Tag / Karl Marx

by doctormcgrail

History produces nothing but Barbarism

In a recent video interview for publisher Unherd, Yanis Varoufakis asked the question: “Why is the Left the loser of history?’ He went on to argue that the Left failed to “take its opportunity” in the wake of the crisis of capitalism in 2008. Consequently, the ground remained wide-open, only to be filled by the politics of the Far Right.

Of course, since the Left failed in its historic duty to take up the reigns of ‘power’, it has the unenviable position of remaining religiously pure and untainted as the rightful and righteous outcome of ‘history’. It can live for another day, though such a position leads to the inevitable question, given there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ sides of history, of ‘why, so far, has the Right always ended up as the victor of history?’

There is a deeper question here: ‘What is history?’

To ‘Left revolutionaries’, Rosa Luxembourg is famous for stating that ‘the’ class struggle will end in either “Socialism or Barbarism”. The openness of the ‘choice’ with which she confronted her comrades indicates Luxembourg did not see ‘socialism’ as an automatic outcome of the ‘historical process’. But her statement does leave two interpretations: (1) that ‘socialism’ is one possible outcome of ‘the historical process’ (for Varoufakis, socialism can be ‘the victor’), and, alternately, (2) that human action – struggle – is the means by which to avoid the inevitable barbarism that ‘the historical process’ will produce (so, ‘socialism’ can never be ‘the victor’ of a socio-historical process humanity must struggle against).

Following the latter interpretation, a key question is ‘what form should the required struggle take?’ Well, aiming to take up the reigns of political ‘power’ (electoral politics; state capture, Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Bolshevism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Black Power, and Matriarchy) has been tried on numerous occasions. Luxembourg was murdered in 1919, so didn’t live to see the historical outcome of ‘actually existing socialism’.

That is, Varoufakis, no matter how he, himself, sees the world, or understands contemporary ‘history’, needs to deal with the fact that for many people, in certain places and times, socialism has been ‘the victor of history’ and has done nothing but produce barbarism. When socialism has been ‘the victor of history’ then, to change Luxembourg’s quotation: Socialism becomes Barbarism! To the ‘victors’ the spoils.

What has Varoufakis missed?

Varoufakis clearly understands ‘socialism’ to be part and parcel of the historical process – it is a component of the current system which can ‘guide’ history towards a positive outcome. This ‘positivity’ is a theoretical descendant of early utopian socialists (heavily criticised by Marx) such as John Bray and Proudhon – who believed in nationalised banks and ‘fair’ labour exchanges on the basis (as Bonefeld, 2023 puts it) that they could get rid of ‘the capitalist’ but keep ‘capital’ (i.e., the waged labour relationship or social form).

Incidentally, I find Varoufakis’ coining of the ‘concept’ technofeudalism very confusing – a jumble of definitions and meanings. By ‘feudalism’ he appears to serfdom (in a similar way as Hayek referred to ‘The Road to Serfdom’). But this forgets that the tech-bros’ goal is to produce ‘surplus value’ and NOT garner tribune (rents/taxes) under a system of ‘extra-economic’ devine-rights (imposed by ‘direct’ violence). In short, Greece had a Finance Minister who never really understood ‘capitalism’ (conceptually nor practically).

I surmise that Varoufakis has never read the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists (Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno), or, if he has, he hasn’t understood them. Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History reminds us that the point of history is to break with it, not “swim” with its tide. Rather, the struggle is to bring the historical process to a ‘stop’ (to serve the needs of the present) and not drive history to its ‘completion’ (towards some Messianic ‘vision’). Adorno brilliantly sums the same point up: “There is a history which leads from the slingshot to the atom bomb, but not one that goes from barbarism to humanity”.

History is on the wrong side of class struggle – it is a process which runs against the presently-existing needs of humanity. Rather, history (the perpetuation of tradition) is an accumulating “nightmare” which weighs heavily on the “brains of the living” (Marx from 18th Brumaire), compelling them forward on grounds of ‘lack of alternative’. The struggle is to wake up and leave the nightmare; not stay in it to find out who will be ‘victors’. If we stay in it (do not wake up) and keep ‘falling’, then the urban myth tells us there will be just one outcome: Thump!

Notes: The featured image is from a photo of holiday postcards I took in a museum – I’ve entitled it ‘History Sails Forward’. It’s an image captured from ‘the past’, held within a time-capsule.

References:

Bonefeld, W. (2023) A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation London: Routledge.

by doctormcgrail

Marx’s Anarchism and the Politics of Capitalism

On the relevance of Marx in times of ‘Zombie Capitalism?’

Studying an author hermeneutically refers to understanding a writer by standing in their shoes and seeing the world from their perspective.  Studying political writings in such a manner was advanced in the mid-20th century by scholars like those in the ‘Cambridge School’ of history of political thought.  

When Karl Marx was writing Capital, in mid 19th century, the term ‘left’ (on the political spectrum) meant being ‘radical’ whilst ‘right’ referred to being ‘conservative’.  The designations (literally positions or ’wings’) were taken from the post-revolutionary Constituent Assembly of France, with the colours derived from the Republican tricolour flag. 

However, by the mid 20th century, during the post-war consensus, ‘the left’ was associated with support for state control of the economy and government social intervention whilst ‘the right’ had come to be associated with anti-state individualism and ‘liberalism’ (or Hayekian ‘market non-interventionism’).  By the 1970s and ‘80s a new breed of ‘post-consensus’ right-wing politicians emerged who were deemed (in many respects correctly) ‘radical’.

Reagan and Thatcher were the most prominent ’radicals’ to have ideologies named after them (Reaganism and Thatcherism).  Such radical right-wingers wanted to tear down what they saw as a ’statist’ establishment which, of course, many left-wingers wanted to ‘conserve’.  The switch in meanings of left and right was completed in the form of conservative left-wingers (whether Bolsheviks, Maoists, Post-colonialists, Keynesians, Swedish Social Democrats, British reformers, or any other version of left ’state power’ grabbers who felt they had something to preserve, a status quo).

This kind of ‘conservative’ left statism was not unknown to Marx.  Marx’s awareness can be detected in his many critiques of ‘utopian’ socialists during his lifetime, from Robert Owen to his Critique of the Gotha Programme (of the German Social Democratic Party, SPD). But Marx describes workers taking control of (rather than power over) society on very few occasions, with his most prominent account featured in news articles published (later) by Engels as The Civil Wars in France (1871).

This was Marx’s account of the rise and fall of the Paris Commune (1870).  Importantly, what he describes in these articles is a delegate-based anti-statist workers’ council or commune system (the word ‘commune’ meaning grassroots council).  ’Councils’ were both local (geographically-centred – the rural village) and vocational (workplace or activity centred – e.g., a weavers’ collective) to ensure different elements of society were heard, but significantly that no-one living off the private expropriation of production (performed by others) would be (easily) heard.  This was a reversal of the prior situation where a separate class of politicians (who expropriated or represented expropriators, and even proprietors of private ‘labour power’) formed the state and government. 

Furthermore, when Marx was asked if the ‘stage’ between pre-capitalist and communist societies could be by-passed or skipped, he eventually nodded to a positive answer regarding the development of existing Russian ‘communes’ (in a letter to a Narodniki).  To be clear, I consider him hinting that ‘industrialisation’ and ‘urbanisation’ were not prerequisites to the fulfilment of some objectified ’inevitable’ historical progression working ‘at the backs of people’ towards ‘socialism’ and then ‘communism’ in a compulsory stadial trajectory.

As ‘communes’ already existed in Russia they could form the basis of an emancipated society, without a deranged detour through ‘capitalism’!  However, Marx still thought that the experience of capitalism would be more likely to produce a social revolution, given the nascent conservatism of the rural commune – put another way, more advanced industrial countries should see a revolution first given the (contradictory) life conditions they generate.  Also, given capitalism’s existence (historical arrival, even by accident) hopes of a direct transition from peasant communes were, simply, after the fact even in the mid-Victorian era.  The social form that gave rise to such hopes (the peasant village eulogised by the Narodniki) was already disappearing, specifically in the advanced and developing industrial nations who had the power to colonise and suppress every other type of social form or mode of production. 

Nevertheless, and this is a salient point, I would argue that for most (if not all) of his political life Marx was what would be known, in both 19th and 20th centuries, as an ‘anarchist’!  The point of the Paris Commune’s mandatory delegation system was to ensure there would be no separation between a (professional) political class and the rest of the population.  Thus, parliamentary ‘representation’ with its political leadership (elites or vanguards) was simply not good enough since it would reproduce one of the fundamental social / political divisions which Marx wished to see the back of.

Indeed, one way of outlining how Marx understood the ‘politics’ of capitalism, compared to feudalist and ancient slave modes of production, was that capitalism makes what was obvious in the others (direct political domination) an inconspicuous, or ‘hidden’, process (via indirect economic domination under the ‘guise’ of ‘fair’ trade – see Ellen Meiskins Wood, 2002).

But how did the previously noted transition in meaning, from the 19th century radical left / conservative right to the 20th century conservative left / radical right, take place?  The answer, not surprisingly, was via successful social revolution in the early 20th century!  The conceptual and analytical problem here is that all too often activists (those present at the time) and commentators (contemporary or later) have focused attention on the ‘trees’ whilst failing to see the ’wood’!  Hence, we end up with histories and analyses of ‘The Russian Revolution’ (1917), ‘The German Revolution’ (1918-19), ‘The Hungarian Revolution’ (1919-20), but don’t hear much about ‘The Irish Revolution’ (1916), the Syrian democratic constitution (1919-20), ‘The Finnish Revolution’ (1917-22) nor ‘The British Revolution’ (1918-22).  Generally, a global move towards universal suffrage, imposed from below as part of a working class revolution in political practice (namely, direct democracy), gets overlooked. 

The dominant analytical time frames and intellectual interests tend to be centred on what can be described as moments of coup d’etat (significant but fleeting changes within forms of political ‘representation’) which merely punctuated much broader social changes.  With the latter including changes in working practices, shifts in artistic practices and possibilities in communication, but also developments in social roles and recognition – the rise of married women in the workplace, the emergence of state welfare recipients (like working-class ‘pensioners’ in Britain), the emergence of ‘childhood’, and the extended legal reach of the state (such as compulsory purchase of land, military conscription, and nationalisation of banking). 

One way of taking a wider survey of the workers’ revolution is to frame it in terms of all those socio-politico-economic changes taking place between the start of the Great War (1914) and a final capitulation of ‘traditional’ (pre-fiat money) capitalism in the Wall Street Crash (1929); a fifteen year period after which things can never go back to the way they were before though the desire to do so (right-wing radicalism) continues to be felt as an echo – the march of the Zombies.

Whether we understand ‘the revolution’ as having succeeded (the eventual emergence of the Soviet Union as a ‘workers’ state’) or failed (the crushing of the German Revolution by the freikorp in 1919), by the early 1930s states (and/or public, centralised institutions associated with them, such as central banks) are everywhere taking the lead role in forming (and/or reforming) the most advanced ’capitalist?’ economies.  From here on, I place a question mark on ‘capitalism?’ to indicate the far-away hills distance of the classic liberal model or mode.  Both the ideology and practice of classical ‘liberal’ political-economy was ’dead’ but also ‘alive’ as a zombie.

Whereas before 1914 capitalist enterprises mostly got on with the job of reproducing, disciplining, exploiting workers in an autonomous manner (with little to no state intervention), by the early 1930s the state becomes, increasingly, an integral part of the social process, including the production of surplus value (profit) via a national organisation of surplus labour time (e.g. how to manage unemployment).  States did take different forms, such as ’total‘ states (a singularity, as in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany) compared to ‘hegemonic’ ones (pluralities dominated by mass cultures and technocratic control), but the main task of all states / governments was to reproduce (provide subsistence to), discipline, and (successfully) exploit workers directly as the key means of sustaining the wage-labour mode of production. The purpose of the modern nation-state, after all, is to ensure the compliance of the population (whether worker, manager, capitalist, or politburo member) under its territorial control with the accumulation of capital.

By exploitation, of course, I include the ideological elements of emotional exploitation (something Gramsci picked up on as hegemonic cultural domination): “Heave away lads, put your backs into it, for the benefit and sake of the nation!”  A new ‘social contract’ between political elite (the state) and the people (workers) was being founded, and in many experimental forms – Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, Japanese Imperialism, Irish and Finnish nationalism, German Nazism, the American New Deal, Jewish Zionism, and ‘Greater’ Britishness (re-modelling the Empire as ‘Commonwealth’).  The last of these was even mooted, at one point, as a new country, called Greater Britain.

Some of these were ethno-nationalist (Nazism / Zionism) whilst others were pan- or trans-nationalist (the Soviet federation and British unionism), but almost all (excepting the smaller nations) led to expansionism (ultimately, war).  In contrast with the era of joint-stock ‘liberalism’, state-control of economic and social life was now in the driving seat.  Many of these subsequently failed (losers to others in war) and the leading ideologies emerged as those of (Western) ‘Keynesianism’ and (Eastern) ‘Communism’, with a common connection in ‘state-led’ social formation.  It is not inaccurate to describe the outcome as socialism, with socialism as the natural religion (‘binding’) of capitalist alienation.

In this sense, ‘a’ social revolution did take place in the early 20th century, but one with a compromised, synthetic outcome.  In Gunn and Wilding’s (2022) Hegelian terms: mis-recognition pertained.  Workers gaining universal suffrage in Britain was ‘a revolution’, but one that is almost always overlooked!  Sometimes the achievement of suffrage is deemed a mere ‘concession’ by a ruling class determined to retain their power through more subtle methods (the hegemonic control of education and broadcast media, as pinpointed by Gramsci’s early analysis of Italian Fascism).  But to rob the period and Gramsci of their ‘openness’ produces an historiography which makes the ruling class ‘oh-so clever’, as if it was their ‘Revolution’. 

More tellingly, the same social revolution produced a crisis in surplus value production (and the rate at which accumulation could proceed) – the Wall Street Crash both questioned the emerging fascist conceptions of a ‘New Man’ (much admired by elite figures such as the British Royals: Edward Prince of Wales and Albert Duke of York) whilst also hastening change.  As Thomas Piketty’s (2018) empirical data has demonstrated, before 1914 capital accumulation grew at a rate faster than wage growth, but throughout the mid-20th century the reverse was true (wages grew faster than profits).  ‘Capitalism?’ had been saved by socialist collectivism (the amalgamation of multiple capitals into a singularity), but at massive economic and social (status) cost to the conventional ruling class and its practices.  Workers, in their role as waged workers (subjects central to the accumulation system), had imposed their interests and gained decision-making power within the capitalist state mechanism, even if their so-called ‘class consciousness’ remained ‘corrupted’.

In his overview of Keynes’ theoretical work, and reformation of capitalist strategy, Negri, in Revolution Retrieved (1988), coins the term positive Keynesianism to refer to the immediate post-war period (1945-1973) when state welfare benefits and full employment policies were used to encourage and entice employees to work hard and raise their productivity.  This ever-rising productivity was central to the strategy and was baked-in to a social necessity for endless economic growth and, so long as the economy could be grown at a sufficient rate, the fact wage earners (as property owners) were making distributional ground on recipients of profits, rents and taxes was an acceptable trade-off, especially as any class relying on unearned income was on the back foot.  But with ‘stagnation’ in the 1970s the situation grew desperate for profiteers, rentiers and public servants (tax-takers) meaning something needed to be done – the rise of the right-wing radical was witnessed just as open ‘class conflict’ surfaced or re-emerged.

This conflict produced a shift in the social contract, but not one from Keynesianism back to Liberalism, despite the hopes of the radical right-wing ideology known as ‘Neoliberalism’.  Rather, Negri describes the shift as one towards negative Keynesianism.  That is, rather than the state taking a reduced and fading (or to use Marx’s phrase, vanishing) role in ‘the economy’, which is what Neoliberals like Thatcher may have ‘thought’ was going to happen (or wished would happen in a return to the ‘classic’ era), negative Keynesianism maintained levels of state intervention in social life (and its prominence in guaranteeing the reproduction, discipline, and exploitation of the working class).

Instead of positive encouragements (material benefits; socialised myths of ‘we are all in it together’), negative Keynesianism ‘liberated’ the representatives of monied-capital only by ‘oppressing’ worker dissent to capital’s imposition that people remain ’waged labour’.  Militarisation of society (higher prison populations; investment in security, securitisation, and surveillance), the piling on of indebtedness (for housing, education, and health), and creeping isolation (social individualisation and insulation: gated communities; financial ‘independence’) were the negative Keynesian modes of operation.

So, what is the importance of the above analysis of social change over the last 100 years with regards to studying Marx’s Capital?  On the one hand, when we read Marx via his original writings his anti-statist (radical) position must be kept in mind – his anarchism means he was against political systems containing social divisions between rulers and ruled.  He would have been appalled by the ‘Soviet’ regime produced not just by ‘Stalin’ (that is too easy a cop-out) but Bolshevism from its inception (in 1892). Marx would have recognised the ‘council communist’ and even ’liberal democratic’ revolution that occurred in Russia in Feb (or March) 1917 as progressive whilst reserving criticism for remnants of expropriator influence and power. 

Whilst Bolshevism did get a ‘populist’ upper-hand on (the more ‘reformist’) Menshivist movement (largely related to ending the war immediately), leading to the ‘October Revolution’ (a coup d’etat), the dismantling of the Soviet (‘council’) system and democratic ‘reforms’ happened very quickly under Lenin’s centralisation of political institutions.  The democratic arrangements of Feb-Oct 1917 may not have led to a ‘non-statist’ system, as Marx would have desired, but they could have produced a different outcome for both Russia and Germany in the 1920s (Luxembourg did not feel the time was right for the kind of ‘coup’ attempted by workers in Germany).  Probably the ‘revolution’ would have developed more along lines of what happened in the Western world.  Marx reserves his ‘ire’ for statist politicians of all shades in his political writings, as well as those who try to ‘force’ history and recognition forward (e.g., the professional ‘revolutionary’)!

On the other hand, a standard objection to taking Marx seriously is that, given all the social and technical ‘change’ that took place during the 20th century, surely Marx’s writings are limited to the kind of 19th century capitalism he witnessed (of the classic liberal type)?  Namely, he is good at excoriating Mr MoneyBags, the woefully selfish carpetbagger and child-exploitative industrialist of Victorian slum cities, but modern capitalist corporations are operated by equality, diversity and inclusion-qualified executives who are socially aware and just don’t operate in the same way as the Victorian businessman!  I would point out that whilst Marx is often associated with writing a ‘grand narrative’ (an overarching account of the large sweep of history, a la The Communist Manifesto) his study in Capital is highly specific. 

Capital is an examination of just one type of social relation (or mode of production) – the wage labour / capital relationship.  Marx’s work analyses (breaks down) this relationship and identifies its complex and multifarious derivative forms – that is, if we find ‘the commodity’ (which is produced and appears everywhere in daily life – part of our immediate experience) then we will also find both mutual recognition and value (defined as socially necessary labour) – anyone producing ‘commodities’ must recognise others as equivalents (owners) and produce at a socially-recognised rate (e.g., items per hour).

If we then find that human ‘labour power’ is one of the commodities available for purchase, then we will find ‘surplus value’, which is produced via ‘absolute’ and ’relative’ processes, and so on.  The argument in Capital Is not an ‘historical’ story but Marx’s way of laying out a conceptual ‘unfolding’.  One difficulty, compared to earlier classical political economists, is in getting the order of conceptual presentation correct, so that the reader does not go off on the wrong foot by starting with something which is ‘derivative’ (e.g., ‘profit’).

In summary, Capital is a study of one kind of social relation, and wherever that social relation (waged labour) is found then Marx’s analysis remains applicable, no matter how technologically-advanced or different a ‘society’ might happen to appear.  The main question, therefore: is ‘our society’ still based on waged labour (capital)?  If so, then Marx’s Capital is [remains] relevant. The flesh of the elephant may have fallen away, but to the trained anatomist what stands before them is still an elephant.

Publication Note:

I wrote (started) this article in February 2024, but it then lay dormant and unfinished (on my cloud drive) until September 2025. Reading my friend Werner Bonefeld’s (2023) book (A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion Routledge) inspired me to return to it and at least publish, in a still unfinished form (the referencing is incomplete; if / when I get the time I will return to this element).

References:

Bonefeld, W. (2023) A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation London: Rutledge.

Gunn, R. & Wilding, A. (2022) Revolutionary Recognition

Negri, T. (1988) Revolution Retrieved

Piketty, T. (2018) Capital in the 21st Century

Wood, E. M. (2002) The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View

by doctormcgrail

Exploiting “low science capital”

The university access programme I teach on (for several years now) is currently being expanded to cover (natural) science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses. Previously it only covered arts, humanities and social sciences. The expansion is to be welcomed since there should be routes into the ‘natural sciences’ for adult returners at any university and not just the ‘cultural’ realm. Plus, it would be good to have more interplay between natural and social scientists (and, of course, sciences).

The inaccurate ‘adoption’ of natural scientific ideas within social science and theory (or discourse) has been widely and famously criticised, via well-known examples which now include late-19th century ‘Social Darwinism’ (or evolution understood as ‘survival of the richest’) and the late-20th century Alan Sokal ‘hoax’, involving Sokal’s submission of a tongue-in-cheek paper to the postmodern journal Social Text (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/new-sokal-hoax/572212/). Whilst media coverage of the latter focused on the journal’s editors not being able to tell genuine from false ‘social science’ (or ‘sociology’), Sokal’s subsequent work made it clear that, as a physicist, what most upset or concerned him was inaccurate appropriation of natural scientific concepts by those who didn’t understand (nor desire to understand) them and, instead, turned such concepts into mere “jargon”, or as The Atlantic magazine put it, in 2018, “jabber”.

The argument of the physical or natural scientists is that their concepts are based in a reality which human ‘thinking’ can reflect (correspond to) but not construct, and hence it is folly to claim that concepts rooted in properties external to human will – the properties of the physical world, such as the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere – are somehow ‘socially constructed’. In this fashion Sokal did contemporary social sciences a service by simply reminding us of Thomas Reid’s aim in developing Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which was to save philosophy from becoming “ridiculous” (Broadie in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid).

Of course, what is good for the goose must be good for the gander!  Hence, it is always interesting to see natural scientists adopt what are socially-constructed languages, concepts and belief-systems!

As part of my department’s expansion of access routes into natural degrees, new staff with natural ‘science’ qualifications (I’ll drop the pretence that social sciences are treated as ‘science’ from this point on) had to be recruited, along with a new Head of Educational Transitions. So far, so good. On completion of the recruitment process the candidates were introduced to the wider department – a procedure that involved presentation of personal statements about what the new staff hoped to achieve. There should be nothing surprising in this induction process, but what caught my eye was reference, by one presentation, to how the target audience of prospective students was to be understood or, if you prefer, framed; this was as individuals with “low science capital”.

If the phrases “low science knowledge” or “little scientific understanding (and/or awareness)” had been used then I would not have perceived a problem. But the word “capital” in the phrase indicated the adoption of societal “jargon” (or ‘jabber’) by a natural scientist who doesn’t know what the word means, other than what it means to ‘laypersons’ (not social scientists) around them in everyday general use, no doubt where the term has been ‘picked up’. But capital is not, you (will) see, within Sokal’s definition of ‘science’, that is, pertaining to:

“an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws”.

(Sokal)

What my colleague intended, at heart, was that there are students or potential students with little (maybe ‘no’) understanding of science, and that their role (our department’s role) is to build such knowledge and awareness through education. These students would, no doubt, also lack skills and ‘academic literacies’, or general attributes and capacities (mental and physical) which can be built upon, via practice and repetition (say, in doing lab work and writing reports), in an effort to turn them into ‘scientists’. This is all well and good.

However, usage of the word ‘capital’ managed to sneak in, like a Trojan Horse, a whole set of other connotations. On gaining their new attributes, capacities and skills, our trained up students will go forth (with these additional elements and extensions to self) to exploit them (and themselves) as ‘capital’. After all, what does it mean to have ‘low capital’, whether of the scientific or any other variety (social; financial; industrial; cultural)? That is, we won’t be turning students into scientists per se, but scientists for sale! They will be employable scientists, scientists on the market, and scientists with a ‘load of’ or ‘lots of’ capital.

This usage of the term ‘capital’ is not surprising, nor should it be. It is typical of early 21st century Scotland where the sociological terminology of sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu has been broadly adopted and spread into popular culture, including mainstream mass research events like the BBC’s ‘class calculator’: a website where you fill in your details and the computer informs you which (of 7) social classes you ‘belong to’, based on your self-reported accumulation of capitals – social, cultural and financial.

Where ‘scientific capital’ fits into this realm of capitals I am uncertain, but it probably sits somewhere between cultural and financial. The cultural bit is that you can ‘talk’ science and therein impress potential employers, who also happen to ‘talk’ science and see themselves (well, a younger version of themselves) in the ‘candidate’ (i.e. you) – ‘cultural capital’, by the way, never gets beyond thinking in terms of hierarchical systems as the candidate is always flogging themselves to someone or something, like ‘the market’. The financial bit is that once you’ve landed a job in ‘science’ you are more highly valued than you were before. Neither quite explain ‘science capital’ since there is an aspect of just enjoying the knowledge, which somehow has to be treated or recognised as ‘capital’! Nevertheless, no matter which ‘type’ of capital we are considering or thinking of they all share one thing in common, namely, that all forms of capital are possessions. The student who studies ‘science’ will end up possessing science and move from having “low” to “high” science capital.

But the cultural context to this usage of the term ‘capital’ merely indicates the folly of the culture.

Capital as a Social Relation, and not a ‘Thing’

The whole of Chapter 1 of Marx’s opus Capital (1867) can be thought of in terms of making one core point: capital is a human relationship and not a ‘thing’ (to be possessed), but the social process (relation) which produces capital also entails commodity fetish whereby relations between people appear (or take the form) of relations between things.  Marx makes the joke about never having seen a coat walk into a shop and exchange itself for a roll of linen.  What is actually taking place is the exchange of labour (effort) of the tailor in return for that of the weaver (a la Adam Smith’s labour theory of value, presented at the start of the Wealth of Nations). It might look as if the tailor ‘possesses’ coats for sale, but it is really the tailor who is possessed by the need to continuously produce coats, which they have no personal need for, just in order to ‘exist’.

The duality (relation-appearing-as-thing, and vice versa, thing-appearing-as-relation) does not exist purely ‘in the mind’. Hence, Smith provided two definitions of ‘capital’. First, he defines capital as all the ‘things’ in society, produced by humans (i.e. not natural products like metals in the ground or wild fish), covering buildings, bridges, machines, existing stock (raw materials), etc. As Isaac Rubin notes, this is the ‘wrong’ definition – it describes the appearance of ‘things’. Basically, capital has to, at some point in its reproductive cycle, take the form of useful (wanted) ‘things’, though these can include intangibles such as insurance, a story, a song, a poem, or an idea (a patent). But this ‘form’ taking is always momentary and passing to what capital is – a relationship. Second, Smith defines capital as a ‘fund’ which produces a ‘return’. For Rubin this is the ‘correct’ definition and reveals the fundamentals about what capital is – a human relationship where, to use Smith’s phrasing, one person ‘shares in’ the effort of another.

A Quick and Easy Example

Let’s say you go out with a friend for a drink and they end up in such a state that they need to stay the night with you (sleeping on your sofa). In this instance your sofa is nothing but a useful object. The next day the two of you go out again and the same thing happens. You enjoy your new routine and before long you have a new housemate.

At this point you decide that you don’t mind your friend staying with you, but they are going to have to give you something for the use of your sofa, namely, ‘rent’ in the form of money (say £10 per night – the amount does not matter). At this point your sofa goes through a magical transformation into a piece of capital. It is no longer a merely useful object – having a use value – but has taken on the means of raising or making a ‘return’ (in the monetary form) in the form of ‘rent’ (which meets Smith’s second definition). The sofa, despite being owned by you with no change to its material form, now has an exchange value attached to it. The sofa is now a piece of ‘capital’ – or part of a social relationship of monetary exchange – which ‘earns’ you £10 a night. Of course, it is your friend who has to ‘earn’ the £10 each day to pay you the ‘rent’. It is the changing form of your relationship with your ‘friend’ (now in inverted commas) which has translated the sofa from simple useful object to piece of capital. The sofa’s definition as capital rests on a particular and peculiar kind of social relationship and not on its material form. It has to be noted, since this is very significant, that your ‘friend’ is no longer your friend (or just your friend) because your relationship is now one of landlord to tenant!

Thus, capital is a social relationship and not a ‘thing’. Students, or anyone, with ‘low science capital’ do not lack possession of a ‘thing’ but stand ‘low’ in a social relationship where they can get very little (or nothing at all) in exchange for their skills (their labour power). Subsequently, aiming to raise or enhance such a person’s ‘science capital’ (make them a saleable commodity) is a different goal or purpose than wanting to advance their socially-useful knowledge in a ‘universalist’ sense (to the betterment of ‘humanity’ or society as whole, or even to their own emancipated sense of self). Rather, the goal in discussing ‘low science capital’ is to feed the market with what the market (a peculiar form of social relationship) wants and, of course, raise the ‘return’ that can be had on any ‘investment’ made in such science education and science students (even when they themselves are to be one of the many ‘beneficiaries’ of their own exploitation).

Moral of the Tale

As Sokal notes, inaccurate appropriation of scientific concepts compounds human ignorance. This point backs up Adam Smith’s reflection on the negative influences of the division of labour, which are apt to make us all stupid and ignorant. It is also a reminder of the need for a broad-based ‘generalist’ education as one means of overcoming the social problems of the (social) division of labour.