Critiquing Capitalism Today by Frederick Harry Pitts

Author:Frederick Harry Pitts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

5.7 Conclusion

In this chapter I have drawn on the work Werner Bonefeld to set out a means by which we can decode the material determinations present in the abstract unfolding of the value-form . Bonefeld’s critique of the NRM’s tendency towards a ‘logical’ rather than ‘historical’ reading of the genesis of the rule of value is staged from within the theoretical tradition but augments it with the Open Marxist centring of class struggle and primitive accumulation . This conceptual commitment is reflected in Marx’s own presentation of the commodity fetish , where the real antagonistic social relations between human agents are not something submerged beneath the appearances these relations take in the modes of existence of value, but rather something that is expressed in these. This gives us a way to talk about life under capitalism without outsourcing all contentions or commitments to pure speculation as to how things ‘really’ are or could be. It is there for us to grasp by means of the ‘negative dialectics of economic objectivity’ Bonefeld presents in his CPECTS .

This has impacts on how we consider the future or present possibilities for any escape from capitalism. It is to this aspect that we now turn our focus in the second part of this book. What the theory of class and crisis given in this chapter emphasises is that there are persistent and contradictory relations of class antagonism at the core of capitalist society which cannot be discounted in considering not so much the source, but the necessity of crises. As we will see next, such a consideration of these constitutive contradictions is missing in much of the postoperaist-inspired thinking that takes, variously, one of two contested and contentious elements of Marx’s oeuvre as their basis: the Fragment on Machines , and the passages on the falling rate of profit . By treating each in their place within a wider reading of Marx’s work, we can put right what is wrong in many Marxist theories of crisis.

In a time where new theories of capitalist collapse draw on the contested inheritance and overly optimistic political efficacy of the LTROPF, the following analysis works against attempts to recoup it in light of the radical rethinking of Marx’s work that has unfolded in the wake of the New Reading. Today we see a reappearance of ideas around the rising organic composition of capital sounding the death-knell of capitalism, mainlined into the mainstream of left thought via the new reception granted Marx’s Fragment on Machines. A new cadre of postcapitalist dreamers contend that so-called ‘info-capitalism’ exhausts capital’s capacity to instigate countervailing measures against the falling rate of profit , in a time of accelerating automation, ‘free machines’ and endemic unemployment. The second part of the book uses the ideas of the NRM to take these ideas apart.

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