Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

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Value becomes the mechanism through which economic activity is organised because the units of production are separated from each other while still remaining dependent upon each other.”

Of course, early on in Capital Marx defines this double freedom: ‘For the transformation of money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must find the free worker available on the commodity-market; and this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power [ability to labour] as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization of his labour-power’ ( Capital, p. 272-3). In addition to Mau’s concerns, the impacts of real subsumption of agriculture on human nutrition and health needs to be explored. Capitalism: a society in which social reproduction is governed by the logic of capital to a significant degree.”

Mute Compulsion is available in English, Danish and German, and forthcoming in Spanish, French and Arabic in 2024. There are different things we can gain from carrying out an abstract analysis. From a methodological point of view, these theories can be helpful to produce concepts that can then be used to analyze concrete situations. From a political perspective, they can also be useful. When we criticize a specific variant of capitalism, located in a historical, geographical, cultural, or national context, defenders of capitalism will always say, “Well, this is just not the real or the right form of capitalism.” They can accept that there might be problems with a given form of capitalist society, but that capitalist society could be otherwise. What I try to do in the book is to show that the capitalist economy is always necessarily a system of domination, and that it is therefore always going to be anti-democratic. If you only criticize particular historical variants of capitalism, then it’s always possible for someone to come and say that the things you criticize are only an expression of that particular situation, and not of capitalism as such. By showing that domination is inherent to the core structure of capitalist society, it becomes possible to reject such a defense of capitalism. So what are we left with? Capital reproduces antagonisms within the proletariat to a certain extent, but not to a degree when it interferes with accumulation. “The balancing act capital has to perform thus consists in nurturing antagonisms to such a degree that it prevents proletarians from forming a collective force yet does not create obstacles for the accumulation process.” The conflation of class relations with work relations is an understandable but regrettable feature of the contemporary politics of class. It is understandable because capitalist class relations are clearly dependent on capitalist work relations, and work relations are more empirically tractable and politically salient. It is regrettable, though, because it leads many proponents of the working class to fall into a false opposition between “class-based” politics and other forms of political organizing. By shifting between features of the structural class relations basic to capitalism (between proletarians, capitalists, and landowners) and features of one or another work relation, advocates of a working-class political base make the political task seem easier than it is. To “class politics” is attributed both the immediacy of work relations and the universality of class relations. Like workplace organizing, “class politics” appeals to material interests, but unlike workplace organizing, it is also supposed to have a national and even international constituency. Unfortunately, the canon of Marxist theory does not do much better than Poli Sci 101 in this regard. The dichotomies of violence and ideology, of coercion and consent, of dominance and hegemony, of RSAs and ISAs litter the traditions of Marxist theory. They all reproduce the fundamental intuition of social contract theory, of modern economics, and of Weberian sociology “that power comes it two fundamental and irreducible forms,” the power to act forcibly on the body and the power to alter thoughts and act on ideas.

Here I follow what can broadly be termed value-form theory, an approach that interprets Marx’s theory of value not as a theory that attempts to explain prices but a theory about the social form of labor in capitalism or, in other words, a theory about how social labor is organized. Building on a critical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s unfinished critique of political economy and a wide range of contemporary Marxist theory, philosopher Søren Mau sets out to explain how the logic of capital tightens its stranglehold on the life of society by constantly remoulding the material conditions of social reproduction. Granting the need for transhistorical categories, Mau argues, however, that these should not take the forms they commonly do in anti-capitalist discourse. There is not a transhistorical and original human essence from which capitalism represents a temporary loss or alienation and to which we must return. Nor is there a set of basic human needs that drive human history by giving rise to and then overriding specific social relations. Finally, there is no natural mode of production from which human beings have departed and that we must recreate at a higher level. Capitalism is neither the alienation of the human essence, nor the temporary ascendency of artificial, socially constructed needs, nor the loss of our unity with nature.Mau also offers another important footnote: “Raya Dunayevskaya also made important headway with her interpretation of Capital as ‘a critique of the very foundations of political economy’. More than two decades before Diane Elson, she suggested that we should speak of the ‘value theory of labour’ rather than the ‘labour theory of value’. Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until Today."

Money has existed for thousands of years but "from the sixteenth century onwards a fundamental transformation took place: the logic of capital began to weave itself into the very fabric of social life, eventually reaching the point where people had become dependent upon it for their survival. Capital became ‘the all-dominating economic power’, or, put differently: society became capitalist." Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital's paradoxical expansion and entrenchment amidst crisis and unrest, Mute Compulsion offers a novel theory of the historically unique forms of abstract and impersonal power set in motion by the subjection of social life to the profit imperative. I am grateful to Mau for critical takes and clarification on orthodox Marxist concepts like Historical Materialism, crisis theory, alienation and contextualizing the “New Reading of Marx” for English readers like me outside of academia. This stuff is great. But too often the book reads like others such as Marx on the Margins and Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism that spend too much time justifying Marx instead of going beyond him. Mau admits Marx is inconsistent. We should read Capital and take what we can get from Marx, but be clear that it is past time to leave “Marxism” behind. Combining Marx and Foucault seems like a solid start. If this book is “not a Marxological treatise; its ultimate aim is to understand capitalism, not Marx” it provides a foundation but leaves more work to be done.As discussed briefly with Adorno above, many of the proponents that would go on to form the "New Reading of Marx" may overemphasize the value-form over class relations. M-C-M' or the capital relation is not merely simple commodity production; money for commodity for the same amount of money. The capital relation uses money to produce commodities to produce a larger amount of money (M' not simply M). This requires the existence of a commodity whose very consumption is a source of value: labor power that is available on the market. Surplus value, with the form of appearance as profit, requires the existence of the vertical class relations of proletariat and capital. Autonomous Marxists like Cleaver, hold that “the commodity-form is the basic form of the class relation.” The relations of value depend on vertical class relations, but also create impersonal domination through the value form. Marx writes ‘subjection of the worker to the product of labour, the [subjection of the] value-creating power to value, mediated (appears in) through the relation of compulsion and domination between the capitalist (the personification of capital) and the worker.' What is historically specific about capitalism is not the creation of one class to create surplus for a ruling class, but that both depend on exchange of abstract labor time to meet needs. The mute compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Extra-economic, immediate violence is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the ‘natural laws of production’, i.e., it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them… ” This essential gap between human life and its conditions of reproduction is exploitable. The access of some people to the conditions of reproduction can be made conditional upon them using them in particular ways — to produce a surplus to be consumed by those who control access, for instance. Because “parts of the human body” — tools — “can be concentrated as property in the hands of other members of the species,” Mau writes, “power can weave itself into the very fabric of the human metabolism” with nature. Thus, a transhistorical fact about human existence explains how economic power is possible, though it does not explain why economic power takes a particular form in a particular mode of production.

Whereas real subsumption is a progressing linear tendency of capitalism, the end of the book looks at capital’s cycles of creating surplus populations crises of overproduction? Marx defines 3 types of surplus population that make up the industrial reserve army: floating – temporarily under or unemployed workers; latent – proletarians only drawn into wage labor when capital needs them; stagnant – lowest strata of proletarians with ‘extremely irregular employment’ that do not have access to means of subsistence outside of the wage relation. Marx believes that as productivity continues, there will be a growing surplus population, though it is not clear why employment from accumulation could not outweigh rises in productivity. In 1924, Evgeny B. Pashukanis, a Soviet legal scholar that was later executed by the USSR, asked “why does the machinery of state coercion not come into being as the private machinery of the ruling class; why does it detach itself from the ruling class and take on the form of an impersonal apparatus of public power, separate from society?” Fifty years later, scholars such as Nicos Poulantzas, Ellen Meiksins Wood, the Conference on Socialist Economics, and the German state-derivation debate would seek to answer the question: “capitalist relations of production presuppose the existence of an institution not directly involved in the organisation of social reproduction... For example, it can be shown that the universalisation of the ‘cell form’ of capitalism – the commodity – presupposes an institution with the ability to guarantee property rights.” Basically state violence was, and continues to be necessary, but social production continued to be dominated by the mute compulsion of capital. Why do people freely vote against their own interests or continue to work for low wages etc? Søren’s work is now available in revised form as a book. It is dedicated to a detailed investigation of this specific ‘power of capital’. The various elements of a theory of this power are reconstructed from Marx’s critique of political economy in his manuscripts written after 1857. The results of this reconstruction do not refer to a concrete capitalist society; they are located on the level of representation of the ‘ideal cross-section’ of the capitalist mode of production, namely the level of abstraction on which Marx locates his own analysis, at the end of the manuscript for the third book of Capital. On this level, everything is analysed that necessarily belongs to the capitalist mode of production, regardless of its respective historical manifestation – and here this ‘mute compulsion’ is inherent in every case. Instead, Mau turns to analyzing the horizontal relations mentioned earlier: how value is realized by direct producers (workers) through the market to meet their needs and competition between different capitalists (and workers for higher wages etc). These horizontal relations create forms of power which can’t be reduced to vertical class domination. Marx’s analysis of value is not intended to explain quantitative prices but the qualitative organization of social reproduction in capitalist society that underlies them. I think Marx could have expanded on abstract vs. concrete labor and brought in real world examples, as he did in ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, and Heinrich has informally mentioned that Marx could have expanded this footnote into an entire chapter, but he did not.The idea behind it – that under certain circumstances it is not persons but economic conditions that exert compulsion on formally free workers… This ‘mute compulsion’ was of central importance in the contrast between personal relations of domination such as slavery or serfdom in pre-capitalist modes of production, and the impersonal domination of legally free wage labourers by which Marx characterises the capitalist mode of production. That alone should be reason enough to look at it in more detail. The only astonishing thing was that no one had done so before.” The economic power of capital is hard to understand with the standard concepts you encounter in an introductory course in political theory or political philosophy. Violence, coercion, and force — the things the state is supposed to monopolize — are not appropriate. Neither are the legitimacy, authority, and voluntary submission that are supposed to mark the relationship between citizens and government in most liberal and democratic theory. No one forces you to go to work every day, but that doesn’t mean you think your boss has a legitimate right to tell you what to do. Probably the most helpful definition of dialectics is given: “a process in which a concrete totality reveals itself to contain its own negation as one of its moments.” Hence, the relation between nature and the social dialectical: human material organization emerges out of nature and opens up new possibilities. Even amid the current outpouring of scholarship on Marx, leftist philosopher Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital stands as a significant contribution. First published in German and Danish in 2021 and published in English by Verso earlier this year, the book meticulously develops a theory of what Mau calls “economic power,” a form of capitalist domination that is not strictly bound to notions of class and, unlike the forces of violence or ideology, that acts upon subjects indirectly.