Capitalism and Anti-Capitalism: re-reading Capital


'Believe me, dear citizen' (Marx, 'Preface to the French Edition', 1990: 104)
OR
'Think Doomed' (Billboard Liberation Front jams an Apple Macintosh campaign [cf. 'Think different')

Introduction:

Ernest Mandel begins his lengthy introduction to Capital (Das Kapital), Volume One (1990) with the claim that contemporary society reflects the model of Capital in a 'purer form' than when it was first composed in 1867. He is writing this in 1976, and points to various examples of late-capitalism's crises at that time (for example, from the student and workers' riots in Paris of 1968, to ecological concerns as a result of nuclear power). If this was contentious then, it certainly is not anymore (in 2001). Wealth and power on a global scale is ever more and grotesquely concentrated in a small number of giant industrial and financial corporations. That the distinction between rich and poor has been widening is a moral and political outrage, is it not?   

In the light of these general tendencies, Capital attempts to explain the fundamental contradictions that lie in the system in which impetuous growth is combined with the seeds of its own destruction (to paraphrase Marx). More recently, these contradictory aspects have been even more sharply demonstrated in the collapse of 'hyper-industrial' Communist regimes in Eastern Europe (after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) expressing their inability to incorporate the information revolution and the recent anti-capitalism protest movement, demonstrating a renewed interest in political economy and a critique of current neo-liberal capitalism (bizarrely, what Americans call 'libertarianism'). Capitalism has undergone dramatic transformations, characterised by flexibility, decentralisation and networking. But these developments are in process and have uneven consequences: 'Indeed, we observe the parallel unleashing of formidable productive forces of the information revolution, and the consolidation of black holes of human misery in the global economy...' (Castells, 1996: 2). 

According to Capital, the decline of capitalism's mode of production is inevitable, as it is simply a product of history that also produced it in the first place. Contradictions manifest themselves in all aspects of capitalism's workings, however latent they may appear. These contradictory tendencies unfold in every detail of the system, 'every one of its basic "cells", the commodities' (Mandel, 1990: 13). Neoliberalism's dominant ideology of expanding markets and less governmental interference extends the logic of Capital (note: the process of circulation is covered more scientifically in Capital: Volume Two, 1992). Dialectical contradiction similarly extends to the circulation of commodities in the market-place. 

The purpose of Capital was to 'lay bare' the laws of motion that govern the capitalist mode of production. This is unashamedly historical in scope in order to situate this specific mode of production in the context of others, each of which demonstrate their own economic logic and laws of motion - and Capital has its own intricate history. Mandel explains that Capital is based on 'an understanding of the relativity, social determination and historical limitation of all economic laws' (1990: 13). Clearly once understood, alternative laws and social forms might replace existing ones, but only if there are previous analyses of basic concepts (materiality, commodities, labour, value, etc). This is also an argument for the continuing relevance of the text, of course. Simply to dismiss Capital as out of touch with contemporary modes of production would fall into this ahistorical and mystical trap. Castells describes the restructuring of capitalism underway in the mid 1990s as 'a more decisive effort at deregulation, privatisation, and the dismantling of the social contract between capital and labour that underlay the previous growth model', using technology to effect. Thus, to paraphrase Castells, reform sought to deepen the capitalist logic of profit-seeking; enhance productivity; globalise production, circulation, and markets; ensuring profit-making; establishing state support for these policies often to the detriment of social and public interests (1996: 19). Industry passes through periodic cycles of economic expansion and stagnation (exemplified by Mandel's work elsewhere, The Long Waves of Capitalist Development, and adapted by Jameson, and in turn Foster, to chart cultural trends) and correspondingly the laws of motion point to future developments of commodity production too. Such tendencies have been verified in the expansion of surplus-value to its extreme, and current expressions of slave labour in various parts of the world. The general tendencies and laws of motion, predicted by Capital, have been confirmed by the test of history, and accelerated by technological innovation.

Capitalist society structured by antagonism of two dominant classes - the bourgeoisie (owns and controls the means of production) and the proletariat (owns and provides labour only). It appears on surface to be a fair exchange of commodities - labour for money through the market mechanism. But Marx points out to the underlying exploitation of proletariat by class of capitalist producers - as the price of the labour set on the free market is less than the value of labour's product.  Therefore the class of capitalist producers appropriate surplus value which arises from such exchange.

Method:

Marx famously applied the materialist dialectical method in his analysis of the mode of production. He says in the 'Postface to the Second Edition' of 1873: 
'My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly the opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of 'the Idea', is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected I the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.' (Marx, 1990: 102)

However this is certainly not to dismiss the Hegelian dialectic out of hand, as: 'The mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.' (Marx, 1990: 103) Ironically the same criticism has been levelled at Marx for his mystification of the dialectical method - amongst others, by Karl Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies (first published in 1945), who accuses Capital of being unscientific and of overstressing economism. Popper accuses historical materialism of economic historicism: 'the doctrine that economic motives and especially class interest are the driving forces of history' (2003: 110). To be fair, Popper's work on historicism in Hegel and Marx is a complex work and attempts to appreciate and criticise its contribution to an understanding of the meaning of history. Popper says: ' What I wish to show is that Marx's "materialist interpretation of history', valuable as it may be, must not be taken too seriously; that we must regard it as nothing more than a most valuable suggestion to us to consider things in their relation to their economic background.' (2003: 120)    

Against the criticism of the unscientific nature of the method, on the contrary, it is crucially verified through practice (more accurately praxis). The method rises from the concrete materiality (of bourgeois society) to the theoretical abstractions that underpin it, in order to move back to the concrete totality of the theoretical analysis (see Sekula? quoting Marx's Grundrisse). Most criticism simply confirms the motives for the method in the first place: 'In its rational form it is a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary' (Marx, 1990: 103)

The method is therefore crucial presupposing the view that all elements are dialectically interconnected and part of an integrated totality of the mode of production. The laws of motion relate to its inception and to it eventual destruction, and are 'discovered to be nothing but the unfolding of the inner contradictions of that structure, which define its nature. The given economic structure is seen to be characterised at one and the same time by the unity of these contradictions and by their struggle, both of which determine the constant changes which it undergoes.' (Mandel, 1990: 18) Dialectics suggests that nothing is finished or resolved but in a continual state of flux. Furthermore, these laws are possessed in a materialist sense, in existing social and historical frameworks, that even reflect the production of the analysis itself - with reference to a history of ideas and the mode of production in which it was itself produced. 

Capital is a detailed account and packed with 'scientific' data (of course, the specific detail is mostly outmoded). In terms of method, it is only with this material that the dialectical method might throw light on the material, its inner connections and totality. The Hegelian distinction of appearance and essence is important here too, in describing the dialectical method of peeling back successive layers to discover the deep-seated laws of motion (like code). These, in turn, might 'explain why these phenomena evolve in a certain direction and in certain ways (Mandel, 1990: 19).' There are parallels here with the idea of an integrated form and content, and the critical power of dialectical analyses are emphasised in the rejection of mere surface appearances, designed to hide critical depth (described by Debord as The Society of the Spectacle). It is the integration of appearance/essence and form/content that reveals the inner workings and contradictory forces built into the system. Marketing and advertising aim to distance the products from the factories and workers that produce them. Yet, recently even these images have become fashionable in some circles - we are shown a nostalgic form that less describes the conditions in which goods are actually produced these days. 

Value/Labour:

'The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an "immense collection of commodities"' (Marx, 1990: 125). The commodity, as external object reflecting human needs (and implying wants or desires), expresses the inner contradiction and essential component of capitalism through the opposition of use-value and value expressed externally by the opposition of use-value and exchange-value (what Marx calls 'congealed labour-time', 1990: 130). 'Every useful thing... may be looked at in two points of view of quality and quantity' (Marx, 1990: 125) and the commodity expresses this two-fold aspect of labour, and in turn, is embedded in contradiction. Marx explains this through Hegelian logic: 'at a certain point merely quantitative differences pass over by a dialectical inversion into qualitative distinctions' proving the 'correctness of the law' (1990: 423). In far too brief summary to do it justice, Marx discovers that the capitalist mode of production (as distinct from a pre-capitalist one) simultaneously produces value, surplus-value, capital, as well as the production and reproduction of the antagonistic social relations between labour and capital - based on the need for workers to sell their labour and the corresponding desire for capital to 'extort' value from the workers; the conflict works more neatly in the German language: 'Arbeitgeber' (labour-giver) and 'Arbeitnehmer' (labour-taker). 

This 'surplus-value' (excess) is thus the result of the use-value of labour producing value greater than its exchange-value (and this has nothing to do with its usefulness in the sense of social progress, only in terms of its status as commodity). Marx summarises the commodity-form: 'If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values' (1990: 177). A commodity is made mystical through exchange-value, and in this way made into a 'fetish' (describing its condition as commodity rather than simply a utility). Marx explains this process of mediation through an analogy with something rather like religious substantiation: 'There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands' (1991: 165). The metamorphosis takes place through its circulation and exchange, through buying and selling in the market-place (and use of money as a change of form of the commodity). It is through the circulation of commodities developed into world trade (by the sixteenth century) that the system of capitalism arises. Circulation aptly describes this process that renews itself, wherein capital and surplus-value are produced and reproduced in incessant and limitless transformation.         

Apr�s moi le d�luge! is the watchword for every capitalist says Marx (1990: 381; and later to become a Situationist slogan), caring little for the damage caused in the obsessive drive for profit (operating like a vampire in search for every last drop of blood, according to Engels, or like Shylock's bond of flesh; both in Marx, 1990: 416 & 400). The aim of the capitalist is to exploit this surplus as far as possible as this is its 'variable capital' and wherein capitalist wealth is accumulated or diminished accordingly. Marx makes the distinction between 'constant capital' and 'variable capital': the former indicating the capitalist's fixed material private property stopping the workers from working for themselves; and the latter, describing labour-power that partly produces surplus-value. For the most part, new technologies produce enormous increases in constant capital (the total value of the means of production employed) set against a corresponding reduction in variable capital (expressed in labour power). The equation simply alters the internal proportions of the total capital, expressing the basic character of the distinction, and the site for potential exploitation - in the relationship between necessary and surplus labour for instance. Take for example, the usual practice of work being advanced to the capitalist, of workers allowing credit to the capitalist - only paid for later (most of us are paid in this way, even in a fairly benevolent working contexts). The worker is coerced into producing surplus labour-time for the capitalist, beyond the necessary levels or needs of the worker (and outside the structures of 'over-time' as such). 

The capitalist must find 'free' workers willing enough to sell their labour on the market, and with no other option of course, due to historical circumstances. In such an un-democratic scenario, Marx describes the 'dramatis personae' of capitalist and worker: 'The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but - a tanning' (1990: 280). These violent conditions are in themselves a product of history and inherited social formations - all part of the process of buying and selling labour-power. Marx reminds us that the 'owner of labour-power is mortal', evoking the extreme rationalism of the labour (death) camps (the irony of 'Arbeit Macht Frei'), and that 'the labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced...' by the family as factory (Marx, 1990: 275). Thus a Marxist critique of (biological and cultural) reproduction, sexual politics, education and training emerges. In the broadest sense, education can be simply thought of as a means of providing the appropriate labour-power, and in turn fresh labour-power to produce capital. Capital through its disguised commodity forms, literally and metaphorically 'brings forth living offspring' (1990: 255). (note: ref. Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural reproduction', and Sekula's 'School is a Factory', etc). For Marx, the relations are the same between worker and product whether in a teaching factory or sausage factory (1990: 644). In this way, apologists might begin to describe the whole of society as running like a gigantic sausage factory producing surplus-value.

Capital is inextricably tied to the private ownership of the means of production, private appropriation of produced commodities, of surplus-value and the private accumulation of capital. Private property is the antithesis of collective, social, public property. Marx operates dialectical thinking to explain the preferred chain of events ('the expropiators are expropriated'): 

'The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. It does not re-establish private property, but it does indeed establish individual property on the basis of the achievements of the capitalist era: namely co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production produced by labour itself.' (1990: 929)

Thus, rather than dispersed private property (of workers) being accumulated not by singular individual monopolies, it becomes the common, socialised property of public (state) ownership. Presently, the state is selling off its public sector stock to private interest with abandon, verified by nation state and EU policies (in the case of the UK), and to the ultimate benefit of private interests. These rights of private property have been and are still protected by bourgeois legislature and policy-making, and the corporate sector. The privatised 'branded world', as Naomi Klein calls it, in No Logo (2001) increasingly resembles a theme park. She is not evoking Baudrillard's Simulations as one might expect (in which he describes Disneyland as more like America than America itself), but the latest developments in marketing where actual towns are becoming branded (a situation in which it appears that cultural theorists, like Baudrillard, have been used as copy editors). As a further development, she describes the Disney town of Celebration, Florida, in which residents can live, work, shop, and consume entertainment in one place without fear of influence from other brands. 

Klein explains:
'For the families that live there year-round, Disney has achieved the ultimate goal of lifestyle branding: for the brand to become life itself.
Except the life on offer is perhaps not the one we might expect from the Mouse. When Disney first conceived of a branded city, it was meant to be an artificiality bonanza, a temple to the mid-fifties futuristic gods of technology and automation... Although wired with every modern convenience, Celebration is less futurism than homage, an idealised re-creation of the liveable America that existed before malls, big-box sprawl, freeways, amusement parks and mass commercialisation. Oddly enough, Celebration is not even a sales vehicle for Mickey Mouse licensed products; it is, in contemporary terms, an almost Disney-free town - no doubt the only one left in America.' (2001: 155)

The example aptly demonstrates the achievement of the complete privatisation of public space. There are no factories or unsightly spaces here - as they have been displaced to other parts of the world. Private space has become entirely commodified - and become a 'privatised public utopia' (Klein, 2001: 158).

These capitalist conditions lay bare '... the unceasing movement of profit-making. This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely the capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The ceaseless augmentation of value, which the miser seeks to attain by saving his money from circulation, is achieved by the more acute capitalist by means of throwing his money again and again into circulation' (Marx, 1990: 254-5). In this way, money makes money; capital circulates and re-circulates, preserves and expands itself and demonstrates its automatic, self-valorising processes: like 'an animated monster which begins to "work", "as if its body were by love possessed"' (Marx prone to quoting from literature, quoting Goethe's Faust, 1990: 302). With this in mind, the capitalist imagination unleashed the 'house of terror' in the shape of a gigantic workhouse for the industrial worker (Marx 1990: 389) - commonly known as the factory. Such social organisation on a grand scale, has been proven to stimulate the 'animal spirits' into higher productivity - evoking the factory farm. Herein lies an important principle of co-operation: 

'Not only do we have here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one' (Marx, 1990: 443). 
This is both the unifying principle of the Fordist production line (named after Henry Ford's organisational form of the production line) and also of Trade Union action; the whole is more than a sum of its parts in both cases. Thus, the careful organisation, and regulation of this mass remains fundamental to its successful operation in terms of the interested party. 'In form it is purely despotic', claims Marx (1990: 450) as for the most part, the unification of the diverse elements is strategically organised into hierarchical divisions, stratified to enable the greatest levels of exploitation. Remember: 'What is true of the division of labour within the workshop under the system of manufacture is also true of the division of labour within society' (Marx, 1990: 615). In contemporary neo-liberal democracies, the so-called flat management system is just the latest fashionable technique for the systematic division of labour. This is usually justified by some oblique reference to complexity theory but that stops short of an understanding of the dynamic of disorder and order within such a model (see my later explanation of this linkage between chaos theory and the marxist dialectic). If, in general, it could be said that production is now organised in more flexible, and dispersed forms, in the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism (if you like), new organisational logic leaves the relations of oppression and authority in place all the same. These lines of domination are merely inscribed with a different organisational logic. The flexible production system is perhaps best exemplified by 'Toyotism' (as opposed to Fordism), employing co-operative team work, decentralised methods, performance rewards, and flat management, and cultivating close relationships to suppliers (more on this in Castells, 1996: 157-172) - all contributing to an adaptive control over production and the work force. It is not despite capitalism's contradictions, that it remains active, but more that these contradictions are part of the very working dynamism that allow it to adapt to change so effectively.

Further flexibility might be characterised by the network (web-like) model where the horizontal axis (more so than vertical axis, a scenario in which lumpen corporations are left vertically-challenged) is preferred corporate expansion and mutability: 
'Information technologies allows simultaneously for the decentalised retrieval of such information and for its integration into a flexible system of strategy-making. This cross-border structure[...] forming networks that are able to innovate and adapt relentlessly. Thus, the actual operating unit becomes the business project, enacted by a network...' (Castells, 1996: 165). He calls this new organisational form: 'network enterprise', that 'makes material the culture of the informational/global economy; it transforms signals into commodities by processing knowledge' (1996: 172). 

Here, I am merely quoting the general tendency, as the forms vary according to cultural specifities (that I haven't time to go into in detail). For instance in East Asia, Castells catorgises three distinct types with examples from Japan, Korea and China - all with their particular nuances. However, the examples also point to the inadequacy of the Western ethnocentric business view. There is something anti-corporate about these formations in themselves (something missed by much anti-corporate protest that uses this misleading phrase), and they are better described in terms outside of corporate centred-ness. Clearly, these new enterprises are multinational, corporations are transnational, and the networks are international in scope - summarised in terms of economic globalisation (that itself requires better definition of course).       

Clearly, there is a distinction to be made about the capitalist character of this co-operation and collective operations within different epochs and within cultural traditions. Tracing these developments historically, a very similar division of labour applies but in an exaggerated form (examples later). History has proved that on a large scale, co-operation has too often relied on the forces of domination and enslavement as its defining feature. For Marx, this enters a new era with the capitalist process of production wherein: 'a worker who performs the same simple operation for the whole of his life converts his body into the automatic, one-sided implement of that operation', increasingly efficient through repetition, and coming to embody 'the living mechanism of manufacture' (1990: 458). According to Adam Smith, the worker 'generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become' and 'in every improved and civilised society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall' (quoted in Marx, 1990: 483). In other words, the worker becomes increasingly dull in mind and body, and is conditioned by the nature of the tasks undertaken. (To be fair, Smith suggests education is necessary for these reasons, but all the same the necessary link between the division of labour and the education system is made explicit). 

Perhaps more positively, the example of watch manufacture (clock-work) is suggested as a way of imagining the partial operations that are must come together in precise ways. To achieve this, a number of specialised workers are employed in collective effort to produce a complex single product; a total mechanism (and one is left to question the analogy in terms of the digital watch). Collective labour must be forced to function as a working organism, but one in which inherent human sociability is forced to turn against itself. Herein lies the technical foundations of the industrial revolution. The collective working mechanism takes on new forms under digitisation, but still one in which the working principles are maintained to integrate the worker into its overall system of operation. 

The all important surplus-value is derived from the strategic organisation in the production process taken as a whole. The private industrial factory is filled with useful machines and labour, and in turn organised to increase productivity. The aim is to enhance surplus-value above all else on a grand scale (the recent anti-capitalist slogan proposing an alternative to the guiding capitalist principle of profit over people comes to mind; as well as the slogan of Globalise Resistance: 'Our World is not for Sale'). Examples like this evoke the grim descriptions of the working day in Capital (especially the chapter 'The Working Day', 1990: 343-416), quoting Montagu Valpy in 1860: 'the system... is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, morally, and spiritually... Is their black market their lash, and their barter of human flesh more detestable than this slow sacrifice of humanity... for the benefit of capitalists' (Marx, 1990: 353-4); wherein industry is organised without legal limits to exploitation, but now on a global scale. Opposition is possible of course, and this has been the historical function of Trade Unions, to shift the balance to the democratic rights of workers. Yet, under what Mandel calls 'senile capitalism' (one might be more specific and call it 'senile-dementia'), if coercion fails, strikes and Trade Unions are simply banned. This is common in free-trade zones, belying their title.

In this way, an 'efficient' capitalist factory system, subordinates labour in favour of the machine: 'Alienation of labour is no longer only alienation of the products of labour but alienation of the forms and contents of the work itself' (Mandel, 1990: 34). Without a shadow of doubt, this still holds: 
'IBM claims that its technology spans the globe, and so it does, but often its international presence takes the form of cheap Third World labour producing the microchips and power sources that drive our machines. On the outskirts of Manilla, for instance, I met a seventeen-year-old girl who assembles CD-Rom drives for IBM. I told her I was impressed that someone so young could do such high-tech work. "We make computers," she told me, "but we don't know how to operate computers".' (Klein: 2001: xvii)

The process of production, like the wider infrastructure of society and communication, still rests entirely on living labour, despite the suggestion otherwise. Even a so-called autonomous computer system cannot produce value in itself. This labour-power might be enhanced?? by technology but is still reduced to a commodity under capitalism. The role of machines and technology are important here, as they enable the capitalist to subordinate labour, increase surplus-value and accumulate ever more capital - simply enhancing the sum total of capitalist wealth as a calculation involving what workers receive set against what they produce in terms of value. The question of where this surplus should be distributed is at issue. 

It might be easy to assume that Marx was technophobic, but this is far from the case, and undialectical in principle {note: Marx was no Luddite; the movement that terrorised industrialisation in 1811, opposing labour-saving technologies at the time). On the contrary, the revolutionary potential of new technology might just as easily be put to emancipatory ends. It would be plainly ridiculous to deny the possibility of technology, and of collective effort, increasing the social productivity of labour, and contributing to social progress. Marx denies the charge of 'stupidity', and is clearly 'against the capitalist application of machinery, [not] against machinery itself' (1990: 569). He further explains that murder cannot be blamed on a knife; the knife can be employed by the murderer and the surgeon (echoing the positive image of the surgeon in Benjamin, penetrating reality - ref?). The function of machines is not to replace labour as such, but to assist in the accumulation of capital.

Unsurprisingly, it is the analogy to levels of co-operation by the division of labour that are at issue, and what distinguishes the fully developed factory from previous modes. Machines replace human labour but also require labour in themselves, and might increase labour in other fields. Despite this, in overall terms, there is an undeniable trend to replace living labour with the 'dead' labour of machines. The value of the machine can be measured against the human labour that it replaces. This is further complicated by having to account for the amount of labour invested in making the machine. However, these are fairly fixed costs compared the variable labour costs that the machine replaces. Accordingly, it is perhaps easier to enslave humans than machines and to reward their efforts in more miserly amounts (and there are countless examples of the slave-labour of women and children in Capital; these stories are shockingly much the same as those in No Logo, some time later). Large-scale industry thus makes the calculation not in human terms, but crudely lumps humans and machines together in terms of extending the productivity of labour. 

Marx recommends: 
' A machine which is not active in the labour process is useless... Living labour must seize upon these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values. Bathed in the fire of labour, appropriated as part of its organism, and infused with vital energy for the performance of the functions appropriate to their concept and to their vocation in the process...' (1990: 289). 
(Aside: this is a crude opposition perhaps for those that remain deluded by the idea of an autonomous computer operation as analogous to life).

The analogy of human/machine labour goes further. Just as human labour can express signs of wear and tear, so too the machine. It suffers material wear and tear, but more significantly depreciation of exchange-value as newer and improved machines come onto the production line. Again, its value is contingent on the labour-time invested in the reproduction of the improved version. With the human worker, its an increasingly easy replacement especially with the predominance of temporary contracts in the workplace. With machines, the machine might be more efficient but also the very production method involved in producing the machine. Reproduction spins faster and faster in an endlessly reciprocal loop (elsewhere Marx calls this the 'metamorphosis of capital' to describe the discontinuous stages: successive, and at the same time, co-existent process of rotation, in Mandel's introduction to Volume 2, 1992: 18). 

Currently, employment patterns have evolved to general rules of profit accumulation and general shared characteristics but also have crucial and diverse differences even if these work interdependently under globalisation. The danger of over-simplifying these factors belies the contradictory nature of capitalism itself perhaps. For instance, there is no global labour force as such within the global economy - it is subject to borders, institutions, racism as usual. Whilst capital flows freely, labour is still constrained despite the rhetoric of the free market economy and globalisation. There may be a tendency towards change and global labour networks, but it is only a tendency. Surplus value must be protected at all costs and requires significant capital outlay on machinery. Labour-power is thus extended and intensified for effect.

Machines:   

Earlier forms of the mode of production were essentially conservative, but the technical basis of industry at this point in time is distinctly revolutionary (there is a note here, 1990:617, to 'all that is solid melts into air', in, The Communist Manifesto). According to Castells, the conditions were similarly conservative in Silicon Valley in the 1960s but combined with a certain libertarian (hippy) spirit (1996: 5-6). Seen in this way, the social consequences were unintended - merely a bi-product of the speed, diversity and scope of technological change. 'Profitability and competitiveness are the actual determinants of technological innovation and productivity growth. It is in their concrete, historical dynamics that we may find the clues for understanding productivity's vagaries.' (Castells, 1996: 81) 

The chapter 'Machinery and Large-Scale Industry' (in Marx's Capital: Volume One, 1990: 492-639) is an extremely important one in pointing to broad and general principles of automation, and of course the starting-point of the industrial revolution itself. It begins with the common distinction between tool and machine (and one often stupidly repeated in terms of the computer): 'the tool is a simple machine and the machine as a complex tool'; the tool requires human motive power, whist the machine operates independent of it (1990: 492-3). Marx insists that all machines are a combination of these factors, no matter how much they are disguised. He claims machines consist of three parts: the motor mechanism (acting as the generating force but either working independently or by external impulse, eg. horse-power); the transmitting mechanism (that regulates the motion and distributes it, eg. the use of gears); and lastly the tool or working machine (that takes the working machine and 'seizes on the object of labour and modifies it as desired')  (1990: 494). 

In this way, in general terms, 'the machine, therefore, is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operation as the worker' (1990: 495). The difference is that the worker might now be more of an operator, and that the machine might perform the functions of multiple workers. In this way, the machine became emancipated from the limits of human effort, and part of a wider scheme of machines working together collectively as part of an extending industrial apparatus. This is where he makes a further distinction of a complex system of machinery from the co-operation of a number of similar machines by identifying where the multiplicity takes place; as either a number of tools forming the organs of the machine or a number of machines of one kind constituting the organs of the motive mechanism. 

Continuity marks the regulating principle of the fully developed factory and not the isolated practices of the division of labour under manufacturing previously described. Marx further explains: 
'The collective working machine, which is now an articulated system composed of various kinds of single machine, and groups of single machines, becomes all the more perfect the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one' (1990: 502)

The resulting system 'constitutes in itself as a vast automaton as soon as it is driven by a self-acting prime mover' - an auto-generative system in embryonic form. Marx continues wildly: 

'An organised system of machines to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from an automatic centre is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have, in place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs.' (1990: 503) This image of workers becoming 'second-order robots' is commonplace but more positively one can point to autonomous educated workers programming their sequences of work (Castells, 1996: 241). As an aside, the term 'robot' was allegedly first used by Karel Capek in his play 'Rossum's Universal Robots' (Prague, 1921) drawing upon the Czech term 'robota' which literally means 'forced work or labour' from the Latin 'robor' meaning power or force (Floridi, 1999: 207; the play typically describes a scenario in which a factory that builds artificial agents is eventually taken over by them and the whole of humanity destroyed). Networkers are the necessary agents of the network enterprise made possible by information technology, as Castells puts it (1996: 242). 

With information technology, automation comes of age, and labour is transformed by the need for the required knowledge to operate it, offering new relational patterns in the performing of tasks. In fact, he goes further and makes the distinction between the networkers, who set up connections on their initiative, and the networked, who are online but without any control over decisions; and another category of the switched-off who are tied to tasks and operate through non-interactive, one-way instructions. In terms of decision-making, he presents three characterisations: the deciders (who make the decisions in the last resort), the participants (who are involved in decision-making), and the executants (who merely implement decisions) (Castells, 1996: 244). One can readily apply these formulations to interactive systems and the generative media and identify the subsequent relations of power.   

The automatic factory is described as an integrated system: 'a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in an uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinate to a self-regulating moving force' (Ure 'Philosophy of Manufactures', quoted in Marx, 1990: 544). In this scenario, the automaton itself is the subject; not as convention would have it, the worker simply controlling the machine-object. Rather, the worker starts to become the appendage of the machine. In the modern industrial factory of 1867 (at the time of writing), the machine works in tandem with human in a collective and conscious effort (note: at this time, machines weren't thought of as capable of consciousness apart from in popular fictions). Together they function as a living mechanism (with the worker transformed into a state of the living dead). Marx points out the significance of this overall and specialised machine as not only the function of an automaton but an autocrat. It expresses the autocrat's will to power and ruling ideology. 

This is perhaps even more the case with informational production, wherein constant networked interaction is required between workers, management and machines. Systems must be networked and integrated in order to process information efficiently in much the same way; through a thoroughly integrated network of computers that link to each other and to mainframes - both arranged in decentralised and centralised working relations. However, any polarisation of labour that has resulted (specified by race, gender and class - as always, there are winners and losers) is not determined by technology itself. Changes are socially-determined and ideologically arranged. For the most part, in practice, 'the combined productivity of scientists and technologists, workers by hand and brain, inventors of machinery and flexers of muscle, increase the profit of the owners of machinery' (Mandel, 1990: 53). 

The empty promises of more and more jobs (for geeks) in the high-tech industry illustrates the point well. Moreover, Castells points to the observation that even in the most competitive of economies like Germany and Japan, it does not follow that most jobs will be in information processing despite information being a crucial aspect of the success of those economies (1996: 211). As a general trend, Castells maintains that 'there is no sytematic structural relationship between the diffusion of informational technologies and the evolution of employment levels in the economy as a whole' (1996: 263). But without doubt, traditional forms of work are being thoroughly eroded (and you can detect this in terms of creative production too of course). The relationship between capital and labour has changed making it suitably more flexible and adaptable like the networked technologies that support these changes. 

Castells follows: 'A new spectre haunts Europe (not so much America and Japan): the emergence of a jobless society under the impact of information technologies.... Yet, as is usually the case with spectres in the electronic age, in a close-up it appears to be more a matter of special effects than a terrifying reality' (1996: 265). This is perhaps a temporary lapse, but new patterns are emerging that owe more to institutional determinants that the influence of technology per se. This is clearly the lesson of history too. Microsoft, the symbolic target of most attention in this field, provides opportunities for 'contingency workers' (or 'flextimers' as they are sometimes called), not employment as such. In the new media industry, the use of temporary workers is rampant, following the lead of the likes of Microsoft in 'engineering the perfect employee-less corporation'. Klein claims Microsoft 'wrote the operating manual' for banishing employees to the margins, extensive use of independent contractors, 'outsourced divisions, contract factories, and freelance employees' (2001: 249) (elsewhere referred to as 'temp slaves' or descriptively as a 'disposable labour force'). 

This is a familiar story to anyone involved in the new media industry. At the centre of operations are the privileged few ('microserfs') - those on permanent, full-time contacts, benefits, stock options - earning an average $220,000 a year (Klein, 2001: 250). At the hub, Bill Gates has amassed a fortune of $55 billion (Klein, 2001: xvii). Even hackers are employed as part of the overall operative mechanism - which incorporates apparent opposition to effect. Labour is still crucial, but disaggregated in the network society - for 'on the surface, societies were/are becoming dualised, with a substantial top and a substantial bottom growing at both ends of the occupational structure, so shrinking the middle, at a pace and in a proportion that depend on each country's position in the international division of labour and on its political climate' (Castels 1996: 279; who provides statistical analyses to substantiate these claims).

The dialectical approach to this reveals (and to repeat) 'the contradiction between use-value and exchange value, inherent in every commodity, [that] fully unfolds itself in this contradictory nature of capitalist machinery' (Mandel 1990: 37). Technology might just as well be used for progressive, humane purposes as repressive, destructive ones (perhaps suitably exemplified by the dialectical example of nuclear fusion). There are environmental consequences: 'The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as a background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction' (Marx, 1990: 638). 

To labour the point, technology's deployment is evidently a matter of politics and choice, hence its misuse for the most part. 'It is not the machine that, nor any technological compulsion, which inevitably transforms workers and men and women in general into appendices and slaves of monstrous equipment. It is the capitalist principle of profit maximisation...' (Mandel: 1990: 65). Castells suggests that the social dimension of the Information Technology Revolution might be best understood in terms of social agency, by quoting Kranzberg: 'Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral' (1996: 65). Thus the application of machinery can be seen to express the contradictions of capitalism itself: it both shortens and lengthens labour-time; it creates new employment and new unemployment as a necessary corollary; it both liberates and enslaves. With the accumulation of wealth comes the accumulation of poverty. This is clearly evident on a global scale now. 

Global Capital:

Enhanced by networked information technologies, that form the material base for the global economy, all activities of production, consumption and circulation operate through global networks of interaction. With an economic crisis in the 1970s, Castells describes the conditions for the change in the evolution of capitalism into the Information Technology revolution. Capital required increased flexibility and mobility, and was crucially assisted by the new information technologies in close conjunction with deregulated markets and the integration of financial markets. This is what Castells calls 'the recapitalisation of capitalism' (1996: 85). Capital's reproduction cycle necessarily follows a spiral-like pattern of transformation: 'This, then, is the process of accumulation of capital: the transformation of surplus-value into additional capital, which can produce new increments of surplus-value, leading to new increments of capital' (Mandel, 1990: 61). So it goes, capital accumulates with uncanny efficiency reproducing itself on a progressively increasing scale. Marx says 'The conditions of production are at the same time the conditions of reproduction' (1990: 711). Capitalism has become ever more dynamic, mobile and expansive reflecting the technology that it serves and that serves it. (the Jameson quote would fit in well here - describing the network)

Klein, demonstrates the incorporative/recuperative power of capital in appropriating revolutionary signs as consumer goods: in 1999, Mao and Lenin appeared on 'Red or Dead" handbags; Pizza Hut deliver pizzas to a picket line in a commercial; Apple computers appropriated Gandhi or their 'think different' campaign; and Che Guevara became a logo for 'Revolution' soda (2001: 85). That these contradictory processes operate on a world scale is nothing new, but perhaps the extortion of capital from the so-called under-developed world to the developed one is more overt under present conditions of 'globalisation', sharpening capital's imperialist ambitions (add Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, Harvard University Press, in this connection. It has been described as the 'new communist manifesto'). Capital seeks surplus-value through identifying the cheapest labour costs in 'free-trade zones' where companies are granted special privileges to guarantee surplus-value.

In the chapter 'The Modern Theory of Colonisation', Marx traces early forms of globalisation and the need to create dependence 'by artificial means' (1990: 937), to retain control of the fragmentation of the means of production. The Old World imposes its values on the New World. In the chapter 'The Discarded Factory', Klein describes the Cavite Export Processing Zone, located near Manilla, in gory detail (one of 52 in the Phillipines, but like zones elsewhere - in Indonesia, Mexico, Vietnam, for instance) (2001: 202 -229). According to the International Labour Organisation Special Action Programme on Export Processing Zones, the largest zone economy is in China, where it is estimated that 18 million people work in 124 export zones. There are 27 million workers world-wide, and the World Trade Organisation estimates that $200-250 billion worth of trade flows through these zones  (Klein, 2001: 205). As one arbitrary example of many, Cavite is simply grotesque in scale and ambition, as 682 acres of walled-in industrial area, housing 207 factories, with 50,000 workers, producing goods only for export (for Nike, Gap, IBM, and other notorious multinationals). However, these factories do not publicise what they make or who they make it for, and certainly not the conditions in which things are made - this is a clandestine activity as there is much to hide. The zones are tax-free economies, entirely separate from any democratic control over work conditions (Klein calls this a miniature military state). There is nothing new here of course, except it exists in a purer state, as Mandel suggested earlier. In these zones, there are no import or export duties, no Income or property taxes, and as a result gross exploitation is rife.

At the risk of generalisation, the vast majority of the workers are young women, migrants, subject to very long working day and unconditional overtime, on temporary short-term contracts (if on a contract at all) with no rights (such as to strike or claim sick benefit), where the wages often remain below subsistence level (and the minimum wage is only $6 a day anyway), and all these conditions are enforced through abusive military-style management (echoed in Marx's descriptions of labour conditions in 1867, see 1990: 802-870). Klein characterises these working conditions in terms of fast food (or what Julie Burchill elsewhere calls 'vile slop'): a 'McJob'. Work remains at the centre of the social structure and remains a suitable site of struggle. It has been transformed of course, but general principles of exploitation remain. Castells characterises the changed forms of 'networkers' and 'flextimers' in terms of the increased individualisation of work and the fragmentation of society in general (in the chapter 'The Transformation of Work and Employment', 1996: 201). New employment patterns correspond to the modes of development outlined elsewhere - broadly, in relation to the agricultural, industrial (what could be described as post-agricultural) and informational (or post-industrial) forms.

Often, the workers have little choice often denied the rights to strike, form unions, and work in factories that do not follow labour rights of the country they are situated in, or the companies that subcontract the work (as corporations negotiate waivers if possible). This is what Pierre Bourdieu calls the 'utopia (becoming a reality) of unlimited exploitation' in an essay an 'neo-liberalism' as a political programme of 'pure and perfect order.' ( 2001: 94) The zone factories occupy a never-never-land of global capital, the dystopian flip side of the Disney town, 'Celebration'. 

Workers clearly have little to celebrate. Compared with the Philippines, wages in China are lower again - as low as 13 cents an hour according to one survey. It's a harsh irony that The People's Republic of China has become a favourite site or these free-trade zones. 'Zero-risk globalisation' serves the needs of capital accumulation over those that do its dirty work. The counter-argument is that these operations have longer-term, positive, sustainable effects on the host economy. Much of the evidence suggests otherwise. Capital reproduces itself through its own brand mechanisms - the World Bank, G8, GATT, WTO, APEC, EU, NATO, and so on. For instance, it was on the 1st January 1995, that the general agreement was struck on tariffs and trade (GATT) became the world trade organisation with extraordinary legislative, executive and judicial powers (Katherine Ainger, New Internationist, issue 338, September 2001). Taken together diverse factors combine to form part of a hugely successful self-perpetuating mechanism for the accumulation of surplus-value and capital. 

It would be easy to draw limes of continuity here with capitalism operating on a world scale since the sixteenth century, seeking sought to overcome the limits of time and space. What distinguishes the global economy is that 'it is an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale' (Castells, 1996: 92). [add Doreen Massey stuff on the specific character of globalisation] Castells sees this global economy as 'characterised by the combination of an enduring architecture and a variable geometry' (1996: 145) expressing dynamic processes of competition and change.

Importantly, it should be noted that global resistance is exactly that, as global as capital (not simply the 'global resistance' of the Socialist Workers Party). The Zapatistas, of Mexico, declared in 1996: 'We will make a collective network of all our particular struggles and resistances. An intercontinental network of resistance will against neoliberalism, an intercontinental network of resistance for humanity' (New Internationalist, 2001: 15). Western media tend to report the protest on its own doorstep, at the risk of overlooking examples like the Zapatistas in Mexico, cry of 'Ya Basta' (enough) to neoliberal policies (1994); 130,000 Filipino workers protesting against free trade (1996); international day of action in 21 countries, in support of the Liverpool dockers fighting casualisation (1997); to more widely publicised examples like the first global street party at the time of the G8 summit (1998); activists disrupting the WTO meeting in Seattle (1999); to what has been characterised as Europe's summer of resistance in Gothenburg and Genoa for the G8 summit. There are simply too many instances to mention. 

The anti-capitalist movement is much publicised for its appearance around the world at key events, but local resistance is crucial too. There are a number of contentions here of how best, or most effectively, to proceed. The original composition of the protests involved 'anti-statist elements... espousing anti-hierarchical, decentralised models' (Seymour, 2001: 2), and yet a growing recognition that the movements diverse elements need some kind of consolidation and alliance with longer established labour movements like trade unions. Both those positive and critical of globalisation forget the still powerful influence of the nation-state and the role of governments in influencing the economy (Castells 1996: 97). 

However there are also some serious inconsistencies to resolve. These all appear as symptoms of the 'third way' neoliberal ideology (allegedly beyond the old oppositions of left and right wings of thought) of increased privatisation, free-trade agreements and the dismantling of the welfare state (certainly not left in other words). The opposition can be effectively characterised as that of between the imperialism of multinational corporations against the more local efforts of the traditional nation state. Global anti-capitalism is opposed to global capitalism through 'trans-local' networks of resistance - both echoed in the Coca-Cola catchphrase of 'think global, act local'. Whether the nation-state remains an effective framework for resistance to these forces of globalisation is contentious (such as the traditional model of 'statism'). But surely there is the equal danger of multicultural politics playing into the hands of multinationals - itself modelled on the same non-hierarchical, decentralised principles of individualism. The failure of identity politics (recognised by diverse commentators from Slavoj Zizek to Naomi Klein) has evolved into a renewed engagement with the political economy - correspondingly shifting issues around representation to those of institutional politics, and from issues of exclusion to those of exploitation. 

The recent popular protests have articulated capitalism's contradictions and a refusal to cooperate, but a recognised and broadly agreeable alternative would be significantly more difficult to identify. A new model would be welcome but what model, and what's wrong the old model anyway as a means of understanding the limits of the thing under question. The anti-capitalist movement is perhaps too diverse - even in its description of whether it is 'anti-capitalist', 'anti-corporate' or 'anti-globalisation-ist'. It may well be all these things but the choice of title suggests complementary and competing agendas. Its decentralised framework is both one of the reasons for its success and perhaps one reason why it will not succeed in bringing about any better alternative. A synthesis of old and new forms of resistance is required. 

This is why Capital remains a pertinent text, in helping define the laws of motion of the capitalist machine itself. Castells reiterates that 'while the informational/global economy is distinct from the industrial economy, it does not oppose its logic' (1996: 91). It remains the case: 'that wage-labour and capital are still the two antagonistic classes of society; that accumulation of capital is more than ever the basic motive force of that society; and that the extortion and realisation of private profit governs the basic drive of separate firms'. In Mandel's view, 'These basic laws of motion thus continue to remain valid' (1990: 82), and have been widened in a 'gigantic leap forward in the reach and scope of the circulation sphere' (1996: 92). Not least, the anti-capitalist movement points to the currency of these observations. Herein lies the most recent hope of a revolutionary consciousness - through a recognition of the fundamental contradictions of the system in which impetuous growth is combined with the seeds of its own destruction.