have suffered from the collapse of the Soviet system as
badly as Russia has, most of the former Soviet satellites in Eastern
Europe soon recovered from the transition crisis; and the experience
of China, of course, presents almost a mirror image of the fate of
Russia in its transition to a market economy. While Russian GDP per
head fell by almost half over the 1990s, in China it doubled. While
industrial production in Russia fell by more than half, in China it
increased more than three times. While agricultural production in
Russia fell by almost half, in China it increased by 50 per cent.
Many commentators attribute these differences to the different
policies pursued by the various national governments. The interna-
tional financial institutions have contrasted the fate of Russia at
various times with the success of Poland, Hungary and the Czech
Republic. Critics of neoliberalism contrast the fate of Russia with the
success of China. But policy-makers in all these countries have been
severely constrained by the circumstances in which they have found
themselves and restricted by the opportunities they confront. Russia
has not pursued radically different policies from those of her former
satellites, while much of the programme of perestroika was similar
to the reforms being introduced at the same time in China. It is not
so much the policy packages which have differed, all of which have
been based on the subordination of the domestic economy to world
market prices, as the outcomes.
In all of these countries the ‘transition to a market economy’ has
not been so much a feature of a particular set of policies, as a strategy
of integration into global capitalism. The specificity of Russia lies
not in the policies pursued by its government but in the mode of its
integration into global capitalism, which has been dictated by the
dynamics of the latter. Against many of the other former Soviet
198 Anti-Capitalism
republics, Russia at least had the advantage of having stupendous

natural resources, in the form of oil, gas, metals and minerals. But
the former Eastern European satellites had the advantages of a highly
skilled and relatively low-paid industrial labour force and of location
on the fringes of the European Union, giving them ready access to
a booming market and making the economies very attractive to
foreign investors. China, on the other hand, had the advantages of
location on the Pacific rim, of political stability and, above all, of
abundant reserves of cheap labour. The latter allowed China to
pursue a dualistic strategy of continuing to subsidise the strategically
important traditional state industries, while encouraging private and
foreign investment in local and foreign-owned enterprises. Never-
theless, the unevenness of the Chinese pattern of development
creates its own problems, which raises the question of how long such
a dualistic strategy can be sustained. But that is another question.

Clarke, S. (1988) Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State.
Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Clarke, S., Fairbrother, P., Burawoy, M. and Krotov, P. (1993) What about the
Workers? Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in Russia. London: Verso.
Clarke, S. (1996) ‘The Enterprise in the Era of Transition’, in S. Clarke (ed.)
The Russian Enterprise in Transition. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Goskomstat (2000) Rossiiskii Statisticheskii Ezhegodnik. Moscow: Goskomstat
Rossii.
Goskomstat (2001) Rossiya v Tsifrakh. Moscow: Goskomstat Rossii.
IMF/World Bank/OECD (1991) A Study of the Soviet Economy. Washington/
Paris: IMF, World Bank, OECD.
NOTE
1. This was, of course, not an automatic process but one that was mediated
through the class struggle, as Robert Brenner classically argued; but the
class struggle itself expresses the dynamics of the contradiction between
the forces and relations of production.
15 Capital Accumulation
and Crisis
Paul Zarembka
‘Crisis’ can be used and misused. If it is used too frequently and for
circumstances not clearly defined, it loses meaning. It can become
an escape from deeper understanding. Virtually everyone would
agree that the 1930s represented a world economic ‘crisis’ and one
of major proportions. It led to the success of fascism and the resulting
world war. In China, it eventually led to renewed civil war and revo-
lutionary success. But what of lesser examples, such as the so-called
‘oil crisis’ of the early 1970s? Virtually everyone would agree that
Argentina is in crisis in 2002, but what of Venezuela at the same time?
Crisis in capitalism has economic and political dimensions and
always includes the extent to which workers are mobilising. Short-
term or conjunctural crises of capitalism have multiple causes and
the most we can expect of theory at present is to understand a pre-
disposition to crisis. Theory for the secular crisis of capitalism,
however, is available within the Marxist tradition, although not to
be found directly in Marx. That is, in subjecting the concept of ‘accu-
mulation of capital’ to a deeper understanding and using the work
of the Polish-German revolutionary leader Rosa Luxemburg as a
stepping stone, limitations in Marx can be overcome and the secular
crisis of capitalism understood. In the process, along with the silent
compulsion of the market in the struggle between capital and wage
labour over surplus value, it is necessary to incorporate the roles of
force and violence integrally into understanding accumulation
and crisis.
MARX ON CRISIS
Marx does not develop an explicit crisis theory. But he does clearly
indicate what to examine regarding the possibility of crisis. Such
possibility arises from the fact that the mere production of a
commodity does not guarantee sale; rather, sale is limited ‘by the
proportional relation of the various branches of production and the
consumer power of society’ (Marx 1894, p. 244). The former
201
202 Anti-Capitalism
problem, of disproportionalities, is well accepted even by many non-

Marxists. That is, within capitalism there is no guarantee that one
sector (branch) of the economy actually produces exactly what other
sectors need from that sector, particularly in the circumstances of
the constantly changing technologies being developed within
capitalism. This theory was emphasised by the Russian economist
Tugan-Baranowsky and is well presented by Hilferding (1910,
Part IV) whose work was an important background for Bukharin’s
and Lenin’s works on imperialism.1
The role of overall consumer spending power is more controver-
sial, i.e. can production exceed the ability to pay, can there be
‘overproduction’ for society as a whole? Marx devotes considerable
attention to Ricardo’s views on the dynamics of capitalism and in
the process lays out his approach to understanding this overpro-
duction possibility of crisis (Marx 1905, pp. 492–535). He says that
Ricardo’s erroneous conception denying the possibility of overpro-
duction is based upon seeing products as being exchanged against
products, rather than understanding capitalist production as
concerned with the expansion of surplus value (pp. 493–5). The first
elements of capitalist production are ‘the existence of the product
as a commodity, the duplication of the commodity in commodity
and money, the consequent separation which takes place in the
exchange of commodities and finally the relation of money or com-
modities to wage-labour’ (p. 502). The capitalist first wants to turn
commodity capital back into money capital. While forced sales
(selling in order to pay) are often an important element of crises, in
any case, sales are necessarily limited by those needs which are
backed by ability to pay. Therefore,
overproduction is specifically conditioned by the general law of the

production of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive
forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labour
with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for
the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability
to pay; and this is carried out through continuous expansion of
reproduction and accumulation, and therefore constant recon-
version of revenue into capital, while on the other hand, the mass
of producers remain tied to the average level of needs, and must
remain tied to it according to the nature of capitalist production.
(Marx 1905, pp. 534–5).
Capital Accumulation and Crisis 203
Marx later notes that the features of bourgeois distribution ‘enter

into bourgeois production itself, as a determining factor, which
overlaps and dominates production’ and this, in turn, is the deepest
cause of crises (Marx 1910, p. 84).
A concise, but very readable, aid in understanding Marx’s
approach to crisis is provided by Kenway (1987). Clarke’s (1994) full-
length study concludes that Marx did not actually have a theory of
crisis as such, but that he demonstrated the important proposition
that ‘the tendency to crisis is pervasive ... as the tendency to over-
production runs into the barrier of the limited market’ (p. 279). By
the time Capital was written, he says, Marx was more interested in
the secular development of capitalism than in a conjunctural crisis
theory. Of course, the fact that Marx himself did not have an explicit
theory of crisis does not mean that such a theory cannot be built on
Marxist foundations.
Underconsumption?
Underconsumption theories of crisis emphasise insufficient effective
demand for consumer goods, principally because the level of worker
wages is unable to sustain sufficient demand relative to production
levels. The level of wages in different countries, and in different
sections and sectors of a particular country, is a result of class
struggles and historical developments, with capital continually
striving for lowering of wages. This capitalist pressure for lowered
wages threatens an underconsumption (relative to production).
Some have thought that a theory of ‘increasing misery’ for workers
could be taken from Marx, but Lapides’ careful research (1998) has
dispelled this notion. Desai (1991) provides an overview of the case
for, and the limitations of, underconsumption theory, while Bleaney
(1976) undertakes the detailed analysis.
Certainly, there is a relationship between underconsumption and
conceptualising overproduction, with underconsumption more
narrow in focus as a source of crisis in capitalism. Overproduction
refers to all sources of supply of commodities exceeding their
demands, whether for consumption goods for workers or capitalists,
for produced means of production, for other social classes within the
existing capitalist structure, or for those classes existing within a pen-
etration of non-capitalist structures. Marx himself virtually never
referred to underconsumption.
204 Anti-Capitalism
Falling Rate of Profit?

There may be an understanding of crisis centred around a tendency
of the rate of profit to fall. But, then again, there may not be. Here
is the problem. The rate of profit is the measure capitalists use to
express their ‘return’ on their investment in means of production.
Since the basis of profit, interest, and rent in a capitalist society is
surplus value s, and surplus value is measured in terms of hours of
work not returned to those who do the production (the workers),
the rate of profit r (abstracting, for this discussion, from interest and
rent) is the ratio of surplus value to the socially necessary labour time
going into the means of production being used by workers, C; i.e.
the rate of profit r = s/C. On the other hand, the rate of surplus value
is s/v, where v is the variable capital of the capitalist – the cost of
labour power to the capitalist measured in terms of value. The rate
of profit can therefore be re-expressed as r = s/v ÷ C/v, or after a little
algebra to clearly indicate the role of s/v, as
s
r= v
 s  C 
 + 1  
 v   s + v  
C/(s+v) describes the ratio of the value invested by capital in means

of production relative to the labour power currently provided by
workers. The rate of profit is falling, suggesting the possibility of
crisis, if this ratio C/(s+v) is rising while the rate of surplus value s/v
remains fixed (or rises only slowly).2
From casual observation, it is easy to accept that wage labourers
today are working with more massive means of production than 50,
100 or 200 years ago. But this is not good enough. For, we are
discussing the socially necessary labour time which goes into the
means of production and there are certainly technological improve-
ments in the very making of means of production, thus reducing
those labour requirements over time. Furthermore, the production
of relative surplus value discussed by Marx is precisely targeted
toward increasing the rate of surplus value, s/v. Therefore, how could
we assert a falling tendency of the rate of profit? The manner in
which Marx does it in Volume 3 of Capital is initially to take the rate
of surplus value, s/v, as fixed and to abstract from technological
improvements in producing means of production so that C/(s+v) is
‘clearly’ rising.3 Ergo, he gets a falling tendency for the rate of profit.
When he removes these assumptions Marx describes countervailing
factors as ‘counter-tendencies’. This is all well and good, but it does
not show whether capitalism really is described theoretically by
some type of law of a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. And,
while falling profits in the first half of the nineteenth century
encouraged economists to see this as a fact requiring theoretical
explanation, a century and a half later of rising, falling, rising, falling
(etc.) rates of profit pushes into the background even searching the-
oretically for a tendency in profit rates.
As Clarke (1994, pp. 58–72) points out, a falling tendency in the
rate of profit as a backbone toward understanding crises did not arise
within Marxism until the 1970s, and the resulting discussion is not
very convincing.
TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
As an element conditioning the possibility of crisis, technological
change in capitalism derives from the capitalist intention of
increasing that portion of the workers’ labouring day which is
withheld from workers. Workers are only employed by capital
insofar as the time they work is greater than the time required to
produce (via other workers) the necessities of all workers for main-
taining life and strength for further work, both for themselves and
for their children. Those necessities are both biological and
social/historical in a very complicated process. If those necessities
can be produced with less expenditure of labour time (including time
required to produce means of production), this leads to capital
getting more from the same workday. This result Marx calls
production of relative surplus value (see Chapters 1 and 5).
Technical change is focused on reducing the time required to
produce such items as clothing (the ‘Industrial Revolution’) and food
(the ‘Green Revolution’). Marx labelled the capitalist establishments
in industries producing these goods as being within ‘Department 2’.
Those engaged in producing means of production are in
‘Department 1’, the department producing the instrumentality of
capitalist control. Of course, technical change occurs in Department
1 also; iron is revolutionised into steel.
Technical change has contradictory implications and thus leads
to possibilities for crises, including disproportionalities among
sectors as well as crises of overproduction. It may reduce the required
labour power for production but, in so doing, it also decreases values
206 Anti-Capitalism
being produced since values refer to labour time. And it can throw
more commodities on the market, requiring more outlets. Yet, capital
in general, in accumulating, strives to exploit more labour power
with concomitant requirements for more means of production,
which in turn requires more market outlets for commodities.
CAPITAL ACCUMULATION
Capitalism is a social system driven by capital accumulation and so
accumulation must be clearly defined. Were it to mean more means
of production, such as more equipment in factories and on agricul-
tural lands, it would mean the same as in mainstream economics.
Yet for Marx capitalism is fundamentally a social relation between
capital and wage labour, between capitalists and workers working
for a wage. It is a relation of exploitation and of power, derived from
one social class controlling the main means of production. Accu-
mulation of capital, therefore, needs to be seen as the extension of
that social relationship, i.e., as incorporation of more wage labourers
under the domination of capital, with the concomitant requirement
for of more means of production.
Marx was insufficiently clear in utilising the concept ‘accumula-
tion of capital’. The norm is given by clear statements such as
‘accumulation reproduces the capital-relation on a progressive scale,
more capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage-labourers
at that’ or ‘capital is not a thing, but a social relation between
persons, established by the instrumentality of things’ (1867, pp. 575,
717, the latter commenting favourably on Wakefield).4 Neverthe-
less, sometimes he can be read as meaning more means of
production. This ambiguity has led to problems in the theory of
capitalism. Indeed, after the success of the Bolshevik revolution in
1917, undeserved priority was given to Lenin’s understanding of
Marx’s economics which included understanding accumulation of
capital as increased production (see Zarembka 2000).
Luxemburg (1913) undertook the most penetrating analysis of
accumulation of capital and was an advance on Marx’s theory. Her
Accumulation of Capital of 450 pages represents one of the longest
and most comprehensive works in all of Marxist economic theory,
outside of Marx’s own work.
In Capital Marx characterised the economy as being only capitalist,
with no other social classes than capitalists and workers (and
landlords, in some places). While he was quite aware of the existence
of other classes, this delimitation, says Luxemburg, got Marx into
trouble analysing the accumulation of capital. If the economy is

assumed to be only capitalist, then ‘the desire to accumulate plus the
technical prerequisites of accumulation is not enough ... to ensure
that accumulation can in fact proceed and production expand: the
effective demand for commodities must also increase. Where is this
continually increasing demand to come from?’ (p. 131). Capitalists
sell to workers the monetary equivalent of their subsistence needs,
but oppose anything further; indeed, workers buying consumer
goods ‘merely refund to the capitalist class the amount of the wages
they have received, their assignment to the extent of the variable
capital’ (p. 132). Capitalists also sell to themselves subsistence and
luxury goods, but the drive within capitalism is quite distinctly for
accumulation, not merely luxury consumption. So, the capitalists’
only other outlet is marketing means of production.
Yet, the system must reach an impasse since, within the capital
and wage-labour relation, we cannot answer for whom the
additional means of production would be produced. ‘From the
capitalist point of view it is absurd to produce more consumer goods
merely in order to maintain more workers, and to turn out more
means of production merely to keep to keep this surplus of workers
occupied’ (p. 132). Thus, the constant creation of a home market or
the advance of imperialism into areas not yet, or not fully, capitalist
is necessary: ‘the decisive fact is that the surplus value cannot be
realised by sale either to workers or to capitalists, but only if it is sold
to such social organisations or strata whose own mode of production
is not capitalistic’ (pp. 351–2). In other words, capital must reach
beyond itself.
Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital is difficult reading because it
is so rich in understanding. A decisive implication is the need to
move away from ‘purely’ economic, market, issues and also to
consider the penetration of non-capitalist regions. She undertakes
this in the last portion of her book.
Marx had commented that ‘constant capital is never produced for
its own sake but solely because more of it is needed in spheres of
production whose products go into individual consumption’ (Marx,
1894, p. 305).5 While quite conscious of capitalism’s drive for
production and the accumulation of capital for its own sake,
Luxemburg confronted that drive with an additional reality, the
reality that the commodities to be produced by workers with the aid
of means of production must ultimately find a target in consump-
tion (producing a new railroad track adjacent to an old one simply
208 Anti-Capitalism
to provide rail access during the track’s construction hardly cuts ice
in defending a proposition of capitalism’s freedom for continuous
expansion in means of production).
Although failing to clarify the ambiguity left by Marx regarding
the actual meaning of ‘accumulation of capital’, Luxemburg’s work
is a significant step forward for an understanding of secular capitalist
crisis and is also another indication that Marxism is a living project,
both theoretically and in practice.
PENETRATION OF CAPITALIST RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION

The Communist Manifesto refers to the ‘cheap price of commodities
which battered down all Chinese Walls’, perhaps leading one to
think of an economic process in the narrow sense. However, by the
time of Capital, Volume 1, Marx stressed, for eighteenth century
England, the coercive, non-economic methods predominating in the
formation of wage-labour and how bloody was the history of
merchant capital.
Marx refers to the destruction of non-capitalist relations of
production in the rise of capitalism from feudalism as ‘primitive
accumulation’. Yet, such destruction still obtains within the ‘regular’
accumulation of capital, although the word ‘primitive accumulation’
would no longer correspond to Marx’s usage.6 One striking and
educative illustration is the work of van Onselen (1976) for the
formation of the Southern Rhodesian wage-labour force at the turn
of the twentieth century. By controlling of travel passes, taking
advantage of famine, making exaggerated claims about labour
conditions in mines, and even using direct force, capitalism drove
the rural population of Malawi down a proscribed path: produce
your sons for work, or lose your land – that property threatened at
the point of the gun if earnings from wage labour were not supplied
in sufficient quantity to pay high cash land taxes. Compulsion of
their type continues in many manifestations today and is an
important dimension of any thorough study of crises of capitalism.
SECULAR ‘CRISIS’ OF CAPITALISM

Luxemburg once said that if ‘capitalist development does not move
in the direction of its own ruin, then socialism ceases to be objec-
tively necessary’ (1899, p. 40, emphasis added). Such an objective
necessity for ruin was, for her, one basis for socialism, with two
others being the progressive socialisation of production, and
increasing working-class organisation and consiousness. The
importance of such objective necessity is its addition to subjective
factors. It becomes, however, an urgent question after concluding

that Marx does not offer a crisis theory.
Luxemburg’s most important work directly deals with crisis only
in its very last paragraph. There, Luxemburg says that, although
capitalism ‘strives to become universal, and indeed, on account of
this tendency, it must break down – because it is immanently
incapable of becoming a universal form of production’ (1913,
p. 467).7 In other words, if accumulation of capital represents the
extension of capital into non-capitalist portions of a society or the
world, it is of decisive importance to know the implications of the
very success of such endeavours, even as we understand both the
‘economic’ and non-economic, forcible methods by which this
extension is accomplished. If accumulation of capital is absolutely
basic for understanding capital, so too are the implications of its
achievements, the implications of capital ‘winning’ the world in its
own name and no longer having that much use for surplus value for
additional accumulation of capital.
The Depression of the 1930s can be seen as a consequence of the
very success of earlier capitalism as a major crisis of overproduction
occurred. The ‘solution’ was the development of massive amounts
of ‘unproductive labour’ which is wage labour which does not
produce value and surplus value (see Chapter 2). Unproductive
labour initially developed on a large scale with regard to the imple-
mentation of fascism, then as a consequence of the Second World
War, followed by Cold War militarism and other developments of
unproductive labour. But this is not accumulation of capital. Rather,
the development of unproductive labour is a systemic message that
the limits of the accumulation of capital are being reached. As such,
the fall in the accumulation of capital, relative to the mass of appro-
priated surplus value, is the deeper message of the past century and
fully consistent with Luxemburg’s work.
Bleaney, M. F. (1976) Underconsumption Theories: A History and Critical
Analysis. New York: International Publishers.
Clarke, S. (1994) Marx’s Theory of Crisis. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Desai, M. (1991) ‘Underconsumption’, in T. Bottomore (ed.) A Dictionary of
Marxist Thought (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Hilferding, R. (1910) Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist
Development. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
Kenway, P. (1987) ‘Crises’, in J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman (eds.)
The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics. London: Macmillan.
Lapides, K. (1998) Marx’s Wage Theory in Historical Perspective. Westport,
Conn.: Praeger.
210 Anti-Capitalism
Luxemburg, R. (1899), ‘Reform or Revolution’ (2nd edn., 1908), cited in Rosa

Luxemburg Speaks. New York: Pathfinder, 1970.
Luxemburg, R. (1913) The Accumulation of Capital. New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1951.
Marx, K. (1867, 1894) Capital, vols. 1 and 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1954, 1959 and London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974.
Marx, K. (1905, 1910) Theories of Surplus Value, parts 2 and 3. Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1968 and 1971.
van Onselen, C. (1976) Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia,
1900–1933. London: Pluto Press.
Zarembka, P. (2000). ‘Accumulation of Capital, Its Definition: A Century after
Lenin and Luxemburg’, Research in Political Economy 18. Stamford, Conn.
and Amsterdam: JAI/Elsevier.
NOTES
1. Clarke (1994, pp. 39 ff.) shows, however, that Hilferding’s work on crisis,
while quite an advance over bourgeois theories of the time, was based on
imperfect competition and without ‘specific reference to the social
relations of production, so that in the last analysis it was not clear what
(if anything) was specifically Marxist in his theory’.
2. Note that, if we want real numbers of the ‘rate of profit’, we need to
remember that surplus value includes all three of profits, interest and rent,
and the distribution among these three changes over time.
3. Actually, even Marx (1867, pp. 564–5) has examples for which this is not
true.
4. Also, ‘the economists ... transform capital from a relationship into a thing,
a stock of commodities ... which, insofar as they serve as conditions for
new labour, are called capital’ (Marx 1910, p. 272, in discussing accumu-
lation of capital).
5. Thus, citing this passage, Clarke (1994, pp. 277–8) notes that the ‘ultimate
limit of the stimulation of capital accumulation by the expansion of credit
is set by the market for final consumption’.
6. ‘Accumulation merely presents as a continuous process what in primitive
accumulation appears as a distinct historical process’ (Marx 1910, p. 272).
7. Rather than being an underconsumptionist, Luxemburg pointed to the
contradiction between expanding production and limited markets for
both consumer goods and means of production. Bleaney (1976, ch. 9)
correctly understands Luxemburg in this regard, although not grasping
her larger point. In his comprehensive book on crisis theory we have
otherwise favourably mentioned, Clarke (1994) unfortunately considers
Luxemburg to be an underconsumptionist (pp. 53–8), leading him to
claim mistakenly that she replaces unlimited expansion of production and
productive forces with the notion that ‘the development of the market
and the growth of consumption … is the driving force of capitalism’
(p. 75), thereby even providing a foundation ‘for the reabsorption of
Marx’s economics back into the framework of bourgeois economic theory’
(p. 280). We point out this misinterpretation of Luxemburg in order to
alert a reader turning to this aspect of Clarke’s work.
16 Marxian Crisis Theory and

the Postwar US Economy
Fred Moseley
In the first 30 years after the Second World War, the United States
economy performed remarkably well. The rate of growth averaged
4–5 per cent a year, the rate of unemployment was seldom above 5
per cent, inflation was almost non-existent (1–2 per cent a year), and
the living standards of workers improved substantially (the average
real wage, or the purchasing power of wages, roughly doubled over
this period). This was the ‘golden age’ of US capitalism.
However, this ‘golden age’ ended in the 1970s. Since then, the rate
of growth has averaged 2–3 per cent, the rate of unemployment and
the rate of inflation have both been higher, and the average real
wage has not increased at all (and by some measures has even
declined 10 per cent). It is in this sense that we refer to the ‘stagfla-
tion’ of the US economy in recent decades.
During the late 1990s, the US economy improved significantly,
with the highest rates of growth (3–4 per cent) and the lowest rates
of unemployment and inflation since the 1960s, and real wages
increased modestly. As a result, most economists concluded that the
late 1990s ‘boom’ marked the end of the long period of stagflation
and the beginning of a new prolonged period of sustained
prosperity, similar to the early postwar ‘golden age’. However, this
‘boom’ came to a sudden end in early 2002, and the US economy
has fallen again into recession. Now there is widespread concern that
this recession will be deep and long, and that it will be accompanied
by the first worldwide recession since the 1930s.1
This chapter presents a Marxian explanation of the long period of
stagflation in the US economy, and attempts to determine whether
or not this period of stagflation is indeed over, or whether the US
(and world) economy is instead headed for something even worse.
THE DECLINE IN THE RATE OF PROFIT

According to the Marxian theory presented here, the most important
cause of the long period of stagflation in the US economy was a very
211
212 Anti-Capitalism
significant decline in the rate of profit (the ratio of total profit to the
total capital invested) in the economy as a whole.2 According to
Marxian theory, the rate of profit is the main determinant of the
overall condition of capitalist economies. When the rate of profit is
high, capitalist economies are generally more prosperous: business
investment is high, unemployment is relatively low, and workers’
living standards increase (such as occurred in the early postwar
‘golden age’). On the other hand, when the rate of profit is low,
prosperity turns into stagnation and depression: business investment
is low or non-existent, unemployment is high and living standards
decline (such as has occurred in recent decades, and occurred during
the Great Depression and the nineteenth-century depressions).
From 1950 to the mid-1970s, the rate of profit in the US economy
declined almost 50 per cent, from around 22 per cent to around 12
per cent (see Figure 16.1; see Moseley 1991 for a description of the
sources and methods used to derive these estimates.) This signifi-
cant decline in the rate of profit appears to have been part of a
general worldwide trend during this period, affecting all major
capitalist economies.
0.23
0.22
0.21
0.20
0.19
0.18
0.17
0.16
0.15
0.14
0.13
0.12
0.11
0.10
0.09
1947 1952 1957 1962 1967 1972 1977 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002
Figure 16.1 The Rate of Profit in the Postwar U.S. Economy

Marxian Crisis Theory and the Postwar US Economy 213
According to Marxian theory, this very significant decline in the

rate of profit was the main cause of both of the ‘twin evils’ of higher
unemployment and higher inflation, and hence also of the lower
real wages, of recent decades. As in periods of depression of the past,
the decline in the rate of profit reduced the rate of business
investment, which in turn has resulted in slower growth and higher
rates of unemployment. One important new factor in the postwar
period is that many governments in the 1970s responded to the
higher unemployment by adopting expansionary Keynesian policies
(more government spending, lower taxes, lower interest rates) in
attempts to reduce unemployment. However, these government
policies to reduce unemployment generally resulted in higher rates
of inflation, as capitalist firms responded to the government stimu-
lation of demand by raising their prices at a faster rate in order to
restore the rate of profit, rather than by increasing output and
employment.
In the 1980s, financial capitalists revolted against these higher
rates of inflation, and have generally forced governments to adopt
restrictive policies (less spending, higher interest rates). The result
was lower inflation, but also higher unemployment. Therefore,
government policies have affected the particular combination of
unemployment and inflation at a particular time, but the funda-
mental cause of both of these ‘twin evils’ has been the decline in the
rate of profit.
It is striking that mainstream explanations of the stagflation of
recent decades have completely ignored the very significant decline
in the rate of profit. These mainstream explanations stress
‘exogenous shocks’ (i.e. accidents), such as government policy
mistakes, the OPEC oil price increase, a mysterious slowdown in pro-
ductivity growth, etc. According to Marxian theory, all these factors
are not ‘exogenous shocks’, but are instead themselves caused by the
decline in the rate of profit. By ignoring the rate of profit,
mainstream explanations miss this fundamental cause and remain
on the level of superficial appearances.
ATTEMPTS TO INCREASE THE RATE OF PROFIT

Capitalist enterprises have responded to the decline in the rate of
profit by attempting to restore it a variety of ways. We have already
mentioned the strategy of inflation, i.e. of increasing prices at a faster
rate. Businesses have also attempted to slow down wage increases,
and in some cases even to cut wages. Another strategy to reduce
214 Anti-Capitalism
wage costs has been to move production operations to low-wage

areas of the world. This has been the main driving force behind the
so-called ‘globalisation’ of recent decades: a worldwide search for
lower wages in order to increase the rate of profit.
Another strategy has been to make workers work harder and faster.
Such a ‘speed-up’ in the intensity of labour increases the value
produced by workers and therefore increases profit and the rate of
profit. The higher unemployment of this period contributed to this
‘speed-up’, as workers have been forced to compete with each other
for the fewer jobs available by working harder. One common
business strategy has been ‘downsizing’, e.g. by laying off 10–20 per
cent of a firm’s employees and then requiring the remaining
employees to do the work of the laid-off employees. This method
also generally increases the intensity of labour even before the
workers are laid off, as all workers work harder so that they will not
be among those who are laid off.
We can see that the strategies of capitalist enterprises to increase
their rate of profit in recent decades have in general caused suffering
for workers – higher unemployment and higher inflation, lower
living standards, and increased stress and exhaustion on the job.
Marx’s ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’ – that the accumula-
tion of wealth by capitalists is accompanied by the accumulation of
misery of workers – has been all too true in recent decades.
However, the startling fact is that, despite the decline in real wages
and the ‘speed-up’ of workers’ labour, the rate of profit in the United
States has not increased very much since the 1970s (see Figure 16.1).
There have been cyclical increases in the rate of profit, especially in
the 1990s, but most of these increases have been wiped out in the
subsequent downturn, so that overall the rate of profit has recovered
only about a third of its previous decline. The rate of profit at the
time of writing (2002) remains about 30 per cent below the early
postwar peaks. This absence of a full recovery in the rate of profit is
the main reason why the US economy has not returned in recent
decades to the more prosperous conditions of the ‘golden age’. My
guess is that the same conclusion also applies to other advanced
countries.
Therefore, the most important questions to be answered in a
further analysis of the causes of the economic stagflation of recent
decades have to do with the rate of profit: What were the causes of
the significant decline in the rate of profit in the early postwar
period? In recent decades, why hasn’t the rate of profit increased
more, as a result of the stagnant real wages and the ‘speed-up’ of

labour? And, finally, what is the likely trend in the rate of profit in
the future? What are the chances of a significant increase in the rate
of profit, which would make possible a full and lasting recovery from
the current stagflation and a return to the more prosperous
conditions of the early postwar period?
In attempting to answer these key questions about the trends in
the rate of profit, mainstream economic theories are of no help,
because these theories generally ignore the rate of profit. Mainstream
macroeconomics has no theory of profit at all (profit is not a variable
in this theory of a capitalist economy!). In microeconomics, the
marginal productivity theory of profit (or interest) is completely
static (i.e. it provides no theory of trends over time) and is also now
in general disrepute, because it has been shown to be logically con-
tradictory (as a result of the ‘capital controversy’). This much
maligned theory is being quietly dropped from microeconomic
textbooks at both the undergraduate and the graduate level.
The only economic theory that provides a substantial theory of
the rate of profit and its trends over time is Marxian theory. Indeed,
the rate of profit and its trends over time is the main question of
Marxian theory. The rate of profit is the main variable in Marxian
theory, in striking contrast to mainstream theories in which profit is
not a variable at all.
Therefore, if we want to understand the causes of the decline in
the rate of profit and its likely trend in the future, the only economic
theory available to us is Marxian theory. It is often said these days
that Marxian theory is ‘dead’ or ‘obsolete’. But this assertion is simply
false. As this book itself demonstrates, there are many excellent
Marxian economists around the world using Marxian theory to
analyse and understand contemporary capitalism, including the
current world economic crisis. Indeed, Marxian theory is essential if
we want to understand the rate of profit and its trends. There is
simply no credible alternative theory of the rate of profit available.
Let us turn now to the explanation offered by Marxian theory of
the decline in the rate of profit in the postwar US economy, and of
the lack of a full recovery of the rate of profit in recent decades.
MARXIAN THEORY OF THE DECLINE IN THE RATE OF PROFIT

The main point of the Marxian theory of profit is that profit is
produced by workers, by the surplus labour of workers, because the
value added to commodities by the labour of workers is greater than
216 Anti-Capitalism
the wages the workers are paid (profit is equal to the difference
between the value produced by workers and the wages they are paid).
This conclusion follows from the labour theory of value, which is
usually misinterpreted by mainstream economists as a theory of
individual prices, like mainstream microeconomics. But this is a mis-
understanding. The Marxian labour theory of value is mainly a
macroeconomic theory of the total profit produced in the economy
as a whole.
Marxian theory concludes that the rate of profit (the ratio of the
total profit to the total capital invested) will decline over time,
because technological change – an inherent, ever-present feature of
capitalist economies – tends to replace workers with machines, and
thus tends to reduce the number of workers employed in relation to
the total capital invested in machinery, etc. However, since profit is
produced by workers, the reduction in the number of workers
employed also reduces the amount of profit produced, in relation to
the total capital invested. In other words, the rate of profit will
decline. Expressed inversely, technological change causes the total
capital invested to increase faster than the number of workers
employed, or causes the average capital invested per worker to increase,
which in turn causes the rate of profit to fall.
Marxian theory argues further that the negative effect on the rate
of profit of the increase in the capital per worker can be partially
offset by increasing the amount of profit produced by each worker,
which also tends to increase as a result of technological change,
which increases the productivity of labour. This positive effect of
new technology and higher productivity on the profit produced per
worker is also reinforced by other ways of increasing the profit per
worker, such as wages cuts and increases in the intensity of labour,
discussed above.
However, Marxian theory argues that there are inherent limits to
the increase in the profit produced by each worker. The main limit
is that there are only so many hours in the working day, and it
becomes harder and harder to increase the profit produced by each
worker in a given working day. Another limit is the resistance of
workers, who usually fight against wage cuts and fight for higher
wages and a share of the benefits of the higher productivity. As a
result of these limits, Marxian theory concludes that ‘labour-saving’
technological change will eventually cause the rate of profit to
decline. This decline in the rate of profit is no accident, nor is it due
to ‘external causes’. Rather, the decline in the rate of profit is the
result of capitalism’s own internal dynamics characterised by

continual technological change (see Moseley 1991, ch. 1, for a
further discussion of Marx’s theory of the falling rate of profit).
The above trends, predicted by Marxian theory, are essentially
what happened in the postwar US economy. Technological change
increased the capital invested per worker, and also increased the
amount of profit produced by each worker. And, as predicted by
Marxian theory, the capital invested per worker increased faster than
the profit produced per worker, so that the rate of profit declined
significantly, as we have seen above.
Another important determinant of the rate of profit, according to
Marxian theory, which Marx himself did not emphasise, but which
seems to have been important in the postwar US economy, is the
ratio between productive labour and unproductive labour in the
capitalist economy. According to Marxian theory, profit is not
produced by all employees in capitalist firms, but only by workers
engaged directly or indirectly in production activities (actually
making or designing or transporting something), which Marx called
‘productive labour’. There are two other main groups of employees
who are not engaged in production activities, which Marx called
‘unproductive labour’: ‘sales’ employees (sales and purchasing,
accounting, advertising, finance, etc.) and ‘supervisory’ employees
(managers, supervisors, ‘bosses’ in general). These two groups of
unproductive labour, although entirely necessary within capitalist
firms, nonetheless do not themselves produce value and profit (see
Chapter 2 and Moseley 1991, ch. 2, for a further discussion of Marx’s
concepts of productive and unproductive labour).
According to Marxian theory, if unproductive labour (which does
not produce profit) increases faster than productive labour (which
does produce profit), this will also cause the rate of profit to fall,
because costs are increasing, but profit is not, for the economy as a
whole. This is what happened in the postwar US economy: the ratio
of unproductive labour to productive labour almost doubled during
the ‘golden age’, and this very significant increase contributed to the
decline in the rate of profit. This increase in the ratio of unproduc-
tive labour to productive labour also seems to have been due in large
part to technological change, which increased the productivity of
production workers more rapidly than that of non-production
workers, and which therefore required more and more sales workers
to sell the more rapidly increasing output of production workers (see
218 Anti-Capitalism
Moseley 1991, ch. 5, for a further discussion of the causes of the

relative increase of unproductive labour).3
Therefore, according to the Marxian theory presented here, there
were two main causes of the decline of the rate of profit in the
postwar US economy from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s: an
increase in the capital invested per worker, and an increase in the
ratio of unproductive labour to productive labour. According to my
estimates, these two trends contributed roughly equally to the total
decline in the rate of profit during this period (see Moseley 1991, ch.
4). Both of these causes were themselves the result of technological
change, an inherent feature of capitalist economies. Therefore, the
decline of the rate of profit in the postwar US economy was not due
to accidental, external causes (‘exogenous shocks’), but was instead
due to the inherent dynamic of technological change. It is an inter-
esting and important question whether this Marxian explanation of
the stagflation of recent decades also applies to other advanced
countries. My conjecture is that it does.4
WHAT IS NECESSARY TO INCREASE THE RATE OF PROFIT?

What does the Marxian theory presented above imply about what
must be done in order to increase the rate of profit, and thereby
make possible a revival of capital investment and a return to the
more prosperous conditions of the ‘golden age’? According to this
Marxian theory, the rate of profit varies directly with the profit per
worker, and varies inversely with the capital per worker and the ratio
of unproductive labour to productive labour. Therefore, there are
three main ways to increase the rate of profit: (a) increase the profit
per worker, (b) reduce the capital per worker, and (c) reduce the ratio
of unproductive labour to productive labour.
Marxian theory suggests further that an increase in the profit
produced per worker (by means of wage-cuts, speed-ups, etc.) is not
likely by itself to be sufficient to restore the rate of profit to its
previous levels, since the prior decline in the rate of profit was not
caused by a decline in the profit per worker, but was instead caused
by increases in the capital per worker and in the ratio of unproduc-
tive labour to productive labour. We have already seen that a
significant increase in profit per worker in recent decades has
resulted in a relatively small increase in the rate of profit. Marxian
theory suggests that what is required to fully restore the rate of profit
is to reverse the two trends that caused its decline, i.e. to reduce the
capital invested per worker and to reduce the ratio of unproductive

labour to productive labour.5
The main way capital per worker has been reduced in the past has
been through the widespread bankruptcies of capitalist firms, which
are caused by the combination of falling profits and rising debts. As
a result of bankruptcies, surviving firms are able to purchase the
productive assets of the bankrupt firms at a very low price, thereby
reducing the amount of capital invested per worker and raising their
rate of profit. This process of bankruptcies, etc (which Marx called
the ‘devaluation of capital’) continues until the capital per worker
has been reduced enough and the rate of profit increased enough in
the economy as a whole for capital investment to resume and for a
period of recovery and expansion to begin. Of course, widespread
bankruptcies also worsen the economy in the short run, and many
times in the past have turned a recession into a depression.
The main way to reduce the ratio of unproductive labour to
productive labour would be to lay off large numbers of non-
production employees (sales, managers, etc.). Leaving aside the
questions of whether such a large reduction of non-production
employees is feasible in the US economy today, and how it would be
brought about, such a large displacement of non-production
employees would sharply increase the rate of unemployment,
especially among these occupations. Thus we can see that all the
various ways in which the rate of profit could be increased (wage-
cuts, bankruptcies, lay-offs, etc.) involve hardships and declining
living standards for workers.
Since the mid-1970s, as discussed above, profit per worker has
increased significantly (through wage cuts, etc.) and this has indeed
contributed to an increase in the rate of profit (while at the same
time contributing to an increase in the hardships of workers).
However, the other two crucial adjustments necessary to increase
the rate of profit have not yet happened in the US economy. The
capital invested per worker has remained more or less constant (first
decreasing in the 1980s and then increasing in the 1990s) and the
ratio of unproductive labour to productive labour has continued to
increase (although at a slower rate) and thus has continued to have
a negative effect on the rate of profit. This is the main reason why
the rate of profit has increased so little since the 1970s, in spite of
the significant increase in the profit produced per worker (see
Moseley 1997 for a further discussion of the trends in these key
variables since the 1970s).
220 Anti-Capitalism
WHAT LIES AHEAD?

What does this Marxian theory imply about the future course of
events in the US (and world) economy? In the first place, this theory
implies that the future of the US economy, like its past, will depend
mainly on the rate of profit. If the rate of profit increases signifi-
cantly, then perhaps the US economy will return to the more
prosperous days of the early postwar ‘golden age’. However, if the
rate of profit remains at the current low levels, then a return to
prosperity is not very likely. Instead, the US economy will continue
to experience sub-par growth and higher unemployment, and
perhaps even worse.
Furthermore, this theory suggests that the future trend of the rate
of profit depends on the three main factors discussed above: the
profit produced per worker, the capital invested per worker, and the
ratio of unproductive labour to productive labour. Profit per worker
will probably continue to increase as in recent years (as slow growth
and higher unemployment continue to put downward pressure on
wages), which will continue to have a positive effect on the rate of
profit. Further, if the economy continues to expand (although
slowly), then the capital per worker will probably also increase slowly,
which will have a negative effect on the rate of profit. And the ratio
of unproductive labour to productive labour will probably continue
to increase, which would continue to have a negative effect on the
rate of profit. The net effect of these opposing trends is difficult to
predict with precision, but extrapolating from the recent past, it does
not appear very likely that there will be a significant increase in the
rate of profit in the foreseeable future. In the absence of such an
increase in the rate of profit, the US economy will at best remain stuck
in the stagnation of recent decades (see Moseley 1999 for a further
discussion of the likely future trends in these key variables).
Furthermore, according to Marxian theory, there is not much the
government can do to avoid this gloomy prospect, because there is
not much that government economic policies can do to increase the
rate of profit. Expansionary fiscal and monetary policies do not
increase the profit produced per worker, nor reduce the capital
invested per worker, nor reduce the relative proportion of unpro-
ductive labour. Therefore, even though expansionary and monetary
policies may provide a temporary boost for the economy, they are
not able to achieve the necessary precondition for a return to a new
era of prosperity: a significant increase in the rate of profit.
As this is written, six months after 11 September 2001, the US

economy is falling again into recession, which threatens to be severe.
This recession has not been caused by the September attacks, but
rather by a rapid decline in the rate of profit since 1997 (see Figure
16.1), which has led to a sharp reduction in capital investment
beginning in 2000, and then to a spreading recession in recent
months (even before 11 September). Also, capitalist firms contracted
record amounts of debt in recent years in order to finance the
‘investment boom’ of the late 1990s (and also to help finance the
stock market boom of the late 1990s, as firms used about half of the
money they borrowed to repurchase their own stock!). This combi-
nation of low profits and high debt makes the risk of defaults and
bankruptcies today the highest in the postwar period. Also,
households have taken on record levels of debt to finance their
‘consumer spending spree’ of the late nineties, and they too face a
higher danger of defaults and bankruptcies, which would further
worsen the recession.
Another important aspect of the current recession is that the other
two major economies in the world are also either in recession (Japan,
which has been mostly in recession for the last decade), or falling
into one (Europe). This synchronised recession of the three major
economies will in turn have devastating effects on the rest of the
world, especially developing countries, who depend very much on
exports to the three main economies. Most of the rest of the world
– Asia, Latin America and Africa – is already in a deepening recession,
as a result of the slowdown of the major economies (e.g. Mexico,
which sells 85 per cent of its exports to the United States, has been
in a recession for over a year). The ‘Asian crisis’ has returned, this
time without the capital flight and currency crises, but probably even
worse in terms of GDP declines and higher unemployment, because
the major economies are also in a recession this time (there is no ‘US
locomotive’ to pull these countries out of recession this time). This
will be the first global recession in the world economy as a whole
since the Great Depression.
Whether the current global recession turns into global depression
cannot be predicted with precision. But if Marx’s theory (and
history) is any guide, the postwar period of declining profitability
and increasing debt will eventually be followed by a period of
depression, characterised by significant and widespread bankrupt-
cies which will eventually raise the rate of profit for surviving firms
and eliminate much of the existing debt, thereby creating the
222 Anti-Capitalism
conditions for another period of expansion and prosperity. In other

words, a return to prosperity requires a prior depression. It may be
possible to continue to avoid such a depression for a few more years;
but without such a depression, Marxian theory suggests that a return
to the more prosperous conditions of the early postwar ‘golden age’
is not very likely.
Such a worsening crisis of global capitalism would inflict great
suffering – loss of jobs, lower incomes, greater hunger and poverty,
greater anxiety and desperation, etc. – on the world’s working
population, especially in developing countries. How would workers
around the world and in the United States respond to this
widespread and increasing misery? In seems likely that in the next
few years workers all over the world will be forced to choose between
passively accepting higher unemployment and lower living
standards or actively resisting these hardships and striving to defend
their economic livelihood. It is possible that, as economic conditions
deteriorate, these struggles by workers to maintain their living
standards within a capitalism in crisis will lead more and more of
them to call into question capitalism itself, and the adequacy of
capitalism to meet their basic economic needs. If capitalism requires
these attacks on our economic livelihood, then perhaps there is a
better economic system that does not require such attacks and which
could better satisfy our economic needs and wants.

Freeman, A. (1991) ‘National Accounts in Value Terms: The Social Wage and
the Profit Rate in Britain, 1950–1986’, in P. Dunne (ed.) Quantitative
Marxism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Moseley, F. (1991) The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States
Economy. London: Macmillan.
Moseley, F. (1997) ‘The Rate of Profit and the Future of Capitalism’, Review
of Radical Political Economics 29(4), pp. 23–41.
Moseley, F. (1999) ‘The US Economy at the Turn of the Century: Entering a
New Era of Prosperity?’, Capital and Class 67, pp. 25–45.
NOTES
1. The rest of the world has experienced a similar deterioration of economic
performance in recent decades. The rate of unemployment has been
above 10 per cent in Europe for most of the 1990s. Japan has been in a
prolonged economic slump for over a decade. The other Asian economies
have also fallen into crisis in recent years. Economic conditions have been
especially severe in Latin America and Africa, which have suffered two
‘lost decades’, in which growth has been stagnant and living standards
have declined drastically.
2. Total profit includes the interest paid to creditors, and hence is a com-
prehensive measure of the total ‘return to capital’ for capital as a whole,
including both non-financial and financial capital.
3. In chapter 15, Paul Zarembka presents a very different interpretation of
the effects of an increase of unproductive labour. Zarembka argues that
an increase of unproductive labour solves the problem of the realisation of
surplus value which is inherent in capital accumulation. In my interpreta-
tion, for which there is considerable textual evidence (see Moseley 1991,
ch. 2), unproductive labour is a cost, a deduction from surplus value.
Therefore, an increase of unproductive labour, in relation to productive
labour that produces surplus value, increases the relative deductions from
surplus value, and hence causes the net rate of profit going to capitalists
to decline. In other words, a relative increase of unproductive labour is an
important cause of capitalist crises, not a solution to capitalist crises.
Zarembka also argues that the question of a secular decline in the rate of
profit is no longer of theoretical interest: ‘And, while falling profits in the
first half of the nineteenth century encouraged economists to see this as
a fact requiring explanation, a century and a half later of rising, falling,
rising, falling (etc.) rates of profit pushes into the background even
searching theoretically for a tendency in profit rates.’ However, the all-
important fact is that the rate of profit in the US economy (and other
major capitalist countries) declined significantly (about 50 per cent) in the
1960s and 1970s, and has not recovered since. I have argued above that
this significant decline in the rate of profit was the main cause of the dete-
rioration of economic performance since the 1960s. Therefore, the
explanation of this significant decline in the rate of profit is a very
important question, both theoretically and practically. It may be that
Marx’s theory cannot prove that there is a long-term, secular decline in
the rate of profit over centuries (I don’t think that is what Marx was trying
to do). But Marx’s theory does provide an explanation of the long-term
decline in the rate of profit in the postwar US economy (and I think other
economies as well). According to this Marxian explanation, the decline
in the rate of profit was caused in part by the relative increase of unpro-
ductive labour. Therefore, the relative increase of unproductive labour in
the postwar US economy was a big problem for capitalism, not a solution
to the realisation problem.
4. For a similar explanation of the decline in the rate of profit in the postwar
UK economy, see Freeman (1991).
5. Japan has been in a prolonged slump for the entire decade of the 1990s,
and has fallen again during 2002 into even deeper recession. According to
Marxian theory, the main reasons for this prolonged slump are: a signif-
icant decline in the rate of profit and the unwillingness (or inability) of
Japanese banks to force money-losing firms into bankruptcy. The Japanese
experience seems to suggest, in support of Marxian theory, that these
bankruptcies cannot be avoided.
17 Where is Class Struggle?
John Holloway
WHERE IS CLASS STRUGGLE TODAY?

Perhaps the commonest argument against Marxist theory today is
not that it is wrong in its criticism of capitalism but that it is wrong
in insisting on the importance of class struggle. The evils of
capitalism are plain for all to see, but where is the class struggle that
Marxists keep talking about? Struggle certainly, struggle there is: the
struggles of the anti-globalisation movement from Seattle to Genoa,
the struggles of the Zapatistas in Mexico or of the landless peasants
in Brazil, the struggles of women and gays against discrimination,
the struggles to protect the environment, even the spectacular protest
of the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Centre.
Struggle is easy to see, but is it class struggle? Where has the labour
movement been in the last 20 or 30 years? Certainly not leading the
revolution. Is it not better then to stop talking about class struggle
and to speak of new social actors or simply of ‘the multitude’?
This chapter argues that class struggle has probably never been so
vicious and violent as it is today.
THE EXISTENCE OF CAPITAL IS CLASS STRUGGLE

But no, we must go back before that. Why start with capital, why
not with racism or patriarchy? Are there not lots of different types
of oppression?
Let’s not start with capital, then. Let’s start with ourselves. We
want to change the world. We want to change the world because it
stinks, because it is obscenely unjust, because it is violent, because,
the way society is organised at the moment, it looks as if humanity
will probably destroy itself before very long. (If you don’t want to
change the world, go and read a different book.)
Changing the world implies doing. If we want to change society,
then we must think of society not as-it-is, but as something that
people have made and that people can change. We must think of
ourselves as doers, not as beings. This is sometimes referred to as
materialism, or even dialectical materialism: what Marx means by
materialism is basically understanding society in terms of human
224
Where is Class Struggle? 225
doing, ‘sensuous human activity, practice’ (Marx 1976, p. 3, ‘First

Thesis on Feuerbach’).
Doing is central to any revolutionary project, to any project of
changing the world. That is why revolutionary thought means
thinking of society in terms of doing. This is not just a call to action,
to rushing out in the street and doing something. It means first
trying to understand society (and our own repudiation of present
society) in terms of the way that human doing, human activity, is
organised.
When we think of our doing, our activity, one of the first things
that strikes us is that it is social. It is difficult to think of any activity
that does not depend on the doing of others, either now or in the
past. I sit here writing and think of it perhaps as my great individual
act, but I know that without the doing of the people who made the
computer, installed the electricity, built the building, made the desk,
wrote all those other books that have influenced me, I could not be
writing what I am writing. The doing of others is always the pre-
condition of our own doing, the means of our doing; and our doing
becomes the means of the doing of others. Our doing is always part
of a social flow of doing.
Our doing is not only social, it is also projective. An aspect of our
doing is the aim to change, to make things other than they are. Our
doing includes a projection beyond that which is. This projection-
beyond is fundamental to any idea of changing the world. For Marx,
it was also the characteristic that distinguished humans from
animals – or from machines, we might add. In a famous passage in
Capital, he contrasts the architect and the bee: ‘A spider conducts
operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame
many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distin-
guishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the
architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in
reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already
existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He
not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works,
but he also realises a purpose of his own’ (1965, p. 178).
What happens to doing in capitalism? Somebody comes along,
takes what we have done and says ‘this is mine’. The capitalist (and
the feudal lord and the slave-owner before him, but let us focus on
the capitalist) appropriates that which we have done, the product of
our work (see Chapter 1).
226 Anti-Capitalism
This shatters doing. The capitalist, by appropriating the product,

shatters the social flow of doing. (Oh, he may conceivably be a very
nice man, or possibly woman, and this is not a very nice thing to
do, but if he doesn’t do it, he won’t be a capitalist: that’s what Marx
means by talking of capitalists as the ‘personifications of capital’).
What we have done becomes his property. He now owns the means
of doing of others – the means of production, in other words. In
order for others to do (and to survive) they must get access to the
means of production: this they do by selling their labour power
(their capacity to do) to the owner of the means of production. Their
doing is now converted into labour at the command of the capitalist,
labour which produces commodities which are, of course, the
capitalist’s property and which he can sell on the market.
The direct connection between our doing and the doing of others
is broken. Of course, our doing is still part of a social flow of doing,
but it does not appear that way. Now my writing appears as an
individual act in which I use a number of things (computer, electric-
ity, desk, and so on), for which I have paid money, commodities
which I buy on the market. Our doing is social, but is not directly
social: it is indirectly social.
The social flow of doing is broken, and so too is the projective
character of doing. It is now the capitalist, the owner of the means
of production to whom the worker sells her labour power, who
decides what the worker will do. The conception or projection is now
the activity of the capitalist, the execution is left to the worker. With
that, the worker is reduced to the status of a bee, having been
deprived of the projection which is the distinctive character of
humans. This does not just happen once, it is a repeated process.
Since the capitalist appropriates the product of the labour, the
worker leaves the labour process just as poor as she entered, just as
dependent on the kindness of the capitalist in employing her the
next day. The capitalist, on the other hand, gets richer and richer,
since the product produced by the worker is worth more than what
the capitalist has paid her for her labour power. The capitalist, in
other words, exploits the worker, extracts more value from the
worker than he pays her.
SO WHAT?
We started with interesting things like the Zapatistas and the World
Trade Centre, and now the argument seems to be dragging us into
the factory, dragging us towards some sort of economic theory of

society. That’s the problem with Marxism, isn’t it?
No, no you didn’t understand. Or perhaps I didn’t explain. Doing
is not in itself economic. It is lying in bed, making dinner, eating,
writing articles, doing essays, making love, going on a demonstra-
tion, making a chair, producing electricity, making a car, whatever.
It is the existence of capitalism that defines a major part of our doing
as labour, as an ‘economic’ activity. It is the fact that our only access
to the means of survival is through money and our only way of
getting money is by selling our labour power and turning a big part
of our daily doing into labour at the command of others – that is what
puts ‘economics’ at the centre of our lives. But though the critique of
capitalism is not an economic critique, it is necessarily a critique of
economics. That is why Marx in Capital did not develop an alterna-
tive economics but a critique of economics (or a critique of political
economy). The struggle is to emancipate doing from labour, life from
economics. That is why our analysis cannot start from labour, but
must begin with doing, ‘sensuous human activity, practice’.
Doing, then, in capitalism, is a shattered, fragmented, separated
process. ‘Separation’, says Marx, is the ‘real generation process of
capital’ (1972, p. 422). Capital is the separation of the vast majority
of people from the means of doing (means of production), the
separation of the product from the producers, the separation of
people from purposive social activity (their ‘species-being’, as Marx
puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts), the separation of people from one
another, the separation of ‘labour’ from other forms of activity. This
separation affects absolutely every aspect of our lives. The doing
which is separated off from labour is affected, for it is defined as
leisure, as secondary, as not very serious – ‘I don’t do anything, I’m
just a housewife’, or ‘I don’t do anything at the moment, I’m
unemployed’. The doing which creates the conditions for the doing
of others is now seen as producing ‘things’ for others to buy. The
relations between people thus become refracted through things; they
become reified or fetishised, as Marx puts it in the first chapter of
Capital. The way in which we relate to the doing of others is through
the exchange of things. Social relations acquire the form of things
(such as money, commodities, capital, the state) which we do not
recognise as forms of social relations, nor as the product of our own
doing. Fetishism does not refer just to the economic, to the
appearance of social relations in economic forms, but to every aspect
of society, every aspect of the way in which we see our own lives and
228 Anti-Capitalism
our relations to others. Every aspect of our doing is transformed by

that fundamental rupture of the social flow of doing, that separation
process which is capital.
And how does the separation take place? Through struggle, of
course. It does not take place automatically. Think of what the
capitalist says to us each day. He says ‘all of these wonderful things
that you see around you, all these things that you would like to have
in order to survive, all these things that you would like to enjoy, all
of that is private property, all that is mine. If you want to enjoy any
of these things, you can do so by earning money. But in order to get
money, you must give up any idea of spending your days doing what
you like: you must come and labour for me and, if you do what I tell
you, then I shall give you money so that you can buy some of these
things. But, mind you, I shall only give you enough money to keep
you going for a short time, tomorrow you must come back and
labour for me again. And of course I shall employ you only as long
as I manage to exploit you successfully and make a profit from
employing you’. He says all this as though it were obvious, but of
course it is not. Think of the poor capitalist. In order to carry through
his existence as a capitalist, he must persuade or force us to accept
what he says when he says ‘this is mine’: he must force us to respect
his private property. This is not done easily: it requires the services
of millions of police and security guards, not to mention teachers,
social workers and parents. Then he must persuade or force us to
accept the horrifying, absurd idea that we should turn our daily
doing into labour under his command. In general terms, he does this
by protecting his private property, but he still has to get us up early
in the morning (never an easy task, especially when the prospect is
going to work at the command of others), and get us to go to work
and to do what he commands and do it efficiently (more efficiently
than his fellow capitalists, with whom he has to compete).
All this is not easy. It is made more complicated by the fact that
we are not slaves or serfs. We are free. ‘Ha ha!’, you laugh, ‘free to
obey the command of the capitalist’. Yes, certainly, but also, as a
result of the struggles of slaves and serfs, really free in a way that is
sometimes inconvenient for the capitalist. He cannot stop us from
going and selling our labour power to a different capitalist if we get
tired of him. He also cannot (usually) shoot us or flog us if we do
not obey his commands at work. In other words, unlike the feudal
lords, the capitalists require the support of an apparently external
instance in order to apply the sort of violence that is required to
maintain a system of exploitation. This is the state. The separation

of state and society, the political and the economic, is another, very
important aspect of the separation process which is capital. The state,
as part of the process of separation, regulates the process of
separation as best it can: it protects the separation of done from
doing, the ‘this is mine!’ of private property which ruptures
everything. All systems of exploitation are armed robbery; what is
peculiar about capitalism is that the person who holds the arms is
distinct from the person who does the robbing (see Chapter 9).
All of this is struggle. Of course it is. It is struggle over what we
think, how we act, struggle over how we get up in the morning and
therefore over what time we go to bed and what we do in bed, it is
the struggle of the alarm clock, as we throw it at the wall and then
still get up to go and sell our labour power. It is an extremely violent
struggle in which thousands and thousands of people die each day,
because they are cut off from the flow of doing and starve, because
of the repression against those who do not accept the ‘this is mine!’
proclaimed by the capitalists, because what they are commanded to
do by capital is dangerous. It is a struggle that comes in the first
place from them, from the capitalists. If it were up to us, we would
lie in bed or potter about all day or dedicate ourselves with passion
to whatever we like to do. It is they who do not leave us in peace, it
is they who say ‘get up out of bed and come to labour for us – or
starve, if you prefer’. The struggle, then, is between two ways of
doing, two forms of social relations. Capital is the imposition on our
lives of a certain form of doing, a certain form of relating to one
another. Capital is the struggle both to transform our doing into
labour and also, once we are in the place of work, to get us to work
as capital commands.
And of course we struggle back. We struggle back because we are
not yet machines. We struggle back by throwing the alarm clock at
the wall, by going to bed late even when we know it will impair our
efficiency at work the next day, we struggle back by giving higher
priority to playing with our children than to producing profit, we
struggle back by fighting for higher wages at work or by fighting for
more acceptable conditions, we struggle back when we demonstrate
against the misery created by the imposition of private property, we
struggle back by projecting beyond capitalism, by dreaming of a
better society, a society in which we ourselves decide what we do.
We struggle in the workplace and outside the workplace. We struggle
for a different way of doing, a different form of social relations.
230 Anti-Capitalism
THIS, THEN, IS CLASS STRUGGLE

It is class struggle not because we wear cloth caps. It is class struggle
not because we think of ourselves as being left-wing, but just because
we live and want to live: if class struggle were exclusive to the left or
the consciously militant, there would be no hope. It is class struggle
not because we want to be the working class, but because we don’t
want to be working class. On our part, it is struggle not for being a
class but against being a class. It is capital that classifies us. It is
capital that says to us each day, ‘you are without property, you must
come and work for us; and then you will go home without property
and come back the next day, and so on for the rest of your life, and
so on for the lives of your children and of their children’. It is capital
that ensures that each day what is produced in the factory is not just
commodities but two classes. As Marx puts it, ‘capitalist production,
therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a
process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only
surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist
relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-
labourer’ (1965, p. 578). Capitalist production produces classes,
imposes discipline and regimentation, forces our doing into the
narrow band of labour that produces profit for the capitalist (or
labour that supports capitalist profitability, in the case of state
employment). Capital is grey, we are the rainbow, fighting for a
world in which doing becomes free, liberated from the bonds of
value production, from the chains of profit.
The existence of capital, then, is class struggle: the daily repeated
separation of people from the social flow of doing, the daily repeated
enforcement of private property, the daily repeated transformation
of doing into labour at the command of capital, the daily repeated
seizure of the products of that labour. It is class struggle but it does
not appear as such. It does not appear to be class struggle (or indeed
struggle at all) because of the very nature of the struggle itself.
Capital’s struggle is to separate doers from the social flow of doing,
but that very separation means that people no longer understand
themselves as doers, nor as social. The separation means that people
appear as individuals and as beings rather than as doers. The more
successful capitalist class struggle is, the more invisible it becomes:
people are transformed from doers bound together by the
community of their doing into free and equal individuals tied
together by external institutions such as the state. Capitalist class
struggle takes place through apparently neutral forms such as

property, money, law, state. These are all forms through which
capital as a form of doing is imposed upon our lives. Capital does
not say ‘we are going to exploit you, we are going to force you to
labour for us until you crawl home exhausted at the end of the day,
and then we are going to force you to come back and back for the
rest of your life’. No, capital simply says a number of key words:
‘Respect private property, the money, the law’. When it says ‘respect
private property’, what it means is ‘stand aside while we separate you
from the means of doing and of survival’. ‘Respect money’ means
‘just let us get on with shattering all social relations, with mediating
all relations between people through money’. And respecting the law
means that we should give up all idea of shaping our own doing,
that all activity must be made to conform with the acceptance of
private property, that we must bow to an external force. Capitalist
class struggle comes clothed in liberal theory.
Capital cannot stand still. Under feudalism, the relations of
exploitation were more or less stable: what the lord demanded of his
serfs did not vary very much over time. It is different with capital.
Capital is driven forward constantly by its ‘were-wolf’s hunger for
surplus-labour’ (Marx 1965, p. 243). The fact that capital is
fragmented into many distinct capitalist units (companies), each in
competition with the others, each depending for its survival on
being able to exploit its workers more effectively than the others,
means that capital can never stand still, that it is constantly driven
forward to intensify the exploitation of labour. Intensifying exploita-
tion means not only imposing tighter discipline in the factory but
creating the conditions in society (that is, the world) that make this
exploitation easier. This means subordinating every aspect of life
more and more tightly to the aims of value production. More and
more intensely, every aspect of life becomes a battleground for the
imposition of capital, a battleground on which we resist and try to
defend and develop what we consider to be human or emancipa-
tory. In education, for example, recent years have seen a huge assault
in all parts of the world to bring teaching into line with the require-
ments of the market (that is, with capital). Sometimes, this takes the
form of outright privatisation, allowing the content of education to
be dictated directly by the market, sometimes it means the intro-
duction of various forms of control within the state system of
education to achieve the same end. Of course that assault meets
constant resistance, either in the form of student strikes or, far less
232 Anti-Capitalism
dramatically, in the form of teachers and students pushing beyond

market requirements in the attempt to develop an honest and critical
understanding. Sometimes it takes the form of teachers writing or
recommending and students reading books like this one and
suddenly finding that, just when they thought that class struggle
was dead, they are in the middle of it.
CAPITAL HAS BEEN PARTICULARLY VIOLENT IN RECENT YEARS

The violence stems from the curse that strikes all who try to
dominate and exploit: they depend absolutely upon those whom
they exploit and dominate. Capital depends for its existence on its
capacity to transform doing into labour and to exploit that labour.
Not just that: it depends for its existence, as we have just seen, not
just on being able to maintain exploitation but on being able to
intensify it all the time. It needs not just to subordinate society, but
to subordinate it more and more and more. If it cannot do so, it falls
into crisis. The crisis tells capital that in order to survive, it must
intensify subordination. In the 1970s, capital was manifestly in crisis,
socially and economically. The weakness of subordination was
obvious in society from the late 1960s: strikes, demonstrations,
student movements, revolutionary movements in many parts of the
world. The failure to subordinate became economically manifest in
the worldwide crisis which broke in 1973–74. The response of capital
came in various forms (emphasis on a return to traditional family
values, increasing police and in some cases military action), but
above all it took the form of money and property.
Money has been central to class struggle over the last 25 years or
so. First, in the early years of Reagan and Thatcher, tight monetary
policies were applied as a means of reducing debt and imposing the
discipline of the market. When this strategy threatened to destroy
the world financial system, a more flexible approach to debt was
adopted, allowing more spending to those (basically big companies,
rich people and rich states) whose well-being was considered essential
to the health of capitalism, while using debt as a means of disciplin-
ing those who required discipline (basically the poor) or were simply
disposable (a large part of the world’s population is not an ‘industrial
reserve army’ for capital in any sense, but simply a nuisance).
The extension of property has also been important to capital’s
struggle. Just as, in the early days of capitalism, landowners pushed
the peasants off the land, enclosed the land and said ‘this is mine’,
so capital is now enclosing more and more areas of human activity
and saying ‘this is my property, this is mine’. The development of

the concept of ‘intellectual property’ has been crucial in this. Capital
spends enormous sums of money on trying to assert its property
rights over music, software, pharmaceutical discoveries, genes and
so on. In many parts of the world this extension of property rights
has been carried out with a remarkable violence, as the traditional
agricultural or medicinal knowledge of communities has been
appropriated by capitalist enterprises, which patent the knowledge
without any compensation and then enforce their property rights
against all comers, including the communities themselves.
Money and property are very violent forms of struggle. They have
undoubtedly caused far more deaths in the last twenty years than
all the wars fought in the last hundred. Each day 35,000 children die
simply because property and money separate them from what they
need to survive. But they are also remarkably vulnerable forms of
struggle. Money, especially in the form of debt, is contested all the
time, both by those who will not pay and by those who point to the
enormous destruction of human lives that the enforcement of debt
involves. Property, especially intellectual property, is also contested
almost universally – both by those who habitually copy software,
videos and CDs, and by those who campaign against the misery
caused to AIDS sufferers, for example, by the protection of pharma-
ceutical patents. Both of these issues have been important features
of the anti-capitalist movement of recent years.
Is this class struggle? Of course it is. Why not refer to it just as a
multiplicity of struggles by new social actors or by the ‘multitude’?
Because the concept of class points to the fact that behind the
particular issues (AIDS in Africa, copying music from the internet,
student loans, poverty in Latin America) there is a single struggle: the
struggle by capital for profit, that is, the struggle by capital to exploit,
to convert doing into labour and impose its form of social relations,
and the struggle by us against all that, for a different form of doing,
a society based on the recognition of human dignity. Class points to
that underlying unity in a way that the other categories do not. It
also points to something else that is fundamental: there is no
certainty that we shall win, that humanity will survive the attacks of
capital, but the concept of class gives us hope, for it shows that capital
depends upon us for its existence, that we are the only subjects.

Bloch, E. (1993) The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
234 Anti-Capitalism
Bonefeld, W. and Holloway, J. (eds.) (1995) Global Capital, National State and
the Politics of Money. London: Macmillan.
Dinerstein, A. and Neary, M. (eds.) (2002) The Labour Debate. London:
Ashgate.
Holloway, J. (2002) Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto
Press.
Marx, K. (1976) Theses on Feuerbach, Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 5.
London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Marx, K. (1965) Capital, vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, K. (1972) Theories of Surplus Value, part 3. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Marx, K. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (any edition).
Marx, K. Capital (any edition).
Smith, C. (1996) Marx at the Millennium. London: Pluto Press.
18 Transcending Capitalism:
The Adequacy of Marx’s
Recipe
Michael Lebowitz
THE VISION OF AN ALTERNATIVE

In the ‘Postface to the Second Edition’ of Volume 1 of Capital, Marx
mocked a French reviewer of the first edition who criticised him, he
said, for not ‘writing recipes … for the cook-shops of future’ (Marx
1977, p. 99).1 Although he did not respond here, Marx’s answer
would be apparent from his comments elsewhere about utopian
socialists who merely constructed ‘fantastic pictures and plans of a
new society’. While not rejecting the goals of the utopians, Marx
stressed that the means of achieving them were not through
propaganda and exhortation; rather, workers through their struggles
would bring about a new society: ‘the real conditions of the
movement are no longer clouded in utopian fables’ (Marx and Engels
1971, p. 166).
Nevertheless, Marx did have a clear conception of an alternative
to capitalism. His goal, like that of other early socialists, was the
creation of a society that would allow for the full development of
human potential and capacity. As his associate Friedrich Engels
wrote in an early draft of the Communist Manifesto (‘Draft of a
Communist Confession of Faith’), the goal of the Communists is ‘to
organise society in such a way that every member of it can develop
and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and
without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society’.
Marx’s final version of the Manifesto stresses the indivisibility of this
goal, calling for ‘an association, in which the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all’.
At the very heart of Marx’s conception of the society of free and
associated producers was the removal of all fetters to human beings
– just as the stunting of human potential and the tendency to reduce
human beings to beasts of burden and things was at the core of his
rejection of capitalism. From his earliest writings, Marx stressed the
235
236 Anti-Capitalism
potential for the development of rich human beings with rich human
needs, the potential for producing human beings as rich as possible
in needs and capabilities. What, indeed, is wealth, he asked, ‘other
than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures,
productive forces…?’ The goal of human development is the ‘devel-
opment of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production
as in its consumption’. Thus, the growth of human wealth is ‘the
absolute working-out of his creative potentialities’, the ‘development
of all human powers as such the end in itself’. Within capitalism,
however, the goal of capital is definitely not the development of that
potential. Rather, as Marx wrote in Capital (1977, p. 772), the worker
exists to satisfy the capitalist’s need to increase the value of his capital
‘as opposed to the inverse situation in which objective wealth is there
to satisfy the worker’s own need for development’.
In the co-operative society based upon common ownership of the
means of production that Marx envisioned, the all-sided develop-
ment of people would be based upon ‘the subordination of their
communal, social productivity as their social wealth’, and their
productive activity would flow from a unity and solidarity based
upon recognition of their differences. Thus, the human community
would be presupposed as the basis of production, and characteristic
of this relation of associated producers would be that they expend
‘their many different forms of labour power in full self-awareness as
one single social labour force’ (1977, p. 171). As a result of the focus
upon human beings, increased productivity would come not at the
expense of workers but would translate into the greater satisfaction
of needs and free time – which ‘corresponds to the artistic, scientific,
etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with
the means created, for all of them’. It would be ‘time for the full
development of the individual, which in turn reacts back on the
productive power of labour itself as itself the greatest productive
power’. All the springs of co-operative wealth would flow more
abundantly, and the real products of this society of freely associated
producers would be human beings able to develop their full potential
in a human society.
THE PRODUCTS OF CAPITAL

But how do you get there? Some people look forward to the crises of
capitalism in the expectation that their onset will lead workers to
rise up in all their glory. They should read Marx more closely. No
Transcending Capitalism: The Adequacy of Marx’s Recipe 237
one was more aware than Marx of capital’s strength and its
domination of workers.
Marx understood quite well that the very nature of the wage-
labour relation within capitalism produces workers who are
conscious of their dependence upon capital. Having yielded to
capital his ‘creative power, like Esau his birthright for a mess of
pottage’, the worker looks upon capital as ‘a very mystical being’
because it appears as the source of all productivity. ‘All the
productive forces of social labour appear attributable to it, and not
to labour as such, as a power springing forth from its own womb.’
Indeed, as Marx commented, the transposition of ‘the social pro-
ductivity of labour into the material attributes of capital is so firmly
entrenched in people’s minds that the advantages of machinery, the
use of science, invention, etc. are necessarily conceived in this
alienated form, so that all these things are deemed to be the attributes
of capital’ (Marx 1977, p. 1058). Wage labour assigns its own
attributes to capital in its mind because the very nature of the
capital–wage labour relation is one in which it does so in reality.
So, it is no accident at all that capital appears as the source of
social productivity or that it looks as if the worker’s well-being
depends upon capital. Within the capital–wage labour relation, the
worker needs capital. The very process of capitalist production
produces and reproduces the working class that capital requires,
workers who consider the necessity for capital to be self-evident:
The advance of capitalist production develops a working class

which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the require-
ments of that mode as self-evident natural laws. The organisation
of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed,
breaks down all resistance. (Marx 1977, p. 899)
Breaks down all resistance. Given Marx’s statement that ‘the great
beauty of capitalist production’ consists in its ability constantly to
replenish the reserve army of labour and thereby to reinforce ‘the
social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indis-
pensable’, how can we possibly talk about transcending capitalism?
(Marx 1977, p. 935). On the contrary, as Marx noted about
developed capitalism:
In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the

‘natural laws of production’, i.e. it is possible to rely on his
238 Anti-Capitalism
dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of

production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.
(Marx 1977, p. 899)
THE PATH BEYOND CAPITAL

So, what did Marx propose in order to bridge the enormous gap
between, on the one hand, workers who look upon the rule of capital
as common sense and, on the other, a society in which associated
producers recognise each other as differing limbs of a collective
worker? For one thing, Marx dedicated himself to demonstrating to
workers through his theoretical work that capital was simply the
workers’ own product turned against them. Precisely because of the
inherent mystification of capital, Marx was determined to demystify
capital, to reveal it to be not an independent source of productivity
but, rather, the result of exploitation. Marx clearly believed that it
was essential that workers grasp that it was the social productivity
of the collective worker rather than capital which should be
celebrated, and he considered this important enough to ‘sacrifice my
health, happiness, and family’ to this end.
In addition to his theoretical work, however, Marx also was the
central figure in the Working Men’s International Association, an
organisation that attempted to bring international unity to workers
in their struggles against capital. The separation among workers
benefits capital. Referring to the antagonism between Irish and
English workers, he argued: ‘It is the secret by which the capitalist
class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it’. These
two elements – challenging the ideological hegemony of capital by
revealing its nature and working for unity in action against capital
– were the ingredients in Marx’s own recipe for transcending
capitalism. Workers may be numerous, he noted in the Inaugural
Address of the International, but they can succeed only ‘if united by
combination and led by knowledge’.
All of this presumed that workers were already engaged in struggle.
Marx understood that workers in general engage regularly in warfare
against capital, sometimes hidden, sometimes open. Not only
because they are defending themselves against capital’s drive for
profits at their expense but also because ‘the worker’s own need for
development’ necessarily pits them against capital. Thus, the attempt
of workers to satisfy socially generated needs for commodities leads
to wage struggles, and their desire for time and energy for themselves
underlies their struggles over the length and intensity of the
workday. There are inherent limits, however, to how much success

is possible from this guerrilla warfare conducted by groups of workers
united in trade unions – given the power of capital as a whole, a
power which rests upon its ownership of the products of labour.
Accordingly, Marx stressed the necessity for further unity as a
class. Look at the Ten Hours’ Bill, ‘the marvellous success of this
working men’s measure’, this victory for ‘the political economy of
the working class’, he declared. Here was a case where, to limit the
workday, workers in England recognised that they had ‘to put their
heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law’ (Marx
1977, p. 416). Where workers do organise to pressure the state in this
way, he commented, ‘the working class do not fortify governmental
power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used
against them, into their own agency’. Indeed, Marx argued, they
could not succeed in limiting the workday otherwise: ‘This very
necessity of general political action affords the proof that in its merely
economic action capital is the stronger side’.
Accordingly, it followed that workers should organise and struggle
to gain political supremacy. This was the message of the Interna-
tional: ‘To conquer political power has therefore become the great
duty of the working classes’. And, this was the message that Marx
and Engels continued to stress in the Communist Manifesto: ‘the first
step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat
to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy’.
But, then what? The Manifesto called for a process of making
‘despotic inroads on the rights of property’, introducing measures
‘which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which,
in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves’. While the
initial steps would not be far-reaching (the list of measures excluded
nationalisation of private industry), the goal would be clear: ‘The
proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all
capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of
production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised
as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as
rapidly as possible’. The key term here is ‘by degrees’. As Engels
indicated in a second draft of the Manifesto (the ‘Principles of
Communism’), ‘to abolish private property at one stroke’ is no more
possible than it is to increase productive forces to the necessary level
at one stroke. The proletarian revolution ‘will transform existing
society only gradually’.
240 Anti-Capitalism
Thus, the picture that emerges from a consideration of the

Manifesto is one involving a lengthy period during which the
workers’ state creates the foundations for a communist society. The
state here is used to restrict the possibilities for the reproduction of
capitalist property relations – while at the same time fostering the
conditions for the emergence of state-owned property. And, the clear
sense is that the process will be self-reinforcing. One measure will
always lead on to the next, and ‘the proletariat will see itself
compelled to go always further’. It is a process, too, that would
continue until such time that productive forces had been sufficiently
developed to allow the last remnants of the old social relations to
fall away. This political rule (or ‘dictatorship’) of the proletariat
would exist within capitalism, and its success was the precondition
for transcending capitalism.
An interesting picture of the organic development of the new
society. Yet, there are two problems related to this scenario – one on
the side of capital and the other on the side of wage labour. As noted,
this process of despotic inroads upon capital is a path of gradualism.
However, as Oskar Lange argued (Lange 1938, pp. 121–9), gradualism
as a strategy ignores the response of capital to encroachments. If cap-
italists know in advance that the plan of the workers’ state is to
‘wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie’, then their
reaction will be predictable – no investment. The result will be crisis.
Capital’s response to ‘despotic inroads’ (and even minor ones) is to
go on strike – which, given the ease with which capital moves in the
modern capitalist world, can occur far more rapidly today than Marx
could have anticipated. When capital goes on strike, the workers’
state has two choices – give in or move in. Thus, Lange (p. 129)
commented that, if a socialist government wants to do more than
the administration of a capitalist economy, the only policy that an
economist can recommend is ‘a policy of revolutionary courage’.
This brings us, however, to a more serious concern about the
Manifesto’s scenario. When we recall Marx’s insights into the way
capital produces workers who ‘by education, tradition and habit’
view its requirements as common sense, why assume that any of the
struggles of workers are struggles to go beyond capital? Although
workers struggle for higher wages and to reduce the length and
intensity of the workday, why should we see this as any other than
an attempt to get what they consider ‘fair’ for themselves within
capitalism? Indeed, where workers attempt to use the state as ‘their
own agency’ within capitalism (even where they have won ‘the
battle of democracy’), that state will be constrained to facilitate

conditions for the expansion of capital – as long as workers continue
to view capital as productive.
In short, as long as workers consider capital’s requirements to be
‘self-evident natural laws’ and continue to function within the
bounds of a relation in which the reproduction of wage labour as
such requires the reproduction of capital, the response to crises –
whether they are the result of economic forces or encroachments
upon capital – will be to ‘give in’ rather than move in. Here, in a
nutshell, is the sorry history of social democracy, which never ceases
to reinforce the capital relation.
How can we reconcile, then, Capital’s understanding of the ‘social
dependence of the worker upon capital’ and the Manifesto’s revolu-
tionary programme?
REVOLUTIONARY PRACTICE
It is essential to understand that Capital is only about the logic of
capital.2 That was its point – to reveal the nature of capital and its
tendencies. There is no place in Capital for living, changing, striving,
enjoying, struggling and developing human beings. People who
produce themselves through their own activities, who change their
nature as they produce, are not the subjects of Capital. But, they are
at the very core of Marx’s understanding of the subjects of change.
Human beings are beings of praxis – they are what they do, and
when they engage in struggle, they transform themselves.
This is what Marx designated in his ‘Third Thesis on Feuerbach’ as
‘revolutionary practice’ – ‘the coincidence of the changing of cir-
cumstances and human activity or self-change’. Marx’s message to
workers, as he would note subsequently, was that you have to go
through years of struggle ‘not only in order to bring about a change
in society but also to change yourselves’. Over 20 years later, too, he
wrote that workers know that ‘they will have to pass through long
struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming cir-
cumstances and men’. Only in motion could people rid themselves
of ‘all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew’.
Thus, when workers struggle for higher wages, struggle against
capital in the workplace and struggle for the satisfaction of their
social needs in general, that very process is one of transforming them
into people with a new conception of themselves – as subjects
capable of altering their world. And, the same is true of the struggle
to make the state the workers’ agency. Not only is this necessary
242 Anti-Capitalism
(because ‘in its merely economic action capital is the stronger side’),
but it is also an essential part of the process by which workers
transcend their local interests and take shape as a class against capital
as a whole. Thus, for example, the struggle to make the state expand
its provision of use values ‘needed for common satisfaction of needs such
as schools, health services, etc.’ both attempts to substitute the state
for capital as a mediator for workers and also unifies workers (skilled
and unskilled, waged and unwaged). In this respect, the struggle for
the state is an essential moment in the process of producing the
working class as a class for itself, an essential moment in the process
of going beyond capital.
But, what kind of state? It is essential to understand that Marx
learned from workers – and never more so than with respect to the
character of the state which workers need to serve them. Following
the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx wrote that the Commune, the
government initiated by the workers of Paris, proved that ‘the
working class can not simply lay hold of the ready-made state
machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’; its particular character
was ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out
the economical emancipation of Labour’. (At last discovered!) In a
word, the commune-form was the form of the ‘dictatorship of the
proletariat’ described in the Manifesto – its purpose was ‘to serve as
a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests
the existence of classes, and therefore of class-rule’ (Marx and Engels
1971, pp. 68, 75).
The working class, Marx argued, could not use the existing type of
state because it was infected – its very institutions involve a
‘systematic and hierarchic division of labour’, and it assumes the
character of ‘a public force organised for social enslavement, of an
engine of class despotism’ (pp. 68–9). How could the working class
use such a state for its own purposes – a state whose very nature was
hierarchy and power over all from above? Rather than being
controlled by workers, such a state would represent the control of
workers, retaining the character of a ‘public force organised for social
enslavement’. That is why Marx stressed that the Commune was a
‘Revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion
of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social
life’. It was ‘the reabsorption of the state power by society as its own
living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the
popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the
organised force of their suppression – the political form of their

social emancipation’ (pp. 152–3).
What, then, was the particular form of rule at last discovered?
Simply, it was a decentralised government composed of councillors
paid workers’ wages and who were recallable and bound by the
instructions of their constituents; in every district, common affairs
would be administered by an assembly of delegates, and these
assemblies would select deputies to constitute a central government.
‘All France’, Marx commented, ‘would have been organised into self-
working and self-governing communes’ (pp. 155–6). This was the
destruction of state power insofar as that state stood above society
– ‘its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority
usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the
responsible agents of society.’ Centralised government would give
way to the ‘self-government of the producers’ (pp. 72–3). And, yes,
Marx responded to Bakunin’s doubts (in notes on the latter’s
Statehood and Anarchy): all members of society would really be
members of government ‘because the thing begins with self-
government of the township’.
In short, as Marx came to understand, we cannot be indifferent
to the form of the state as an agency of workers. The form and the
content of the state are inseparable. Only insofar as the state is
converted ‘from an organ superimposed upon society into one
completely subordinate to it’ can self-governing producers change
both circumstances and themselves. As Marx knew, this new form of
the state did not do away with class struggles. Indeed, it brings the
producers together in their ‘self-working and self-governing’
assemblies and councils and calls upon them to drive beyond every
barrier that capital puts up. What this struggle produces is an increas-
ingly self-conscious collective worker, composed of workers who
cease to be dependent upon capital – who are empowered by a state
which is that of ‘the popular masses themselves, forming their own
force instead of the organised force of their suppression’.
When we consider the side of capitalism not developed by Capital,
then we can reconcile the Manifesto’s revolutionary programme with
Marx’s analysis of the logic of capital. What Marx demonstrated in
Capital was that the necessary condition for the reproduction of
capital is the reproduction of the worker as wage labourer. Capital’s
‘indispensable’ condition of existence is the feeling of dependence
of the worker upon capital, and its inherent tendency is to produce
that dependency. On the side of workers, on the other hand, we see
244 Anti-Capitalism
an alternative logic driven by the worker’s need for self-development

that leads beyond that necessary condition of existence for capital.
Even the more rapid onset of crises as the result of the mobility of
capital would only compress the process of transcending capital. In
this scenario, every step in the struggle against capital creates the
basis for a deeper social relation among producers, one in which they
emerge as a collective worker increasingly conscious of the interde-
pendence of its limbs. And, it is this collective worker, working
through its own state ‘to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bour-
geoisie’ which would be the premise for the ‘cooperative society
based upon the common ownership of the means of production’.
A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

But that second scenario, the workers’ scenario, is not inevitable.
And Marx knew this. That’s why he insisted in 1853, that ‘the
continual conflicts between masters and men ... are ... the indis-
pensable means of holding up the spirit of the labouring classes ...
and of preventing them from becoming apathetic, thoughtless, more
or less well-fed instruments of production’. Indeed, without strikes
and constant struggle, the working classes ‘would be a heart-broken,
a weak-minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass’. It is the reason, too,
why that Marx was uncompromising in his criticism of all those who
would ‘dilute’ class struggle, who would demobilise workers and put
an end to ‘proletarian snap’. Writing in 1879 against three such
writers, he declared:
For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the
immediate driving power of history and in particular the class
struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat as the great lever of
the modern social revolution; it is, therefore, impossible for us to
co-operate with people who wish to expunge this class struggle
from the movement.
Why would any of this matter if the victory of workers is already

recorded in the Good Book? Why, too, would he sacrifice ‘health,
happiness and family’ to the writing of Volume 1 of Capital if it were
all inevitable?
In the years since Marx wrote, that lack of inevitability is
something we understand so much more clearly. The elements that
concerned Marx are there even more strongly than before – the over-
whelming mystification of the nature of capital and the separation
and competition of workers internationally. But there is more now.

Working people have recorded the failures of social democratic gov-
ernments (which have demobilised and disarmed workers’
movements and surrendered to capital) and ‘actually existing
socialism’ (AES) (unreal socialist episodes marked by hierarchy and
power from above). Small wonder that the declaration of TINA (there
is no alternative) has resonated so deeply.
It is clear that one essential element in Marx’s recipe for tran-
scending capitalism, the centrality of revolutionary practice, was not
written down – not at least in any place as consolidated as Capital.
Had this ingredient received the attention it deserves as an indis-
pensable part of Marx’s theory, a wider opposition to the state-forms
of social democracy and AES as structures that prevent the self-devel-
opment of producers might have existed. In any event, given those
experiences (which are now part of the collective memory of
workers), the side of the self-development of human beings through
their activity must be restored to its rightful place.
But, there is something else that needs to be added. Given his
belief that workers would develop the elements of the new society in
the course of their struggles, Marx was reluctant to write recipes for
future cooks. But, he wrote at a time when utopian visions were com-
monplace. Now, after the experience of the last century with AES, it
is an absolutely essential political task to demonstrate how AES was
not consistent with Marx’s vision. Given the widespread sense that
‘socialism doesn’t work’ (which may be preceded by ‘It’s a lovely
idea, but…’), the problems identified in socialism need to be shown
to be specific to AES and the feasibility of an alternative vision
demonstrated.3 (Simply asserting that ‘that wasn’t socialism’ is not
very convincing.) Thus, the vision of the society of associated
producers needs to be part of the recipe. But, that’s not a recipe for
the cooks of the future. It’s for today’s cooks.
In short, there is no inevitability but there is possibility. Revealing
capital as the workers’ own product turned against them, working
for unity in struggle, stressing the centrality of revolutionary practice
for the self-development of the collective worker and setting out the
vision of a feasible alternative – all these are essential ingredients for
the demonstration that A Better World is Possible. Build it Now.

Lange, O. (1938) On the Economic Theory of Socialism, ed. Benjamin E.
Lippincott. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
246 Anti-Capitalism
Lebowitz, M. A. (1991) ‘The Socialist Fetter: A Cautionary Tale’, in R.

Miliband, R. and L. Panitch (eds.) The Socialist Register: Communist Regimes:
The Aftermath. London: Merlin.
Lebowitz, M. A. (1992) Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working
Class. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Lebowitz, M. A. (2000) ‘Kornai and the Vanguard Mode of Production’,
Cambridge Journal of Economics 24(3), pp. 377–392.
Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse. New York: Vintage Books.
Marx, K. (1977) Capital, vol. 1. New York. Vintage Books.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1971) On the Paris Commune. Moscow: Progress
Publishers.
NOTES
1. I have chosen to use many direct quotations from Marx in this essay – not
to send the reader in search of the source but to convey Marx’s point in
language more compelling and relevant than mine. Most of the
quotations from Marx are drawn from Volume I of Capital (Marx 1977),
the only volume of Capital that Marx completed, and from his rich
notebooks of 1857–58 which have been published as the Grundrisse (Marx
1973). Except where otherwise noted, these quotations appear (with
proper citation) in Lebowitz (1992), an expanded version of which is
forthcoming from Palgrave.
2. Lebowitz (1992) explores this theme, focusing upon the other side of
capitalism – the side of workers.
3. Some examples of my own efforts in this regard can be found in Lebowitz
(1991, 2000). The subject is also the theme of a book in progress, Studies
in the Development of Communism: The Socialist Economy and the Vanguard
Mode of Production.
19 Towards a Society of Free

and Associated Individuals:
Communism
Paresh Chattopadhyay
Communism as the representation of an ideal society is at least as

old as Plato. However, as a doctrine, it evolved only with the modern
working class in the early nineteenth century. In particular Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels (mainly Marx) made communism famous as
the projection of a society that could arise logically from the con-
tradictions of capitalist society itself as the outcome of a
self-emancipatory revolution of the working class. In this chapter we
try to offer a coherent portrait of the new society as envisaged by
Marx (and Engels). The chapter is divided into five sections. The first
section touches on the (pre-)conditions for the advent of the new
society. Then the succeeding sections deal respectively with the new
mode of production, ownership relations, exchange relations and
the relations of distribution in communism.
(PRE-)CONDITIONS OF COMMUNISM
In his projection of the communist society succeeding capitalism
Marx, it should be pointed out, drew on the writings of his
immediate predecessors – such as Saint Simon, Charles Fourier and
Robert Owen – all of whom envisaged a post-capitalist society
without exploitation of human by human. However, these pre-
Marxian socialists advanced their ideas of the future society during
a period of the undeveloped state of the working class and its
movement as well as the absence of the material conditions of its
emancipation. Hence they sought through their personal inventive
action to create these conditions. For Marx (and Engels) on the other
hand, the ‘theoretical conclusions of the communists are in no way
based on the ideas and principles that have been invented or
discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely
express the actual relations springing from an existing class struggle,
from a historical movement going on under our very eyes’ (1970,
pp. 46–7).1 In the same way Marx stressed that the material
247
248 Anti-Capitalism
conditions of the rise of communism – the union of free individu-

als – are not given by nature; they are the product of history.2 The
future society arises from the contradictions of the present society.
The ‘working class’, writes Marx, ‘have no ready-made utopias to
introduce … They have no ideals to realise, but to set free the
elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois
society itself is pregnant’ (in Marx and Engels 1971, p. 76). Marx
argues that at a certain stage of capitalism’s development, its
relations of production – that is, relations in which individuals enter
in the social process of production of their lives – turn into fetters for
the further development of the forces of production – including the
‘greatest productive force’, the working-class forces which have been
engendered by capital itself and have progressed under it hitherto.
This signifies that the old (capitalist) society has reached the limits
of its development, and that it is time for it to yield place to a new,
higher social order – which thus signals the beginning of the ‘epoch
of social revolution’ (in Marx and Engels 1970, pp. 181–2).
On the other hand, before departing from the scene, capital,
besides engendering and developing the subjective agents of the
revolution – its ‘grave diggers’, the working class (the proletariat) –
will have already created the necessary material conditions for the
advent of the new society without which ‘all attempts to explode
[current society] would be quixotic (Marx 1981, p. 159).3 Put briefly,
these conditions are the great abundance of material wealth based on
the universal development of the productive forces and, necessarily
connected therewith, the socialisation of labour and production. It
cannot be sufficiently stressed that though capital creates the
material conditions of its own disappearance as well as those for the
advent of the new society, the old society is not revolutionised
within itself on its own simply because these material conditions
exist. It is the working class (the proletariat), capital’s ‘wage slaves’,
which is the active agent for eliminating capital and building the
communist society. And it is only through a communist revolution
that the working class can be emancipated, ceasing to be wage
labourers and becoming ‘associated labourers’. There are two points
to stress here. First, this working class or proletarian revolution is
self-emancipatory. Marx stresses that ‘the emancipation of the
working classes must be conquered by the working classes
themselves’ (General Council Minutes 1964, p. 288).4 Secondly, the
(self-)emancipation of the proletariat signifies, at the same time, the
emancipation of the whole humanity, the proletariat being the
Towards a Society of Free and Associated Individuals: Communism 249
lowest class in capitalist society, which generates the ‘last antago-

nistic form of the process of social production’ (in Marx and Engels
1970, p. 182).
The communist revolution begins with the smashing of the
bourgeois political rule and the establishment of absolute political
rule by the proletariat – the rule of the immense majority in the
interest of the immense majority, the ‘conquest of democracy’ (Marx
and Engels 1970, p. 52, translation modified). This so-called ‘seizure
of power’ by the proletariat in no way signifies the victory of the
revolution which, on the contrary, continues through a more or less
prolonged ‘transition period’, a ‘period of revolutionary transfor-
mation’ of the capitalist society into the communist society, during
which the whole bourgeois mode of production and therewith the
whole bourgeois social order are superseded (Marx, in Marx and
Engels 1970, p. 327). Until capital completely disappears, the workers
do not cease to be proletarians, and hence the proletarian rule – the
‘revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’,5 as Marx calls it (in Marx
and Engels 1970, p. 327, underlined in the original) – continues
throughout the ‘transitional period’, the period of preparation for
the workers’ self-emancipation. At the end of the process, with the
disappearance of capital, wage labour also naturally disappears. The
proletariat with its political rule ceases to exist, leaving individuals
as simple producers; classes come to an end along with the state, the
embodiment of class domination and oppression.6
NEW MODE OF PRODUCTION

The outcome of the workers’ self-emancipatory revolution is the
communist (socialist) society.7 In all hitherto existing societies –
based on class rule – community has in fact stood as an independent
power against singular individuals and subjugated them. Thus it has
really been a ‘false’ or ‘illusory’ community. In the communist
society, in sharp contrast, there arises, for the first time, the ‘true’
community where universally developed individuals dominate their
own social relations (Marx and Engels 1974, p. 83; Marx 1975, p.
265; 1981, pp. 162–4; 1978a, pp. 82–3). This is what Marx calls ‘asso-
ciation’ or ‘union’ of ‘free individuals’ based on a new mode of
production – the ‘communist’ or ‘associated mode of production’ –
in which the ‘free development of each is the condition of the free
development of all’ (Marx and Engels 1970, pp. 49, 53; Marx 1978a,
p. 82; 1984b, pp. 440, 607). The term ‘union’ or ‘association’ in this
connection has a profound meaning.
250 Anti-Capitalism
Under capitalism individuals in society do not relate to one

another directly. Relations between individuals take the form of
relations between their products, which appear as commodities to
be exchanged, take on an autonomous existence vis-à-vis the
producers and dominate them. Thus individuals are ‘alienated’ from
one another as well as from their own products. Additionally,
producers separated from the means of production (within the broad
‘conditions of production’, their own creation) have, in order to
survive, only their labour power to fall back on, which they are
compelled to sell to the owners of the means of production against
a wage or salary. Thus ‘union’ or ‘association’ as applied to the
communist society has a double meaning as opposed to capitalism’s
‘alienation’ and ‘separation’. First, it is a voluntary and unmediated
union of individuals dominating their own products, which are no
longer commodities, and secondly, it is an unconstrained union of
producers with the conditions of production (which puts an end to
the producers’ situation as wage labourers or, as Marx calls them,
‘wage slaves’).
This union of producers with the conditions of production,
opposed though it is to capitalism’s alienation and separation, is not,
it should be stressed, a simple restitution of the type of union which
prevailed under pre-capitalism – such as constrained union under
slavery or serfdom or voluntary union under simple family enterprise
or ‘natural communism’. Under them neither could there be a
universal development of the productive powers of labour – engen-
dering an abundance of material wealth – nor could labour and
production be socialised at a universal level. As referred to earlier, it
is only capital that by separating the producers from the conditions
of production and pursuing the path of production for production’s
sake – the logic of accumulation – creates, independently of the
individual capitalist’s will, these fundamental material conditions
for building the new society (Marx 1978c, pp. 422–3). Marx
envisages the whole process of human development in terms of the
changing relation between the ‘Man of Labour’ and the ‘Instruments
of Labour’, starting with their ‘Original Union’, then passing on to
their ‘Separation’ and finally arriving, through a ‘new and funda-
mental revolution in the mode of production’, at the ‘restoration of
the original union in a new historical form’ (in 1970, p. 208, capi-
talisation and emphasis in original).
Individuals in the new society are free in a sense unknown
hitherto. Going beyond the ‘personal dependence’ (domination of
person over person) of pre-capitalism, as well as the ‘material

dependence’ (domination of the product over the producer) of
capitalism, ‘social individuals’ attain their ‘free individuality’ in this
‘society of free and associated producers’. It is, as Marx calls it, the
‘real appropriation of the human essence by and for the human’, a
‘complete elaboration of the human interiority’, ‘the development
of human energy which is an end in itself’ (1975, p. 348; 1981, p.
488; 1984b, p. 820; translation modified).8
RELATIONS OF OWNERSHIP
The social relations of production form the ‘real basis’ of a society.
The latter’s ownership relations – relations around the ownership of
the means of production – arise from and are simply the juridical
representation of the (social) relations of production (Marx, in Marx
and Engels 1970, pp. 181, 318). Hence when the latter relations are
transformed, society’s ownership relations are also transformed. In
all class societies (including capitalist society) the great majority of
labouring individuals has been deprived of ownership of the means
of production, which have been owned by only a small minority.
Private ownership in this fundamental class sense, never recognised
by jurisprudence, has prevailed till now. Marx calls it ‘private
ownership of a part of society’. Under capitalism it signifies
capitalist-class ownership of the means of production, which is only
the reverse side of the ‘non-ownership’ or ‘alien property’ of the
means of production for the labourers (1978b, p. 56; 1978c, p. 460;
1976, p. 1003). This is independent of the question of ownership by
individual capitalists in their private capacity.9 Within this broad
class ownership there could be different forms of private ownership.
In bourgeois jurisprudence (taken over from the Roman law), as well
as in the commonly accepted sense, private ownership refers to the
ownership (of the means of production) by an individual (a
household) or by a business enterprise. Quite logically the juridical
replacement of this form of ownership by ‘public’ (basically state)
ownership has meant the abolition of capitalist private ownership
as such in the means of production.10 However, this is a mistaken
view. It confuses the ownership form with the ownership relation
itself which is simply the juridical representation of the production
relation of a society. The capitalist (class) ownership relation is given
as soon as the capitalist production relation is given. This specific
ownership relation is defined by the producers’ separation from the
means of production – they themselves being neither owners nor
252 Anti-Capitalism
forming part of the means of production. This ownership relation,

however, could assume different forms such as ownership of the
‘individual capitalist’ or the ‘associated capitalist’ (joint stock
companies) or even by the ‘state’ (Marx 1984a, pp. 100, 237). Marx
in fact shows that capitalist-class ownership has taken different
forms following the demands of capital accumulation. Originally
starting as pure private ownership by individual capitalists, capitalist
ownership reaches a stage where private ownership in its initial form
is eliminated, the means of production come under collective
capitalist ownership (as in share companies) and capital becomes
‘directly social’ as distinct from ‘private capital’ which, given the
continuation of the capitalist relation of production, Marx
designates as the ‘abolition of capital as private ownership within
the framework of capitalist production itself’ (1984b, p. 436). Marx
(1978a, p. 588) even envisages a stage where, driven by the needs of
accumulation, the capital of the whole society comes under single
ownership (though capital as a production or ownership relation is
not eliminated thereby).
Thus state ownership of the means of production does not at all
mean the abolition of capitalist-class ownership – that is, capitalist
private ownership in the sense argued earlier – so long as the
producers remain separated from the means of production and
continue to be wage labourers. It simply signifies the end of the
legally recognised private individual (including corporate) ownership
of the means of production. Here the ‘real agents of capitalist
production’ or the ‘functionaries of capital’, as Marx would call
them, are at the same time the functionaries of the state.
Indeed the Communist Manifesto underlines the need for the
juridical elimination of individual private ownership in the means of
production and for bringing it under the ownership of the proletar-
ian political power only as a beginning measure. Since the setting up
of the workers’ political power does not mean the immediate super-
session of the capitalist relations of production (the inauguration of
communism), the proletarian state ownership does not at all mean
the end of capitalist private ownership in the fundamental (class)
sense. In this latter sense the ‘abolition of private ownership’ is
equated in the Manifesto only with the ‘disappearance of class
ownership’ (Marx and Engels 1970, pp. 47, 49, 52). Exactly the same
idea Marx expresses many years later in his discourse on the Paris
Commune (in Marx and Engels 1971, p. 75). Capitalist-class
ownership disappears only with the disappearance of capitalist
production relations. Capitalist private ownership – both in its

individual sense and in its fundamental class sense – yields place to
collective (social) appropriation of the conditions of production
under communism. This is in fact the appropriation of the
conditions of production by society itself, which is only the collec-
tivity of the free producers who are now ‘universally developed social
individuals’. (The disappearance of the state with the disappearance
of capital was noted earlier.) This appropriation, contrary to its
earlier forms, which had a limited character (involving private class
ownership), has now a total and universal character. This is because
the deprivation of the lowest class – the ‘immense majority’, as the
Manifesto puts it – within the last antagonistic social formation is
total; and secondly, given the universal character of the develop-
ment of the productive forces attained under capitalism, the
appropriation of the forces of production has also to be universal,
appropriation by society (of emancipated producers) itself as an
entity. Thereby the individual in the new society also becomes a
‘total’ or ‘integral’ individual. Quite appropriately Marx calls this
transformed ownership, arising from the ‘expropriation of the expro-
priators’, ‘individual ownership’ (1975, p. 348; 1974, p. 93; in Marx
and Engels 1971, p. 75; 1978a, p. 715).
EXCHANGE RELATIONS
With the transformation of society’s production relations, its
exchange relations – that is, individuals’ material exchanges with
nature and their social exchanges among themselves – are also trans-
formed. Capital, while increasing at an unprecedented scale the
material forces of production, rendering humans less dependent on
nature’s caprices, at the same time, driven by the logic of accumu-
lation, seriously damages the environment and undermines the
natural powers of the earth together with those of the human
producer, the ‘twin fountains of all wealth’ (Marx 1978a, pp. 474–5;
1984b, p. 813). In the new society, freed from the mad drive for accu-
mulation and with the unique goal of satisfying human needs,
individuals rationally regulate their material exchanges with nature
with the least expenditure of force and carry on these exchanges in
the conditions most worthy of and in fullest conformity with their
human nature (Marx 1984b, p. 820).
Coming to the exchange relations among individuals, first let us
note that in any society the labour of the individual producers
creating useful objects for one another has, by that very fact, a social
254 Anti-Capitalism
character. However, in a commodity (capitalist) society, where

products result from private labours executed in reciprocal inde-
pendence, the social character of these labours – hence the relations
of the creators of these products – are not established directly (see
Chapter 1). Their social character is mediated by exchange of
products as commodities. As mentioned earlier, the social relations
of individuals take the form of social relations of their products. The
products dominate the producers confronting them as an indepen-
dent power. The related labour is ‘alienated labour’ (Marx 1975,
pp. 330–1). The whole process of this ‘mystification’ Marx famously
calls in Capital ‘commodity fetishism’.
With the inauguration of the ‘union of free individuals’, there
begins, as noted above, the collective appropriation of the
conditions of production by society. Consequently, with the end of
private appropriation of the conditions of production, there also
ends the need for the products of individual labour to go through
exchange, taking the commodity form. In the new society individual
labour is directly social from the beginning. In place of exchange of
products taking commodity form (as in the old society) there is now
‘free exchange of activities’ among ‘social individuals’ determined
by their collective needs and aims on the basis of collective appro-
priation. In the communist society, in contrast with the capitalist
society, the social character of production is presupposed, and par-
ticipation in the world of products is not mediated by the exchange
of reciprocally independent labours or of products of labour. Here
the labour of the individual is posited as social labour from the very
outset. The product of the individual ‘is not an exchange value’ (Marx
1981, p. 172). In a famous text Marx asserts that in the ‘communist
society as it has just come out of the capitalist society the producers
do not exchange their products and as little does labour on these
products appear as value’ (in Marx and Engels 1970, p. 319,
emphasis in text).11
ALLOCATION AND DISTRIBUTION

The basic distribution in any society is the distribution of the
conditions of production – the material means of production as well
as the living labour power – from which follows the distribution of
the products of these conditions. The ‘distribution of the conditions
of production is a character of the mode of production itself’. Hence
the mode of distribution based on the capitalist mode of production
is transformed with the transformation of this mode into the
associated mode of production. For any society, the distribution of

the conditions of production is really the allocation of the total
labour time (dead and living) of society across the economy in
definite proportions corresponding to its needs. Equally, society’s
total time employed on production (and related activities) has to be
economised in order to leave the maximum non-labour time for the
enjoyment and self-development of society’s members. Thus ‘all
economy is finally reduced to the economy of time’. The economy
of time as well as its distribution among the different branches of
economic activity are executed in different societies in different
ways. Whereas under capitalism the distribution of society’s labour
time is effected through exchange of products taking commodity
form, under the ‘Republic of Labour’ the problem is solved through
the direct and conscious control of society over its labour time,
without the need for social relations of persons to appear as relations
between things (Marx’s letters to Engels and Kugelmann, 8 January
and 11 July 1868). On the other hand, given the unusual importance
that the communist society would attach to the self-development
and enjoyment of ‘social individuals’, requiring maximum non-
labour time beyond the labour time necessary to satisfy their
material needs, the economy of time, including its distribution,
would become the ‘first economic law on the basis of communal
production’ (Marx 1981, p. 173).
The economy of society’s global time employed in material
production (and related activities) – generating disposable time
thereby – acquires a new meaning in the new society. This surplus
labour time beyond the time required for labourers’ material needs,
instead of being appropriated by a small minority in the name of
society (as in all class societies) now becomes society’s free time
creating the basis of all-round development of the ‘associated
producers’. In fact the distinction between necessary and surplus
labour time loses its earlier meaning. Necessary labour time would
now be measured in terms of the needs of the ‘social individuals’
and not in terms of the needs of valorisation. Surplus labour time –
now the free time for the ‘associated producers’ – would mean free
activity which, unlike labour time as usually understood, would not
be determined by any external finality that has to be satisfied either
as a natural necessity or as a social obligation (Marx 1978c, p. 257).
Turning to the distribution of the total social product in the new
society, it is first of all divided between the production needs and
the consumption needs of society. As regards the share going
256 Anti-Capitalism
towards production needs, it is again divided between the replace-

ment and extension of society’s productive apparatus on the one
hand and society’s insurance and reserve funds against uncertainty
on the other. The rest of the social product serves collective con-
sumption – such as health, education, provision for those unable to
work – and personal consumption. As regards the mode of distribu-
tion of the means of consumption – that is, after deducting from the
common fund – among society’s producing individuals, the latter,
collectively mastering and appropriating the conditions of
production and hence ceasing to be sellers of labour power, no
longer receive the return to their labour in wage form. Instead they
receive from their (own) ‘association’ a kind of labour certificate
indicating the amount of labour each one has contributed to
production, enabling the person to draw from the common stock of
means of consumption an amount costing the same amount of
labour. These certificates are not (in the absence of commodity
production) money; they do not circulate (Marx 1978, pp. 97–8;
1984a, p. 362; in Marx and Engels 1970, p. 319).
At the initial stage of the new society – just coming out of the
womb of capital – this principle of equivalent exchange (labour
against labour of the same amount), similar to but not the same as
what prevails under commodity production, cannot be avoided. This
process is wholly overcome only at a higher stage of the ‘associa-
tion’ when the opposition between physical and mental labour
vanishes, when labour becomes life’s prime need and not simply a
means of living, when all-round development of the ‘social
individual’ along with the development of the productive forces
takes place and when all the springs of ‘co-operative wealth’ flow
more fully. Only then would prevail the principle: ‘from each
according to one’s ability, to each according to one’s needs’ (Marx,
in Marx and Engels 1970, p. 320).

Engels, F. (1970) ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, in K. Marx and F. Engels,
Selected Works in One Volume. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
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Progress Publishers.
Marcuse, H. (1960) Reason and Revolution, part 2. Boston: Beacon Press.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1970) Selected Works in One Volume. Moscow: Progress
Publishers; including the Communist Manifesto (pp. 31–63), Marx’s Preface
to the ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ (pp. 180–4),
‘Wages, Price and Profit’ (pp. 185–226) and ‘Critique of the Gotha
Programme’ (pp. 315–31).
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1971) On the Paris Commune. Moscow: Progress
Publishers.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1974) The German Ideology, part 1. London: Lawrence
& Wishart.
Marx, K. (1975) ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in Early Writings.
New York: Vintage Books.
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vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1981) Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Marx, K. (1978a, 1984a, 1984b) Capital, vols.1, 2, 3. Moscow: Progress
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NOTES
1. ‘Communism for us is not a state (of things), which should be created,
an ideal to which the reality should conform. We call communism the
real movement which abolishes the existing state (of things). The
conditions of this movement result from the premises existing at
present’ (Marx and Engels 1974, pp. 56–7, translation modified).
2. The young Marx already wrote: ‘In order to supersede the idea of private
property the idea of communism is totally sufficient. In order to
supersede private property as it really exists, real communist activity is
necessary. History will give rise to such activity, and the movement that
we already know in thought to be a self-superseding movement will in
reality undergo a very difficult and protracted process’ (1975, p. 365,
original emphasis, translation slightly modified).
3. ‘No social formation ever perishes before all the productive forces, for
which it is large enough, have developed, and new, higher relations of
production never appear before the material conditions of their
existence have been hatched within the womb of the old society itself’
(Marx, in Marx and Engels 1970, p. 182, translation slightly modified).
4. Contrary to a fairly widespread idea of the Left, the workers themselves
through their own experience of struggle against capital, unaided by any
outside ‘guide’, arrive at the consciousness of the necessity of revolution
to free themselves from capital’s subjugation. As Marx and Engels
underline, ‘The consciousness of the necessity of a profound revolution
arises from the (working) class itself’ (1974, p. 94).
5. Referring to the Paris Commune under workers’ rule (1871), Marx
observes that the ‘superseding of the economical conditions of the
slavery of labour by the conditions of free and associated labour can only
be the progressive work of time ... in a long process of development of
258 Anti-Capitalism
new conditions … through long struggles, through a series of historic

processes transforming circumstances and men’ (in Marx and Engels
1971, pp. 76, 156–7).
6. In 1847, in the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote that in course of its
development the ‘labouring class will substitute for the civil society an
association which will exclude classes and their antagonism and there
will no longer be political power in the proper sense’ (Marx 1977, p.
215). The very next year he (and Engels) stressed that ‘in the course of
development (of the revolution) all production is concentrated in the
hands of the associated individuals (and) public power loses its political
character’ (1970, p. 53; translation modified). Years later Marx praised
the Parisian communards for their ‘revolution against the state itself, not
against this or that form of state power’ (in Marx and Engels 1971,
p. 152; original emphasis).
7. Marx does not distinguish between communism and socialism. Both
stand for the society succeeding capitalism. The distinction was first to
be made famous, if not introduced, by Lenin. Marx, of course, distin-
guishes between a lower and a higher phase of the new society – that is,
of the same post-capitalist society – depending on the stage of develop-
ment (in Marx and Engels 1970, pp. 320–1). However, starting with
Lenin, the Left has, by and large, misleadingly treated these two phases
as two distinct successive societies – ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’.
8. Indeed, corresponding to the three stages of evolution of the relation
between the producers and the conditions of production, just
mentioned, Marx mentions these three stages of the development of
human freedom – the ‘personal dependence’ of pre-capitalism where
human productivity develops only in small proportions and at isolated
points, personal independence based on the ‘objective dependence’ of
capitalism – the ‘second great form’ in which alone is formed a system
of general social metabolism, universal relation, all-sided needs and
universal faculties – and, finally, ‘[f]ree individuality based on the
universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their
collective, social productivity as their social wealth’, the third form. The
‘second’, Marx adds, ‘creates the conditions for the third’ (1981, p. 158).
9. It should be stressed that Marx conceives the individual capitalist as a
mere ‘functionary of capital’ the ‘real agent of capitalist production’, not
necessarily a private owner of capital, receiving a ‘wage of administra-
tion’ for exploiting the labour of others in the ‘real process of
reproduction’ (1978c, p. 477; 1984b, pp. 382–3, 387–8, 436).
10. The ‘really (non-)existing socialist’ societies have justified their
‘socialism’ essentially on the basis of this logic.
11. It is immediately clear that the so-called ‘market socialism’ – touted by
a section of the Left as an alternative to capitalism – is a contradiction
in terms (as we noted earlier, Marx does not distinguish between
socialism and communism). Either you have the market as the basic
exchange relation of society, in which case you have a capitalist society,
or you have ‘free exchange of activities’ among individuals unmediated
by the commodity form of the product of labour, in which case you have
a communist or socialist society.
Contributors
Suzanne de Brunhoff is honourary research director, Centre

National de la Recherche Scientifique, and former professor of
economics at the University of Paris-X (Nanterre). She is the author
of several books, including Marx on Money (New York: Urizen Press,
1976) and The State, Capital and Economic Policy (London: Pluto Press,
1976).
Paul Burkett teaches at the department of economics, Indiana State

University, Terre Haute, Indiana. He is a long-time member of the
Conference of Socialist Economists and the Union for Radical
Political Economics, and the author of Marx and Nature: A Red and
Green Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
Paresh Chattopadhyay teaches political economy at the University

of Quebec in Montreal. He is the author of The Marxian Concept of
Capital and the Soviet Experience (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994).
Simon Clarke is professor of sociology at Warwick University, UK.

Since 1990 he has been researching workers’ organisation, labour and
employment in Russia in collaboration with Russian and interna-
tional trade union organisations. In addition to his work on Russia,
his most recent books are The State Debate (ed., London: Macmillan,
1994) and Marx’s Theory of Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1994).
Christopher Cramer teaches political economy at the School of

Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He has
worked chiefly in Southern Africa, and in 2000 launched at SOAS
the MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development.
Elizabeth Dore teaches Latin American history in the School of

Modern Languages, University of Southampton, UK. Her books
include Gender Politics in Latin America (ed., New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1997), Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin
America (ed., with M. Molyneux, Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2000), The Peruvian Mining Industry: Growth, Stagnation and
Crisis (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1988) and The Myth of
259
260 Anti-Capitalism
Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Rural Nicaragua (Durham, N.C.:

Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Ben Fine is professor of economics at SOAS, University of London.

He is the author of several books, including Labour Market Theory: a
Constructive Reassessment (London: Routledge, 1998) and, most
recently, Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and
Social Science at the Turn of the Millennium (London: Routledge, 2001)
and The World of Consumption: The Material and Cultural Revisited
(London: Routledge, 2002).
Diego Guerrero is professor of applied economics at the Com-

plutense University, Madrid. Since 1995 he has been co-ordinating
the doctorate programme in his department, and researching on
competitiveness, macroeconomics, globalisation and heterodox
economic thought. His most recent books are Manual de Economía
Política (ed.) (Madrid: Síntesis, 2002) and Lecturas de Economía Política
(ed.) (Madrid: Síntesis, 2002).
John Holloway is professor at the department of sociology, Instituto

de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Benemérita Universidad
Autónoma de Puebla, Puebla, Mexico. Has published widely on
Marxist theory and the theory of the state. His publications include:
Change the World without Taking Power (London: Pluto Press, 2002),
Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (ed., with Eloína Peláez,
London: Pluto 1999), Open Marxism III (ed., with others, London:
Pluto Press, 1995), and Global Capital, National State and the Politics
of Money (ed., with W. Bonefeld, London: Macmillan, 1995).
Costas Lapavitsas teaches economics at SOAS, University of

London. He works on finance, monetary theory, history of economic
thought, and the Japanese economy. He is the author (with M. Itoh)
of Political Economy of Money and Finance (London: Macmillan, 1999).
Michael Lebowitz teaches economics at Simon Fraser University,

Vancouver, Canada. He has been an editor of Studies in Political
Economy: A Socialist Review since 1980. In addition to preparing an
expanded edition of his Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of
the Working Class (London: Macmillan, 1992), he is working on a
book on the theory of socialist economies, Studies in the Development
of Communism: The Socialist Economy and the Vanguard Mode of
Contributors 261
Production and on a collection of his essays on ‘Analytical Marxism’,

methodology and crisis theory.
Les Levidow is a research fellow at the Open University, where he

has been studying the safety regulation and innovation of agricul-
tural biotechnology since 1989. This research encompasses the
European Union, and the Unite States of America and their trade
conflicts. He also has been managing editor of Science as Culture since
its inception in 1987, and of its predecessor, the Radical Science
Journal. He is co-editor of several books, including: Science, Technology
and the Labour Process; Anti-Racist Science Teaching; and Cyborg Worlds:
The Military Information Society (London: Free Association Books,
1983, 1987, 1989).
Simon Mohun teaches economics at Queen Mary, University of

London. He has published widely on value theory, including Debates
in Value Theory (ed., London: Macmillan, 1994), and his research
focuses on the empirical application of Marxian value categories to
contemporary capitalist economies.
Fred Moseley is professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College,

South Hadley, Massachusetts. He is the author of numerous books
and articles on Marxian value theory and crisis theory, including The
Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States Economy (London:
Macmillan, 1991), Marx’s Method in Capital: A Reexamination
(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993), and Heterodox
Economic Theories: True of False? (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995).
Michael Perelman teaches economics at California State University,

Chico. His most recent books are Steal this Idea: Intellectual Property
Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity (New York: Palgrave,
2002), The Pathology of the US Economy Revisited: The Intractable Con-
tradictions of Economic Policy (New York: Palgrave, 2001), The
Invention of Capitalism: The Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), Transcending the Economy:
On the Potential of Passionate Labour and the Wastes of the Market (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), The Natural Instability of Markets:
Expectations, Increasing Returns and the Collapse of Markets (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1999) and Class Warfare in the Information Age
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
262 Anti-Capitalism
Alfredo Saad-Filho teaches political economy of development at the

department of development studies, SOAS, University of London.
He is the author of The Value of Marx: Political Economy of Contem-
porary Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2002).
John Weeks is professor of economics at SOAS, University of

London. He is the author of several books on development theory
and Marxist analysis, including Capital and Exploitation (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981).
Ellen Meiksins Wood is the author of many books, including The

Retreat from Class (London: Verso 1986, 1998), The Pristine Culture of
Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), Democracy Against Capitalism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and The Origin of
Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).
Paul Zarembka is professor of economics at the State University of

New York at Buffalo. He has been editor of the yearbook Research in
Political Economy (JAI/Elsevier) since 1977 and has published lengthy
articles on ‘The Accumulation of Capital, Its Definition’, on ‘Rosa
Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital’, and on ‘Accumulation of
Capital in the Periphery’, and shorter pieces on the Soviet system,
on Polish ‘Solidarity’, on the declining importance of Hegel for Marx,
and on primitive accumulation. He is currently completing research
on Lenin’s economics. He has lived and worked in Switzerland,
Germany, Poland and France, in addition to California and New
York, and has also been a union activist.

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Saad-Filho 00 prelims 3/9/02 4:08 pm Page i

Saad-Filho 00 prelims 3/9/02 4:08 pm Page iii

Part I: Capital, Exploitation and Conflict

1. Value, Capital and Exploitation 00

Part II: Global Capitalism

8. The History of Capitalism 00

12. Understanding Capitalism in the Third World 00

Part III: Crisis and the Supersession of Capitalism

15. Capital Accumulation and Crisis 00

The need of a constantly expanding market … chases the bourgeoisie

CAPITALISM AND ANTI-CAPITALISM

preach submission to Wall Street and the US government. They will

demonstrated over and over again, until it becomes self-evident to

11 SEPTEMBER AND BEYOND

security guarantees for its business interests. However, the cost of

FOUR PRESSING ISSUES

import liberalisation and devaluation of the exchange rate, to

more efficient. Therefore, even mainstream economic theory can

capitalists’.9 The reasons are easy to understand. First, the state is

Neoliberals have been at the forefront of the hyper-globalist

elsewhere. In this sense, there is little difference between domestic

power and political influence of TNCs raise important ethical and

coexistence of critiques of corporate practices with pathetic

My argument is not intended to be anti-capitalist. Capitalism is

This approach is profoundly misguided. The outrageous behaviour

that the expansion of democracy into critically important areas of

challenged. When intervening, the state relies on the power of the

universal suffrage have been extended across the world, the

spite of political pluralism and the consolidation of democratic insti-

THE WAY AHEAD

choice and implementation of economic policy, the operation of

LEAVING CAPITALISM BEHIND

Marxist analysis of transcendence can be divided into two areas, the

5. ‘G7 activists no better than Bin Laden’ (London Evening Standard,

1 Value, Capital and

This chapter explains the essential elements of Marx’s theory of value

hundred cappuccinos, and so on. Exchange value shows that, in

Value, Capital and Exploitation 29

abstract labour has real existence; it is not merely a construct of the

Value, Capital and Exploitation 31

bargaining position when facing their prospective employers.

On the other hand, the diffusion of wage labour and commodity

Value, Capital and Exploitation 33

leads to optimum outcomes. In the real world, expensive advertising

VALUE AND SURPLUS VALUE

The circuit starts when the capitalist advances money (M) to

Value, Capital and Exploitation 35

the diffusion of wage labour, and the generalisation of market-

value there would be no wage employment, no capitalist production,

Value, Capital and Exploitation 37

to the former, or pursue a combination of these strategies. What

PROFIT AND EXPLOITATION

experience shows that such reductions can be neutral or even lead

Value, Capital and Exploitation 39

OVERVIEW AND CONCLUSION

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Value, Capital and Exploitation 41

Marx, K. (1987) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Collected

2 Does All Labour Create Value?