The history of class struggle: from original accumulation to neoliberalism

Monthly Review, May, 1997 by Kees van der Pijl

There is no need to idealize this social substratum; but however impoverished it may be, authentic joy, love, and friendship do survive here. There have been various attempts, in the history of capitalism, to recover the losses suffered in this sphere. So, for example, psychoanalysis has been interpreted as an attempt to rediscover intimacy, self-knowledge, sensuous and emotional satisfaction in a context of social relations one-sidedly molded by commodification.(13) In the 1970s, "flower power" and Eastern religions performed a comparable function, just as "New Age" movements do today. The socialization of the reproduction of labor power in the 1950-1970 era, in the framework of the welfare state, gave rise (in North America and Western Europe in particular) to a vast army of "cadres" - (adult) education, neighborhood, health and welfare, or comparable "workers." Now that these are being made redundant under neoliberal fiscal stringency, "daily life" is further exposed to commodification in the most radical way.

So it is not only the natural substratum of the capitalist world economy that is being exhausted (by destruction, pollution and poisoning, and literally exhausted in the case of fresh-water supplies and agricultural yields). A similar exhaustion is taking place in the social, reproductive substratum, in "daily life" and the regenerative capacity it represents. Perhaps American inner cities are the unfortunate "best" example of what an exhausted society looks like - a society under the ultimate discipline of capital. Here we are seeing something new, something distinct from the old forms of poverty related to original accumulation or the reserve army of labor in industrial society. In a setting stripped bare of non-economic social cohesion, capital caters to the last source of purchasing power, the destitute drug addict. And this social exhaustion is a matter of deliberate capitalist policy, of which the attack on welfare provisions promoted by Clinton's government is the final step.(14)

All this is taking place in the context of the "neoliberal" strategies which have been adopted across the whole political spectrum throughout the capitalist world. These strategies have introduced their own controls and disciplines, including various financial institutions which impose conformity on governments through the mechanisms of credit and debt.(15)

Yet this apparently all-powerful, tightly integrated system of controls does not mean that the discipline of capital over the entire reproductive system is beyond resistance. The many different forms in which society and nature are subjected to the discipline of capital do produce anger and discontent, often exacerbated by the "politics of unpopularity," as governments confront their own populations with unpopular policies in the name of "the economy." Under conditions of extreme commodification and individualization, such discontent often assumes individual, non-political forms - family and street violence, etc. Anger may also be mobilized for violent confrontations, in which people are driven not by opposition to unsustainable development, but by opposition to other social groups and states, expressed in various ways, from racism and xenophobia to conflicts over fishing rights.