The Collective Response to a Collective Dilemma
David Harvey
I write this in the midst of the corona crisis in New York City. It is a difficult time to know exactly how to respond to what is happening. Normally in a situation of this kind, we anti-capitalists would be out on the streets demonstrating and agitating. Instead, I am in a frustrating situation of personal isolation at a moment when the time calls for collective forms of action. But as Marx famously put it, we cannot make history under circumstance of our own choosing. So we have to figure out how best to make use of the opportunities we do have.
My own circumstances are relatively privileged. I can continue to work but from home. I have not lost my job and I still get paid. All I have to do is to hide away from the virus. My age and gender put me in the vulnerable category, so no contact is advised. This gives me plenty of time to reflect and write in between zoom sessions. But rather than dwelling upon the particularities of the situation here in New York, I thought I might offer some reflections on possible alternatives and ask: how does an anti-capitalist think about circumstances of this kind?
I begin with a commentary that Marx makes on what happened in the failed revolutionary movement of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx writes: “The working class did not expect miracles from the commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce by decree of the people. They know in order to work out their own emancipation and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly trending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.”
Let me make some comments on this passage. First, of course, Marx was antagonistic somewhat to the thinking of the socialist utopians, of which there were many in the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s in France. This was the tradition of Fourier, Saint-Simon, Cabet, Blanqui, Proudhon and so on. Marx felt that the utopian socialists were dreamers and that they were not practical workers who were going to actually transform the conditions of labor in the here and now. In order to transform conditions here and now you needed a good grasp on exactly what the nature of capitalist society is about. But Marx is very clear that the revolutionary project must concentrate on the self-emancipation of the workers. The “self” part of this formulation is important. Any major project to change the world will require also a transformation of the self. So workers would have to change themselves too. This was very much on Marx’s mind at the time of the Paris commune. But he also notes that capital itself is actually creating the possibilities for transformation and that through long struggles it would be possible to “set free” the lineaments of a new society in which the workers could be released from alienated labour. The revolutionary task was to set free the elements of this new society already existing within the womb of an old collapsing bourgeois social order.
Now, let’s agree that we’re living in a situation of an old collapsing bourgeois society. Clearly, it’s pregnant with all kinds of ugly things (like racism and xenophobia) that I don’t particularly want to see set free. But Marx is not saying set free all and everything inside of that old and awful collapsing social order. What he’s saying is that we need to select those aspects of the collapsing bourgeois society which will contribute to the emancipation of the workers and the working classes. This poses the question of what are those possibilities and where are they coming from? Marx does not explain that in his pamphlet on the Commune but much of his earlier theoretical work had been dedicated to revealing exactly what the constructive possibilities for the working classes might be. One of his writings, where he does this at great length is in this very large, complex and unfinished text called the Grundrisse which he wrote in the crisis years of 1857-8. Some passages in that work shed light on exactly what it is that Marx might have had in mind in his defense of the Paris Commune. The idea of “setting free” relates to an understanding of what was then going on inside of a bourgeois capitalist society. This is what Marx was perpetually struggling to understand.
In the Grundrisse, Marx dwells at length upon the question of technological change and the inherent technological dynamism of capitalism. What he shows is that capitalist society, by definition, is going to be heavily invested in innovation and heavily invested in the construction of new technological and organizational possibilities. And that is so because as an individual capitalist, if I’m in competition with other capitalists, I will get an excess profit if my technology is superior to that of my rivals. Thus, every individual capitalist has an incentive to search out a more productive technology than those with which that capitalist is competing. For this reason technological dynamism is embedded within the heart of a capitalist society. Marx recognized this from the Communist Manifesto (written in 1848) onwards. This is one of the prime forces that explains the permanently revolutionary character of capitalism. It will never rest content with its existing technology. It will constantly seek to improve it because it will always reward the person, the firm or the society that has the more advanced technology. The state, the nation or the power bloc that possesses the most sophisticated and dynamic technology is the one that is going to lead the pack. So technological dynamism is built into the global structures of capitalism. And it has been so since its very beginnings.
Marx’s perspective on this is both illuminating and interesting. When we imagine the process of technological innovation we typically think of somebody making something or other who seeks out a technological improvement in what it is that they’re making. That is, the technological dynamism is specific to a particular factory, a particular production system, a particular situation. But it turns out that many technologies actually spill over from one sphere of production to another. They become generic. For instance, computer technology is available to anybody who wants to use it for whatever purposes. Automating technologies are available to all kinds of people and industries. Marx notices that by the time you get to the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s in Britain, that the invention of new technologies had already become an independent and free-standing business. That is, it’s no longer somebody who’s making textiles or something like that who is interested in the new technology that will increase the productivity of the labor they employ. Instead, entrepreneurs come up with a new technology that can be used all over the place. The prime initial example of this in Marx’s time was the steam engine. It had all of these applications from drainage of water out of the coal mines to making steam engines and building railroads while also being applied to the power looms in the textile factories. So if you wanted to go into the business of innovation then engineering and the machine tool industry were good places to start and whole economies, such as that which arose around the city of Birmingham which specialized in machine tool making, became oriented to the production of not only new technologies but new products. Technological innovation even by Marx’s time had become a free-standing business in its own right.
In the Grundrisse Marx explores in detail what happens when technology becomes a business, when innovation creates new markets rather than functioning as a response to a specific existing market demand for a new technology. New technologies then become a cutting edge of the dynamism of a capitalist society. The consequences are wide-ranging. One obvious result is that technologies are never static, they’re never settled and quickly become obsolete. Catching up with the latest technology can be stressful and costly. Accelerating obsolescence can be disastrous for existing firms. Nevertheless, whole sectors of society – electronics, pharmaceuticals, bio-engineering and the like - are given over to creating innovations for the sake of innovation. Whoever can create the innovation which is going to capture the imagination (like the cell phone or the tablet) or have the most applications (like the computer chip) is likely to win out. So this idea that technology itself becomes a business becomes absolutely central in Marx’s account of what a capitalist society is about. This is what differentiates capitalism from all other modes of production. The capacity to innovate has been omnipresent in human history. There were technological changes in ancient China and even under feudalism. But what becomes unique within a capitalist mode of production is the simple fact that technology becomes a business with a generic product that is sold to producers and consumers alike. This is very specific to capitalism. This becomes one of the key drivers of how capitalist society evolves. This is the world we live in whether we like it or not.
Marx goes on to point out a very significant corollary of this development. In order for technology to become a business you need to mobilize new knowledges in certain kinds of ways. This entails the application of science and technology as distinctive forms of knowledge and understandings of the world. The creation of new technologies on the ground becomes integrated with the rise of science and technology as intellectual and academic disciplines. Marx notices how the application of science and technology and the creation of new knowledges become necessary to this revolutionary technology. This defines another aspect of the nature of a capitalist mode of production. Technological dynamism is connected to a dynamism in the production of new scientific and technical knowledges and new, often revolutionary mental conceptions of the world. The fields of science and technology mesh with the production and mobilization of new knowledges and understandings. Eventually wholly new institutions, like MIT and Cal Tech were founded to facilitate this development.
Marx then goes on to ask: what does this do to the production processes within capitalism and how does it affect the way in which labor (and the worker) is incorporated into these production processes? In the pre-capitalist era, say the 15th, 16th centuries, the laborer generally had control of the means of production (the tools) and became skilled in the utilization of these tools. The skilled laborer became a monopolist of a certain kind of knowledge and certain kind of understanding which, Marx notes, was always considered an art. But by the time you get to the factory system and even more so by the time you get to the contemporary world, then that is no longer the case. The laborers’ traditional skills are rendered redundant because technology and science take over and technology and science and new forms of knowledge are incorporated in the machine. The art disappears. And so Marx, in an astonishing set of passages in the Grundrisse, (pages 650 to 710 of the Penguin edition if you are interested), talks about the way in which new technologies and knowledge become embedded in the machine; that they’re no longer in the laborer’s brain and the laborer is pushed to one side to become an appendage of the machine, a mere machine-minder. All of the intelligence and all of the knowledge, which used to belong to the laborers and conferred upon them a certain monopoly power vis-à-vis capital, disappear. The capitalist who once needed the skills of the laborer, is freed from that constraint and the skill is now embodied in the machine. The knowledge produced through science and technology flows into the machine and the machine becomes “the soul” of capitalist dynamism. This is the situation that Marx is describing.
So the dynamism of a capitalist society becomes crucially dependent upon perpetual innovations driven by the mobilization of science and technology through the business of perpetual innovations. Marx saw this clearly in his own time. He was writing about all of this in 1858!! But right now, of course, we’re in a situation in which this issue has become critical and crucial. The question of artificial intelligence (AI) is the contemporary versions of what Marx was talking about. We now need to know to what degree artificial intelligence is being developed through science and technology and to what degree is it being applied and likely to be applied in production processes. The obvious effect would be to displace the laborer and in fact disarm and devalue the laborer even further in terms of the laborer’s capacity for the application of imagination, skill, and expertise within the production process..
This leads Marx to make the following commentary in the Grundrisse. Let me cite it to you because I think it’s really, really fascinating. “The transformation of the production process from the simple labor process into a scientific process, which subjugates the forces of nature and compels them to work in the service of human needs, appears as a quality of fixed capital in contrast to living labor….Thus all powers of labor are transposed into powers of capital.” The knowledge and scientific expertise now lies within the machine under the command of the capitalist. The productive power of labor is relocated into the fixed capital, something which is external to labor. The laborer is pushed to one side. So fixed capital becomes the bearer of our collective knowledge and intelligence when it comes to production and consumption.
Further on, Marx homes in on what it is that the collapsing bourgeois order is pregnant with that might redound to the benefit of labor. And it’s this. Capital “- quite unintentionally - reduces human labor, expenditure of energy to a minimum. This,” he says, “will redound to the benefit of emancipated labor and is the condition of its emancipation.” In other words, in Marx’s view, the rise of something like automation or artificial intelligence creates conditions and possibilities for the emancipation of labor. In the passage I cited from Marx’s pamphlet on the Paris Commune, the issue of the self-emancipation of labor and of the laborer is central. That condition is something which needs to be embraced. But what is it about this condition that makes it so potentially liberatory? The answer is simple. All of this science and technology is increasing the social productivity of labour. One labourer, looking after all of those machines, can produce a vast quantity of commodities in a very short order of time. Here again is Marx in the Grundrisse: “To the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production....Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product.” But then, and here Marx quotes one of the Ricardian socialists writing at that time, “Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time...but rather disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.”
It is this that leads capitalism to produce the possibility for “the free development of individualities” including that of the workers. And by the way, I’ve said this before but I’m going to say it again. Marx is always, always emphasizing that it’s the free development of the individual which is going to be the endpoint of what collective action is going to push for. This common idea that Marx is all about collective action and the suppression of individualism is wrong. It’s the other way around. Marx is about mobilizing collective action in order to gain individual liberty. We’ll come back to that idea in a moment. But it’s the potentiality for the free development of individualities that is the crucial objective here.
All of this is predicated upon “the general reduction of the necessary labor,” that is, the amount of labor which is needed to reproduce daily life of society. The rising productivity of labour will mean that the basic needs of society can be taken care of very easily. This will then allow abundant disposable time for the potential artistic scientific development of the individuals to be set free. At first this will be time for a privileged few but ultimately it will make free disposable time for everyone. That is: setting free individuals to do what they want is critical because you can take care of the basic necessities by use of the sophisticated technology. The problem, says Marx, is that capital itself is a “moving contradiction”. It “presses to reduce labor time to a minimum while it posits labor time on the other side as a sole measure and source of wealth.” Hence it diminishes labor time in the necessary form, that is what is really necessary, to increase it in the superfluous form. Now, the superfluous form is what Marx calls surplus value. Who is going to capture the surplus is the question. The problem that Marx identifies is not that the surplus is unavailable but that it is not available to labor. While the tendency “on the one side is to create disposable time” on the other it is “to convert it into surplus labour” for the benefit of the capitalist class. It is not actually being applied to the emancipation of the laborer when it could be. It’s being actually applied to the feathering of the nests of the bourgeoisie and therefore the accumulation of wealth through traditional means within the bourgeoisie. So here’s the central contradiction. “Truly,” Marx says, “the wealth of a nation. How would we understand that? Well,” he says, “you can understand it in terms of the mass of money and all the rest of it that somebody commands.” But for Marx “a truly wealthy nation is one in which the working day is six rather than twelve hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labor time but rather disposable time outside that needed in direct production for every individual in the whole society.” That is: the wealth of a society is going to be measured by how much disposable free time we all have to do what the hell we like without any constraints because our basic needs are met. And Marx’s argument is: you have to have a collective movement to make sure that that kind of society can be constructed. But what gets in the way is, of course, the fact of the dominant class relation and the exercise of capitalist class power.
Now, there’s an interesting echo of all of this in our current situation of lockdown and economic collapse as a consequence of the corona virus. Many of us are in a situation where individually we have a lot of disposable time. Most of us are stuck at home. We can’t go to work, we can’t do things that we normally do. What are we going to do with our time? If we have kids, of course, then we have quite a bit to do. But we’ve arrived at this situation in which we have significant disposable time. The second thing is that, of course, we are now experiencing mass unemployment. The last data today suggested United States, that something like 26 million people have lost their jobs. Now, normally one would say this is a catastrophe and, of course, it is a catastrophe because when you lose your job you lose the capacity to reproduce your own labor power by going to the supermarket because you have no money. Many people have lost their health insurance and many others are having difficulty accessing unemployment benefits. Housing rights are in jeopardy as rents or mortgage payments fall due. Many people in the United States, perhaps as many as 50 percent of the households, have no more than $400 of surplus money in the bank to deal with small emergencies let alone a full blown crisis of the sort we are now in. These populations are likely to be hitting the streets very soon with starvation staring them and their kids in the face. But look deeper at the situation.
The workforce that is expected to take care of the mounting numbers of the sick and reproducing the minimal services that permit the reproduction of daily life is typically highly gendered, racialized and ethnicized. This is the “new working class” which is in the forefront of contemporary capitalism and it bears the brunt of either being the workforce most at risk from contracting the virus through their jobs or of being laid off with no resources because of the economic retrenchment enforced by the virus. The contemporary working class in the United States (comprised predominantly of African Americans, Latinx and waged women) faces the ugly choice of contamination in the name of caring and keeping key features of provision (like grocery stores) open or unemployment with no benefits (such as adequate health care). This workforce has long been socialized to behave as good neoliberal subjects (which means blaming themselves or God if anything goes wrong but never daring to suggest capitalism might be the problem). But even good neoliberal subjects can see that there is something wrong with the way this pandemic is being responded to and the disproportionate burden they bear of sustaining the reproduction of the social order.
A collective form of action is required to get us out of this real serious crisis of how to deal with this virus. We need a collective form of action to control its spread: lockdowns and distancing behaviors, all of those kinds of things. This collective action is required to eventually free us up as individuals to live however we like. We cannot do what we like right now. This turns out to be a good metaphor for understanding what capital is about. It is about creating a society where most of us are not free to do what we want because we are actually taken up with producing wealth for the capitalist class. What Marx might say is, well, maybe those 26 million unemployed people, if they could actually find some way of getting enough money to support themselves, buy the commodities they need to survive and rent the house they need to live, then why not pursue mass emancipation from alienating work. In other words, do we want to come out of this crisis by simply saying there’s those 26 million people who need to get back to work in some of those pretty awful jobs they may have been involved in before? Is that how we want to come out of it? Or would we want to ask: is there some way to organize the production of basic goods and services so that everybody has something to eat and everybody has a decent place to live and we put a moratorium on any kind of evictions and everybody can live rent free? In other words, isn’t this moment where we could actually seriously think about the creation of an alternative society? If we are tough and sophisticated enough to cope with this virus, then why not take on capital at the same time? And instead of saying we all want to go back to work and get those jobs back and restore everything to what it was before this crisis started, maybe we should say why don’t we come out of this crisis creating an entirely different kind of social order? Why don’t we take that which the current collapsing bourgeois society is pregnant - its astonishing science and technology and productive capacity - and liberate these aspects of artificial intelligence and technological change and organizational forms so that we actually create something radically different than that which existed before. After all, in the midst of this emergency we are already experimenting with all sorts of alternative systems – basic free food supply to poor and impacted neighborhoods and groups, free medical treatments, alternative access structures through the internet and the like. In fact the lineaments of a new socialist society are already being laid bare, which is probably why the right wing and the capitalist class are so anxious to get us back to the status quo ante.
This is a moment of opportunity to think through what an alternative might look like. This is a moment in which the possibility of an alternative actually exists. Instead of just doing knee jerk reaction and saying, “Oh, we’ve got to get those 26 million jobs back immediately,” no, maybe we should look to expand some of the things that are going on already, such as the collective organization of collective provision. This is already going on in the field of health care but it is also beginning to be seen through the socialization of food supply and even cooked meals. In New York City right now several of the restaurant systems have remained open and through donations they’re actually providing free meals to the mass of the population that is in that situation, has lost its jobs, that can’t move, it can’t get around. In other words, instead of saying, well, okay, this is what we do in an emergency, why don’t we say, this is the moment when we can start to say to all of those restaurants, okay, your mission is to feed the population so that everybody has a decent meal at least once a day, twice a day. And we have elements of that society already here, which is that, for instance, a lot of schools provide school meals and so on. And so let’s keep that going or at least learn the lesson of what might be possible if we cared. Isn’t this a moment where we can use this socialist imagination to construct an alternative society? This is not utopian. This is saying, all right, all those restaurants on the Upper West Side which have closed and which are sitting there kind of dormant. Well, okay. We get the people back in, they start producing the food and they feed the population on the streets and they feed it in the houses and they give it to the old people. We need that collective action in order for all of us to become individually free. In any case, if the 26 million people now unemployed have to go back to work then maybe it should be for 6 rather than 12 hours a day so we can celebrate the rise of a different definition of what it means to live in the wealthiest country in the world. Maybe this is what might make America truly great (leaving the “again” to rot in the dustbin of history).
This is the point that Marx is making again and again and again. That the root of real individualism as opposed to the fake one which is constantly preached in bourgeois ideology, the real root to individual liberty and freedom and emancipation is a situation where all of our needs are taken care of through collective action in such a way as to mean that we only work six hours a day and the rest of the time we do exactly as we please. In other words, isn’t this an interesting moment to really think about the dynamism and the possibilities of construction of an alternative socialist society? But in order to get on such an emancipatory path we first have to emancipate ourselves to see that a new imaginary is possible alongside a new reality.
