The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

106 The passage from modernity to postmodernitydestroy, past investments and labour skills. Creative destruction isembedded within the circulation of capital itself. Innovation exacerbatesinstability, insecurity, and in the end, becomes the prime forcepushing capitalism into periodic paroxysms of crisis. Not only doesthe life of modern industry become a series of periods of moderateactivity, prosperity, over-production, crisis, and stagnation, 'but theuncertainty and instability to which machinery subjects the employment,and consequently the conditions of existence, of the operativesbecome normal.' Furthermore:All means for the development of production transform themselvesinto means of domination over, and exploitation of, theproducers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man,degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroyevery remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hatedtoil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of thelabour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporatedin it as an independent power; they distort the conditionsunder which he works, subject him during the labour-processto a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transformhis life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and childbeneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. (Capital, 1:604)The struggle to maintain profitability sends capitalists racing off toexplore all kinds of other possibilities. New product lines are openedup, and that means the creation of new wants and needs. Capitalistsare forced to redouble their efforts to create new needs in others,thus emphasizing the cultivation of imaginary appetites and the roleof fantasy, caprice and whim. The result is to exacerbate insecurityand instability, as masses of capital and workers shift from one lineof production to another, leaving whole sectors devastated, while theperpetual flux in consumer wants, tastes, and needs becomes a permanentlocus of uncertainty and struggle. New spaces are necessarilyopened up as capitalists seek new markets, new sources of rawmaterials, fresh labour power, and new and more profitable sites forproduction operations. The drive to relocate to more advantageousplaces (the geographical movement of both capital and labour) periodicallyrevolutionizes the international and territorial division oflabour, adding a vital geographical dimension to the insecurity. Theresultant transformation in the experience of space and place ismatched by revolutions in the time dimension, as capitalists strive toreduce the turnover time of their capital to 'the twinkling of an eye'M oderniz ation 107(see below, Part III). Capitalism, in short, is a social system internalizingrules that ensure it will remain a permanently revolutionaryand disruptive force in its own world history. If, therefore, 'the only'secure thing about modernity is insecurity,' then it is not hard to seetrom where that insecurity derives.Yet, Marx insists, there is a single unitary principle at work thatunderpins and frames all of this revolutionary upheaval, fragmentation,and perpetual insecurity. The principle resides in what he calls, mostabstractly, 'value in motion' or, more simply, the circulation ofcapital restlessly and perpetually seeking new ways to garner profits.By the same token, there are higher-order co-ordinating systems thatseem to have the power - though in the end Marx will insist thatthis power is itself transitory and illusory - to bring order to all thischaos and set the path of capitalist modernization on a more stableterrain. The credit system, for example, embodies a certain power togulate money uses; money flows can be switched so as to stabilizerelations between production and consumption, to arbitrate betweencurrent expenditures and future needs, and to shift surpluses ofcapital from one line of production or region to another on a rationalbasis. But here, too, we immediately encounter a central contradictionbecause credit creation and disbursement can never be separatedfrom speculation. Credit is, according to Marx, always to beaccount.ed for as 'fictitious capital,' as some kind of money bet onproduction that does not yet exist. The result is a permanent tensionbetween what Marx calls 'the financial system' (credit paper, fictitiouscapi al, financial instruments of all kinds) and its 'monetary base'(unul recently attached to some tangible commodity such as gold orsilver). This contradiction is founded on a particular paradox: moneyhas to take some tangible form (gold, coin, notes, entries in a ledger,etc.) even though it is a general representation of all social labour.The question of which of the diverse tangible representations is 'real'money typically erupts at times of crisis. Is it better to hold stocksand share certificates, notes, gold, or cans of tuna, in the midst of adepression? It also follows that whoever controls the tangible form(the gold producers, the state, the banks who issue credit) that ismost 'real' at a given time, has enormous social influence, even if, inthe last instance, it is the producers and exchangers of commoditiesin aggregate who effectively define 'the value of money' (a paradoxicalterm which we all understand, but which technically signifies'the value of value'). Control over the rules of money formation is,as a consequence, a strongly contested terrain of struggle which generatesconsiderable insecurity and uncertainty as to the 'value of value.'In speculative booms, a financial system which starts out by appearing