THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL IS VERY LIMITED...

...if the happiness of the whole, and not the luxuries of a few, is the proper subject for national congratulation. -- C. W. Dilke, Source and Remedy

Part three of a three part essay. Part one is Fetters on the Development of the Productive Forces. Part two is The Realm of Freedom and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. 

Think about that for a minute:

THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL IS VERY LIMITED, if the happiness of the whole, and not the luxuries of a few, is the proper subject for national congratulation.

Capitalization (no pun intended) is as it appeared in the original pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, published in 1821. Four decades later, Karl Marx elaborated on what he designated the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.

Instead of the happiness of the whole, Marx emphasized the misery of a surplus part of the population, who at the extreme become paupers. The cause of this misery is the unlimited accumulation of capital. What Marx's account gained in drama over Dilke's, it gave up in universalism. Not only with regard to population but also to a literature whose theme was the relationship between virtue and happiness. 

For example, William Godwin's Political Justice was concerned – as the subtitle of the first edition announced – with the influence of political justice on general virtue and happiness. "Virtue is upon no other account valuable," declared Godwin, "than as it is the instrument of the most exquisite pleasure."

The virtue/happiness nexus has a long and prestigious history. I will only mention a few highlights. In Benedict [Baruch] Spinoza's Ethics Proposition XXXVII of Part IV (1677) states: "The good which every man, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men, and so much the more, in proportion as he has a greater knowledge of God."

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), John Locke wrote of the connection between virtue and public happiness as inseparable:

For God having, by an inseparable connexion, joined virtue and  public happiness together, and made the practice thereof necessary to the preservation of society, and visibly beneficial to all with whom the virtuous man has to do; it is no wonder, that every one should not only allow, but recommend and magnify those rules to others, from whose observance of them he is sure to reap advantage to himself. 

Locke's influence on William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law of England (1765) is conspicuous in the wording of his discussion of the "first principles of the law of nature":

For he has so intimately connected, so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained but by observing the former; and, if the former be punctually obeyed, it cannot but induce the latter.

Blackstone mentioned the happiness of each individual where Locke had specified public happiness. But this may be less significant than it seems. Later in the paragraph, he referred to substantial happiness and twice to real happiness and then mentioned substantial happiness again two paragraphs later.

Public happiness returned in the title of the Marquis de Chastellux's De La Félicité Publique. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, was undoubtedly influenced by Locke, Blackstone, and Jefferson's friend, Chastellux. Whether the declaration's "pursuit of happiness" refers to individual or public happiness is a moot question. Reason and virtue tell us that one's individual happiness is inseparable from the happiness of others.

Chastellux made the innovation of relating happiness to the hours of work:

First: how many days in the year, or hours in the day, can a man work, without either incommoding himself, or becoming unhappy? ...

Secondly, how many days must a man work in the year, or, how many hours must he work in the day, to procure for himself that which is necessary to his preservation, and his ease? 

The answer to these questions leaves a sum of "how many days in the year, or how many hours in the day, may remain for this man to dispose of... without robbing him of either of the means of subsistence, or of welfare." In Political Justice, Godwin also offered a calculation of the relationship between work and happiness:

Let us compute that the Industry of a labouring man engrosses ten hours in every day, which, when we have deduced his hours of rest, recreation and meals, seems an ample allowance. It follows that half an hour a day, seriously employed in manual labour by every member of the community, would sufficiently supply the whole with necessaries.

A few years later, in The Enquirer, he followed up with a less quantitative estimate:

The commodities that substantially contribute to the subsistence of the human species form a very short catalogue: they demand from us but a slender portion of industry. If these only were produced, and sufficiently produced, the species of man would be continued. If the labour necessarily required to produce them were equitably divided among the poor, and, still more, if it were equitably divided among all, each man's share of labour would be light, and his portion of leisure would be ample.

Godwin then went on to extol the benefits of increased leisure, that could be "devoted to the cultivation of the understanding, the enlarging our stock of knowledge, the refining our taste, and thus opening to us new and more exquisite sources of enjoyment." He didn't think all of free time had to be employed intellectually or culturally but clearly assumed a substantial portion of it would be.

Charles Wentworth Dilke – author of the 1821 pamphlet and a devoted follower of Godwin – took a different route to arrive at his vision of a leisure society. Having established that the beneficial accumulation of capital had intrinsic limits, he asked what would happen if this process were allowed to run its course. His conclusion was that the amount of labour that could be extracted for the use of capital would decline and society would cease exerting its full productive power. "The next consequence therefore would be," he concluded, "that where men heretofore laboured twelve hours they would now labour six, and this is national wealth, this is national prosperity." Later in the pamphlet he stipulated that the six hours would be "for three days a week from twenty to fifty."

After all their idle sophistry, there is, thank God! no means of adding to the wealth of a nation but by adding to the facilities of living: so that wealth is liberty – liberty to seek recreation – liberty to enjoy life – liberty to improve the mind: it is disposable time, and nothing more.

Marx was fascinated by these two thoughts, "where men heretofore laboured twelve hours they would now labour six," and "wealth... is disposable time, and nothing more." He cited them repeatedly in the manuscripts for the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value. Moishe Postone viewed the Grundrisse as a ‘key’ for reading Capital. Unmentioned by Postone, however, the passages he cited as constituting that key were the ones where Marx was examining the subtleties of Dilke's disposable time.

Marx rarely mentioned 'virtue' in volume one of Capital or the Grundrisse and 'happiness' was mostly relegated to the footnotes. 'Misery' was a frequent concern in the former and 'dissolution' in the latter. History, in Marx's analysis, was not the heavenly ordained working out of Blackstonian "first principles of natural law" in which virtue inevitably bestows happiness. 

Nearly half of the 'dissolutions' in the Grundrisse appear in a 41-page section of notebook V that the editors have titled "Forms which precede capitalist production. (Concerning the process which precedes the formation of the capital relation or of original accumulation)." In the beginning, capital had produced neither the free labourers it would employ nor the subsistence goods with which to pay them for their labour power. It found them both ready to hand, the products of the dissolution of the feudal mode of production. 

Toward the end of the section, Marx noted the consequence of this transition: 

The production of capitalists and wage workers is therefore a major product of the valorisation process of capital. Ordinary political economy, which considers only the objects produced, entirely forgets this.

This production of capitalists and wage workers necessarily continues the process of dissolution – original accumulation – that preceded the formation of the capital relation, as Marx made abundantly clear elsewhere in the Grundrisse and in his "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" cited above.

In the twentieth century ordinary economics began to look at the production of workers, if only at first in their capacity as consumers of second-hand goods:

...under any but a progressive obsolescence régime, many such people would never be able to have an automobile at all. And now the same thing is occurring in regard to vacuum cleaners, washing machines, furniture, rugs, typewriters and other articles, using the polite word "re-built" instead of the more expressive ' 'hand-me-down.

Progressive obsolescence was advertising executive J. George Frederick's term for what later became known as planned obsolescence, which the journalist Vance Packard wrote about in his 1960 best seller, The Waste Makers. Herbert Marcuse was very much taken with Packard's account and extended the effects of obsolescence to socialism and the individual. Packard's book clearly reflected the influence of Thorstein Veblen's "conspicuous consumption," although it may have been indirect. He did not mention Veblen in The Waste Makers but did acknowledge the influence of Stuart Chase, a Veblen acolyte. 

Marcuse also didn't mention Veblen in One Dimensional Man, the book most directly influenced by Packard. It is unfortunate that Marcuse didn't consult Adorno's critique of Veblen, "Veblen’s Attack on Culture," originally published in the same 1941 issue of Studies in Philosophy and Social Science as an essay by Marcuse on modern technology. Adorno had pointed out that Veblen's critique of conspicuous consumption was one-sided in that it sought to do away with the "bad side" of conspicuous consumption while retaining "the fullness of life" without realizing that the two "comprise the inherently mediated identity of luxury... the concrete form of their happiness always contains the totality of social conditions of the situation in which they live."

Uncannily, it was those who sought to preserve the "obsolete social system" who grasped the radical implications of Veblen's conspicuous consumption more "dialectically" than Veblen and his followers, from Chase to Packard to Marcuse. Paul Mazur, an investment banker and partner in Lehman Brothers, wrote the magnum opus of the genre in 1928, American Prosperity Its Causes And Consequences, which was the inspiration for Frederick's  "Is Progressive Obsolescence the Path Toward Increased Consumption." Frederick thought Veblen's conspicuous consumption was "an excellent phrase." He was all in favour of it. 

Here is how Mazur diagnosed America's problem in 1928:

Europe’s condition must and will improve. Her problems, it is true, are many, but they can and will be solved. The belt that is drawn to the last notch may be indicative of an unsatisfied appetite, but it is also a clear indication of a nation’s as well as a man’s utmost determination to survive.

Meanwhile, America has loosened the belt. Her problem, as far as it affects a majority of the people, really lies in filling the maw to fit the belt and not in drawing in the belt to fit a shrinking waistline. American industry, in other words, has the odd problem of feeding those who are not hungry; of clothing those who are already warmly clad. Her problem may, therefore, seem to be a “high grade worry” indeed; but actually it is a very serious matter. The factory system, which is built to produce millions, depends upon those millions for profits. A relatively small decrease in production, it should be clear to all, measures not the difference between excess profits and big profits, but the entire difference between profit and loss. It is a difficult problem we are facing — unique in history.

In short, America's problem was excess productive capacity and Mazur's prescription was conspicuous consumption in the form of progressive obsolescence... and consumer credit: 

Clearly then, obsolescence has been a vital ingredient in American business prosperity. One step beyond, however, was still necessary in order to ensure as large a consumer demand as American business desired and, above all, needed. Generous and effective use of advertising, high pressure sales methods, and especially the replacement of wear by obsolescence would, it is true, convert consumers’ sales resistance into a real desire to buy. The fact that the consumer was already exhausting a good deal of his purchasing power, however, was a serious impediment to increased sales. It was therefore necessary that increased consumer purchasing power should be created. And this was done by the extraordinary extension of instalment purchasing, the plan which enables American consumers today to satisfy many billions of dollars’ worth of their needs and desires.

Mazur's affirmation of advertising and high pressure sales was shared at the highest levels of the U.S. government. In a 1930 address to the Association of National Advertisers, President Herbert Hoover reiterated his administration's support for advertising: 

The purpose of advertising is to create desire, and from the torments of desire there at once emerges additional demand and from demand you pull upon increasing production and distribution. By the stimulants of advertising which you administer you have stirred the lethargy of the old law of supply and demand until you have transformed cottage industries into mass production.

Such advertising-induced "torments of desire" are a far cry from Spinoza's "good which every man, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men." Nevertheless, it is prudent to recall Adorno's admonition about "the concrete form of their happiness." Given the choice between ersatz happiness that at least is feasible and an abstract utopia that renounces the false happiness and replaces it with a virtuous enigma, it's not hard to guess what outcome is likely.

In 1940, shortly before he took his own life, Adorno's colleague, Walter Benjamin, wrote eighteen theses, On the Concept of History. In the collection of fragments related to these theses is one numbered "XVIIa" that challenged elements of Marx's concept of classless society.

"Three basic concepts can be identified in Marx's work," Benjamin wrote, "and its entire theoretical armature can be seen as an attempt to weld these three concepts together. They are the class struggle of the proletariat, the course of historical development (progress), and the classless society." Benjamin affirmed Marx's secularization of messianic time in the idea of a classless society as a "good thing" but saw the idea's elevation to an "ideal" by the Social Democrats as corrosive.

In Benjamin's view, the classless society, "is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately achieved interruption." What Benjamin was criticizing was not simply the German Social Democratic Party but the myth of progress embraced by Bolsheviks of all factions and parties:

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.

Repeating the theme of interruption yet a third time, Benjamin objected that "classless society is not to be conceived as the endpoint of historical development. From this erroneous conception," Benjamin continued, "Marx's epigones have derived (among other things) the notion of the 'revolutionary situation,' which, as we know, has always refused to arrive."

Another notion that has refused to arrive was the six-hour working day with a three-day week. André Gorz explained why over thirty years ago in "Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation," He attributed the attrition of the demand for shorter working time to the fact that there is "no evident correlation between the volume of production and the hours worked" and cited Marx, from the Grundrisse, "'labour ceases to be the measure of production and working time the measure of labour.'" 

It is useful to examine the full context of that statement in some detail: the first quotation is from the 1987 Marx Engels Collected Works, volume 29, translated by Victor Schnittke; the second from the 1973 Penguin edition, translated by Martin Nicolaus:

The theft of alien labour time, which is the basis of present wealth, appears to be a miserable foundation compared to this newly developed one, the foundation created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in its immediate form has ceased to be the great source of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and therefore exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of a few has ceased to be the condition for the development of the general powers of the human mind.

The theft of alien labour time on which the present wealth is based appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head.

Without going into detail on the vagaries of translation, two things can be noted about the sentence fragment Gorz cited. First, Marx referred to wealth (Reichtums), not production; second, he specified labour in the direct or immediate form (unmittelbarer Form). Both of these distinctions are important. 

The distinction between wealth and production (or value) is central to Marx's critique of political economy. One of the four inherent barriers to capitalist accumulation is that "real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, a form not absolutely identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all." Labour in the direct form refers to the distinction between living labour power and "dead" labour embedded in capital – the latter being its indirect form.

The sentence fragment Gorz cited is sandwiched between two sentences that contain emphasized phrases: "The theft of alien labour time on which the present wealth is based" and "surplus labour of the mass... non-labour of the few." What Marx was talking about in notebook VII, the famous "fragment on machines," was the dissolution of capitalist relations of production. He said so at the beginning of the notebook. "Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production." A curious feature of this dissolution is that capital endeavors to keep up the appearance of direct labour and surplus labour (in the form of "profit") even when those have substantially dissolved into indirect labour and rent.

In Gorz's "Political Ecology" article, he offered the strategy of "Self-Limitation as a Social Project" as an alternative to relying on experts to impose a "technical" solution to environmental crises. Gorz identified the problem that there is "no commonly accepted norm of sufficiency that could serve as a reference for self-limitation." It is not possible to rely on restoring old traditions, he argued, and thus he proposed the political definition of a norm of sufficiency through a social project. The aim of this project was "to restore politically the correlation between less work and less consumption on the one hand, and more autonomy and more existential security on the other, for everyone."

Until a few days ago, I would have supported the aim of Gorz's project. I wrote a version of this essay that got tangled up in how to present this as the conclusion.

I was wrong. Restoring the correlation between less work and less consumption is a quixotic quest. It is the mirror image of capital's charade of positing rent as profit and indirect labour as direct labour. Besides the name is wrong. A norm of sufficiency for what? Gorz proposed "autonomy" and "existential security." 

Why not happiness?

Capitalist relations of production were in their prime in the 1860s when Marx proposed the limitation of the working day as a preliminary condition for improvement and emancipation, hailed the enactment of the English Ten-Hour Bill as a victory of the political economy of the working class over the political economy of the middle class, and prescribed reduction of the working day as the prerequisite for attaining the realm of freedom. What Marx recommended in the 1860s is obsolete. How he got there is not.

In the Grundrisse, Marx did not dwell on reduction or limitation of the working day aside from his quotation, twice, from The Source and Remedy, "Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours." What occupied the core of his analysis of surplus value was disposable time. "The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time," he wrote. 

Marx's resolution of what he defined as the "moving contradiction" "that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth" is that "the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour." Surplus labour, not surplus labour time, presumably because their surplus labour time has already been incorporated into capital and persists as value but not as time. 

Marx's transition from disposable time to the reduction of working time in the 1860s appears to have happened around the time he became involved with the First International and it arguably was strategic. His only and incidental mentions of disposable time in Capital were from the perspective of the capitalist and thus ironically dismissive, "If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist." "Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital." Marx's point, of course, was that the capitalist robs the worker of her disposable time, which is not "by nature and by right... to be devoted to the self valorization of capital."

I have discussed here the elements of a radical political ecology: concrete happiness, public happiness, virtue, dissolution, sufficiency, and disposable time. How one puts those ingredients together, to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, "is a matter of taste and experience, i.e. of morals and knowledge."  But more importantly, it is a collective, political task not an individual one.