--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781608461042" library_document_id: "4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe" source_sha256: "46dee6b4497d88f0c925457d635dd321964c6f4b00bbc137e1d31adde30698c7" pdf_physical_page_count: 426 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 80 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe?start=80&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=80&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=70&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=90&limit=10" --- # Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=80 | PRINTED_PAGE=80 The islands of planning within the enterprises do not exist apart from the sea of commodity production around them. The internal regime is a response to the external pressure to extract and accumulate surplus value in order to compete: "Anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in that of the workshop are mutual conditions the one of the other" .59 The despotism arises from the pressure on the capitalist to relate the productivity of labour within the enterprise to the ever changing productivity of labour in the system as a whole. But this cannot be done without using compulsion, pressing down on each worker, to achieve what is brought about in the wider society by the blind interplay of commodities. The law of value operates between enterprises through the market. Within the enterprise it has to be imposed by conscious regulation on the part of the capitalist. Planning within capitalism is not the opposite of the market; it is the way in which the capitalist tries to impose the demands of the market on the workforce.60 The capitalist can often still have a certain leeway within which to operate. The enterprise can make profits if the market for its output is growing rapidly despite costs of production internally departing markedly from those currently prevailing in the system as a whole. Things are similar when it has gained a major share of the market in a sector of production that requires very large amounts of fixed capital. The production methods associated with the physical structure of its fixed capital (its use value) can be much more costly than those available in the system as whole (eg when old machines using many workers are used), but the enterprise is protected from serious competition for a long period of time by the sheer cost to new firms of entering the industry to compete with it. The existence of a certain capital as a fixed, physically constituted use value as well as a potentially fluid exchange value means that the law of value does not apply to it directly and instantaneously. This is not a state of afairs that can last indefinitely. Eventually the development of new, more advanced production methods in the wider system will lead to it facing sudden serious competition. 80 Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=81 | PRINTED_PAGE=81 It is then, through the impact of crisis on it, that the enterprise is forced to restructure so as to produce according to the law of value or to go under. The more enterprises there are that have been relatively protected in the past-that is, the higher the concentration and centralisation of capital-the greater will be the crisis when it eventually breaks. But in the interim the giant firm can evade the crisis-and sometimes the interim can be a very long time. If many giant firms are able to do this for a period, the impression can arise that that system-or part of it-has become crisis free. What is not noticed is that the price it pays for avoiding crises is that it is there is no restructuring to offset the long-term downward pressure on profitability. Capitals avoid small crises, only to be hit, eventually, by a much greater one. The other limit of capitalism? There is a final point that has often been lost in expositions of Marx's ideas: his stress on the expansion of the "forces of production" has been interpreted as identification with economic growth at all costs. Yet in both the earlier and the later writings of Marx and Engels there is a keen awareness of the contradictory character of such growth within class societies in general and within capitalism in particular. They wrote in 1 845-6: In the development of the productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being which, under existing relations, can only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive.61 Marx and Engels did not just view capitalism as generally destructive. They also provided the outlines of a critique of the particular ecological damage wrought by it, as writers like John Bellamy Foster have emphasised in recent years.62 Marx saw human beings as an integral part of the natural world. "Labour", he wrote: is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and The Dynamics of the System 81 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=82 | PRINTED_PAGE=82 Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants.63 But the drive of capital to create surplus value leads to it undermining of the vitality of nature-and the conditions for human life: Exploitation and squandering of the vitality of the soil takes the place of conscious rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property, an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race.64 There arises "an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life" .65 "Capitalist production develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer . . . "66 Just as "large-scale industry . . .lays waste and destroys . . .labour-power", "large-scale mechanised agriculture ... directly exhausts the natural vitality of the soil . . . "67 Capitalist production, Marx recognised, was slowly destroying the very basis on which it, like all human production, rested-the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of the natural world. Marx's remarks were mainly concerned with the immediate effects of capitalist agriculture on soil fertility, which in his time could only be overcome by the use of guano-nitrous mineral deposits resulting from thousands of years of bird droppings to be found mainly on the coast of northern Chile. Marx's insights were taken up and developed in this sense by Karl Kautsky in the 1 890s as implying a crisis of food production in the short term. But they seemed to lose their relevance with the discovery of how nitrous fertilisers could be made artificially (through the Haber-Bosch process) during World War One and world food production was able to expand without difficulty throughout the 20th century. But analyses of the relation between humanity and nature had wider implications than a simple concern with food output, as was spelt out by Engels in his manuscript The Dialectics of Nature, which was not published until 30 years after his death, in the mid- 1 920s. 82 Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=83 | PRINTED_PAGE=83 Here Engels noted that, although humans differ from other animals in being able to "master" nature, this historically has often had unforeseen negative consequences which cancelled out initial gains. He took as an example the way in which deforestation had wreaked havoc on Greece, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor: Thus with every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature as over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature-but that we, with flesh and blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst. 68 Scientific progress was slowly providing the means to avoid causing ecological calamities by controlling and regulating "production activity" . But "this regulation" required "something more than mere knowledge" . It required "a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order". 69 This was necessary because: The individual capitalists, who dominate production and exchange, are able to concern themselves only with the most immediate useful effect of their actions . . . In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote efects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.70 The implication is that capitalism contained another inbuilt limit besides that of its inbuilt tendency to economic crises. It is that left to itself it could eventually destroy the very environmental conditions for any form of human existence, including its own. Neither Marx nor Engels developed this implication. But it would become very important a century later. A dynamic and contradictory system The recognition that capitalism is an ever expanding system of alienated labour runs through the pages of Marx's economic writings. It is a system in which people's living force is taken from them and turned into a system of things that dominate them. Capital is labour that is transformed into a monstrous product whose only aim is to expand itself: "Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks" .71 It is this which gives capitalism a dynamic of growth unparalleled in previous societies. The Dynamics of the System 83 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=84 | PRINTED_PAGE=84 The endless drive to pump out surplus value in order to further pump out yet more surplus value, of accumulation in order to further accumulate, knows no bounds. As capitalism emerged in parts of north west Europe, it was compelled to stretch out its tentacles to encompass the whole earth, subjecting ever more living labour to it: The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by 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 production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-suficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.72 What stands out from Marx's analysis is precisely what has been missing from mainstream economics since his time-a sense of the mass forward rush of capitalism.73 His model provides, as no other has, an account of a system that had expanded to fill most of Western Europe and North America by the time of his death in 1883-and expanded further to fill the whole globe in the 20th century. But that is not all. His model was not only of a self-expanding system, but of one whose expansion is based upon the interplay of contradictory forces that finds expression in the crisis and the downward pressure on the rate of profit. The expansion of the system simultaneously leads to a massive growth in the productive forces-the capacity of humanity to produce its livelihood-and of the transformation of these into destructive forces through the crippling of people's lives. 84 Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=85 | PRINTED_PAGE=85 Capitalism has been a totalising-1 am tempted to write "totalitarian"-system, in a way in which no previous mode of production had been, compelling the whole world to dance to its frenzied rhythms of competiton and accumulation. As it has done so, the system as a whole has continually reacted back upon the individual processes on which it depends. It forces each capital to force down the price of labour power to the minimum that will keep its workers able and willing to work.74 The clash of capitals compels each to accumulate in a way that will produce downward pressure on profit rates for all of them. It stops any of them standing still, even if they occasionally become aware of the devastation they are causing. It is a system that creates periodic havoc for all those who live within it, a horrific hybrid of Frankenstein's monster and of Dracula, a human creation that has escaped control and lives by devouring the lifeblood of its creators. It is this understanding which above all distinguishes Marx's approach from every school of mainstream economics, orthodox and heterodox alike, and which means it alone provides a guide for analysing capitalism in our century. But doing so means using Marx's concepts to go beyond Marx. The Dynamics of the System 85 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=86 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=87 | PRINTED_PAGE=87 Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State New developments Marx depicted a system that was very dynamic, but also plagued with seemingly insuperable contradictions. Its very dynamism continually led capital to try to expand at a greater rate than could be sustained by the living labour power on which it ultimately depended. The barrier to capitalist production, Marx wrote, lay in capital itself. The implication was that as capitalism engulfed the whole world, it would be subject to longer and deeper slumps, interspersed with shorter and shallower periods of boom. At the same time, the concentration and centralisation of capital would produce an ever greater polarisation between a capitalist class which was diminishing in size and a working class that absorbed into itself the rest of society. The model was by design an abstraction. Marx consciously ignored much of the day to day functioning of markets and many of the features of particular capitalist societies in his attempt to grasp the underlying tendencies built into the mode of production as such-its "general laws" . The way each of the three volumes of Capital operated at a different level of abstraction meant that the third volume, by integrating production and circulation, was closer to the actual operating detail of any really existing capitalist society than the first volume, even though its analysis depended on the basic concepts developed there. It dealt not only with the equalisation of profit rates, the deviation of prices from values, crises and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, but also with credit and the banking system, commercial profits, interest payments to money lenders and rents to land owners. But even the third volume deliberately paid little attention to many important things: foreign trade, the impact on the capitalist system of absorbing the still enormous pre-capitalist parts of the world or the role of the state. Marx had intended in the original plan for Capital he drew up in the early manuscripts of the work further volumes dealing with such things. But he never had time to do so, immersed as he was in day to day revolutionary political activity, compelled to make a livelihood for himself through journalistic articles and, in the last years of his life, plagued by illness, although the three volumes he did fully or partially complete were themselves an incredible achievement. CHAPTER FOUR 87 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=88 | PRINTED_PAGE=88 The gap between the model and the reality left many questions unanswered about the course capitalism would take. These questions did not necessarily seem to matter that much either to Marx and Engels or to the activists in the new workers' movements of the 1870s and 1880s. These were the years of a long period of crises known as the Great Depression. The US steel magnate Andrew Carnegie expressed the mood even in capitalist circles in 1889: Manufacturers . . . see savings of many years . . . becoming less and less, with no hope of a change in the situation. It is in a soil thus prepared that anything promising of relief is gladly welcomed. The manufacturers are in the position of patients that have tried in vain every doctor of the regular school for years, and are now liable to become the victim of any quack that appears . . . 1 A quarter century of falling profit rates2 led to massive pools of poverty in London and other cities and to mass unemployment in the mid- 1 880s.3 It was not surprising that Frederick Engels could feel that the logic of Marx's model was working itself out right in front of his eyes in England as "the decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, overproduction and crisis" seemed to give way to "a permanent and chronic depression" .4 The trajectory of capitalism soon, however, proved to be more complicated than the experience of the 1 880s suggested. Profit rates recovered in Britain in the 1890s, and the US and Germany went through a new wave of economic expansion.5 There were certain positive reforms for workers that seemed to contradict Marx's picture: Otto von Bismarck granted pensions to Germany's workers in 1889 and a British Liberal government produced a similar scheme in Britain 20 years later, along with free school meals; real wages rose in the last two decades of the 19th century, even if they tended to stagnate after that;6 working hours everywhere tended to fall from 12 or 14 hours a day to eight, and the working week to fall from six days to five and a half. 7 88 Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=89 | PRINTED_PAGE=89 The apparent refutation of the predictions drawn from Marx's model led to a crisis within Marxist ranks, known as the revisionist controversy. Out of it emerged two very diferent trends in the analysis of capitalism which were to confront each other again and again over the next century. Edward Bernstein, only a few years previously a close collaborator of Engels, produced a root and branch critique of Marx's methods and conclusions. "Signs of an economic worldwide crash of unheard of violence have not been established", he wrote. "Overproduction in single industries does not mean general crises" .8 "Workingmen", he concluded, are not "universally pauperised as was set out in the Communist Manifesto".9 These changes, he argued, had arisen because of "the enormous extension of the world market" and the regulation of production with "the rise of the industrial cartels" so that "general commercial crises" were "improbable" . Bernstein's "revision" of Marx was rejected by Engels' other collaborator, Karl Kautsky. But this did not prevent many socialist activists coming to accept in practice that capitalism had stabilised itself for the indefinite future. Challenging such views meant going further than Kautsky and adding to Marx's analysis. It is this which, each in their own way, Rudolf Hilferding, Vladimir Lenin, Nicolai Bukharin and Rosa Luxemburg tried to do. Soon it was not only the purely economic functioning of the system that required something more than the basic account provided by Marx. So too did a new period of immense political convulsions as 44 years of peace in western Europe gave way to the most horrific war humanity had yet known. Hilferding: finance capitalism and imperialism The first Marxist economist to publish a detailed analysis of the changes was the Austrian Rudolf Hilferding in his work Finance Capital, in 1910. Basing himself on developments in Germany, he argued that banking capital and industrial capital were merging to produce a synthesis of the two, which he labelled "finance capital". On this basis giant trusts and cartels were emerging that could dominate whole sectors of industry: Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State 89 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=90&limit=10)