Part 2 of 6: The Political-Economic "Law of Motion" of Modern Society

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».

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.