Representing Capital by Fredric Jameson

Author:Fredric Jameson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

Rosa Luxemburg insists far more centrally on this origin of capitalism in what it is too mild to call the expropriation of the Third World, while modern post-decolonization scholarship has been even more categorical about this precondition, and the momentous share of non-European labor in the construction of what is wrongly seen to be a European exceptionalism.57 Yet with the extraordinarily rapid development of capitalism in China and elsewhere in the non-West in our time, the debate about Europe’s historical precedence has been renewed, and the preponderance of discussions of weapons and armaments points to the ideological difficulties in this line of approach. For from the outset Marx himself appealed to an extra-economic explanation, namely the violence with which gold and silver were plundered and the “natives” forced to labor. Yet our own situation reminds us, if it were necessary, that “violence” is an ideological category, which is always appealed to in political arguments: not only is it an extra-economic factor which falls outside the categories of the system (in this case virtually by definition) but it can never be a reliable historical concept. We have thus taken a road that leads nowhere else but into an impenetrable ideological thicket; and the whole notion of “primitive accumulation” proves to be a kind of myth, like original sin itself, as Marx remarks from the outset (834). We must return and follow an alternative route, that of the production of the other half of the combination, namely the working population. An additional justification for doing so may be found in the reminder that it was the worker who built capitalism in the first place.

When we examine that other precondition, which specifies the conditions under which a working population appropriate for capitalist development will be available, we discover that Marx here reaps the benefit of his entire life’s work, returning in these pages (874ff) to the fundamentals of the account of alienation he had worked out in the 1844 manuscripts.58 But this new and final version makes clearer what advantages are to be gained from altering the historical framework in which the discussion is taking place, from one of labor generally—all modes of production have depended on and presupposed the extraction of surplus value and surplus labor in one way or another—to the specific historical situation of the transition to capitalism. It should also finally be able to tell us something about the advantage of shifting from a philosophical register to that of political economy. The latter nomenclature is better than the more specialized one either of history or of economics, since its strength was to have included both (whatever criticisms Marx is able to make of its then current bourgeois limitations); meanwhile, it also seems better to replace the traditional complaints about Marx’s alleged Hegelianism in these early manuscripts with a more forthright description that indicts the more general abstractions of philosophy as such, including its vested interests and, as it were, its détournement of thought in its own specialized direction, namely the production of “concepts.

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