Dear Reader,
Below is part 2 of my 6-part serialization of the Equitist Advocacy group’s essay "The Political-Economic '''Law''' of Motion of Modern, Capital-Based Society -- The 'Sociotaxis' Toward 'Humanocidal' [State-]Capitalist Totalitarianism as Political-Economic Attractor".
As with my previous serialization, here, of their "Malady and Remedy" manifesto, I have felt free to add to and/or to re-write portions of the text which I felt needed updating, or other improvement(s).
The Equitist Advocacy group’s original essay can be accessed via the following URLs --
http://equitism.org/Equitism/Equitism-entry.htm
http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/Theory.htm
http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/PoliticalEconomicLawOfMotion/PoliticalEconomicLawOfMotion.htm
Regards,
Miguel
The Political-Economic "Law Of Motion" of Modern, Capital-based Society --
The 'Socio-Taxis' Toward [State-]Capitalist, Humanocidal Totalitarianism as 'Political-Economic Attractor'
Part 2 of 6: Some Intimations Towards the Furtherance of the '''Marxian Theory''' that is Extant in the Published Works of Marx: Partial 'Pre-Constructions' of the Predicted Historical Extremity of Capital Value Accumulation
[begin
insert by M.D.]:
Marx spelled out, for the public,
the core of his breakthrough in human-social science in 1859, eight years
before the publication of the first volume of Capital, in
the celebrated Preface to his book A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy, in the following terms:
“The general conclusion at which I arrived and which,
once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies, can be summarized as
follows. In the social production of
their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are
independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a
given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which
arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode
of production of material life conditions the general process of social,
political and intellectual life. ... At a certain stage of development, the
material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing
relations of production, or -- this merely expresses the same thing in legal
terms -- with the property relations within the framework of which they had
operated hitherto. From forms of development
of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an era of social revolution.”
[Karl
Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,
International Publishers [NY: 1970], p. 20-21, emphasis added]
Clue to Solution: If Marx’s generic account, and ‘meta-model’,
of the revolutionary ‘meta-evolutions’ of human society -- of the revolutionary
transitions from each given system of human social reproduction to its
successor system -- is to hold for the special case of the ‘capitals-system’,
the ‘capitals-epoch’, the capital-based “mode of [social re-] production”, then
it must be the growth of “the social forces of production” -- of the social
self-force of human-societal self-re-production, of the self-productivity
of human-societal ‘onto-mass’ -- by, under, and immanently, from within, the capital-relation-of-production,
that drives the supercession of the capital-relation-of-production. There must be a turning point, before which
the capital-relation-of-production fosters, and is fostered by, this growth of
the social forces of production, but after which, the further growth of the
social forces of production “attacks” the capital-relation, and after which the
capital-relation attacks the further growth of the social forces of production.
¿Well, then, what is it about the
growing of social productivity -- which capitalists pursue, not for its own
sake, and not for society’s sake, but as profit-advantages 'incentivize' them to
do: what is it about growing productivity that eventually “attacks” and
“destroys” capital / the capital-social-relation-of-production?
[end insert by M.D.]:
Hypothesis
However, realizing that his plan for the systematic unfoldment of his immanent critique of the bourgeois-ideological science of political economy could not be actualized by him in the time that he had left, Marx built in, even to volume one of Capital, some chapters, and some other, 'sub-chapteral' contents, which, while they maintained the -- appropriately for that stage of the systematic-dialectical, categorial progression -- more limitedly "economic" focus of the Capital volumes as a whole, were not fully prepared-for in the systematic development to that stage, and which, in part, anticipated the later stages of that categorial progression, which would have been native to the later «buchs».
However, realizing that his plan for the systematic unfoldment of his immanent critique of the bourgeois-ideological science of political economy could not be actualized by him in the time that he had left, Marx built in, even to volume one of Capital, some chapters, and some other, 'sub-chapteral' contents, which, while they maintained the -- appropriately for that stage of the systematic-dialectical, categorial progression -- more limitedly "economic" focus of the Capital volumes as a whole, were not fully prepared-for in the systematic development to that stage, and which, in part, anticipated the later stages of that categorial progression, which would have been native to the later «buchs».
In particular, Chapter XXXII. of volume I of
Capital — penultimate chapter of that volume as a
whole — entitled "Historical
Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation", is a case in point.
The operation that the «Kapitals»-system
is, and that it applies externally, to its surrounding
pre-capitalist hinterland [as it converts that hinterland into new
socio-geographical increments to itself, to its own geographical domain], as it
does also internally, to its own already-converted internal terrain, is one of expropriation
— expropriation of small-holder peasant producers on the land and of
self-employed urban artisans, etc., to form/expand the wage-worker class;
expropriation of smaller capitals by larger, etc., and, finally, expropriation
of at least key components of private capital by the national state, a national
state by then wholly under the control of the ruling faction of the core
capitalist plutocracy.
«Kapital» is also an operation
of the '''bursting-asunder''' of all barriers to the ‘quanto-qualitative’
advance of ‘human-societal self-productivity’ [i.e., of the "social
productive forces", cf. Marx, Grundrisse].
As the «Kapital»-conversion of the
pre-capital hinterland nears completion, as the «Kapitals»-system
comes to surround the last remnants of what once surrounded it, we move toward
that moment, and that historical extremity, in which the «Kapitals»-system
will 'surround' and confront only itself
worldwide.
This approaching [temporally-extended] historical moment
means that the operations which that system hitherto applied to the predecessor
social formations that 'environmented' it in the past -- the operations of
"expropriation" and of '''productive-forces-growth barrier-dissolution'''
-- will be applied to the «Kapitals»-system
itself and to the «Kapital»-social-relation-of-production itself,
as a whole, by the «Kapitals»-system,
and by the «Kapital»-relation itself, as its own only remaining
human-social environment.
With regard to the 'expropriation operator' that is
capital, this would mean that Capital’s expropriation operation
will then be applied to [the] capital-immanent expropriation [operation]
itself -- an expropriation of capitalist expropriation
itself, ‘the expropriation of the expropriation’. Marx described this expectation in the
following terms:
"What does the primitive
accumulation of capital, i.e., its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not immediate
transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-labourers, and therefore a mere
change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers,
i.e., the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. ... as
soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet ... the
further expropriation of private proprietors takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no
longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many
labourers. This
expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of
capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One
capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this
expropriation of many capitalists by few, develops, on an ever-increasing
scale, the cooperative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical
application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the
transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only
usable in common [the 'objective
socialization'
of the means of production, still pending their '[inter-]subjective,
memetic, phenomic socialization', in the form
of the conscious creation, by the human species-for-itself, of a truly human, truly
social, '''socialist''', '''associationist''' society; the global,
and global-market-subsuming, society of the democratically
"associated producers"
— Anonymous], the economising of all
means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised
labour, the entanglement of all peoples in
the net of the world-market, and, with this, the international character
of the capitalist régime. ... The monopoly
of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up
and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation
of labour at last reach a point where they
become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property
sounds. The expropriators are
expropriated." [Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I,
Chapter XXXII., Historical
Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation, International Publishers, [NY: 1967], pages 761-764, emphasis added by Anonymous]
Marx foresaw, in the Grundrisse,
that, in this 'self-environment' and 'self-surroundment' of the «Kapitals»-system,
it would find, in its own nature, a barrier to the further development of the
social forces of expanding human-societal self-[re-]production, and act upon
itself accordingly, unstoppably, whatever to the contrary its partisans and
beneficiaries might wish:
"... capital has pushed beyond
national boundaries and prejudices, beyond the deification of nature and the
inherited, self-sufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within
well-defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional way of life. It is destructive of all this, and permanently
revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles that impede the development of the
productive forces, the expansion of needs, the diversity of production and the
exploitation and exchange of natural and intellectual forces. But because capital sets up any such boundary
as a limitation and is thus ideally over and beyond it, it does not in any way
follow that it has really surmounted it, and since any such limitation
contradicts its vocation, capitalist production moves in contradictions, which
are constantly overcome, only to be, again, constantly re-established
[and, on an ever-larger 'meta-fractal' scale — Anonymous]. Still more so. The universality towards which it
is perpetually driving finds limitations in its own nature, which, at a certain
stage of its development will make it appear as itself the greatest barrier
to this tendency, leading thus to its own self-destruction." [David McLellan, The
Grundrisse [ed: implied "by"] Karl Marx, Harper
& Row [NY: 1971], pages 94-95].
Vastly more needs to be said about the historical
"dynamics" -- and 'meta-dynamics' -- of the "lawful"
state-space/control-space "course of development" of the «Kapitals»-system
as a "dynamical system", and, also, as a self-terminating,
tendentially self-transcending 'meta-dynamical system';
about its "attractors", about its "repellors" and
"separatrices", about its "basins of attractions", and
about its [self-]"bifurcations" in the unified,
"state-space" and "control-space" ‘meta-space’ of its self-development,
as well as about the "mechanisms" and the 'organisms' of its
eventual, tendential 'meta-finite self-conversion/-self-bifurcation
self-singularity'/self-explosion,
as especially about the immanent tendency of accumulating capital-value to
de-value itself, through the action of its newer portions upon its older
portions, and of the resulting tendency of the rate of capital value
self-accumulation to decelerate itself, due to the "techno-depreciation",
or "moral depreciation", that results from the pursuit of [transient]
"super-profits" via the [unconscious] pursuit of relative surplus-value, ALL as expressions
of "the growth of the productive forces" — the self-growth of the
human-society-expanding-self-re-productive
force within capital. However, the
above-excerpted intimations must suffice for the present purpose.
Capital accumulation, as Marx's work so superlatively
demonstrates, is not adequately conceived as a merely quantitative increase in
the capital-value extant.
Inextricably interconnected with this tendential
quantitative increase in capital-value, are a whole series of qualitative
changes, including (1) the
tendential rise in the ratio of constant capital to variable capital, (2) and with it, of the technical
composition of "constant capital" — and of the ‘‘‘technical composition’’’ "variable capital", of wages-paid
“labor-power”, (3) the increasing
incarnation/embodiment/materialization of the capital-relation itself as fixed
capital “lawfully” develops into an "automatic system of machinery"
[Karl Marx, Grundrisse],
during the "real domination"/descendant phase of capital
accumulation, and (4) the trends
of the consolidation, concentration,
and centralization of capital-value ownership as predicted in the quote from Capital above, which quote sets
forth the '''historical law/tendency of motion''' of capital accumulation.
The quote above, from volume I of Capital, which seeks to lay bare,
with full explicitude, only the economic
aspect of "the law of motion of modern society", still emphasizes
primarily the economic dynamics and 'meta-dynamics'
of these predicted ultimate tendencies of the historical capital-value
accumulation-process.
Yet these passages are already pregnant with, and almost
ready to give birth to, explicit political-economic
implications, just below their surface.
We hold that the "immiseration" — the horror
that Marx had in mind, and that moved him in his work — as the concomitant of
the accumulation of capital, was not just the '''economic
immiseration''' of humanity in its vast majority, but, at the very least, its '''political-economic immiseration''',
and, in truth, much more: ‘socio-psycho-political-economic
immiseration''; and, therefore, still more: total human
immiseration.
The '''political'''
moment of '''political-economic
immiseration''' includes that of the nightmarish, omni-genocidal atrocities and
enormities of the totalitarian, private-capitalist/state-capitalist-hybrid,
police-state terror-torture regime that global capitalist society, ‘‘‘core’’’
and ‘‘‘semi-periphery’’’ and ‘‘‘periphery’’’ alike, society is destined to become: It is destined to so-become, absent a
majoritarian revolution, completing the movement of the human species towards
full democracy. This is a species-wide
movement that ascendant phase capitalism at first resumed, and continued, but, thereafter
-- after the turn of this ‘capitals-system’ into its ‘descendant phase’, and
especially in its present, accelerating 're-descendance' -- that the present
capitals-system is aborting and reversing.
Grasped not just economically, put political-economically,
there is an accumulation of human, social misery that accompanies the
accumulation of capital that is not just economic misery: it is also 'political
misery', the 'political misery' of
police-state, totalitarian torture-terror.
Grasped political-economically,
the "law" of capital accumulation is also a "law" of the
accumulation of the potential for, and of the motive
for, their totalitarian rule over the rest of society within and by the
capitalist ruling class.
Grasped in its '''political'''
moment, the "accumulation of capital" is also the accumulation
of political power in the hands of the class of concentrated capital-ownership,
and the increasing, concomitant, tendential expropriation of all
remaining power away from the
rest of the people, the vast majority of human society.
The "concentration of capital" is also the concentration
of political power in the hands of the personifications of
capital.
The "centralization of capital" is also the centralization
of political power in the hands of the class that rules capitalist
society, and through which the value-imperatives of capital itself rules that
society.
The "consolidation of capital" is also the
dictatorial consolidation of state power — of dictatorial
power over and through the capitalist state — in the hands of
capital, "representative political democracy" notwithstanding.
The "consolidation of capital" means that
"representative political democracy" will be increasingly hollowed
out; increasingly reduced to nothing more than a sham and a facade, as the ever
more frayed "velvet glove" covering up the "iron hand", but
through which that "iron hand" -- and, with it, the formerly "invisible
hand" of the "law" of capital -- becomes, increasingly, all too
visible, as state-capitalist, totalitarian, humanocidal dictatorship.
In summary, the political-economic
accumulation, concentration, centralization, and consolidation of capital-value
ownership has, as its concomitant and ineluctable political
accompaniment, the '''accumulation, concentration, centralization, and
consolidation''' of vicious, despotic, tyrannical, mass-murderous, ‘‘‘eugenocidal’’’
political power -- within
the capital-based ruling class; the bourgeoisie, and within its
servant-bureaucracies -- over the rest of global human society; over the vast
majority of the human-species, unless and until that majority feels forced to
enact the global revolutionary overthrow of that concentrated, ultra-abusive,
humanocidal power.
Note [by M.D.]: A key feature of the “ultra-irrational” use
of their ultra-concentrated, descendant phase political-economic power by the ruling
faction of the capitalist ruling class still remains to be rationally,
scientifically explained, in the sense of dialectical
rationality. The problem to be solved is
this: ¿Why do the descendant phase rulers
of the capitals-system “lawfully”, predictably apply it to humanocide,
to ‘‘‘eugenocide’’’ -- to the pursuit of catastrophic global
human population reduction, under the cover of Neo-Malthusian, “[pseudo-]ecological”,
“People Are Pollution” ideologies? The
Equitist Advocacy group’s solution to this problem will be set forth in Part 5. of this serialization.
