Re: absolute general law of capitalist accumulation

[Ted Winslow]

The ontological idea of “internal relations,” the idea that makes 
Marx’s analysis of capitalism “dialectical,” leads to the treatment of 
“law” as immanent.  The nature of individuals, in the case of human 
individuals the degree of their rational self-consciousness as 
expressed in their motives and, based on these, their characteristic 
forms of behaviour, is the product of their relations.  For Marx, as 
for Keynes, the “diffentia specifica, of capitalist relations is the 
dominance in it of greed as the motivation of individuals.  Marx claims 
action based on these motives produces both a vast increase in human 
productive powers and “misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, 
brutality, mental degradation … on the side of the class that produces 
its own product in the form of capital.”

It does this by necessarily producing a particular mode of labour, an 
increasing organic composition of capital and via this an industrial 
reserve army.  This produces immiserization of the proletariat.  “This 
is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.”

This is irrational and therefore unreal.  The rational outcome of “the 
law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, 
thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labour, may be 
set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human 
power” is the creation of free time for individual development and 
fully free activity.

The rational is made real by the same capitalist process creating a 
subjectivity able and willing to transform productive relations into 
relations conforming to this rational “law.”  That subjectivity, 
according to Marx, is the immiserized proletariat.

within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social 
productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the 
individual labourer; all means for the development of production 
transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation 
of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, 
degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every 
remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they 
estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process 
in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an 
independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, 
subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful 
for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and 
drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of 
capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the 
same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation 
becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows 
therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the 
labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, 
finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or 
industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this 
law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of 
Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of 
misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of 
wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of 
misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental 
degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that 
produces its own product in the form of capital. [25] This antagonistic 
character of capitalistic accumulation is enunciated in various forms 
by political economists, although by them it is confounded with 
phenomena, certainly to some extent analogous, but nevertheless 
essentially distinct, and belonging to pre-capitalistic modes of 
production.

These claims about how a subjectivity willing and able to transform 
productive relations into rational relations are mistaken.  Individuals 
immiserized in this way would be subjects of this kind.  there is no 
necessity, however, for capitalism to produce immiserization.  The 
organic composition of capital doesn't have to change in the way marx 
assumes.  For this and other reasons, the creation of an industrial 
reserve army isn't a "necessity" i.e. a necessary feature of these 
relations.  Nor is it necessary that: "they mutilate the labourer into 
a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a 
machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a 
hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of 
the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in 
it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he 
works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more 
hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into 
working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the 
Juggernaut of capital."

One way of actually creating the kind of subjectivity required is to 
modify the working of capitalist relations so as to make them more and 
more consistent with the development of such a subjectivity.  This 
requires that their existing form be consistent with a subjectivity 
sufficiently well developed to desire and create improvements such as 
reduction of the working day, increased wages, less alienated labour, 
improved developmental conditions for children, etc.

In Canada, for instance, the political context has just been 
transformed by an election which has made it more likely that the 
existing medicare system will be significantly improved, that a 
national child care system attuned to some signfifcant degree to the 
developmental needs of children will be created, and that cities will 
be made better places to work and live.