Ping pong 37: The Perplexities of Resistance
Marx presents a complex picture of two very different worlds. On the one hand there is society, with all its beliefs and mores, and on the other, technology. The link between two such domains is both palpable and yet strangely elusive. Societies clearly do change as their technological basis changes (industrial societies do not look like feudal societies in most cases). Likewise what industries we get (heavy, chemical, biological or computer) is somehow connected to the societies that value certain technologies over others. However exactly how this exchange takes place is far from self-evident. It is Marx’s Great Claim that he uncovered the real, and relatively simply connection between these different elements. It is on this claim that he sets himself up, and is even more set up, as the great prophet for communisms. Marx suggests that the connection of society and technology needs to be understood, in a capitalist society at least, as having three main elements. Firstly there is the driving need of every capitalist to make profits. Secondly there is the technology that allows these profits to happen in the first place. Thirdly there is a necessary sequence of events that follows on from the interaction of the previous two elements: That is, there is a history, a history that one might predict in advance (as one predicts the flow of water). It is worth running through these ingredients and their relatively simple exchange, before turning to the far more critical problem, as exactly what Marx gets wrong here. Or perhaps better, what he excessively simplifies.
Marx suggests that the only way in which a capitalist can make profit is to squeeze out the costs of the production process. This is because a capitalist will hire a worker by the hour or day. They will pay a fixed price for that work. If they can either pay less for the same work, or get more productive labour out of it, they will stand to make more money. The initial Iron Laws of pay, will require that each worker is squeezed down to subsidence pay. However there is of course a biological minimum to the amount which humans can be paid. Pay too little and they actually die; The science and art of the sweatshop. After a point therefore, a capitalist will need another ruse. They will need technology. A Factory triumphs over a cottage industry, Marx suggests, because it both de-skills the labour but also allows one individual to become far more productive. They are merely a cog in a far larger system. Each capitalist can therefore maximise the amount of money which they can make from their workforce (i.e. maximise the amount of production which a single individual can achieve) by investing in larger and more complex technology.
This is of course the claim of that very modern element of society - ‘contracting out’. Companies be they hospital cleaners or markers of exam papers, or even runners of schools, always claim to be able to do things cheaper, because they have bigger and better technologies supporting them. A move that is theoretically at least right. However there is an immediate problem here. Marx suggested that the problem with large machines is that they are far more costly to buy and maintain. They might therefore allow theoretically great economies of scale, and yet only the very largest companies are likely to have the money to buy and adequately maintain these machines (this is the problem with modern contracting out – it is always financed on the cheap). The effect then of becoming increasingly industrialized is that the number of companies gradually decreases. Moreover there is nothing random in this process. As Capitalists needs to make profit, and profit is tied to large and complex machines, then every successful capitalist needs to acquire the latest and poshest of machines. Of course not all will be able to afford to do this. Those that cannot, will then go under, leaving progressively bigger companies linked to bigger and more complex machines. Another modern example is certainly found in the British supermarket, where up to recently, commercial efficiency seemed to be defined by increasingly large scale and coordinated companies. The big players such as Tesco or Asda therefore got increasingly big, while those who blinked even for a second (Sainsbury’s) appeared at times, to be in real difficulty.
Capitalism is therefore, for Marx pockmarked, by progressive crises, each linked to the advent of a new production process. However there are three natural limits to this process. Firstly the economies of scale are defined by the ability of a manufacturer to lay off staff. If the entire process is therefore mechanized, no more economies can be achieved. This fact is what makes the current recession so very different from those that have gone before it. They were based on crises of technology, according to the strictest Marxian rule. However this recession does not begin in manufacturing, and is not really about industry, as we in the West have already laid off most of our workers in previous recessions. Secondly companies will get larger and larger. Tesco will really threaten to devour the world. Companies in doing so will gradually become far more powerful than the state, and will eventually undermine the very principles of competition on which capitalism is based. Vast companies have no need to compete, or alternatively lack competitors. Companies such as Unilever then seep into every element of our lives, creating a false set of choices. And if such companies really did themselves go under, then the entire system would be in genuine peril. This of course is the other interest in the current situation. Due to financial (and not economic) reasons, such companies might go under… Finally, Marx suggests, capitalism will hit the buffers when it runs out of people to sell a product to. It needs people to spend money (much as Gordon Brown does) and must resort to any measures to ensure that this remains possible.
Marx therefore suggests that capitalism as a system is typified by a restless need to expand, and yet that this expansion is itself limited by the very parameters that set up the system in the first place. There will come a moment therefore where restless expansion comes up against finite limit, and is destroyed by it. This basic model of contradictions inherent within a system of restless change and finite limit, has had a long subsequent history. The current worry about the environment is the most recent version of the same basic story; A Story that has the deep advantage of giving a direction and a sense to the hurly burly of capitalism. That is, if there is a finite limit to the current system, if it really can run up against its own buffers, then there is a sombre order to all the hullabaloo and hocus pocus of capitalism. It is really going somewhere, even if that somewhere is the abyss. It is the tale of the unlimited (be that greed or technology) bound within the finite (the world), and understanding it not. Such a story gives a special place to the dispossessed and disadvantaged (or those who feel themselves to be so). It is after all this group of people who are hard up against the finite walls of capitalism, and so feel their truth. Hence Marx creates a beautifully simple formula: Capitalism relies upon technology, and technology propels the system into history, and up against its finite limits. A formula that includes within it all the drama of suffering and redemption: the poor suffer, and get redeemed (eventually) through that suffering.
However there is a real problem with this formula. At its heart it has the assumption that there is only one direction to this movement. Capitalism is doomed because the foundations on which it is based are finite and the rug really will be pulled from under it. It is this necessary direction which ensures the ‘fact’ that while capitalism and technology are complex in themselves, they can still be resolved into a certain history, and made to resonate, with one another in accordance with a certain finite limit. However this direction has proved to be far from obvious. Moreover Marx himself in a sense knew this. In perhaps the most original chapter of Das Capital, he considers the nature of machines. Machine’s power lies in the fact that they dissolve the difference between human labour and the natural world. Our production processes become then allied to or even indiscernible from forces of nature. The emphasis on forces (plural) is here absolutely vital. Humans do not therefore simply harness existing force (or even forces). But rather humanity will in its machines, uncover ‘new’ forces (in Marx’s day the power of electricity and steam, fifty years ago nuclear technology, currently the power of tidal and solar power). These forces have of course in terms of their physics always been there. However that presence was invisible until humans built machine capable of articulating their power independently of other forces (and the whole of nature), and therefore set them up as independent elements within the world.
There was therefore already in Marx the possibility that machines might evolve in rather different ways, than the fixed manner which he forecasts. That prediction was based on the idea that the machines that currently existed in his time would simply get better and better. It did not forecast that new machines might actually change the entire picture, and challenge both old machines and the history in which they were caught. Certain generations of machines have therefore effectively escaped the large model or made it problematic (by themselves being dangerous or difficult). The Nuclear industry is the obvious example of the last point, while computers or (to a degree) alternative technologies, are an example of the former point. Computers challenge the system by the simple fact that large companies really can be started in back room or college common room. Good ideas become a viable currency in themselves. The computers, at least currently, thereby elude the Marxist laws of economy by scale. The Nuclear industry by contrast represents the alterative point. An industry so complex and so dangerous, and yet so enticing, that it can neither be ignored by or organized in the standard manner. Between the two lies alternative technology. Such technology is the very battleground of small innovators and very large companies. These large companies are torn between the desire to ensure that they invest in the next big breakthrough, but also that other desire to crush any rival technology. Oil companies therefore invest in technology, and yet want to ensure that it is their investment that will eventually triumph. On the other side is the small scale innovator, with their dreams to make the great breakthrough; and the individual determined to make a small difference to their world. Our current problem, our current ‘history’ is defined by the fact that these two elements are far from reconciled with one another. Individuals (inventors and ecologists) eye companies warily, while companies dismiss the world of lone ‘eco-nuts’ (while still needing them to buy and invent). No single simple axis has been found. So that, in the case of alternative technologies, we have not yet therefore mapped out the territory for the kind of history which Marx thought typified capitalism; A history where technology simply flows in one direction, and one direction only. History therefore has exploded into technology. It has ceased to be linear and straightforward, but rather now tells the perplexing tale of endless new technologies, whose power and domain over lap one another in a way that Marx simply did not allow for.
On the other side of the formula, it is also clear that Marx underestimated the power of the market to express the goings on of technology. He thought then that the market was capable of expressing the increased power of technology in terms of recession and boom. He did not consider that the market might respond to the perceived limits of technology. In a sense this is after all what this modern recession is about. Of course ‘sub prime’ is important, and yet it is merely a symptom of a loss of confidence (what else is a worry about a fall in value? The entire premise up to that point had been that prices never fall). Or to put it another way, the problem started with a worry about limitation, both in the possibility for property to rise any further but also that wider worry about the ability of the world to produce enough oil (the crisis was prefigured by a crisis in our belief about the power of Bio-Fuels to deliver viable energy, and then a worry about peak oil). The crisis therefore started when the world of resources or if you like possibility of them, suddenly felt finite and limited, and the which confidence we had enjoyed that every problem could be solved, vanished. However this vanishing then of course has its own effect. It triggers a global recession.
The economy itself in a sense incarnated the anxiety, and with it the limitation. Our economy, our ability to do something became suddenly very real and very tangible. We were all caught up in it, this embodying of finitude within the global economy, which then of course changed one of the very parameters that set up the crisis of confidence in the first place. Suddenly there is too much oil in production. And at a stroke one lurches to a worry about deflation and stagnation. What Marx did not then allow for, was this ability of the economy to be the living incarnation of our worries, an ability that then transforms the nature of that anxiety in itself. The economy expresses our anxiety, and in expressing it, whizzes everything around, changing the rules, and so allows new possibilities to eventually emerge.
The Iron Formula of Capitalism - so Technology so History, has proved porous. History and technology need not be going in one direction. There are many different sliding histories and so many different technologies, and responses to the world. While the market is not simply bound by the laws of technology, but is free to reflect and express the limitation of that technology, as much as its advance, a limitation that then changes everything.
However Marx’s apparent failure should not be exaggerated. There are clearly two deep anxieties in modernity. The first is that vision of a finite world and an unbridled system which might be true on the level of ecology. Or to put it slightly differently, this version of technology, driven by the unbridled lust of capitalism, might be rendered highly problematic within a bound and finite world. We need then another technology (or another world) and need it quickly. Marx’s very general principle would then become that every level of technology, if driven by unlimited desire in likely to run up against a hard wall of finitude. The rules would then include a problem of scale. The larger and the more inclusive the technological system is as a whole, the more the entire system will have to change, in order that it avoids its own finite limits. We would then to this degree still very much be caught up in a Marxist world, and would be even if the solution to this world was now looked for not in political but technological change (but then Marx would have accepted that fact as well, if he had foreseen the way in which technology developed). To do justice to the world is therefore always to consider how one’s current technology will impact upon the world if it carries on unbridled. We face then a perpetual problem of either needing to look for a sudden a ‘new technology’ that might change everything but which will not be forecast - or facing up to the deep problem of how to manage a restless expansion within a system which creates it own finite limits. To do justice to the world becomes a choice between sudden hope and management, and it is by no means clear which of these two is the best course. This is a problem which later Rants in this sequence will examine.
Secondly the failure of Marx to ‘unravel’ history has become a very real problem. We feel we are caught in a world that is changing, even evolving in someway, and lack, in the absence of Marx or of Reason any explanation for that change. The Ghost of narrative history will not simply die. It haunts us all. It threatens us all (as we all make conflicting claims about it, and about whom history claims for its own special people). Justice in the world of ungoverned history, might become something frightening or frightful, as claims are made to lands or pasts that no one has a right to know. The failure of Marx to comprehend history, and yet the failure of history to simply go away and die, becomes then a very real problem. A problem to which the next Rant must turn.
