<http://www.platypus1917.org/archive/article135/>
Living Marxism James Hartfield December 2008
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For more than a decade, the capitalist class in the West has been working with an outlook that is hostile to industry. In Britain, as in the US and elsewhere, capitalists found it easier making money by breaking up industries than building them up. There always was a kind of disgust at the real business of industry from the capitalists. They would move their homes away into the country, so that they did not have to smell the stench of the factory.
But today, the capitalists disdain for production is much more explicit. This was the meaning of all the ‘Lean Production’, or ‘small firm’ business theory (see Tony Smith, Lean Production: A Capitalist Utopia, 1994). This was the ‘post-material’ fantasy that I criticized in my booklet Need and Desire in the Postmaterial Economy (1998).
What most capitalist ideologues are interested in today is how they can lay claim to ‘value streams’ (what we used to call ‘surplus value’) quite independent of any dynamic relation to the production process. That was the meaning of the whole fixation on ‘The Brand’, a peculiarly fetishised idea of the claim to surplus value on the basis of owning the trademark or license, while contracting out the messy business of actually bottling the coca-cola.
They did put a lot more people to work, though typically that work was not in industry, but in the burgeoning service sector. The domestic service that we thought belonged to a pre-democratic past turned out to be one of the fastest growing sectors. Supermarkets and shopping centers were built, while their products had to be imported. These new jobs were low-skilled, underproductive toil that was dressed up as post-industrial service sector growth.
The great expansion of the financial sector meets this elite distaste for industry. Banking, insurance, stockbroking, futures trading and the mysterious trade in esoteric financial instruments are all businesses that are many removes from manufacturing. Entrepreneurs feel a lot more comfortable weaving money out of thin air than they do organizing the ugly business of production. The brokers’ analyst Alan Smithers explained how Britain’s earnings from financial intermediation had superseded those of industry in the nineties. ‘Leave that to the Koreans’ our Trade and Industry advisor Charles Leadbeater said, we are all in the thin air business (he means intellectual property) these days (Living on Thin Air, 2000). Well, lo and behold! You cannot live on thin air.
In my country, especially (but where Britain leads most delusions follow) the entrepreneurial class dedicates its energies to getting money out of licenses and intellectual property rights over the industry of others. And if they cannot lay claim to cash they have not earned in the developing world in the name of ‘intellectual property,’ then they have worked out a thousand ways to wring money from the government, demanding revenues from ‘public-private finance initiatives’ and so on. What they do not do is make stuff people want.
One of the great failings of the left has been that rather than challenge the main trend of capitalism, they have reinforced it. At a time when capitalism has retreated from production, the radicals’ main demand is that they retreat further. And here it is the ideology of environmentalism that has done the most damage. The environmentalists think that they are anti-capitalists. But they are not. At best what they are doing is attacking industrial capitalism.
But capitalism is in retreat from industry. The environmental movement is only affirming the prejudice of the Institute of Directors that the capitalists are on the right course. I call this new anti-productive capitalism Green Capitalism. They want to make money by deindustrialising. Istvan Meszaros’ concept of a ‘declining rate of utilisation’ under capitalism would have been a useful insight if he had developed it more.
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