[lbo-talk] Reminder: seminar on the crisis and a book launch of CAPITAL AS POWER

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Oct 13 11:39:45 PDT 2009



>Jonthan Nitzan writes:


>capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape - or reorder - their society.


>[His book] examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of "capital as power" and a new history of the "capitalist mode of power."

Well, OK, but there is a problem to deal with - Marx and Engels' rejection of the power theory of history:

More than a century ago, Marx's collaborator Frederick Engels had occasion to complain about the philistinism of what was then called 'The Force Theory of History', or would today be called the theory of power - whether in its Foucauldian or realist variant. Engels was replying to the socialist Eugen von Dühring.

For Engels the major problem with the force theory was that it was tautological, leaving everything essentially unexplained: 'The question at issue is how we are to explain the origin of classes and relations based on domination, and if Herr Dühring's only answer is the one word "force," this leaves us exactly where we were at the start.' (Engels, 1978: 218)

Engels' complaint is that 'force' (or 'power' just as much) is too loose a category to explain anything. Like an enormous spanner that fits every single nut but grips none of them, the 'force theory' remains at too great a level of generality.

'The mere fact that the ruled and exploited class has at all times been far more numerous than the rulers and exploiters, and that therefore it is the former who have had the real force in their hands, is enough to demonstrate the absurdity of the whole force theory.' (Engels, 1978: 218)

Engels continued. 'The relationships based on domination and subjection have therefore still to be explained.' (Engels, 1978: 219) Similarly Engels complained that Dühring's phrase "Property founded on force" 'proves here also to be nothing but the phrase of a braggart intended to cover up his lack of understanding of the real course of things' (Engels, 1978: 201). Engels makes a similar point in a letter to Theodor Cuno 'Bakunin maintains that it is the state which has created capital, that the capitalists has his capital only by favour of the state' (Marx and Engels, 1941: 319)

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1941) Correspondence, London: Lawrence and Wishart, ed Dona Torr

Engels, Anti-Duhring, 1978



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list