The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

180 Political-economic capitalist transformation1 Capitalism is growth-oriented. A steady rate of growth is essentialfor the health of a capitalist economic system, since it is onlythrough growth that profits can be assured and the accumulation ofcapital be sustained. This implies that capitalism has to prepare theground for, and actually achieve an expansion of, output and agrowth in real values, no matter what the social, political, geopolitical,or ecological consequences. To the degree that virtue is made ofnecessity, it is a corner-stone of capitalism's' ideology that growth isboth inevitable and good. Crisis is then defined as lack of growth.2 Growth in real values rests on the exploitation of living labourin production. This is not to say that labour gets little, but thatgrowth is always predicated on a gap between what labour gets andwhat it creates. This implies that labour control, both in productionand in the market place, is vital for the perpetuation of capitalism.Capitalism is founded, in short, on a class relation between capitaland labour. Since labour control is essential to capitalist profit, so,too, is the dynamic of class struggle over labour control and marketwage fundamental to the trajectory of capitalist development.3 Capitalism is necessarily technologically and organizationallydynamic. This is so in part because the coercive laws of competitionpush individual capitalists into leap-frogging innovations in theirsearch for profit.":: But organizational and technological change alsoplay a key role in modifying the dynamics of class struggle, wagedfrom both sides, in the realm of labour markets and labour control.Furthermore, if labour control is fundamental to the production ofprofits and becomes a broader issue for the mode of regulation, sotechnological and organizational innovation in the regulatory system(such as the state apparatus, political systems of incorporation andrepresentation, etc.) becomes crucial to the perpetuation of capitalism.The ideology that 'progress' is both inevitable and good derives inpart from this necessity.What Marx was able to show was that these three necessaryconditions of a capitalist mode of production were inconsistent andcontradictory and that the dynamic of capitalism was necessarily,therefore, crisis-prone. There was, in his analysis, no way in whichthe combination of these three necessary conditions could producesteady and unproblematic growth. In particular, the crisis tendenciesof capitalism would produce periodic phases of overaccumulation,defined as a condition in which idle capital and idle labour supplycould exist side by side with no apparent way to bring these idleresources together to accomplish socially useful tasks. A generalizedTheorizing the transition 181condition of overaccumulation would be indicated by idle productiveopacity, a glut of commodities and an excess of inventories, surplusmoney capital (perhaps held as hoards), and high unemployment.The conditions that prevailed in the 1930s and have emerged periodicallysince 1973 have to be regarded as typical manifestations of thetendency towards overaccumulation.The Marxist argument is, then, that the tendency towards overaccumulationcan never be eliminated under capitalism. It is a neverendingand eternal problem for any capitalist mode of production.The only question, therefore, is how the over accumulation tendencycan be expressed, contained, absorbed, or managed in ways that donot threaten the capitalist social order. We here encounter the heroicside of bourgeois life and politics, in which real choices have to bemade if the social order is not to dissolve into chaos. Let us look atsome of these choices.1 Devaluation of commodities, of productive capacity, of moneyvalue, perhaps coupled with outright destruction, provides one wayof dealing with surpluses of capital. In simple terms, devaluationmeans the 'writing down' or 'writing off' of the value of capitalequipment (plant and machinery in particular), the cut-rate disposalof surplus stocks of goods (or their outright destruction, such as thefamous Brazilian coffee-burning episode in the 1930s), or the inflationaryerosion of money power coupled with burgeoning defaultson loan obligations. Labour power can similarly be devalued andeven destroyed (rising rates of exploitation, falling real incomes,unemployment, more deaths on the job, poorer health and lower lifeexpectancy, etc.). The great depression saw plenty of devaluation ofboth capital and labour power, and World War II saw even more.There are plenty of examples, and abundant evidence for devaluationas a response to overaccumulation since 1973. But devaluation extractsa political price and hurts large segments of the capitalist class as wellas workers and the various other social classes comprising moderncomplex capitalist society. Some shake-out might seem a good thing,but uncontrolled bankruptcies and massive devaluation exposes theirrational side of capitalist rationality in far too brutal a way for it tob sustainable for long without eliciting some kind of revolutionary(nght or left) response. Nevertheless, controlled devaluation throughmanaged deflationary policies is one very important and by nomeans uncommon option for dealing with overaccumulation.2 Macro-economic control, through institutionalization of somesystem of regulation, can contain the overaccumulation problem,perhaps for a considerable period of time. It was, of course, the