5.4.2 Accumulation
Lefebvre is not just interested in a general theory of society but has established a dialectical theory that is an interaction of a general social theory and a critical theory of capitalism. Capitalism is not just an economic system but a social formation, a type of society.
Lefebvre (CEL2, 315–339) distinguishes between accumulative and non-accumulative aspects of nature and society. The one’s key aspect is their growth and increase of quantity, the other’s key feature is quality and that non-accumulative systems cannot grow in a quantitative sense. For example, you can improve your moral values qualitatively but one cannot quantitatively increase morality. For Lefebvre, morality, sensitivity, sensory perception, sensuality, spontaneity, art, emotions and affects have a non-accumulative character. He sees a danger in attributing an accumulative character to them. Human spontaneity and creativity would thereby be undermined. He argues that there is a dialectic of accumulative and non-accumulative processes. For example, the brain stores, remembers, and forgets knowledge (331).
For Marx, accumulation is not a general process of society and humankind that consists in growth. Accumulation is rather a logic that is specific for capitalism. Accumulation implies uneven development, inequality, concentration of control and ownership. Accumulation of capital implies labour’s non-ownership of capital. Marx (1867) argues that capital entails that “the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker” (731), that surplus-value is “the legitimate property of the capitalist” (731), and that the worker has to sell labour-power (731). Capitalism is “divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Marx 1867, 875). Labour is in capitalism “absolute poverty […] as total exclusion of objective wealth” (Marx 1857/58, 296). Inequality is built into the accumulation of capital:
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalisation and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital. (799)
The “increasing concentration of the social means of production in the hands of individual capitalists […] grows directly out of accumulation, or rather is identical with it” (Marx 1867, 776). “Accumulation […] presents itself […] as increasing concentration of the means of production, and of the command over labour” (Marx 1867, 776–777).
Lefebvre’s general sociological use of the term splits of non-ownership, inequality, concentration, and crisis from the concept of accumulation. He sees these phenomena as external to accumulation, whereas for Marx they are immanent to capital accumulation. Lefebvre’s terminology risks fetishising capital accumulation as a natural process of society. For Lefebvre, the problem is accumulation that results as part of class society in inequality. For Marx, inequality is part of the definition of accumulation. There is a difference between growth as general natural and social process and accumulation as logic of increasing quantity that shapes capitalism.
Chapter Five | Communication in Everyday (Digital) Life
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Everyday Life and Communication in Capitalism