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The history of class struggle: from original accumulation to neoliberalism
Monthly Review, May, 1997 by Kees van der Pijl
It has become conventional, even on the left, to believe that the days of class struggle are over. That conviction has, of course, been strengthened by the demise of the Soviet bloc, which capped a protracted defeat of left-wing forces the world over. The idea that there could still emerge a collective subject striving for socialism is rejected in the face of advancing individualization and fragmentation, the contradictory but "successful" functioning of capitalism (the "market economy"), and the apparent exhaustion of all alternatives to it.
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The December 1995 movement in France, followed a year later by a truckers' blockade in which the Juppe government did not dare to intervene for fear of a general social explosion, flies in the face of such conclusions. Can we, however, really speak of a class struggle in these (and comparable) social protest movements? This is the question I want to address in these notes.
The Discipline of Capital and Class Struggle
Class formation occurs wherever humanity's interactions with nature take the form of social relations between those who produce and those who appropriate what others produce. In this broad sense, all past history is the history of class struggles, as Marx and Engels claimed in the Communist Manifesto.(1) But something more needs to be said about the specific nature of class formation and struggle in capitalist society.
Let us first establish that, contrary to capitalist ideology and standard economics textbooks, capitalism is not a universal, eternal, transhistorical system which has always existed at least in embryo or in the depths of human nature. Acts of exchange, and even markets of one kind or another, may have existed throughout recorded history. But the subjection of society to the disciplines of the market, to the imperatives of competition, capital accumulation, and increasing labor-productivity, is historically specific, relatively recent, and has required profound and painful social transformations.
Capitalist ideology does not generally acknowledge the historical specificity of capitalism and the social dislocations that were required to subject human practices and social relations to the logic of capitalism. We may take up any economics textbook and read how the market economy ideally works, but we will usually look in vain for the prehistory of capital, the way it penetrated and transformed precapitalist society, separating people from their means of livelihood and mobilizing social wealth as exclusive private property. If a prehistory of capital is acknowledged at all, it usually takes the form of a Robinsonade, an imaginary world of abstract individuals some of whom decide to start a company. The capitalist economy is seen as a self-sufficient entity obeying its own specific laws as if they were themselves the laws of nature, as if there were no human or natural needs or limits independent of the requirements of capital.(2)
We need not imagine an idyllic pre-capitalist community on which the capitalist vulture descends to prey. But we do need to recognize the enormous transformations that take place as capital penetrates to the vital centre of society, as market relations pervade every social practice and nature itself, stamping the commodity form on things, qualities, resources and wealth, and on labor power itself, transforming the labor process and subjecting it to the requirements and rhythms of capital accumulation. And we also need to recognize that this process of penetration occurs not naturally or inevitably but always in conditions of resistance and contestation.
The subordination of society and nature to the reproduction of capital, the imposition of capitalist disciplines, takes place on several levels. In its constant quest for unpaid labor and its constant efforts to raise the rate of exploitation in the actual labor process, capital repeatedly exhausts the available human and natural resources on which it feeds and penetrates ever deeper into its social and natural substratum.
The first level of penetration is original accumulation - the process of stamping the commodity form on social relations including production relations. The second is the capitalist production process, the exploitation of living labor power in which the technical labor process, with all the human autonomy and creativity that it implies, has to be subordinated to the process of expanding value, the "valorization" of capital. The third is the process of social reproduction in its entirety (which I shall call "dally life," to distinguish it from "work"), which likewise has to be subjected to the requirements of capital accumulation. Each of these constitutes its own terrain of resistance and struggle.
Although these three forms of imposing the discipline of capital are intricately connected and the struggles they elicit often overlap, their main impact follows a chronological order. Obviously, original accumulation is primarily a phenomenon of the early history of the capitalist mode of production (although this history is still just beginning in, say, West Irian). As to the other two, the subordination of the labor process to capital and the subordination of the process of social reproduction mutually condition each other, but the deep penetration of capital into the latter sphere is the more recent phenomenon.
