24.07.2002
Globalisation and socialism
Does globalisation undermine socialism along with the national state? Jack Conrad discusses the relationship between global capital and socialism
What is often called 'globalisation' is responsible for a great deal of confusion and, in some cases, consternation on the left. Most fret and worry; a few celebrate. On the one hand there are the national reformists and revolutionaries. Alike they feel threatened by what they see as an unfettered, all-consuming stateless capital - ie, the subordination of the nation-state to the power of giant corporations, faceless currency dealers and institutions such as the World Bank, World Trade Organisation and the European Union. Old Labour - internal as Bennism and external as Scargillism; rheumy-eyed 'official communists' huddled around John Haylett's Morning Star; Alan Thornett's International Socialist Group and beleaguered pro-Labour sects; the Socialist Workers Party and Peter Taaffe's Socialist Party in England and Wales; Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan: all would, if only they could, turn back the wheel of history. On the other hand there are those who welcome what they believe is the decline and virtual disappearance of nation-states. Globalisation and the emergence of what they call "empire" "broke and buried" the nation-state, claim Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (M Hardt and A Negri Empire Cambridge MA 2001, p55). Parliament, trade unions and national legislation are obsolete or irrelevant. Any revolt or protest by the "multitude", no matter how isolated or parochial, immediately touches the global level. These silly ideas find fitting political expression in silly ephemeral groups such as Ya Basta! Various anarchist and left communist sects too maintain that the days of the nation-state as an effective site of struggle are long gone. Capital now exists unmediated, in pure form, and freed from the constraints once imposed by governments. Or so they say. Of course, from its origins capital has striven to overcome all boundaries - national, cultural and geographical. Capital knows no rest. It must ceaselessly revolutionise the means and circumstances of production. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848 Marx and Engels describe the capitalist mode of reproduction as joining the whole world into a single metabolism. Capital's need for unlimited expansion sent it hunting far and wide. No country, no person remained unaffected. Raw materials came back to the metropoles in enormous quantities from the most distant places. Finished commodities are in turn exported to the "world market" (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 6, Moscow 1976, p486). Many decades later, prior to and during World War I, Rudolf Hilferding, Nikolai Bukharin and Vladimir Lenin concluded that capital had reached a new, higher, stage. Imperialism and finance capital denotes the merger of banking and industrial capital, the colonial division of the world, the domination of monopolies and interventionist state controls. There is also the export of capital itself. Indeed the export of capital goes from being an exception and comes to colour the whole system. Instead of simply marketing finished commodities, big capitalists augment their profits through overseas lending, running infrastructural projects and establishing factories in other countries. The global market condenses and ripens into the global economy. New world order So globalisation is hardly a novel phenomenon. Nevertheless over the last two or three decades there have been important shifts in the circumstances of reproduction which do mark an intensification, further integration and spread of the capitalist system. There can in short be no doubt that the post-World War II period has been superseded. There is a new world order. For purposes of illustration I shall highlight four interrelated areas. One, class struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Keynesian methods designed to manage the national economies of the major capitalist countries hit the buffers. The needs of capital clashed with the needs of the working class. Full employment and the provisions of the social democratic state boosted working class self-confidence. Falling profit rates and inflation necessitated a ruling class offensive. Monetarism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, neoliberalism. It took many battles - ideological, legal and physical. But with a venal and incorporated top leadership and lacking any clear-sighted vision of an alternative, communist, society, the organised working class suffered defeat after defeat. Steel, cars, mines, docks, print. Unemployment soared. Anti-trade union legislation cowed. Solidarity crumbled. From this politically constructed vantage point chivalrous captains of industry could gallantly rescue capital from the murderous clutches of taxation - which siphons off surplus labour to provide for social housing, health, earnings-linked pensions and other such useless and irresponsible forms of expenditure. The social democratic consensus is slain. As is right and proper, capital is kept for capital in order to produce more capital. Unprofitable concerns, not least nationalised industries, are either elevated into predatory transnationals or are snuffed out in the gale of international competition. Restrictions on the movement of capital are lifted. Profit rates increase. Inequality widens. The rich have certainly done well. Whereas in the 1970s the top one percent of households owned 20% of national wealth, now it is close to 40%. Two, spread. The irresistible dynamic of global capital erodes and eventually prevails over even the immovable might of the most autocratic 'socialist' state. Universal money subverts the anti-cosmopolitan nomenklatura. The cornucopia of commodities lures every stratum into support for democratic counterrevolution. Neither KGB nor Berlin Wall can save the national socialist dystopia. To preserve its power the bureaucratic elite must become bourgeois. Seclusion and self-sufficiency implodes before the capitalist mode of reproduction. Over two years - 1989 to 1991 - the 'second' world vanished. State industries limp on in hopeless obsolescence or have fallen into the tight fist of bureaucratic thieves and asset-strippers, the oligarchs. That, or they have been cherry-picked by western capitalists. China remains officially a people's democracy. However, the heirs of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaping actively encourage wage slavery and the rapid accumulation of capital in the special economic zones. The bureaucracy merges with capitalism to form a single alloy. Vietnam wants to emulate the Guangdong model. Starving North Korea worships Kim Il Jong as a beneficent and all-powerful god, but relies on South Korean and US handouts. Even in Fidel Castro's Cuba the dollar functions as a parallel currency. Capitalism stares in on these 'socialist' states from every window. In short, all countries now lie within, or are subject to, the capitalist metabolism. There is no outside. But the state has not gone away. Far from it. Nowadays the USA operates as a superimperialist power. It won the cold war. Economically the EU stands on a par. But militarily the US has no serious rival. Neither Russia, the EU, China nor Japan. Administrations, be they Republican or Democrat, confidently unleash, or threaten, overwhelming force when faced by a recalcitrant, small to medium-sized foreign regime. Unwanted treaties are arrogantly torn up or simply ignored. ABM, Kyoto. In parallel old institutions are given new roles. The World Bank and the IMF rule Africa, southern and eastern Asia and Latin America with callousness comparable with colonial times. Structural adjustment means destitution and starvation for millions. Nato polices the Balkans, the UN throttles Iraq and the WTO guards US DNA and GMO patents. Meanwhile anti-terrorism is presented as an ultimatum - you are either with the USA or against the USA. Those who are against will, of course, suffer dire consequences. That is the temporary new world order. Temporary, because capital is a system of antagonistic rivalry. The present-day balance of power is bound to alter and its established structures are bound to be challenged too. Three, increased interlinkage and velocity. Since 1970 the export of commodities has risen enormously, by something like 200%. Everyday items are produced by single companies across diverse countries and continents. Designed in Italy, owned in the US, assembled in Taiwan, sold everywhere. During the same, 1970-1997, period the export of capital has, in comparison with the export of commodities, shot through the roof, leaping by nearly 1,400%. Currency trading stands at over $1.2 trillion daily. Central banks can easily find themselves overwhelmed. Chronic instability results and the possibility of turmoil and a devastating crash goes hand in hand with untold wealth. Both phenomena - interlinkage and velocity - are in part facilitated by staggering decreases in the value and price commanded by the means of communication: sea freight, air transport, telephone calls and computers. IMF statisticians estimate that between 1920 and 1990 the real cost of sea freight went down from an index of 100 to 30. Figures for air, telephones and computers are in comparison breathtaking. Compared to an index of 100 in 1930, air transport stood at just under 20 in 1990; over the same period telephone calls dropped to almost zero. The same feat has been performed by computers - but from a 1960 base line (from New Scientist April 27 2002). Four, structure. As a result of all the above, the internal structure of the world economy no longer simply consists of oppressed and oppressor nations: ie, a handful of great imperialist powers who produce and sell finished commodities and an underdeveloped periphery, often colonies, which supply raw materials. The picture is considerably more complex. Capital as a system of reproduction always was universal and social. Now it is more so. The metropolitan countries remain economically, politically and militarily dominant, but account proportionally for less and less finished commodities. Those jobs have not disappeared. They have been exported. Increasingly the metropoles are characterised by banking, insurance, transport, research and development, advertising and what might be called immaterial commodities, frequently called knowledge and information. The typical worker in Britain is no longer in heavy industry and male, but in administration or services and female. There is no scramble for Africa. On the contrary, apart from South Africa the countries south of the Sahara are being left to rot. Aids, petty wars, famine, debilitating debt. Russia is a huge exporter of oil and gas, but still haemorrhages wealth on a chilling scale. Average life expectancy has fallen by 10 years. The Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc have fared even worse. Afghanistan, Argentina, Columbia, Iraq and most of the former Yugoslavia lie wrecked. As a concomitant, impoverished parts of Latin America, eastern Europe, Russia and the 'third world' are reproduced through mass migration in the great cities of the metropoles - Los Angeles, Houston, New York, London, Paris, Marseilles. On the other hand Ireland, Spain, Greece and Portugal have joined the EU and adopted the euro. They can hardly be regarded as backward or as semi-colonies. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are set to follow them. China, India and Mexico are no longer mere exporters of raw materials, but of finished commodities too. And at a significant level. Something like 80% of the world's footwear comes from China. Places such as Turkey, Singapore, Chile and South Korea have also undergone a qualitative shift. These medium-developed capitalist countries have their own monopolies, export capital as well as finished commodities, and face large, often militant, working classes. Yes, of course, the national sovereignty, so treasured and venerated by conservatives and national socialists alike, has been sapped and undermined by the universal logic of capital. Europe's nation-states must join together in a federal superstate or admit their impotence. The US has well known relations of dependency. Saudi Arabia ensures cheap oil for gas-guzzling Americans. The Clinton boom could be sustained only through a huge influx of foreign capital - mainly German and Japanese. The US now runs on a black hole of chronic indebtedness. Not surprisingly then even the most populous state on earth, China with its 1.2 billion inhabitants, can only satisfy its needs by ensuring all manner of reproductive and political relations with other countries. China has its special economic zones, Hong Kong and is now a full member of the WTO with all that means in terms of loss of autonomy and subordination to the overarching capitalist metabolism. What do these changes mean for strategies and programmes of liberation? Though the spread and universalisation of capital is motivated by needs of self-expansion and is often carried out in a thoroughly inhuman and brutally destructive manner, there is an objectively progressive aspect. Despite all the human suffering the growth of capitalism means that today the working class is in all probability the biggest class on the planet. Due to globalisation for the first time in history there are more proletarians than peasants. However, though capital shows its continued technical dynamism, its intrinsic limits are impossible to ignore. Ecological destruction, crisis, waste and the increasing role of the state in setting prices, ensuring profits and providing military protection from encroachment by foreign competitors. Arms contracts, reliable utilities, subsidies, tax breaks, import controls - all help to keep the vital sphere of circulation functioning in the interests of capital accumulation. Capitalism puts off socialism by organising itself and organising itself again and again. Irrespective of Thatcherite nostrums the bureaucratic state apparatus assumes an ever greater importance. Certainly without the state and its legal framework - laws, courts, prisons and police - capital would find it impossible to exercise its dictatorship in the workplace. They are few, we are many. The state also provides capital - which is internally fractured by its very nature of being many capitals - an overall cohesion it must otherwise lack. Capitalism still operates as capitalism. But its essential laws are historically in decline - value, money, free competition - and contradictions pile up and become ever more intractable and fraught with danger. Society, if it is to survive, must control the wealth it produces. The way forward lies not in appealing to the supposed common sense or humanity of the self-interested personifications of capital. Leave that to archbishop Rowan Williams, Bob Geldof, Bono, Oxfam, Jubilee 2000 and the myriad other NGOs - however naive, here is the reformist wing of the new world order. The task of communists is to programmatically equip and politically train that class that capital itself recruits and economically organises. The global working class is alone capable of constituting itself a viable alternative material power which can overcome capital's apparatus of repression and reorganise the world according to human need and the goal of fully rounded human development. Labour both stands immediately opposed to capital economically and has the potential collective strength to turn rational theories and demands into socially transforming deeds. No other class, social stratum or protest issue can do that - hence goodbye obituaries to the working class are not only wrong-headed, but are declarations of abject political surrender (eg, A Gorz Farewell to the working class London 1982). As to national socialism - owing everything to Otto von Bismarck and Alfred Marshall, nothing to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels - it was always palpably anti-socialism. Merely legally controlling the individual capitalist or expropriating private capital leaves intact capitalism as a reproductive metabolism, along with its hierarchical system of control. Workers remain exploited workers and the system continues, of necessity, to blindly maximise the extraction of surplus-labour from them as producers. Thankfully programmes for instituting socialism within, through or over a single national class state now appear as what they are - utterly foolish. Much to the chagrin of our national socialists, neither a Stalin-type command economy nor the social democratic state any longer represent a coherent alternative to existing neoliberal capitalism. Hence the wailing against globalisation and gnashing of teeth by Labourite and left reformist organisations. Showing a maudlin attachment to auto-Labourism, the SWP's Chris Harman mounted a plucky defence of "old fashioned" trade unionism and "reformist governments" not so many years ago (International Socialism No73, winter 1996). It did not convince. Global production and global ecology mercilessly punish antiquated and blinkered notions of local exclusiveness and isolation. Humanity is interdependent. Exploitation links workers everywhere. They still speak national languages, but mutual conditions - their radical chains - make them a world class. In the stirring battle cry of the Communist manifesto the emancipation of the workers requires a world revolution, the "forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions" (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 6, Moscow 1976, p519). Buzz and drug Within neoliberal establishment circles 'globalisation' is more than the latest buzz word. It serves as an ideological drug to lull workers into acceptance of permanent wage-slavery. In a world where capital is meant to be stateless and comprehensively mobile wage and other demands on governments for improved conditions are patronisingly and poisonously attacked as self-defeating. Higher subsistence levels, or so the story goes, will simply see capital packing its bags and moving off to where labour-power is dirt cheap. China, Burma, Mexico, Indonesia. Hence, the apologists of capital insist, ideas of launching a socialist challenge to the system and its logic of limitless accumulation are a chimera. We do not, for one moment, accept the new-old 'iron law of wages' theory peddled by the political and academic servants of capital - like the nonsense about complete automation and artificial intelligence, it is a fiction, albeit a useful one, invented in order to sustain the carefully constructed image of a capitalism without end. Through class struggle gains can undoubtedly be won. Capital cannot locate just anywhere. Even amongst the transnationals production and sales rely predominantly on the home country. Moreover supplies of "skilled workers and efficient infrastructures" are vital (J Stopford and S Strange Rival states, rival firms Cambridge 1991, p1). So while there is a tendency to equalise wages and conditions there can come into effect - especially through international coordination and organisation - real improvements and gains. There is no need to bid each other down. Workers can still limit competition between themselves. The self-serving economic determinism of the neoliberals is not only contemptible - morally and intellectually. It also makes an easy target for those wanting to rescue the flailing reformist project. A useful example is Ron Bellamy's 'Fighting the myth of globalisation' articles in the Morning Star; published over the three days of June 25, 26 and 27 1997 and defended against a hapless critic in an August 8 letter. (Bellamy subsequently fell out with Morning Star editor John Haylett and his ally Robert Griffiths, part-time Communist Party of Britain general secretary - he sided with the unsuccessful Mike Hicks-Mary Rosser rebellion.) By setting up and duly knocking down absurd and crude formulations - in general from unnamed people and/or institutions - Bellamy tries to give the kiss of life to 'official' communism's cadaverous version of national socialism - the British road to socialism programme (for our critique see J Conrad Which road? London 1991). Despite that limitation, by engaging with Bellamy's arguments we can not only expose the fallacies within his programme, but show once more why those such as Hardt and Negri, who claim that the national state is buried and broken, are mistaken and altogether premature. Evidently the modern state is not "powerless". Nor do transnational companies exist in mid-air, detached from "country" (Morning Star June 25 1997). Bellamy is being rhetorical. Ford is rooted in the US, BMW in Germany and Toyota in Japan. These mighty states have a long and very effective record of ruthlessly defending their transnationals at home and abroad. "At least 20 companies in the 1993 Fortune 100 would not have survived at all as independent companies if they had not been saved by their respective governments in the last decade and a half" (W Ruigrok and R van Tulder The logic of international restructuring London 1995, p218). Neither does it follow that within the framework of the global market "national agents and governments have no role" (Morning Star June 26 1997). Diverse they may be, but the Bank of England, the CIA and the Communist Party of China are far from irrelevant when it comes to ensuring the production and reproduction of capital. Despite Bellamy's diversionary questions, common sense tells us that there is no "world state", nor a non-national "world capitalist" (Morning Star June 27 1997). Nato, the UN, the WTO and the IMF are by definition intra-state organisations and, I would argue, operate under the whip of US imperialism. "Where are the armies, police forces, courts and prisons" of the world capitalist state? Bellamy artfully inquires. There are, of course, none. There is no world state and nor can there be under capitalism. What of a supranational capitalist class? Most boards of directors sitting over transnational companies are mononational. Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Silvio Berlusconi are respectively British, American and Italian. And, yes, seen from that angle, capital is "owned by capitalists of one state which they export from their own nation-state to others" (Letters Morning Star August 8 1997). Calling transnationals 'multinationals' is then a complete misnomer. There are few, if any, multinational companies. Capital is not stateless. Furthermore, capital cannot spread evenly throughout the world. There is, Bellamy triumphantly points out, a strong regional bias. Before him Trotsky called it combined and uneven development. Most exports and overseas investments are between capitalistically advanced countries. For instance, in the early 1990s three-quarters of British foreign direct investments were concentrated in North America, the EU and Japan. Bellamy also rightly stresses that, "though there are new features", international or global capital, in the sense of capital being exported from one country to another, is in itself "no way new" (Morning Star June 25 1997). Just prior to World War I, when Britain was at its imperial zenith, investments abroad amounted to 13% of GDP - roughly the same as today. Between 1880 and 1913 British overseas capital increased fourfold to some £4 billion - "total income from foreign investments reached close on £200 million" (R Palme Dutt The crisis of Britain and the British Empire London 1957, p76). And I hardly need add that international trade in commodity capital considerably predates industrial capitalism (see F Braudel The wheels of commerce Berkley 1992). The neoliberals indulge in hyperbole. Yet so too does Bellamy. The neoliberals maintain that the state is powerless. This excuses dismantling the social democratic consensus and rolling back working class gains. Bellamy in turn maintains that, because globalisation has been much exaggerated by the neoliberals, ipso facto the existing state can be used as the vehicle for his neo-Keynesian alternative economic strategy and in due course a British socialism. He needs a non-global capitalism to justify this programme. So where does this take us? There is, as the noted Marxist thinker, István Mészáros, suggests, a "mismatch" between capital's reproductive structures and its state (I Mészáros Beyond capital London 1995, p65). National capital is by definition tied up with the national state. But, as freely admitted above, global capital has no state formations proper. Nevertheless global capital exerts itself, albeit "in an extremely contradictory form" (ibid p68). Capital exists as a single world metabolism but within a system of national states. Capital by its own logic demands the unlimited exploitation of labour. The national state cannot allow this, observes Mészáros - neither economically nor politically. The masses would rebel and, that failing, starve. Therefore other solutions are sought out ... at enormous cost in terms of human suffering. The 20th century witnessed two world wars, the rise, decline and rise again of imperialist parasitism, the capitalist national socialism of Adolf Hitler, and the post-capitalist national socialism of JV Stalin. In this last named context Bellamy transparently entertains another, unstated, agenda. Implicitly the national socialism of the USSR, despite its abject failure, is exonerated - along with his own record as one of its toadying propagandists. Stalin's USSR - naturally minus its proletarian and revolutionary genesis - actually remains Bellamy's model. Total nationalisation for Bellamy and many others, Trotskyites included, is monstrously equated with socialism or/and a workers' state. The result can be run bureaucratically or democratically, but "property relations" are for the national socialist school the bottom line. Such a viewpoint not only involves mangling Marxist theory and the programme of democracy and social liberation. It is an unsolicited gift for capital's paid persuaders. The USSR's terror, mass oppression, censorship, gulags, irrationality and poverty are turned into a dire warning. This is what happens if you epsilons dare interfere with the natural order of things! Bellamy was particularly mindful of those left labour bureaucrats who after nearly two decades of Tory government looked to the EU in the forlorn hope of salvation. Ken Livingstone and John Monks still do. In an attempt to return them to the true national socialist fold, he cites figures showing that the UK governments spends 56 times more on goods and services than an EU job creation programme: £2,300 per head, as opposed to £41 per head. Bellamy concludes that reformist social change via the EU is a fantasy. Not only would "scrapping the Rome Treaty" be necessary, but so would a "majority of left national governments" on the council of ministers. "How long should the people of one country wait for that?" Bellamy asks, "when they can obtain their own left government." A British socialism that weakens "transnational big businesses", pulls out of the EU and restores welfare would, he sincerely believes, inspire others and thereby prove to the most effective form of "international solidarity" (Morning Star August 8 1997). Exactly the same argument is used nowadays by the Scottish Socialist Party's Alan McCombes to justify his Scottish road to socialism. We have seen on numerous occasions what follows reformist experiments in national socialism. They are hardly inspirational. Spain in the mid-1930s and Chile in the early 1970s ended in bloody tragedy. France in the mid-1930s and then again in early 1980s saw a flight of capital and an almost instant programmatic reversal. Theoreticians of national socialism explain away history by insisting that the state's powers to impose restrictions over capital were not used forcefully enough. Chris Harman doubtless imagined he was very bold when he appendixed a call for "direct action of workers from below" to prevent actions by capital designed to "sabotage attempts to improve the condition of the mass of the people" (International Socialism No73, winter 1996). Suffice to say, this is an echo of the British road to socialism and shows just how far to the right the comrade had strayed from revolutionary Marxism. Only "in the long run" would an attempt to supersede capitalism in one country "succumb to its pressures", he then argued (my emphasis International Socialism No73, winter 1996). By imposing authoritarian restrictions on capital - or even by abolishing capital negatively - the isolated revolutionary regime might well survive for some considerable time. However, in so doing it inevitably and very quickly becomes its opposite - a freak society like Stalin's USSR, Mao's China or Pol Pot's Kampuchea. Year zero marks not the birth of real civilisation but horrendous barbarism. No single country - not even the richest - has within it the means necessary to positively supersede capital. Individual capitalists can be expropriated through a political revolution. But creating a sustainable and dynamic alternative mode of production is a universal task. For Marx and Engels there could be no socialism in one country because socialism must break out of capitalism positively, an outcome "which presupposed the universal development of the productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them". The capital relationship cannot be positively superseded within the narrow framework of the national state. It exists at the level of the world market and world economy - and here and only here are the necessary material conditions for socialism and communism. That is why in the German ideology, written way back in 1845, Marx and Engels savaged all notions of national socialism. Universal capital produces in all countries a mass of propertyless workers and makes "each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others". If by foolish design or unfortunate accident the workers' revolution remained national, all that would happen is that "want is merely made general, and with it the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old crap would necessarily be restored". So "empirically", communism is only possible as the "act of the dominant peoples 'all at once' and simultaneously" (original emphasis, K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 5, Moscow 1976, p49). Socialism - as the stage of revolutionary transition between capitalism and communism - must and can only be the act of a world class. National or local socialism spells disaster. International socialism spells human liberation. The fundamental mistake made by Bellamy and other national socialists is the notion that capital is a thing - money, mines, factories, food, jewels - in the grip of a class of very wealthy individuals. Ownership for them is all. In this way the modern capitalist class is, so it is said, no different from the ancient slave-owner or the feudal lord. Remove them from the levers of the state, take away their property, and - hey presto - there is no capitalism. Marx held all such 'socialist' magic in contempt. The idea that we "need capital but not capitalists is altogether wrong", he explained. "It is posited within the concept of capital that the objective conditions of labour - and these are its own product - take on a personality towards it" (K Marx Grundrisse Harmondsworth 1973, p512). Capital is no mere thing - like land or chattels - but a "social relationship", whereby alienated, dead labour dominates and feeds off living labour. Capital is in essence subjectless. It is its own cause. Its determination runs from capital to the capitalist, not the other way round. The individual owner is no more than the personification of an exploitative relationship; a relationship that can be assumed by anonymous fund managers, a friendly cooperative or Harman's reformist state. Production under capitalism is separate from control. Production is not about satisfying wants. Production takes place for the sake of production. In this subjectless system capital's objective requirement for unlimited self-expansion must overcome the subjective wishes of any of its personifications. Thereby control is alienated from everyone. Decision-making simply becomes finding ways to allow capital to expand. Profits have to be realised. Accumulation must proceed. Either that or go bust. The personification is in actual fact controlled by the system. Capital has to be superseded in its totality and replaced by an open-ended communist totality. Without the positive supersession of capitalist society's division of labour and the domination of living labour by dead labour the power of capital will reassert itself. That is why for Marxists, though the workers' revolution starts politically on the terrain of the national state, the content of our project is to bring the product of humanity back to humanity. What decides the matter is control. Does control over the worker continue to be the unlimited self-expansion of dead labour? Or do the associated producers control the products of work and thereby stop being workers? Mészáros explains that any attempt to "gain control over capital" by treating it as a "material thing" tied to a "simple relation" with its private owner can only result in catastrophic failure. No act of parliament or revolutionary decree can by itself remove capital from the "social metabolic process as the necessary command over labour under the historically long prevailing and after the revolution unavoidably inherited circumstance". So it is not possible to "re-situate" the alienated power of command over labour to labour itself by "simply targeting the private capitalist personification of capital". That can be done only by replacing the established "organic system" as the "all-embracing and dominating controller of societal reproduction" (I Mészáros Beyond capital London 1995, p610). We communists take universal capital as our real point of departure. If capital is grasped as a relationship, then questions such as whether or not General Motors remains American, or the degree to which governments can fix exchange rates or borrowing stand revealed as secondary issues at best or else nothing more than smelly red herrings.
Worker