Contradictions in the universalization of capitalism

Monthly Review, April, 1999 by John Bellamy Foster

A central, perhaps the central, idea of economic liberalism has always been that a market society organized on the basis of individual self-interest is the natural state of humankind, and that such a society is bound to prosper - through an almost providential invisible hand - provided that no external barriers stand in its way. In this view all of human history is nothing more than the gradual freeing up of market relations - the release of the universal and rational forms of society only waiting to be let loose. "In most accounts of capitalism," Ellen Meiksins Wood has critically observed, "there really/s no beginning. Capitalism seems always to be there, somewhere; and it only needs to be released from its chains - for instance, from the fetters of feudalism - to be allowed to grow and mature."(1)

The counterpart of this liberal-economic view has always been a strong tendency to see capitalist society - and particularly market relations - as naturally boundless or limitless in extent, and all external barriers to its expansion as temporary obstacles to be overcome. Crises in the expansion of capital insofar as they are not purely cyclical phenomena, are usually attributed, within this economic philosophy, to external limits or interferences with the market from "outside" rather than to internal contradictions within the capital accumulation process.

State interference in the market, when this did not directly serve the interests of capital itself, has always been regarded by economic liberals as the chief obstacle to the smooth working of the system. But other elements in the natural and social environment of capital, such as the existence of traditional, non-commodity economies; the growth of monopoly (or oligopoly) as a barrier to free competition; the persistence of national boundaries, customs and markets; limits to the commodification of labor power, whether as a result of cultural norms or trade union organization; and the existence of a planetary realm, in external nature, that stands outside the regime of the market - have also been viewed as temporary barriers to be dissolved or surmounted by an expanding capitalist market society.

No one understood this inexorable tendency toward the universalization of capitalism that lay at the base of classical liberalism better than Marx. The brief panegyric to the bourgeoisie in the first part of The Communist Manifesto placed so much emphasis on this inner tendency toward the universalization of capitalism through which national boundaries were extinguished, nature subjected, and "all that is solid melts into air" that this is often seen as embodying Marx's own view of human progress - a "Promethean" universalism to which the revolutionary proletariat would also be compelled to adhere. Nevertheless, Marx was always acutely aware of the contradictions associated with the universalizing tendency of capitalism, and the conception of progress and civilization that this represented, and stressed the absolute limits to, as well as internal contradictions of, this kind of development. This is most evident in the Grundrisse where he wrote:

[J]ust as production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side ... so does it create on the other a side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility ... [in which] there appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of production and exchange. ... In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national boundaries and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production ... But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.(2)

Ultimately, Marx explained, such external barriers to "the universality" after which the system "irresistibly strives" are themselves the alienated products of capital's own inner nature, where the "greatest barrier" is to be found. Hence, capital can never really overcome such limits as external nature, the natural and social conditions of the reproduction of labor power, and the existence of national distinctions, since these are to a large extent a consequence of the one-sided expansion of capital itself, which by striving for universality in an alienated way, serves to further divide humanity from nature, production from the conditions of human production and reproduction (and from universal needs), and nationality from nationality.

The early classical-liberal political economists, such as Smith, Malthus and Ricardo, saw only "the positive essence of capital" in this limitless drive for commodification. Distinguishing his position from these views, Marx argued that this process of the universalization of capitalism had, to a certain extent, to run its course - though at a certain point its contradictions (both internal and external) would result in its revolutionary overthrow. Hence, Marx rejected the views of economic romantics like Sismondi who operated under the illusion that the false universalism of capitalist market society could be countered simply through the erection, as Marx was to put it, of" barriers to production, from the outside, through custom, law etc., which of course, as merely external and artificial barriers, would necessarily be abolished by capital."(3) The contradictions of capitalism were all too real and all artificial restrictions introduced to save the system from itself would simply be swept aside by the development of the system. Capitalism thus tended toward an extreme universalism that undercut the conditions of its own existence. All middle roads, all proposals for the rational regulation of the system were bound to fail in the end. In this respect, Marx's views were thus very close to those of the economic liberals - who failed however to perceive the transitory nature of capitalism that this entailed.