The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
What separates Rand from Marx is that the latter saw the true flourishing of individual creativity as best accomplished through collaboration and association with others in a collective drive to abolish the barriers of scarcity and material necessity beyond which, Marx held, the true realm of individual freedom could begin.
The accumulation of money as unlimited social power is an essential feature of a capitalist mode of production. When people seek to accumulate that social power, they start to behave in a very different way. Once the universal equivalent becomes a representation of all socially necessary labor-time, the potentialities for further accumulation are limitless.
It is therefore only at the money moment – the moment of capitalist universality – that we can tell where we are in relation to value and surplus-value.
Capital is process, and that is that.
Thatcher forged consent through the cultivation of a middle class that relished the joys of home ownership, private property, individualism, and the liberation of entrepreneurial opportunities.
The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking, and it has long dominated the US stance towards the rest of the world.
Marx inverted Hegel’s dialectics and stood it right side up, on its feet.
We need to get behind the surface appearances if we are to act coherently in the world. Otherwise, acting in response to misleading surface signals typically produces disastrous outcomes.
Fierce, and what capitalists sometimes call ‘ruinous’ competition tends, therefore, to produce leap-frogging innovations that more often that not lead capitalists to fetishise technological and organisational innovations as the answer to all their prayers.
For Marx, capital is not a thing, but a process – a process, specifically, of the circulation of values.
This is an absolutely vital point that cannot be overemphasized: value is immaterial but objective. Given Marx’s supposed adherence to a rigorous materialism, this is, on the face of it, a surprising argument, and we have to wrestle a bit with what it means. Value is a social relation, and you cannot actually see, touch or feel social relations directly; yet they have an objective presence. We therefore have to carefully examine this social relation and its expression.
Once you can hang a price tag on something, you can in principle put a price tag on anything, including conscience and honor, to say nothing of body parts and children.
As Marx amusingly put it elsewhere, in boom economies everybody acts like a Protestant – they act on pure faith. When the crash comes, though, everyone dives for cover in the “Catholicism” of the monetary base, real gold.
The management of the New York fiscal crisis pioneered the way for neoliberal practices both domestically under Reagan and internationally through the IMF in the 1980s. It established the principle that in the event of a conflict between the integrity of financial institutions and bondholders’ returns, on the one hand, and the well-being of the citizens on the other, the former was to be privileged.
Separating land, labour and capital as independent and seemingly autonomous factors of production had a double advantage for the ruling classes since it permitted them to proclaim ‘the physical necessity and eternal justification of their sources of revenue’ at the same time as it suppressed any notion of exploitation since the act of production could in principle be portrayed as the harmonious assembly of separate and independent factors of production.
Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus, and he was familiar with Greek thought. Aristotle, as you will see, provides a frequent anchor for his arguments.
This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
There is a big difference between the circulation of money as a mediator of commodity exchange and money used as capital. Not all money is capital. A monetized society is not necessarily a capitalist society. If everything revolved around the C-M-C circulation process, then money would be merely a mediator, nothing more. Capital emerges when money is put into circulation in order to get more money.
The sale of indulgences is sometimes regarded as one of the first major waves of capitalist commodification. It certainly laid the basis for all that hoarded wealth in the Vatican. Talk about the commodification of conscience and honor!
Capital takes away the autonomy of our time and makes it impossible for large segments of the population to leave the realm of necessity behind. In fact, the largest segment of the population is struggling hard to get access to basic necessities, which means that they have a very restricted capacity and time for freedom of expression.