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Democracy Against Capitalism: Neoliberalism

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I’m writing Ellen Meiksins Wood’s book Democracy Against Capitalism as part of my general project of understanding the origins of neoliberalism and its sudden takeover as the sole way of understanding the economy and society. Marxists use the metaphor of base and superstructure, the production base, and the cultural, ideological, legal superstructure. See this post, which defines these and other terms used in this post. Neoliberalism is an ideology, a set of ideas that we use to understand the world. Therefore it is part of the superstructure.

Wood says that no system is pure capitalism because there are always other modes of production in every society. We say we live in a capitalist society because the capitalist mode of production is the most widespread. I use the definition from Wikipedia:

The capitalist mode of production is characterized by private ownership of the means of production, extraction of surplus value by the owning class for the purpose of capital accumulation, wage-based labour and—at least as far as commodities are concerned—being market-based.

This article is very much worth reading. Wood explains the relevance of Marxism today:

… we’re living in a moment when, for the first time, capitalism has become a truly universal system. It’s universal not only in the sense that it’s global, not only in the sense that just about every economic actor in the world today is operating according to the logic of capitalism, and even those on the outermost periphery of the capitalist economy are, in one way or another, subject to that logic. Capitalism is universal also in the sense that its logic—the logic of accumulation, commodification, profit-maximization, competition—has penetrated just about every aspect of human life and nature itself, in ways that weren’t even true of so-called advanced capitalist countries as recently as two or three decades ago. So Marx is more relevant than ever, because he, more effectively than any other human being then or now, devoted his life to explaining the systemic logic of capitalism.

For me, at least, the bold-face sentence sounds exactly like a brief description of neoliberalism. The capitalist mode of production is driven by the logic of accumulation, commodification, profit-maximization and competition. We are at an historic high for those forces, which today reach farther into our lives than ever before.

Wood points out that earlier Marxists confronted societies where the capitalist mode of production had not taken over, as in the Russian Revolution, where there were masses of peasants living in a pre-industrial mode of production. The same situation confronted Mao in China. Marx, she points out, studied an early form of capitalism in England where it had suddenly become the most widespread mode of production but where there were still large pockets of other modes of production. She argues that as capitalism matured in England, it depended on imperialism and colonialism, which operated in non-capitalist forms. This argument is also made by Polanyi in The Great Transformation and Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism in great detail (I discussed these here and here.) That is not the case any more. Capitalism is everywhere.

This explanation helps answer the question about the rise of neoliberalism. It’s not a new thing, it’s simply the form of capitalism that arises from the logical working out of capitalism in historical terms. In this view, the ideology comes into being to justify the form into which capitalism is evolving.

This isn’t to deny agency to the people creating the ideology and pushing it to its dominant position or to the people driving the changes in capitalism. There are always choices, choices to replace capitalism or to control it.

Wood says ideology changes in response to the changes in the social relations created by the capitalist mode of production, which is the way Marxists typically understand the relation between base and superstructure. She puts less emphasis on the individuals who create the ideology, and little emphasis on the people who create the changes in the economic base. She says that something like the current form of capitalism was bound to happen whether the ideology changed or not, and irrespective of who was in the capitalist class.

Wood says that no society is pure, so that the capitalist mode of production is just one of several modes of production. Even in more mature capitalist societies, some workers are not separated from the means of production; they own their own tools, or have a small capital, or a trade that is independent of large pools of capital. They and some others produce goods and services not just for money but also for for other reasons. In its early stages, capitalism can expand into other societies which have not adopted the capitalist mode of production. More recently, those avenues are closing off, and capitalism is expanding by assimilating more and more of those who have until now avoided it. As an example, look at doctors. For decades they owned their own practices and their own tools and offices. Now they are being sucked into the medical industrial form in which they own nothing but their labor, just like factory workers. That changes the social relations between doctors and patients, and the relations between people and the medical system.

Nobody resists. The rich and powerful benefit. Social structures change. A new ideology, neoliberalism, arises to explain and justify this new set of social relations, and to justify further change. The capitalists merge and consolidate, they buy up more small artisans and producers, they acquire dominance over formerly independent professionals, they set up institutions to replace socially owned and controlled sectors like hospitals, jails and schools, and begin to replace government whenever possible. This is a form of domination we used to describe with perjoratives, but now most of our elites are on board.

In this post I discuss the rise of neoliberalism from the perspective gained reading Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdier. In my telling, Bourdieu emphasizes the role of the rich and powerful in the rise of neoliberalism. The important factor is a relatively small number of members of the dominant class, the group which benefits most from exploitation, domination and appropriation. They are able to impose their views on the producers through what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence; a term that is probably more rhetorical than descriptive. Following Page and Winter on oligarchy in democracy, we can add that most members of the dominant class do not interfere with those who move to effectuate their common purposes of wealth protection, wealth enhancement and absolute freedom to deploy their wealth.

The difference is that in Wood’s telling, the current form of capitalism is a logical evolution from prior forms, while in my telling, neoliberalism is imposed from above. Both Wood and Bourdieu are trying to understand how society has changed with a view to helping activists identify ways to effect change. For Wood, the problem is centered on the capitalist mode of production. Social change will come from changing to some other mode of production. For Bourdieu, the problem is the rich and powerful people who are able to dominate the discourse and impose on the rest of us. For him a primary direction for change is to reduce their power to dominate.

Or, we could do both.

Democracy Against Capitalism: Base, Superstructure and More Definitions

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The goal of Ellen Meiksins Wood in Democracy Against Capitalism is to resuscitate the Marxian method of historical materialism. This seems to be a perennial problem for Marxist thought; it was one of the central issues facing the Frankfurt School as we saw in The Dialectical Imagination by Martin Jay. See, e.g. pp. 41 et seq. Part of Wood’s method is argue her definition of some of the critical terms used by Marxists especially in Chapters 2-5. Wood compares her view to those she considers less valid, a typical approach in technical works. My interest is whether any of this can help us understand the rise of neoliberalism.

Chapter 2 discusses a common metaphor, base and superstructure. This from Wikipedia gives a good idea of the problem Wood wants to address:

In Marxist theory, human society consists of two parts: the base (or substructure) and superstructure. The base comprises the forces and relations of production (e.g. employer–employee work conditions, the technical division of labour, and property relations) into which people enter to produce the necessities and amenities of life. The base determines society’s other relationships and ideas to comprise its superstructure, including its culture, institutions, political power structures, roles, rituals, and state. While the relation of the two parts is not strictly causal, as the superstructure often affects the base, the influence of the base is predominant. In Orthodox Marxism, the base determines the superstructure in a one-way relationship. Marx and Engels warned against such economic determinism.

This definition contains more terms requiring a definition. What are the relations of production? This is from the Marxists International Archive Encyclopedia:

The objective material relations that exist in any society independently of human consciousness, formed between all people in the process of social production, exchange, and distribution of material wealth.

Examples of objective material relations are listed in Wikipedia: “employer–employee work conditions, the technical division of labour, and property relations”. The forces of production are the unity of the means of production and labor.

Wood gives a her own list of the relations of production: exploitation, domination and appropriation. Kindle Loc. 1175.

And since we’re doing definitions, here’s a description of the term Capitalist Mode of Production from Wikipedia:

The capitalist mode of production is characterized by private ownership of the means of production, extraction of surplus value by the owning class for the purpose of capital accumulation, wage-based labour and—at least as far as commodities are concerned—being market-based.

The Wikipedia discussion of base and superstructure suggests that the general idea is that the economic base exerts control over the superstructure, and that occasionally changes in the superstructure cause changes in the base. Wood thinks that the two are more closely related. Capital has a lot of control over the superstructure, and can force changes in the base. At the same time, changes in the economic base can force changes in the superstructure.

All of this seems quite obvious. Changes in the machines and processes used in production can require adjustments to laws and rules both to allow the use and to protect workers. It’s also true of other superstructure elements, such as law. In the US, for example, the laws have gradually changed to allow non-compete clauses in contracts between employers and the lowest level of employees. Restaurant chains can require delivery employees, cooks, and window clerks to sign non-compete agreements. That obviously is part of the work conditions between employer and employee, which is identified as part of the base while the change in law is part of the superstructure.

The primary use of this distinction for Wood seems to be that we can use the ideas to isolate parts of society for study and analysis, but that we have to remember always that different parts of a society affect each other.

I draw the following conclusions from this chapter, which I’ve now read three times so you don’t have to.

1. Reading this book is tedious, in part because one or more of the terms I’ve defined and a few other terms we all sort of know (social formation, class struggle, etc.) appear on every Kindle page, which for me is probably 100 words. But in this kind of work, careful definitions matter. When we look back at the past, we see a vast number of specific events. Historical materialism tries to make sense of these events in terms of forces that amount to more than the individual decisions of all our ancestors, logic and laws that can be derived from study. Wood describes historical materialism as follows:

A materialist understanding of the world, then, is an understanding of the social activity and the social relations through which human beings interact with nature in producing the conditions of life; and it is a historical understanding which acknowledges that the products of social activity, the forms of social interaction produced by human beings, themselves become material forces, no less than are natural givens. (Kindle Loc. 491.)

To do this, Marxists use the terms I’ve defined here, although often with other definitions. Each definition has the potential to produce a different interpretation of history. Consequently, these tedious definitions and the tedious prose they help create are necessary.

2. The description of the relation of production as exploitation, domination and appropriation is striking. I wonder if there are any large societies in which these relations do not control production?

3. Domination seems to be the most important, perhaps because of the books I’ve been writing about. Pierre Bourdieu made it a central element of his life’s work. I didn’t get to finish Foucault’s Security Territory and Population (maybe I will someday), but one of the main ideas of that book and other works by Foucault is governmentality, and the systems that have arisen to produce it. Domination is a central focus of oligarchy, because it enables the oligarchs to achieve their common purposes:

1. Protecting and preserving wealth
2. Insuring the unrestricted use of wealth
3. Acquiring more wealth.

I doubt that Marxism is the best way to study domination in a contemporary complex society like the US or France. I don’t see on the google any evidence that Wood engaged with the works of Bourdieu or Foucault. But I am sure that our normal social discourse depends on pretending that we are not dominated.

4. The three relations have deep roots in our individual psyches. It’s easy to see that domination/submission drives behavior in the animal kingdom as pictured in the term Alpha Male. Exploitation and appropriation are frequently found with domination. Perhaps recognition of those fundamental psychological issues drove the scholars of the Frankfurt School to attempt to incorporate Freudian psychology into their revamped Marxism.

5. Ideology is one part of the superstructure, I plan to take that up using this article by Wood.

Democracy Against Capitalism: Capital In A Fiat Money World

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In Democracy Against Capitalism the Marxist scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood says that the driving force of capitalism is the urgent desire to accumulate more capital. As we know, and not just from Marx, capitalist only expends capital in the expectation of profit, and generally can be counted on to invest capital if profit seems likely.

In the US, it has always been the norm that those with access to capital should control every possible avenue that might lead to profit. The government has always been there to provide cash to support capital, with no compensation or justification to the government except maybe new jobs. As an example, the US handed huge tracts of land and direct subsidies to the crooks and cheats who built US railroads. I learned about this from Frank Norris’ book The Octopus, but Railroaded, reviewed here, looks even better. And here’s a sympathetic explanation of this monstrous give-away. There’s an obvious question that no one asks: if railroads were so important, why didn’t the government just build them?

In this post I looked at Wood’s definition of historical materialism and its use in the evolution of the separation of politics and economics starting in the middle ages. The comments add a lot of fascinating detail; thanks to all. What’s missing from Wood’s discussion and from economics generally is the motivation behind this evolution, namely greed and indifference to other humans. As the reviewer of Railroaded, the historian Michael Kazin, says:

The history of American capitalism is stuffed with tales of industries that overbuilt and overpromised and left bankruptcies and distressed ecosystems in their wake: gold and silver mining, oil drilling and nuclear power, to name a few. The railroad barons wielded more power than other businessmen in the Gilded Age. But their behavior revealed a trait they shared with many of their fellow citizens: too much was never enough.

That still true, and governments under both parties are as willing as they ever were to let the capitalists profit and to stuff their pockets with subsidies. As an example, look at the Democrats who run Chicago. In 2008, Chicago leased its parking meters to a group of investors headed by Morgan Stanley; investors today include the wealth fund of Abu Dhabi and other hidden investors. Mayor Richard Daley agreed to a front payment of $1.15 billion to the city.

In the seven years since, the meter company has reported a total of $778.6 million in revenues. It’s on pace to make back what it paid the city by 2020, with more than 60 years of meter money still to come.

There’s the incredible story of the city getting ripped off for hundreds of millions of dollars in derivative transactions. Chicago recently offered Amazon over $2 billion to put its new headquarters here.

That eagerness to coddle capitat has always been part of our culture. Maybe it could be justified in a society hemmed in by commodity money and weak financial markets, where there might be some limitations to the amount of capital available for investment. But there is far more capital looking for profits today than there are plausible investments. We’ve just run a huge real-life experiment. The Republican tax bill gave corporations billions of dollars in tax breaks for money stashed “offshore” to avoid taxes. The brilliant CEOS had no profitable use for it and gave it to their shareholders.

Here’s an example of the amount of capital available to waste, electric rental scooters. Much of that useless capital is employed in various kinds of direct exploitation like payday lending.

Beyond the factual reality of a world awash in capital, we don’t live in a world of limited money. Money is a commodity created by the state. It isn’t pieces of metal, and it isn’t limited by how much of the metal there is in government vaults. Government can create all it wants and needs. The Republicans just passed a bill slashing US revenues for the foreseeable future. Then they passed a bill raising spending. Where is that coming from? Stephanie Kelton explains in a quick and easy introduction to Modern Money Theory.

Returning to the railroads, the government could have built them itself, using a combination of taxes, revenues and borrowing. It might have taken longer; and it would have been corrupt though it would never have been as corrupt as it actually was. Why didn’t that happen?

Or look at oil. In some countries, oil is owned by the State, which employs people directly to drill and refine, or hires private drillers and refiners. We don’t do that. We just let the capitalists take the resources out of public land for a small fee which is rebated in the form of sickening tax breaks like depletion allowances.

There was never any justification for the US system other than the demand of the rich and powerful for greater profits with utter indifference to the rest of us who are left to clean up after the bankruptcies, frauds, toxic spills, nuclear waste and whatever other trash they leave behind. Capitalists won’t make society a better place, because that isn’t profitable. Capitalists believe that they should be able to expropriate all the profits from their investments. The point of making society better is that the benefits from that either can’t be monetized, or we don’t want to lose the benefits to the demand for profit. We don’t need capitalists to make society better and we never did. We just need to be able to control our own government, making it operate for our mutual benefit.

Democracy Against Capitalism: The Separation Of Politics and Economics

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Democracy Against Capitalism is a collection of essays written by Ellen Meiksins Wood. In the first essay, she says that many contemporary Marxists have abandoned the historical materialism which is central to Marx’ own thought. Here’s how she describes historical materialism:

A materialist understanding of the world, then, is an understanding of the social activity and the social relations through which human beings interact with nature in producing the conditions of life; and it is a historical understanding which acknowledges that the products of social activity, the forms of social interaction produced by human beings, themselves become material forces, no less than are natural givens. (Kindle Locations 491-494.)

This seems uncontroversial, in fact It’s really hard to believe anyone disagrees without relying on some other human-made theory.

She illustrates this idea with a sketch of the history of the development of capitalism, showing how capitalism separates politics and economics. This isn’t about the academic study of these fields, but about the way capitalism flowed from earlier times, primarily in the UK.

She starts with the proposition that a central problem for any society is producing the necessities of life and allocation of the production among members. That decision is political, not economic. The explanation begins with a definition of the state as the “complex of institutions” through which society organizes itself. This organization is an instrument of power, and exercises coercion through various means, including violence. Smaller social units, families or clans, owe certain common duties to the whole.

She says that in the earlier times, decisions about production and allocation were made by “public or communal authority”. (Kindle Loc. 676).

Whether or not the essential object of the state is to maintain exploitation, its performance of social functions implies a social division of labour and the appropriation by some social groups of surplus produced by others. It seems reasonable to suppose, then, that however this ‘complex of institutions’ came into being, the state emerged as a means of appropriating surplus product – perhaps even as a means of intensifying production in order to increase surplus – and as a mode of distributing that surplus in one way or another. Kindle Loc. 597.

I’m not sure what to make of this quote. She cites a book by Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics for this proposition.

In the imperial period of Roman government, the supremacy of private property was reasonably well established, When the Roman Empire broke up, the state fragmented. Local feudal lords maintained control by a combination of feudal rights under whatever was left of a central authority, the offer of protection to the local people, and brute force.

Feudal Lords carried out the functions of the state in vestigial form, dispensing justice and providing and organizing defense, social responsibilities that went with their control over production and allocation. Gradually the central authority regained strength, and Feudal Lords ceded some of their duties and powers, but not control of the land or the work done by the people on the land or the right to control allocation of production. The story continues to the present, with the owners of private property maintaining their power to organize production and expropriate the surplus for themselves through their absolute right of control and ownership.

Wood only provides a sketch, and my retelling is a sketch of a sketch, but it’s compelling once you grant the premise that decisions about production and allocation are political issues. Of course, we don’t know how our Stone Age ancestors handled these things. Even so, the assertion that matters of organization of production and allocation of the products is a social matter is quite reasonable. After all, the rules that force that outcome are upheld by the power of the state, through violence and otherwise.

From there, the part of the story that starts in Feudal societies makes good sense. A lot of this history can be seen in the fights over English Land Law, the change from a political system where the king owned all the land to vesting of full title in aristocrats and eventually in the hands of ordinary people. Here’s the Wikipedia version.

This story helps us to see how we got to the place where absolute control of private property became central to our social structures. It wasn’t inevitable. The story is quite different in other countries. For example, in France, the King maintained his central role in the economy much longer, until the French Revolution. For an interesting discussion of the role of the King in the bread markets of France, particularly Paris, see Bernard Harcourt’s excellent book The Illusion of Free Markets, which I discussed here. Harcourt also discusses the arrangement that government should control punishment.

Perhaps as a result, even today the state plays a larger role in the French economy than in the US or the UK. As an example, the telecommunications businesses there are privately owned, but the government regulates the business tightly and insures competition. That keeps prices very low, and services high.

Along with the power to organize production, the capitalist system gives private interests the absolute right to whatever profits it can extract. This fact has such a long history, it appears to be the result of impersonal natural law to economists and others. In part this is because the absolute right to profit is hidden inside the absolute right to property. To the workers, the struggle for wages appears to be an economic struggle, not a political one. To the State, it means that there is little legislation and little regulation to protect ordinary citizens as workers or consumers, or the land, and the courts are always ready to strike down the new laws or to construe them so narrowly as to make them useless. And for most of its history, the US has seen fit to allow private interests to control Polanyi’s third fictitious commodity, money.

When economics began to emerge as a separate academic discipline in the 19th Century, it confronted this situation, and never questioned any of the social structures it found in place, especially the right of owners of capital to extract all profit, control the organization and production of most goods and services, and control the lives of the workers. The existing structures were written into the foundations of the two separated disciplines.

The leftist view, that such decisions are political, continued into the New Deal era, when government began to side with the workers and ordinary people. One landmark piece of legislation was the pro-union Wagner Act. Then, in the 1970s, Democrats joined what C. Wright Mills called the Capitalist Celebration, embracing capitalism as explained by economics. This led to the New Democrats, the Third Way Dems, the Blue Dogs, and the rest of the corporatist Democratic politicians. For the last 40 years, no one has seriously questioned this allocation of power.

There is a curious divide in the understanding of the allocation of production. Workers who own farms, for example, or artists, consider that the things they produce belong to them, and can be used or sold by them without regard to others. Workers who work for other people never make that connection. They do not think of the things they produce as theirs, or even partly theirs. They just assume that these things belong to the owners of capital. But consider this. Suppose a person who works for a tech company dreams up a new idea. Who owns that new idea? Probably the worker has the better claim. As a result tech companies routinely make employees sign contracts giving them ownership, and even that is not necessarily conclusive.

If all workers thought of themselves as having claims to their work product, we’d have a different kind of capitalism.

Democracy Against Capitalism: Competing Stories About Wages

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Ellen Meiksins Wood’s book Democracy against Capitalism, tells a story of capitalism at odds with the story economists tell. At the root of this is her view that we make a big mistake when we separate politics from economics. Here’s an example, summarized from three prior posts, one at Emptywheel, and this one and this one at Naked Capitalism. The original posts give more detailed discussions.

Chapter 12 of Samuelson and Nordhaus’ intro textbook Economics (2005 ed.) is titled How Markets Determine Incomes. They rely on marginal utility theory, invented by William Stanley Jevons, an English mathematician and economist and described in his 1871 book The Theory of Political Economy discussed here. Their explanation uses this chart. P. 238.

The y-axis is the marginal product of labor, with all other inputs held constant. The x-axis is the amount of labor, here the number of employees. We treat the labor as continuous so we can have a nice smooth curve, but in the real world it would look like a flight of stairs. The authors tell us that the employer will add workers until the marginal increase in revenue from the last worker is zero. They tell us that the bottom rectangle is wages, and the top triangle-ish shape DEN is rent. That’s because they are basing their explanation on John Bates Clark’s model from about 1900, and the idea is that this chart describes a farm. But they mean that this works for the economy as a whole, so it includes all workers on one hand, and all capitalists, that is, those who own the factories, smelters, coal mines, etc. on the other. This is their discussion:

Clark reasoned as follows: A first worker has a large marginal product because there is so much land to work with. Worker 2 has a slightly smaller marginal product. But the two workers are alike, so they must get exactly the same wage. The puzzle is, which wage? The MP (marginal production) of worker 1, or that of worker 2, or the average of the two?

Under perfect competition, the answer is clear: Landlords will not hire a worker if the market wage exceeds that worker’s marginal product. So competition will ensure that all the workers receive a wage rate equal to the marginal product of the last worker.

But now there is a surplus of total output over the wage bill because earlier workers have higher MPs than the last worker. What happens to the excess MPs…? The rest stays with the landlords as their residual earnings, which we will later call rent. Why…? The reason is that each landlord is a participant in the competitive market for land and rents the land for its best price. 237-8, emphasis in original.

Clark saw this as the result of the Natural Law, and pronounced it just. This is the model taught to generations in introductory economics. The logic seems questionable, but it doesn’t matter because it isn’t how things actually happen, as I demonstrate in the linked posts.

How would a Marxist like Wood describe this model? She divides society into two groups, the producers, in this case, the farmers, and the appropriators, in this case the landlords (ignoring detail), or the workers and the capitalists. At an earlier part of the history of this society, the land was handed to the landlords, or they took it violently when government was fragmented and power represented government. Wood is talking about England, but something similar happened in the US. As a result, the producers, here the farmers, were separated from the means of production, meaning the land and perhaps some of the tools and animals needed to grow crops, and the landowners were able to expropriate the surplus created by the producers. This is a rough description of what Marx called primitive accumulation (again ignoring details and not precisely following Wood).

Primitive accumulation didn’t happen by accident. It was done by some form of coercion by some sort of ruling class. Gradually the ruling class consolidated into states, and the process continued through the arms of the state. As an example, consider Polanyi’s description in The Great Transformation of the process of “enclosure” as it was called in England.

Turning to the chart, we ignore the marginal productivity stuff and treat the line NE as the level appropriators currently pay the producers. It is as low as the appropriators can make it, using both their control of the state, and their control of the process of production. If you have any doubts about that, read the discussion of the Phillips Curve and especially a paper by Simcha Barkai here. The capitalists appropriate the triangle DEN, which represents the surplus labor, for themselves.

As always, the disposition of surplus labour remains the central issue of class conflict; but now, that issue is no longer distinguishable from the organization of production. The struggle over appropriation appears not as a political struggle but as a battle over the terms and conditions of work. Kindle Loc. 804-806

The organization of production is controlled by the appropriators with the coercive assistance of the State as needed. If the producers were smart, they would struggle with the appropriators over that surplus. They’d elect governments that would take their side in the struggle over the allocation, they’d resist and force change. There is nothing but political power that requires payment of all of the surplus labor to capital.

So now we have two stories. To me, the Samuelson/Nordhaus/Clark story is dumb. It takes the economy as a given, as if things had always been this way. In other versions of their story, we get a few shards of carefully selected history that pretend to find seeds of capitalism in earlier times. Mostly, though, it’s a vision of capitalism as an inevitable and fixed system as available for study as a cadaver.

In addition, this story makes the outcomes seem pre-ordained, and leads people to think that interference with the process is both useless and somehow dangerous, certain to produce even worse results. And, it’s a just-so story: all the numbers appear to come out in perfect equilibrium as if by magic.

Wood’s story is easy to understand. It’s based in history, none of that man-made natural law mumbo-jumbo. It doesn’t call for absurd assumptions to make everything work out beautifully. It’s easy to see how this story can motivate action, and, of course, reaction. And here’s the key point: it’s easy enough to tell the this story without direct reference to Marx.

Democracy Against Capitalism: Introduction to New Series

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My original plan was to do a series on Wolfgang Streeck’s book, How Will Capitalism End?, but it’s really distressing, so I took a break and read a couple of novels, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers about the 70s art scene in New York and the Red Brigades in Italy, and then Impossible Views of the World by Lucy Ives, both of which were engaging and the second was funny, at least to me. It ran out suddenly, as books will do when read on an e-reader, and I didn’t want to go back to Streeck so I took a look at some books I had acquired but not read. That’s how I stumbled into Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism by Ellen Meiksins Wood.

Usually I seek out books because they seem to fall into place in my neoliberalism project. Not this one. A couple of years ago my sister told me that Verso was having a sale on ebooks, all you want for a pound each. So I browsed the catalog and picked out several, including a volume of works by Rosa Luxemburg, and based solely on the title, picked up Wood’s book. When I started it, I had no idea what it was about, or who Wood was. It turns out she’s a major Marxist scholar with wide interests in history and economics. Here’s an appreciation by Vivek Chibber published in Jacobin at Wood’s death in 2016 at the age of 74. This article discusses her main ideas, many of which are addressed in this book.

I’ve read several pieces lately on the question of the compatibility of capitalism and democracy. This one by Eric Levitz is a level-headed view of the main lines of lefty worries, and will help inform the discussion I hope to generate. This one from the Economist is conservative but also worried. As I have said several times during this project, the left has no real theory for criticizing capitalism. That means left-liberal focus has been on criticizing the forms of our democracy. That’s certainly a reasonable program, but it’s limited. A better idea is to allow a formal criticism of capitalism, especially neoliberal capitalism. Critique of capitalism has been the main contribution of Marxism from the beginning.

The 200th anniversary of Marx’ death was May 5, and it brought out the crazy. I won’t cite any more of that than appears in this post, but for fun just search for Karl Marx Birthday, and take your pick. People talk about believing in Marx like it was a religion. We don’t talk about believing in Kant, though, or Camus. We don’t believe or disbelieve in philosophers, we read them and argue with them, and use them to form ideas about our lives and our society. We can and should do the same with Marx. As we go through this book, I’ll point out some of his ideas we can find in Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Veblen’s The Theory of Business Enterprise, Foucault, and the books I’ve discussed on Bourdieu and Critical Theory, as well as economic texts and papers.

Wood starts from the proposition that criticizing capitalism went out of intellectual fashion in the second half of the 20th Century. This alone should make it obvious why I like this book. Regular readers will recall my recurring use of the term Capitalist Celebration which I got from C. Wright Mills to describe the same idea.

‘Post-Marxism’ has given way to the cult of postmodernism, with its principles of contingency, fragmentation and heterogeneity, its hostility to any notion of totality, system, structure, process and ‘grand narratives’. [From the Introduction. I’m reading on a Kindle and don’t have page cites; Kindle location 89.]

Here’s how Wood describes her project for this book:

… I propose to start from the premise that the critique of capitalism is urgently needed, that historical materialism still provides the best foundation on which to construct it, and that the critical element in Marxism lies above all in its insistence on the historical specificity of capitalism – with the emphasis on both the specificity of its systemic logic and on its historicity. In other words, historical materialism approaches capitalism in a way exactly antithetical to the current fashions: the systemic unity of capitalism instead of just post-modern fragments, but also historicity – and hence the possibility of supersession – instead of capitalist inevitability and the end of History [Kindle location 111.]

We saw this historical approach in both Arendt and in Polanyi. Foucault takes a historical approach as well, visible in several books including Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, and apparently in Security, Territory and Population, though I didn’t get to finish that book. I can’t say what Wood thinks, but I’d guess she isn’t a fan of Foucault or Derrida. I’ll try to figure that out as we go along.

I’m certainly glad I stumbled into this book at this time. It fits my project of trying to understand the origins of neoliberalism and it’s current domination of economic discourse, and I hope it will serve as an entry point for understanding current Marxist thought as well.