short essay questions

EAS 248

Lecture 4

Two examples for today’s lecture.

Financial Times, Feb. 4, 2019.

Japan’s finance minister, Taro Aso, argued that, “declining birth rates were a greater problem for fiscal sustainability than ageing or longer life expectancy.”

“It’s not just inconsiderate to people who can’t have children or don’t have children but shows he totally misunderstands the real issue.” Mr Aso is well known for his occasional verbal infelicities, including a statement that old people should “hurry up and die” to tackle the expense of elderly care as well as a variety of racially tinged remarks. But his comments are mild compared with some of his LDP colleagues. In 2007, Hakuo Yanagisawa, a former health minister, drew criticism after he described women as “birth-giving machines”. Last year, Mio Sugita, a junior LDP politician, branded Japan’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community as “unproductive” because they do not have children. Kanji Kato, another LDP member of parliament, reluctantly retracted his advice that married couples should have at least three children so the cost of their nursing care was not paid for by taxes on other people’s children.

John Carpenter’s 1988 movie, “They Live”. The movie is about John Nada (or John Nothing), a drifting construction worker, who comes across a pair of magical sunglasses that allow him to see through ideologies in everyday life, and to realize that aliens have taken over the world and everyday life. Without the glasses, he simply sees what he has always seen: people in their everyday lives, going about town and to work, socializing with friends, having dinners, etc.. When he puts the glasses on, however, all the colours of the world disappear into black and white, and all of the signs and advertisements suddenly change into injunctions to behave in specific ways. Thus, without the sunglasses, Nada sees a sign for a Men’s clothing store; with the glasses on, he sees instead, “Consume.” When he sees magazines and newspapers, he sees their usual titles and covers; when he puts on the sunglasses, however, all he sees are signs that say: “Obey,” “No Imagination,” “Stay Asleep”, “Work 8 hours, play 8 hours, sleep 8 hours,” “Submit to Authority”. And, in an uncanny reference to Marx’s theory of money, John Nada, first without the glasses, he sees a man selling newspapers and magazines and holding a handful of U.S. dollars in cash. But when he puts the glasses on, the money turns into a sign that reads, “I am your God.” Finally, and to tie-in They Live with the population crisis in Japan and Taro Aso’s buffoonery, when John Nada sees a large billboard sign that reads, “Enjoy the Caribbean,” and that depicts a woman in a red swimming suit lying on a beach, it appears to be just another typical tourist agency; but when he puts the glasses on, all of the colours disappear, and in stark black and white, the message of the sign becomes: “Marry and Reproduce.”

I would argue that Marx’s Capital is akin to the special sunglasses in They Live. More specifically, it’s Marx’s method that works like these sunglasses. Like the special glasses, Marx’s method gives us a special lens through which the many capitalist discourses and appearances vaporize into nothingness, and in their place we see the true forms concealed by their distracting, distorting, and unnecessary illusions. These lenses allow us to see how our everyday lives are structured by capitalist ideology, and how our lives have been hijacked, as it were, by alien forces. In the film They Live, the glasses allow John Nada to see the specific form of aliens. In Capital, Marx’s theoretical lens allows us to see how we are captured by the capital-relation, and how the specific form of the commodity is at work on us, on our bodies, and upon “us” as a “population.” It is from this perspective of the question of populations that I’d like to discuss Marx’s method in Capital, as well as Uno’s Theory of Capitalist Crisis.

Part I: On Marx’s Method and the Concept of Populations

Before he began writing Capital, Marx wrote A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, first published in 1859. This text is important not only because it reveals how Marx would write the first chapter of Capital, but also because it is one of the few places where Marx wrote about his own “method”. Moreover, it is in the short section on what Marx called, “The Method of Political Economy,” that Marx distinguishes his method from existing methods in political economy. What distinguishes Marx’s method from theirs? Clearly, it is the question of the “starting point”. For classical political economy, their starting point is always, precisely: the population. Here is what Marx writes, and we will follow his words in length:

…3. The method of Political Economy

When examining a given country from the standpoint of political economy, we begin with its population, the division of the population into classes, town and country, the sea, the different branches of production, export and import, annual production and consumption, prices, etc.

It would seem to be the proper thing to start with the real and concrete elements, with the actual pre-conditions, e.g., to start in the sphere of economy with population, which forms the basis and the subject of the whole social process of production. Closer consideration shows, however, that this is wrong. Population is an abstraction if, for instance, one disregards the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn remain empty terms if one does not know the factors on which they depend, wage-labour, capital, and so on. These presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage-labour, without value, money, price, etc.. If one were to take population as the point of departure, it would be a very vague notion of a complex whole and through closer definition one would arrive analytically at increasingly simple concepts; from imaginary concrete terms one would move to more and more tenuous abstractions until one reached the most simple definitions. From there it would be necessary to make the journey again in the opposite direction until one arrived once more at the concept of population, which is this time not a vague notion of a whole, but a totality comprising many determinations and relations.

The first course is the historical one taken by political economy at its inception. The seventeenth-century economists, for example, always took as their starting point the living organism, the population, the nation, the State, several States, etc., but analysis led them always in the end to the discovery of a few decisive abstract, general relations, such as division of labour, money, and value. When these separate factors were more or less clearly deduced and established, economic systems were evolved which from simple concepts, such as labour, division of labour, demand, exchange-value, advanced to categories like State, international exchange and world market. The latter is obviously the correct scientific method. The concrete concept is concrete because it is a synthesis of many definitions, thus representing the unity of diverse aspects. It appears therefore in reasoning as a summing-up, a result, and not as the starting point, although it is the real point of origin, and thus also the point of origin of perception and imagination.

The last statement thus could be re-phrased as, “Populations appear therefore as a result and not as the starting point, even though populations are the real point of origin, and thus also the point of origin of perception and imagination.” The idea of Marx’s method as a special theoretical lens—the special sunglasses—is located between this movement of the category of population, and how it appears to us in perception and imagination. Without the glasses, we simply see populations as the starting point; with the glasses on, we see the work of capital, commodities, and money, all mediating and capturing our bodies as populations, and thus we come to see these populations as effects of the power of capital.

What I would like to suggest is that what is really specific about Marx’s special theoretical lens is that allows us to see “ourselves” as our lives are mediated by what Marx calls the “capital-relation”, which reveals how “we”—as bearers of labor power—necessarily depend upon this relation to capital in order to subsist, survive, and live. With Marx’s special “sunglasses,” we see that movements of populations are never divorced from the capital-relation, even though in ideological representations of populations and in our everyday lives, populations are always perceived as mere biological entities completely separated from the world of capital.

Put differently, like Copernicus, Marx’s method is a radical de-centering of ourselves from our conception of the world. In a capitalist world, while it may appear natural to consider populations as the centre, in fact it is capital that is at the centre. Populations are mediated by capital, and in this way, workers become “appendages” to machines, which represent the specific form of constant capital. Moreover, after a crisis, it is machinery that ultimately replace human workers, and workers are fired and “freed” from production. This process of expelling labour power from production is what Marx calls a process of producing a relative surplus population. This is a population that is a population that is a “surplus” because it exceeds, relatively speaking, in comparison to the value demands of capital’s organic composition. Thus, it is a relative surplus population. Marx’s point is to show that capitalist production can produce a population on its own, one, moreover, that creates the basic social precondition for future capitalist production: a pool or reserve of labour power.

Properly speaking, capital cannot produce labour power as a commodity directly, even though it must absolutely consume labour power as a commodity. However, based on the commodification of labour power, capitalist production can produce a relative surplus population, which compensates for capital’s originary inability to produce labour power as a commodity directly. The relative surplus population is thus a prosthetic for the originally absent labour power commodity. As a mechanism that assures the reproduction of the capital-relation itself, the periodic production of the relative surplus population reveals what Marx calls the “law of populations peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.

The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous….This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production…783-84

…But if a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements. 784

…there must be the possibility of suddenly throwing great masses of men into the decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production in other spheres. The surplus population supplies these masses. 785

…The path characteristically described by modern industry, which takes the form of a decennial cycle (interruptd by smaller oscillations) of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis, and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-f0rmation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus populations, and become one of the most energetic agencies for its reproduction. 785

….The expansion by fits and starts of the scale of production is the precondition for its equally sudden contraction; the latter again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human material, without an increase in the number of workers, which must occur independently of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly ‘sets free’ a part of the working class; by methods which lessen the number of workers employed in proportion to the increased production. Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands’. 786

The superficiality of political economy shows itself in the fact that it views the expansion and contradiction of credit as the cause of the periodic alternations in the industrial cycle, whereas it is a mere symptom of them. Just as the heavenly bodies always repeat a certain movement, once they have been flung into it, so also does social production, once it has been flung into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects become causes in their turn, and the various vicissitudes of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity. 786

When this periodicity has once become consolidated, even political economy sees that the production of a relative surplus population—i.e., a population surplus in relation to capital’s average requirements for valorization—is a necessary condition for modern industry. 786

On the Necessity of Crisis and its Periodicity

As Marx discussed in his so-called “Plan” for Capital, the topic of crisis was originally supposed to be given an entire volume. Marx never lived to write this separate volume on crisis, and thus we must extract a theory of crisis from the existing volumes of Capital. This, in many ways, was what Uno Kozo did in his Theory of Capitalist Crisis, written in 1953. Uno argues that there is only one place to find Marx’s insights on capitalist crisis, and that is in Capital.

What does Uno especially want to “demonstrate”? He is not interested in demonstrating not simply what causes crisis, but more why capitalism necessary repeats crisis. Thus, he is interested in what he calls the necessity of crisis in capitalism, and why crisis necessarily repeats. In his Theory of Capitalist Crisis, Uno is not interested in analyzing this or that crisis but rather how, in Marx’s Capital, crisis is a recurring phenomena peculiar to the capitalist mode of production. Insofar as it recurs and repeats, therefore, the phenomenon of crisis must also therefore have a periodicity. Uno’s theory of crisis thus focuses on (i) the necessity of crisis and (ii) the periodicity of crisis.